TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Category: Political History

  • Whatever Happened to D.K. Boswell?

    During the early part of the war, Lincoln elevated certain southern leaders who remained loyal to the US, with hope that they could rally fellow southern loyalists and start the reconstruction process.  Examples include: Andrew Johnson, appointed Brigadier General and Military Governor of Tennessee in March 1862; Edward Stanly, appointed Brigadier General and Military Governor […]

  • For Your Sunday Reading

    A couple of articles that TOCWOC readers might enjoy. Joe Bilby continues his “Guns of” series for American Rifleman with “The Guns of Gettysburg.” If you want to know who shot who with what, Joe’s your man. Gettysburg was probably the first major battle anywhere where both sides were armed almost entirely with rifles. In […]

  • The decision that made West Virginia possible

    Normally I prefer to write about the military aspects of the war. But it is the 150th birthday of the State of West Virginia and, after reading some comments on how West Virginia came to be, there is one aspect that seems to me generally overlooked. After the bombardment of Fort Sumter by the confederates, […]

  • Nancy Harts, Salmon Chase

    I was in LaGrange, GA, last weekend for a family get-together and checked out their web page. Turns out LaGrange was home to one of the Civil War’s most colorful and unusual militia companies, the all-female Nancy Harts. Named after a heroine of the Revolutionary War, the group elected two local women as officers. The […]

  • Presidential Material: Civil War Candidates From McClellan to McKinley

    Editor’s Note: This article is a guest post by Greg Quinion.  Greg has submitted several other articles for TOCWOC in the past, including a series on General Phil Kearny.  Greg’s piece on this Election Day focuses appropriately enough on Civil War soldiers who went on to become presidential candidates, and for more than a few, […]

  • Was Justice Scalia wrong About Citizen Militias Having “Cannon” Under the Second Amendment?

    In a recent interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News, Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the Court’s conservative justices (and one known for his support of citizen gun rights), said: Wallace: You wrote in 2008, the opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, the majority opinion that said the Second Amendment means what it says, […]

  • Short Takes

    A large group of scholars and enthusiasts are gathering Tuesday at UNC Wilmington for a symposium on the remnants of the blockade runner Modern Greece. Sorry, it’s sold out. From the archives of the Manchester Guardian comes an editorial from 1861 about the impending “war to the knife” in the US. Like most of the […]