Tag Archives: Civil War

To indict or not to indict: Senior College students will answer a treasonous question

  BELFAST — A course offered this month at Senior College of Belfast will examine the Civil War’s impact on Belfast civilians — and civil liberties, especially those pertaining to a local newspaper editor arrested and charged with treason in 1864. The course, “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War,” takes its name […]

A fearful father took pen in hand on Christmas Day 1863

  His impulsive behavior has cost Charley dearly as he lays recovering — hopefully — from a war wound on Christmas Day 1863. The eldest of six siblings, Charley became the apple of his father’s eye when he was born in Cambridge, Mass. on June 9, 1844; Henry adores all the surviving children, but adventurous […]

Prospect Civil War re-enactor dons a Zouave uniform

PROSPECT — Confederate soldiers watching an approaching Zouave charge did not always hang around to greet the Yankees clad in North African uniforms. And members of Richardson’s Civil War Round Table recently learned why when Civil War re-enactor Rob “Maynard” Kufrovich donned his Zouave uniform and brought his rifled musket and its bayonet to a […]

Hell comes to Rappahannock Station on a dark November night: Part I

Sensing the approaching threat in the deep November darkness, an alert Confederate soldier — probably a North Carolinian — fires his musket. Comrades swarm to their protective breastworks, level their muskets, and loosen a thunderous volley. Hideous screams suddenly erupt in the Virginia night; before the Confederates finish reloading, cold steel leaps through the swirling […]

Private Joseph French tweets the Civil War

Joseph French likes to tweet. He tweets the weather: “Fair and pleasant.” He tweets his official duty for this Sunday: “”We were inspected this morning by our inspecting officer at nine o’clock both camp and person.” And he tweets what he did next: “Then we went to church.” Routine tweets from French, who has mastered […]

Missing

When disease, a wound, or death felled a Maine soldier, his relatives understood the risks inherent with wartime service. They knew his immediate fate. But when a Maine boy went missing, the folks at home could only imagine the worst — and so they did in countless letters addressed to Maine Adjutant General John Hodsdon. […]

Newest Gettysburg museum places visitors on the battlefield

Gettysburg’s newest museum takes visitors to the battle — and onto the battlefield, because men fought and died around this historic building on July 1, 1863. Located in the former Schmucker Hall at the Lutheran Theological Seminary, the Gettysburg Seminary Ridge Museum opened exactly 150 years later, on July 1, 2013. Famous in Civil War […]

A hero charges to dusty glory at Aldie

  The sword-wielding Calvin Douty charged to glory in a Virginia dust cloud in mid-June 1863. Born in Sangerville, Douty lived in Dover when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter. He had served two terms as the Piscataquis County sheriff; in April 1861 Douty “was then serving in the first year of his third term,” […]

The 6th Maine’s screaming demons led the way

Frantically loading and firing their rifled muskets, the Mississippi infantrymen defending the stone wall at Fredericksburg about 11:05 a.m. on May 3, 1863, suddenly realized that all the .58-caliber lead bullets in the world would not stop the screaming, wild-eyed berserkers swarming toward them. No matter how many comrades pitched onto the slope below Marye’s […]

Two heroes still stood at Chancellorsville

“Through smoke and fire and shot and shell, unto the very walls of hell, we did stand and we did stay, in that Virginia field so far away”: Thus does a paraphrased verse from John Tam’s “Over the Hills and Far Away” describe the fate that befell the valiant heroes of the 5th Maine Battery […]