(April 20, 2024) When Confederates were stuck in idle encampments, they’d bet on anything, including lice racing. Sam Watkins tells of how one soldier was always winning because he heated his tin plate before the race started. His trick anticipated Mark Twain’s The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County ..read more

(April 19, 2024) Aside from noting that one captured Confederate private obviously too poor to own slaves replied when asked “What are you fighting for anyhow?” by answering, “I’m fighting because you’re down here,” Shelby Foote added that “in the Southern mind [the war] was a second American Revolution fought for principles no less high, against a tyranny no less harsh” . . . When commanding at Harpers  Ferry early in the war Colonel T. J. [Stonewall] Jackson justified risking his life by arguing, “What is life without honor? Degradation is worse than death. We must think of the liv ..read more

(April 17, 2024) Lincoln took unto himself powers far beyond any ever claimed by a Chief Executive. In late April 1861, for security reasons, he authorized simultaneous raids on every telegraph office in the Northern states, seizing the originals and copies of all telegrams sent and received during the past year. As a result of this and other measures, sometimes on no stronger evidence than the suspicions of an informer nursing a grudge, men were taken from their homes in the dead of night, thrown into dungeons, and held without explanation or communications with the outside world. Writs of Ha ..read more

(April 15, 2024) Provided below is an email from Bo Traywick, a VMI graduate and former member of the school’s Board of Visitors, to a newspaperman who asked for his thoughts on Arlington Cemetery’s Reconciliation Monument. * Dear Jeff, It was nice chatting with you and Jim today. During our conversation, you brought up the monument at Arlington Cemetery. You referred to it as the Confederate Monument. This is incorrect. It is (was!) The Reconciliation Monument. It was put up at the invitation of the United States government after the Spanish/American War, when some prominent ex-Confederates l ..read more

(April 11, 2024) For the next week the Kindle version of the Pat and Tom novel is available at a 75% discount,    Pat and Tom is both a prequel and a sequel to Tom Hindman’s Western Adventure. Before he set forth on his campaigns in the Trans-Mississippi, Tom fought as a member of the largest Confederate army outside of Virginia at the battle of Shiloh on April 6-7, 1862. He and his hometown buddy, General Pat Cleburne, each commanded troops during the fight which was the largest one of the Civil War up to that date. After Tom returned from the Trans-Mississippi he rejoined the Army ..read more

(March 26, 2024) A Mark Twain character and America’s approaching April 8, 2024, solar eclipse have a connection to the Civil War. Twain reportedly modeled the protagonist in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court—Hank Morgan—after Christopher Spencer, inventor of one of the earliest repeating rifles. In the plot, Morgan is transported back to Arthur’s Court where his superior “magic” threatens Merlin who wants him executed. But Morgan realizes England is due for a solar eclipse and warns he will destroy the sun if they try to execute him. When the eclipse begins, he states he will revers ..read more

(March 4, 2024) My last 3 posts provided historical context pertinent to my newest novel, Tom Hindman’s Western Adventure. After authoring 13 non-fiction history books, last year I released my first novel: Firepower. The shift to historical fiction was deliberate for three reasons. First, is a point summarized by Rudyard Kipling: “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” I’ve always seen history as grand story. Second, if novels become sufficiently popular, they can change public opinion. Consider how Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels rehabilitated Longstreet’s ..read more

(March 3, 2024) Serious Civil War students realize that Missouri and Kentucky are represented in the thirteen stars of the Confederate Battle and National flags. Missouri’s star was added in November 1861 when a pro-southern state government passed a secession ordinance in Neosho, in the state’s southwest corner. Among the states represented by the 13-star flag, Missouri ranked second in population behind Virginia. Richmond’s war department assigned Missouri to the Trans-Mississippi District, which encompassed the vast region west of the Mississippi River. Economically, Missouri dominated the ..read more

The first opportunity for the Confederacy to win the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi Department, was to win it in Missouri. The potential stakes were big in the vast region mapped below. (March 1, 2024)  At its peak, the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi Department stretched from the Mississippi River to the southeastern border of California and from Keokuk, Iowa to the mouth of the Rio Grande. Missouri, which had been admitted to the Confederacy in November 1861, might have been the leading state in that vast area if the Southerners had maintained control of it. With 1.1 million white ..read more

(February 29, 2024) Provided below is the first chapter of my latest novel, Tom Hindman’s Western Adventure. At ten o’clock in the morning on 23 May 1862 Confederate Major General Thomas C. Hindman called on Major Francis Shoup at the latter’s tent near Corinth, Mississippi. The Indiana born Shoup was head of artillery for one of the Army of Mississippi’s four corps.  General P.G.T. Beauregard had assumed command of the army after its previous commander was killed at the Battle of Shiloh on 6 April. Yesterday Beauregard and Hindman agreed that the latter would assume command of all C ..read more