Abraham Lincoln is considered by many to be our greatest President, but that high regard was certainly not universal in his lifetime. Most people in the American South considered him the devil incarnate, and many Northerners had a low opinion of his leadership. Quoting from a 2013 article by Mark Bowden in The Atlantic, Lincoln […]
Over the last three years one of my most visited blog posts is the one entitled “General Beauregard’s Bones.” I cannot understand its popularity except that it describes a certain incident in the American Civil War. There are many Civil War students out there, and perhaps they are attracted to this article. That being the […]
Over the life of this blog, my article on Jordan Family Roots has been my most visited post. As of August, 2021, it had been accessed more than 600 times, twice the number of visits to any other article. For that reason I thought it would be well to do an update in which I […]
Not far from where I lived as a boy was beautiful Orton Plantation. It fits almost everyone’s image of a prototypical antebellum southern mansion. It is located on the west side of the Cape Fear River about seven miles downriver from Wilmington. The first home at Orton was built in 1725, but it was destroyed […]
Cape Fear Cape Fear is the name of a cape (pictured above) and a river that flows into the Atlantic just southwest of the cape. As a young boy I lived about fifteen miles north of this point in the resort town of Carolina Beach. As this map shows, the eastern coast of the United […]
As a young boy living at Carolina Beach I was fascinated by the protruding bones of a shipwreck lying less than a hundred yards offshore. We knew that it was a Civil War blockade runner. Later I learned that the ship was originally christened as the Havelock and launched in Glasgow, Scotland. During our Civil […]
In early April 1865, General Robert E. Lee withdrew his troops from their lines around Richmond and Petersburg and retreated west. He hoped to link up with the army of Joseph Johnston in North Carolina, but it was not to be. The remnant of Lee’s once formidable army was trapped near Appomattox and forced to […]
As I watched the Confederate statues come down I had the following thoughts. It is difficult for us to appreciate the perspective of our forefathers. With our modern sensitivities we are often prone to denounce them for behavior that their contemporaries may have considered normal or perhaps even worthy of praise. It is also […]
Confederate Monument At Gettysburg Confederate statues and symbols are being torn down and destroyed all over the country. Recently I read that some people are calling for the removal of Confederate monuments from the fields at Gettysburg. How sad. Do they wish to erase history? Was the Union army fighting against ghosts? It […]
Blockade Runner Modern Greece Run Aground Near Fort Fisher in 1862 When I was a young boy growing up near Greensboro, North Carolina, there were still reminders of the Civil War around us. It was 65 only years in the past, less time than now separates us from the Korean War. There were a […]
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