behind AotW

a companion to Antietam on the Web

  • Getting on with the War

    Berlin, MD. October 1862click to see larger image
    Pontoon bridge at Berlin, Md., October 1862

    In the last week of October 1862, General George McClellan crossed the bulk of his Army of the Potomac into Virginia, ready to again do battle with General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. It was the first significant movement of the Army–outside of the scrap at Shepherdstown on 19-20 September–since the Battle of Antietam.

    Conventional wisdom has it that McClellan had stalled continuously since Antietam in defiance of President Lincoln’s impatience with the lack of pursuit of Lee’s battered ANV, and that the President fired the General immediately after the election in November for that lack of aggressive action.

    But is this too simplistic? (more…)

  • Morrison family ties

    R.H. Morrison
    Rev. Robert Hall Morrison, DD (from Davidson College portrait)

    The Reverend Doctor Morrison (1798-1889) was father-in-law to three Confederate general officers: D.H. Hill (m. Isabella S. Morrison 1848), Rufus C. Barringer (m. Eugenia 1854; she d. 1858, typhoid), and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson (m. Mary Anna 1857).

    I know of no other patriarch of that distinction.

    Hard core students of the American Civil War already know that D.H. Hill and “Stonewall” Jackson were brothers-in-law, though not always happily so. Most will probably not have seen how wide that family net spreads. (more…)

  • Very Bad Behavior

    I love Akismet. It’s very good at identifying comment spam and putting it to one side for me to review later. But my needs have been modest: it took more than 8 months for Akismet to trap the first 2,000 spam comments to this blog.

    Then some invisible switch was thrown or critical mass reached out there in the dark underworld where these spammers live. In December I began to see between one and three hundred attempts per day, each one eating bandwidth and server resources. I couldn’t keep up, and as they arrived in bursts I saw performance problems.

    So I added Bad Behavior to my arsenal. It doesn’t just quarantine spam, it blocks most of it outright – it never hits my server or database. Since I installed Bad Behavior a week ago only 5 spam attempts (out of 1100) got through to Akismet for my attention.

    My life is my own again.

  • 1937: Antietam’s 75th Anniversary

    Dellinger and Miller, 1936click to see larger image
    This is a picture taken June 6, 1936 in the cemetary at Winchester on decoration day.
    I [George Dellinger] am in uniform X. The other one is Daniel Miller, a Confederate vet,
    now in his 100th year. I am in my 92nd year (from the back of the photo)

    George Dellinger, formerly of Company D, 23rd Virginia Cavalry, sent this photograph to the Hagerstown (Md.) Historical Society in response to a US Antietam Celebration Commission questionnaire. The Commission organized the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of that momentous battle at Sharpsburg, Maryland on 17 September 1937, and had canvassed surviving Civil War veterans for their memories and present circumstances.

    This and other photos, along with letters of reply from many of the veterans, are now online at one of two new exhibits created by the folks at the Western Maryland Historical Library. (more…)

  • Craighill: staff officers, a lighthouse, and copyfraud

    William Price Craighill (1833-1909) may have been something of a prodigy as he entered the US Military Academy at West Point at age 16 in 1849.

    duty honor country
    W.P. Craighill, c. 1849

    He graduated in 1853, ranked second in the class which included famous ACW Generals Sheridan and Hood, and was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. At the outbreak of the Civil War he was an instructor at West Point, and though from Virginia, stayed with the Union, seeing War service on fortifications and other engineering projects across the US. His long Army career peaked in 1895 when he was appointed Brigadier General and Chief of Engineers, US Army.

    I bring Craighill to you in several contexts – a kind of 3-for-the-price-of-one post … (more…)