TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Author: Fred Ray

  • Henry Morton Stanley, Confederate

    Henry Morton Stanley is best remembered for his role as an African explorer. His 1874-77 journey, charting the Congo river, started the Scramble for Africa. Before Stanley, the white man had been largely content to nibble at the edges, staking little more than ports such as Freetown, Cape Town and Mombasa. After Stanley, the white […]

  • Short Takes

    Earlier I did a couple of posts on Tom Dooley and his defense counsel Zeb Vance. Now Dooley has come to the stage here in Burnsville, NC, in a locally-produced musical, Tom Dooley. The Kingston Trio gave this tale national, if not global, visibility, but the story of Tom Dooley is based on historical events […]

  • Engels on Artillery

    Fredrick Engels is best known for his political partnership with Karl Marx, especially his editorship of Das Capital after the latter’s death. However, Engels was one of the few political radicals of his time with some actual military field experience, having served in the Prussian army and having taken part in the abortive revolution of […]

  • Some Interesting Guns

    Couple of interesting CW period guns. One is the Norwich rapid fire cannon, which was to compete with Gatling’s gun. This prototype Norwich rapid fire “Gatling type” cannon was made in Greenville, Connecticut by James D. Mowry’s company which became the Norwich Arms Company.  It was made in about 1862 as a prototype for competition in […]

  • British Books on Tactics I

    I’ve been reading a series of book on tactics from both the Napoleonic and Revolutionary wars as a background for my ongoing study of Civil War tactics. Part of this is to try to determine, as British military pundit Paddy Griffith had it, if the American Civil War was another Napoleonic war. How much, if […]

  • Review: Confederate Alamo by John Fox

    The Confederate Alamo: Bloodbath at Petersburg’s Fort Gregg on April 2, 1865 John Fox III, Angle Valley Press 2010, ISBN: 978-0-9711950-0-4 Price: $34.95 In his new book The Confederate Alamo John Fox takes a look at one of the least-known but most important battles of the Petersburg campaign—the defense of Fort Gregg and its associated […]

  • Sharps Conversions

    The Sharps rifles and carbines used during the Civil War used a soft combustible case of paper or linen that burned when the weapon fired. The Sharps used a falling block breech that sealed off the combustion gasses during firing, at least most of the time. Occasionally the system got out of order and gasses […]