Author: Fred Ray
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Dominating the Skirmish Line
I see that Brett is offering a free copy of Earl Hess’s book on the rifle musket, so it might be a good time to revisit a controversy raised therein, namely did the ANV’s sharpshooter battalions punch above their weight in Virginia? I would say they did, and base this as much as anything on […]
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Short Takes
Came across a very nicely done site on vintage battleships, including a section on the ships of the US Civil War. Some nice trivia here as well. Did you know that the twin-turret monitor Onondaga, which served on the James River, later went on to a distinguished career in the French Navy that ended just […]
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Lincoln and the Laws of War
John Fabian Witt, a professor of legal history at Columbia University, pens an article in Slate about Lincoln’s Laws of War, and how the Bush administration supposedly attempted to destroy them. This is amusing, since when it comes to prosecuting a war George Bush is a pantywaist compared to the Great Emancipator. Witt wraps the […]
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Short Takes
Did you know that US president and Union Civil War general Rutherford B. Hayes is a national hero in … Paraguay? Forget Lincoln or Washington. Hayes – a one-term U.S. president who is undistinguished at home – has a holiday, a province, a town, a museum and a soccer team all named in his honor, […]
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Soldiers, Deserters, and Turncoats
Both the Union and Confederacy had to fight two wars—one against their external enemy, one against their own people. Some people simply wanted to avoid the war or military service, while others willingly drew the sword against their own people. In the Union it was relatively easy to avoid military service; in the Confederacy it […]
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The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
I took a night off last night and watched Sergio Leone’s melodramatic western masterpiece The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly on my new wide screen TV. Even though it was released in 1966, and did not reach the US until a year later, it still holds up pretty well. It was the third of […]
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Save Those Confederate (half) Dollars, Boys!
Although most Confederate money was paper they did mint a small number of silver coins at New Orleans. The US Mint there was successively run by the briefly independent state of Louisiana and then by the Confederate government until the fall of the city in 1862. Almost none of these half dollars have survived, but […]