TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Category: Military History

  • Review: The Day Lincoln Was Almost Shot: The Fort Stevens Story by B.F. Cooling

    The Day Lincoln Was Almost Shot: The Fort Stevens Story by Benjamin Franklin Cooling III The Scarecrow Press $45.00 May 2013 ISBN: 978-0-8108-8622-3       Most people would put the high water mark of the Confederacy at a copse of trees near the crest of Cemetery Hill just outside of Gettysburg, PA, on the […]

  • Civil War Book Review: The Battle of Pickett’s Mill: Along the Dead-Line

    Butkovich, Brad. The Battle of Pickett’s Mill: Along the Dead-Line (The History Press, 2013). 208 pages, over 20 images, maps, order of battle, notes, bibliography. ISBN: 978-1-62619-042-9 $21.99 (Paperback). The Battle of Pickett’s Mill: Along the Dead-Line is the first detailed modern book focused solely on the Battle of Pickett’s Mill.  The small battle is […]

  • Archer’s Brigade sharpshooters (and who shot Reynolds)

    Information about Confederate sharpshooter battalions is often hard to come by and you have to dig it out piecemeal and then try to assemble it into some sort of coherent whole. Often all you have is some offhand mentions in letters, reports and reminiscences. Such is the case with Archer’s mostly Tennessee brigade. The presence […]

  • Counting US Forces at Mansfield

    Even though I was able to count a sizable Confederates force that Taylor had at the Battle of Mansfield, wasn’t he outnumbered in the battle? Coming up with the total Present for Duty (PFD) on the US side is relatively easy since there is a table in the Office Records that shows the following Present […]

  • For Your Sunday Reading

    A couple of articles that TOCWOC readers might enjoy. Joe Bilby continues his “Guns of” series for American Rifleman with “The Guns of Gettysburg.” If you want to know who shot who with what, Joe’s your man. Gettysburg was probably the first major battle anywhere where both sides were armed almost entirely with rifles. In […]

  • Gettysburg on GIS

    Smithsonian magazine has a very interesting map study of Gettysburg using modern GIS data to plot elevations and sight distances. You can take a look for yourself and see what the commanders actually saw on those fateful days. Which is not what we see on maps today where, looking down from above, we know exactly […]

  • General Jacob Cox on Assault Tactics

    When discussing tactics one needs to look not just at what pundits are saying now but what the people who actually practiced them said about it. I came across an excellent description of the failure of the column attacks at Kennesaw Mountain by someone who was there, Maj. Gen. Jacob Cox, who commanded a division […]