TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Category: Military History

  • Review: Those Damned Black Hats! The Iron Brigade in the Gettysburg Campaign

    Those Damned Black Hats! The Iron Brigade in the Gettysburg Campaign by Lance Herdegen Product Details Hardcover: 368 pages Publisher: Savas Beatie (October 2008) Language: English ISBN-10: 1932714480 ISBN-13: 978-1932714487 The Iron Brigade was one of the premier combat units of the Army of the Potomac.  Comprised of western regiments their distinctive headgear made them […]

  • Slope Dope

    Whaaa? Bear with me, we’re not talking about something really exotic here. Consider the following account from the Battle of South Mountain (Boonesboro for you Confederates). The report is from the the 107th Pennsylvania, part of Duryea’s brigade, which was attacking up a steep slope toward Turner’s Gap against Robert Rodes’ Alabama brigade. in compliance […]

  • The Lone Marksman

    As a followup to my previous post about a present-day marksman in Afghanistan, I am posting (with his kind permission) Gary Yee’s article about a lone marksman at the Battle of New Orleans and the effect he had. Gary, who will be coming out with a sharpshooting book of his own shortly, is one of […]

  • A Rifleman At War

    There’s a lot of ongoing controversy about the effect of the rifle in battle, but there’s no question that in certain times and places an individual rifleman can have a powerful effect. One such example comes to us from Afghanistan: During the battle, the designated marksman single handedly thwarted a company-sized enemy RPG and machinegun […]

  • Sharpshooters in Action

    While looking through Francis A. Walker’s Second Army Corps in the Army of the Potomac I came across this passage, which describes the fighting between Heth’s division and Hancock’s Second Corps at the Battle of Boydton Plank Road: It may be interesting to pass to the Confederate side and see how the operations of the […]

  • Confederate Mobilization? A Reader Question

    Longtime TOCWOC reader Mark Kucinic recently contacted us with the following interesting observation: I just finished reading a biography of Winfield Scott and ran across a piece of info I have never noted before. I went back through my somewhat extensive library and have taken part in a number of discussions about the origins of […]

  • Origins of the Rifle-pit

    One of the most common features of the Civil War battlefield was the rifle pit, especially in the last two years of the war. Yet this feature was unknown in Napoleon’s time. As the name suggests, the rifle pit’s introduction coincided with the widespread use of the rifle, and can be dated to the Siege […]