While back home recently, I took in a Tigers’ game with my brother. We could not have asked for better Michigan weather, and went downtown early to walk around and enjoy a few Lafayette Coney Island hot dogs before the game. The downtown area of the city is truly experiencing a re-birth. Office buildings, many…
Military conflicts have, I suspect, brought out the entrepreneurial spirit in people for eons. The American Civil War was certainly no different. Hundreds, if not thousands, of would be entrepreneurs inundated the governments and war departments of both sides with offers to provide services and products of all kinds. Most of the folks meant well…
In April I detailed the 8th Pennsylvania Cavalry’s Christmas Day frolic in King George County. The misfeasance of Lt. Col. Amos E. Griffiths, and several of his officers, may have gone unnoticed but for the timely, or untimely, depending upon your point of view, arrival of Col. William Gamble’s 8th Illinois Cavalry. Regiments rotated picket…
Life is tenuous for all of us. Life is especially fragile for a soldier in a combat zone. The order or action which may alter a soldier’s life forever is always only a second away. We are, perhaps, lucky we do not possess the ability to see the future, as we might always be running…
The 8th Illinois Cavalry relieved the 8th Pennsylvania Cavalry from picket duty in King George County on Christmas Day 1862. Leaving their camps in Stafford County, the men headed south and east along present-day Route 3 into King George County. Stafford County was desolate, stark and war-ravaged; fences had disappeared, forests denuded and farms abandoned. …
Writing after the war, Bvt. Col. Benjamin Crowninshield, 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, explained the vital importance of outpost, vidette or picket duty. “On the skill and fidelity of cavalry depends the safety of the army.” Cavalry, Crowninshield continued, “is constantly employed…in the hardest and most inglorious service in the world, outpost and vidette duty, – where…
I built my last post, Willow Hill, around the following letter written by Col. William Gamble, 8th Illinois Cavalry, to Brig. Gen. James Wadsworth. I have received your letter of this date informing me of the arrest of Mr. Thompson overseer of Mr. Arnold, sent with an orderly to identify and have returned a wagon,…
