re: 150 years ago this day...

Monday, 21 September 1863

General George Thomas, the “Rock of Chickamauga” as he would come to be known as soon as the newspaper stories were written up, continued in that role today. Having held the core of the Union army together yesterday on Snodgrass Hill, he had retired towards Chattanooga after nightfall. Today he again held the defenses of the city with the remnants of the Army of the Cumberland. His commanding officer, Rosecrans, was frantically preparing the city for siege. General Braxton Bragg, commanding the Confederates, issued orders for a pursuit before the defenses could be completed, then cancelled the order. Yet another chance to annihilate the Union forces was lost.

Twenty-one persons, exiled for various degrees and offenses of disloyalty, accompanied by nine ladies, who went by permission of the War Department to rejoin their families, permanently residing at the South, left St. Louis, Missouri, in charge of Captain Edward Lawler, of the First Missouri infantry. They were sent within the Southern lines in accordance with orders of the National War Department, of 24 April, 1863.

James Murray Mason, Confederate envoy to England and along with John Slidell the Southern half of the Trent Affair, informed Earl Russell, at the Court of St. James's, that his commission was at an end, and that he had been ordered by President Jefferson Davis to remove himself from the country. While traveling with Slidell to their posts as Confederate commissioners to Britain and France on the British mail steamer RMS Trent, the ship was stopped by the USS San Jacinto on November 8, 1861. Mason and they were confined by the Lincoln Administration in Fort Warren, Boston Harbor, until threatened with a second war by Great Britain.

The British schooner Martha Jane, was captured by the Union gunboat, sidewheel steamer Fort Henry's tender USS Annie, off Bayport, Florida.

The revenue steamer Hercules, while lying off the Virginia shore, was attacked by a large party of Confederate partisan guerrillas, but they were driven off after a fight of about twenty minutes, without inflicting any serious damage to the steamer or her crew.

Chat Discussion

I'm sure he understands the discipline of history and why studying it is important. He's just saying that he doesn't find the Civil War all that interesting or at least presumably not as interesting as other periods of history.

I like the politics of the Civil War. The Election of 1860, the Missouri Compromise, etc. The war itself though (battles, tactics, generals, etc.) doesn't really do it for me.