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Dec 15
Next Time: The Confederate Blockade of the Potomac River • May ’61 – March ’62
By Rob Orrison and Bill Backus.
Shown is a view of the Potomac River from Confederate fortifications at Freestone Point near Dumfries, Virginia
The Battle of Helena Ark. (Vol. 32, #4)
In the late spring of 1863, the situation was growing increasingly dire for the embattled Confederate bastion at Vicksburg, Mississippi. Union General Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee, after audaciously cutting its supply lines to live off the land, had maneuvered some 31,000 Confederate soldiers into their earthworks at Vicksburg and was slowly starving them into submission, with unfettered access of the Mississippi River as the prize.
Editors Letter Vol. 32, #4
Helena For the First Time
There’s a special thrill seeing a Civil War battlefield for the first time. We’ve done several issues on Arkansas, but they were all in the western part of the state: Pea Ridge, Prairie Grove, action in and around Fort Smith. One exception was a brief stop in a field near the defunct Civil War town of Mound City, a short distance north of Memphis on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River. There a soybean farmer and a Memphis attorney located the buried remains of the illfated steamboat Sultana. It was part of a 1990 “General’s Tour” feature.
Next Time: Battle of Helena, Ark., and related events.
Shown is the author, Mark Christ, at the Union fortification on Graveyard Hill.
Historic Crossings of the Rappahannock and Rapidan Rivers (Volume 32 #3)
by Eric Nelson
Civil War campaigns in and around Fredericksburg, Va., required an advancing army first to jump the Rappahannock River. As a consequence, river crossings loomed large at the Battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. At Fredericksburg in 1862, the pontoon bridge sites became the initial points of contact and men died as engineers struggled to build their floating bridges under fire. The hard lesson was that bridges were best built when an army controlled both sides of the waterway. During the Chancellorsville Campaign in 1863, the Union army again crossed the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg, but sent assault forces over first to seize the opposite shore before the bridge building began. These crossings in the tidal part of the Rappahannock River were a diversion from the advance of the main Union force, which occurred far upstream. Where the upriver fords remained usable and lightly picketed, an advance guard could splash across and secure the crossing site. Some fords, however, had become altered by dams and canals, and establishing military crossings there posed additional challenges.
Editors Letter Vol. 32, #3
Back in 1983 when Blue & Gray was founded, I never thought there would be a “General’s Tour” requiring anything but a dependable vehicle with a full tank of gas, good hiking shoes (boots preferred), and a proper functioning odometer. Also, since that kind of touring by its very nature had to be what I termed “turf-bound,” it was pretty clear that oceanic naval operations would not become Tour features.
The Battle of Cedar Mountain
An excerpt from the current issue: Volume 32, #2
The Battle of Cedar Mountain
by Michael E. Block
Vice President, Friends of Cedar Mountain Battlefield
The Battle of Cedar Mountain has never been considered part of a campaign. Many will place the fight as the opening action of the Second Manassas Campaign. However, the fight south of Culpeper, Va., on August 9, 1862 was, if anything, the concluding action of the Peninsula Campaign.
The Lincoln Administration needed to create a distraction for the Confederate armies on the Virginia Peninsula below Richmond—a distraction to relieve pressure on Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac so his troops could withdraw from their pocket along the James River.
Editors Letter: The Making of A Legend
The Making of A Legend
The story of Stonewall Jackson and his battle at Cedar Mountain with principal adversary Nathaniel Banks can not be fully understood without placing the fight in its proper context. Feature article author Michael Block offers the argument that the battle was not an opening action of the Second Manassas Campaign in the summer of 1862, as many accounts claim, but rather a concluding action to the Union’s failed campaign on the Virginia Peninsula.
Blue & Gray Magazine 