By Roy Morris Jr.

With this issue, Civil War Quarterly joins the roster of other regularly published Sovereign Media publications. Our new issue, appropriately enough, contains a heavy dose of Gettysburg on the eve of the battle’s 150th anniversary. We have articles on Richard Ewell’s miscarried assault on Culp’s Hill, the often overlooked cavalry clash between J.E.B. Stuart and George Armstrong Custer, and Gettysburg’s “unknown soldier,” Private Amos Humistead of the 154th New York, who achieved in his lonely death a fame he never would have achieved in life. Gettysburg looms large over our inaugural issue, as it does over the entire Civil War.

But since the war was much more than a few set-piece battles in the East, we also include articles on William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 Mississippi campaign, last-ditch Confederate blockade runners, the savage fighting outside Atlanta, the siege of Pensacola, and life and death inside Civil War prisons. And because much of what we know about the war depends, to a great extent, on what has been written about it, we include the first of a regular series of articles on the written war: General Edward Stackpole’s 1958 classic, Chancellorsville: Lee’s Greatest Battle. Future issues will look at how such famous writers as Stephen Crane, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain wrote about the war, and how the massive Official Records of the War of the Rebellion and Battles and Leaders of the Civil War came to be compiled.

While not stinting on the famous battles that so marked us as a nation, Civil War Quarterly will also strive to remember that the war was, at heart, a true civil war. We will look closely at the effect the war had on civilians, both Northern and Southern, and at a whole range of social, political, and economic factors surrounding the conflict. Wars, particularly civil wars, do not take place in a vacuum, but there has sometimes been a tendency to view the American Civil War as an uninterrupted series of battles fought by chivalrous foes on discrete battlefields. The reality was much more prosaic, and much less romantic. As that least romantic of generals, Nathan Bedford Forrest, warned at the beginning of hostilities: “War means fighting, and fighting means killing.” There is no room in Civil War Quarterly for the “gallant cavaliers/moonlight and magnolias” school of history. The war was far too serious for that.

On a personal note, it is exciting to return to the Civil War after a nine-year run as editor of Military Heritage. With the able assistance of our many talented contributors, I was privileged to learn much about the history of men, weapons, and wars, from the Bronze Age to the present. But as a native Chattanoogan, the Civil War remains my first love. In my hometown, the war is almost a civic religion. Generations of schoolchildren grow up reading about the Battle above the Clouds, the spontaneous Union charge up Missionary Ridge, and the ferocious no-quarters Battle of Chickamauga, fought 10 miles away in the deep woods of northwest Georgia. Plaques and monuments are everywhere, and cannons still sit in people’s front yards. National Cemetery, midway between downtown and Missionary Ridge, serves as a final resting place for soldiers and their spouses from all the nation’s wars since 1863.

In a nation created by one war, solidified by a second and still unfortunately at war today, it is incumbent upon all Americans to remember the valor and sacrifice of the countless thousands of soldiers, living and dead, who gifted us with the freedoms we enjoy today. Civil War Quarterly is dedicated to the task of remembering. As Abraham Lincoln reminded us at Gettysburg, it’s really the least we can do.

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