Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln had been personal and political opponents for 20 years when they clashed for the Illinois Senate seat in 1858.
Civil War Quarterly

Summer 2016

Volume 7, No. 1

COVER: Major General George Armstrong Custer, who led several cavalry charges against Lee’s Confederates at Sayler’s Creek. See story page 14. Photo: Library of Congress.

Summer 2016

Civil War Quarterly, Soldiers

Union General Joseph Mansfield

By Steven L. Ossad

For more than 45 years, Joseph Mansfield prepared himself for the ultimate test of a soldier—high command in time of war. Read more

Summer 2016

Civil War Quarterly, Medicine

Dying to Get Home: PTSD in the Civil War

By Kevin L. Cook

A slight knee wound brought the New Jersey boy to a Washington military hospital, but “his mind had suffered more than his body,” wrote volunteer nurse Louisa May Alcott. Read more

Summer 2016

Civil War Quarterly

Black Thursday at Sayler’s Creek

By David A. Norris

Four hundred Confederate sailors and marines, their small arms loaded and ready, awaited their orders. Some men had their cutlasses within easy reach. Read more

Summer 2016

Civil War Quarterly

The Legendary Lincoln-Douglas Debates

By Roy Morris Jr.

The two men facing each other across the debate stage at Ottawa, Illinois, on the afternoon of August 21, 1858, were no strangers to one another. Read more

Summer 2016

Civil War Quarterly

The Disastrous Red River Campaign

By Michael E. Haskew

Nathaniel Banks was a political creature, and with his country in the throes of civil war, he now held the politically obtained rank of major general in the Union Army. Read more

Summer 2016

Civil War Quarterly

Battle of Mechanicsville: McClellan’s Unexploited Victory

By John Walker

After an almost uninterrupted, four-month-long string of Union successes beginning in early 1862, followed by the advance of a 100,000-man enemy army to the eastern outskirts of its capital at Richmond, Virginia, the Confederacy suddenly found itself in a life-or-death struggle for its very survival. Read more

Union General William T. Sherman and his army cut loose from Atlanta in November 1864 and began cutting a swath of destruction across Georgia.

Summer 2016

Civil War Quarterly

Sherman’s March to the Sea

By William Stroock

On September 3, 1864, a triumphant Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman telegraphed Washington, “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” Read more