Union Army

William T. Sherman: A Hard Lesson in War

By Arnold Blumberg

With the fall of Vicksburg in the first week of July 1863, the strongest remaining Confederate presence in Mississippi was a recently thrown together force of 26,000 soldiers under General Joseph E. Read more

Union Army

Civil War Generals: Albert Sidney Johnston

By Roy Morris Jr.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis considered his old West Point classmate Albert Sidney Johnston “the greatest soldier, the ablest man, civil or military, Confederate or Union, then living,” and it is safe to say that no other general in either army began the Civil War with a more glittering—or fleeting—reputation. Read more

Union Army

Mark Twain Joins the Marion Rangers

By Roy Morris, Jr.

Twenty-five-year-old Mississippi River pilot Samuel Clemens (not yet known by his famous pen name, Mark Twain) was in his home port of New Orleans in late January 1861 when word reached the city that Louisiana had seceded from the Union. Read more

Union Army

Michigan’s Ottawa Indians in the American Civil War

By Roy Morris Jr.

While many Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians threw in their lot with the Confederacy, fighting alongside southern troops at the Battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862, a more northern-based tribe—the Ottawa—chose to remain loyal to the Union, in the forlorn hope that its willingness to fight for the white men’s country would help preserve its increasingly imperiled way of life. Read more

Braxton Bragg’s reinforced Army of Tennessee nearly destroyed William Rosecrans’ Army of the Cumberland at the Battle of Chickamauga.

Union Army

Visiting the Battle of Chickamauga

By William E. Welsh

An hour before the sun reached its zenith on September 20, 1863, on the second day of a hard-fought battle on a sluggish stream in the north Georgia woods, Union Brig. Read more

Union Army

Union Generals of the American Civil War: George McClellan

by Mike Haskew

General George McClellan was a key figure in the prosecution of the American Civil War, particularly during 1862, when he led the Union Army of the Potomac during the Peninsula Campaign, a failed offensive to capture the Confederate capital of Richmond in the spring, and the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day in American history, on September 17, 1862. Read more

Union Army

Bastogne Must Fall

By Mike Phifer

In the early morning of December 16, 1944, 80-man German shock companies from the 5th Panzer Army slipped toward the American lines in the Ardennes region under the cover of heavy fog. Read more

Union Army

Photographing the Battle of Antietam

By Roy Morris, Jr.

Two days after the unparalleled bloodletting at Antietam, a bushy-bearded Scottish photographer and his pudgy, clean-shaven assistant rolled onto the battlefield with their bulky stereoscopic cameras and portable darkroom. Read more