Winfield Scott

First Manassas: The Battle of Bull Run

By Earl Echelberry

On March 4, 1861, with war clouds threatening the land, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated the 16th president of the United States. Read more

Winfield Scott

Battle of Gettysburg: No Picnic at Culp’s Hill

By Roy Morris Jr.

As they formed ranks on the Hanover Road one mile east of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of July 2, 1863, the men in the II Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia stared anxiously at the giant boulders and towering oak trees dotting the humpbacked prominence known as Culp’s Hill, three quarters of a mile southeast of town. Read more

Winfield Scott

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

Winfield Scott

Battle of the Hemp Bales

By Steve Lilley

Brigadier General James S. Rains’s Confederate cavalry rode confidently toward the prosperous little town of Lexington, Missouri. Dressed in Missouri homespun, Rains’s men hardly looked the part of a flying military column, but most of the hard-riding horsemen had known only victory during their short service. Read more

Winfield Scott

Medal of Honor Awardee Horace Porter’s Astonishing Career

By Richard H. Owens, Ph.D.

Horace Porter was born April 15, 1837 in Huntingdon, Pa. He traced his ancestry and family motto, “Vigilantia et virtute,” to William De La Grange, who accompanied William the Conqueror to England in 1066. Read more

Winfield Scott

Rose O’Neal Greenhow: The Spy Who Won Bull Run

By David Alan Johnson

“But for you, there would have been no Battle of Bull Run.” When Confederate President Jefferson Davis made that blanket statement in the summer of 1862, he was not addressing Pierre G.T. Read more

Winfield Scott

Battle of Belmont: Ulysses S. Grant’s First Battle

By Donald J. Roberts II

When the Civil War started in 1861, there were only two officers in the Union Army who had commanded a force in battle larger than a brigade. Read more

Winfield Scott

The War of 1812: Slugfest at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane

by Mike Phifer

In the cover of darkness and fog, American troops quietly made their way down to the edge of the Niagara River. Read more

Winfield Scott

The History of Mobile Artillery

By Arnold Blumberg

“It is with artillery that one makes war.” So declared Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the Great Captains of military history and a born gunner himself. Read more

Winfield Scott

WWII’s Battle of Wake Island: An Unsteady Victory

By John Wukovits

In mid-December 1941, during the thick of the Battle of Wake Island, the 400 U.S. Marines who called the island outpost home stood a lonely sentinel in the watery Central Pacific wilderness, like a cavalry fort in an oceanic version of the Western frontier. Read more

Winfield Scott

James Douglas’ Audacious Plans after the Trent Affair

By William Silvester

On November 8, 1861, two distinguished diplomats from the newly established Confederate States of America were arrested and removed from the British mail steamer Trent by the American ship San Jacinto in the Bahama Channel near Havana, Cuba. Read more

Winfield Scott

Santa Anna at Cerro Gordo: Battle for Devil’s Jaws

By Frank A. O’Reilly

American Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott captured the port city of Vera Cruz on March 27, 1847, and immediately prepared to leave it behind. Read more

Winfield Scott

Colonel Patrick Kelly at the Battle of Gettysburg

by Joseph G. Bilby

Colonel Patrick Kelly, who led the Irish Brigade into the Wheatfield on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, was born in Castle Hackett, County Galway, in 1821. Read more

Winfield Scott

American Civil War Timeline: Piecemeal Operations

by William E. Welsh

U.S. President Abraham Lincoln had no military experience and discarded most of Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott’s so-called Anaconda Plan, which critics deemed too conservative. Read more

Winfield Scott

Military Fashion in the Napoleonic Wars

By Blaine Taylor

Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, was in a fury over the uniforms issued to his newly created Illyrian Regiment: “Too small, too short, too tight, badly cut, badly made, badly sewed; many of the buttonholes made only with a simple snip of the scissors … sleeves not lined … capotes so tight that they cannot be worn over the uniform coat but they hamper the movements of men who have nothing on but a waistcoat under them; many … are of bad cloth … I want a report!” Read more

Winfield Scott

Ulysses S. Grant: Clerk to Commanding General

by Donald J. Roberts II

The Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, marked the beginning of the American Civil War. Read more

Winfield Scott

The Anaconda Plan: Lincoln and Scott’s Move on the Mississippi River

by Donald J. Roberts II

In theory, sealing off Southern seaports was supposed to cause economic ruin in the South, which in turn would diminish the Confederacy’s ability to wage war. Read more

Winfield Scott

Bridge House Hotel: Crimes of the Kempeitai in Shanghai

By Eric Niderost

By the 1930s, Shanghai was already a legend in its own time––the most modern, populous, and decadent city in China. Read more

Winfield Scott

Facts About the Battle of Gettysburg

Gettysburg Fact #1: There Were 50,000 Military Casualties, 1 Civilian

Despite roughly 50,000 casualties reported on both sides during the Battle of Gettysburg, there was only one reported civilian casualty: Mary Wade, a seamstress, was hit by a stray bullet while making bread in her kitchen. Read more

Winfield Scott

Bushrod Johnson: Yankee Quaker, Confederate General

By Roy Morris Jr.

Of all the unlikely heroes of the Civil War, none was more unlikely than Bushrod Johnson, Ohio-born Quaker turned Confederate general. Read more