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Stonewall Jackson’s Arm

You actually can spend a few moments in the past, if you’re willing to get out of your car—and if you’re lucky enough to meet the right guide

James Sorensen
April/May 2005

I have never shaken hands with a politician. I have never worked on a famous person’s house, nor have I ever witnessed a historic event. But one time I had lunch with Stonewall Jackson’s arm.

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General Longstreet And The Lost Cause

One of Lee’s greatest lieutenants is slowly winning his reputation back after losing it for daring to criticize his boss

Stephen W. Sears
February/March 2005

What are we to make of James Longstreet, lieutenant general, Confederate States Army? Longstreet’s newest biographer subtitles his work “The Confederacy‘s Most Controversial Soldier.” Not the most controversial during those four years of war, surely.

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Stonewall Jackson’s Deadly Calm

COMING TO TERMS WITH THE MOST COMPELLING AND MYSTERIOUS OF CIVIL WAR HEROES

Robert K. Krick
December 1996

“THERE WAS A WITHCERY IN his name,” a Mississippian wrote, “which carried confidence to friend and terror to foe,” Northerners victimized by Stonewall Jackson’s daring thrusts were hardly less laudatory. Gen. Gouverneur K.Read more »

Getting Right With Robert E. Lee

How to know the unknowable man

Stephen W. Sears
May/June 1991

In 1905, on a visit to Richmond, the noted man of letters Henry James was struck by the sight of the equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee high atop its pedestal overlooking Monument Avenue.Read more »

A Confederate Odyssey

All this Florida boy wanted to do was rejoin his regiment. Instead they drafted him into the Confederate secret service.

Charles C. Hemming
December 1984

A FTER HE WAS MUSTERED out of his beaten army in 1865, Charles Hemming went west to Texas and a highly successful career as a banker. But he never forgot the men he served with, and in 1898 he came home to raise a Confederate monument in Jacksonville. A few years later, still full of thoughts of the conflict in which he played so strenuous a role, he set down the long and fascinating account from which this article is drawn. This previously unpublished memoir was sent to us by Hemming’s granddaughter, Lucy W. Sturgis. Read more »

The Big Thicket

A Last Link with the Living Frontier

June 1977

COPYRIGHT © 1977 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

The Big Thicket is an ecological wonder. This dense forest, sprawling between the Sabine and Trinity rivers in east Texas, constitutes a natural crossroads for plant and animal species from almost every part of the country. No less remarkable is the pioneer way of life that still flourishes where the dwindling generation of settlers’ descendants live in the Thicket’s leafy shadow, just fifty miles from downtown Houston. Read more »

The Burning Of Chambersburg

Liva Baker
August 1973

Colonel William E. Peters stared at his commanding officer incredulously. Had he heard the order correctly? On whose authority was it given? he asked. Peters, thirty-five years old and a veteran of three years of fighting, had proved his bravery often enough; he had two wounds to show for it. But there were limits beyond which, even in war, he would not—or could not—go. Read more »

Hayfoot, Strawfoot!

The Civil War soldier marched to his own individualist cadence, but he was much like today’s G. I.

Bruce Catton
April 1957

The volunteer soldier in the American Civil War used a clumsy muzzle-loading rifle, lived chiefly on salt pork and hardtack, and retained to the very end a loose-jointed, informal attitude toward the army with which he had cast his lot. But despite all of the surface differences, he was at bottom blood brother to the G.I. Joe of modern days.

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