cleveland – The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable

Ram Warfare on the Mississippi River in 1862

By Daniel J. Ursu, Roundtable Historian
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2025-2026, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was the history brief for the September 2025 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable.

For its 2025 field trip, the Roundtable traveled to Vicksburg to study General Ulysses Grant’s campaign that accomplished one of the major goals of Union General Winfield Scott’s vaunted Anaconda Plan. But before the land campaign could be won, there was a war on the waters to win on the Mississippi River. Civil War naval battles quickly conjure the ironclad duel between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia, Admiral Farragut at New Orleans, and Confederate blockade runners. However, for a couple of months in 1862, an improbable form of ancient naval battle reemerged on the Mississippi River, harkening back to the ancient Greeks, Persians, and Romans: that ancient form of naval battle being ram warfare.

Bushrod Johnson’s Final Resting Places

By David A. Carrino
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2016, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in October 2016.

The Civil War is occasionally referred to as the North vs. the South. However, people who are knowledgeable about the Civil War know that that is not entirely correct on an individual level. This is because quite a few of the combatants were from the opposite part of the country, but felt loyalty to the other side and chose to fight on that side. One such person is General Bushrod R. Johnson, who was a Northerner by birth, but who fought for the Confederacy. Ironically, just like Johnson’s life had a geographic dichotomy across the Civil War’s sectional divide, Johnson has two final resting places with a similar geographic duality, one in the North and one in the South.

Brave Buckeye Women in Blue: Ohio Women Soldiers in the Civil War

By Brian D. Kowell
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2024, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in October 2024.

No one knows the exact number of women soldiers who served in the American Civil War. Historians DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook, who chronicled 240 women in uniform in their book They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War, estimate that over 400 served North and South. The American Battlefield Trust estimates that the number could be as high as 700 women who served in uniform. “The full extent of women’s participation as armed combatants in America’s bloodiest and most costly conflict will never be known with certainty,” wrote Blanton and Cook, “because women soldiers fought for the most part in secrecy.” Some followed their husbands or sweethearts off to war, some escaped from domestic abuse or poverty, and others served for patriotic reasons. Many women soldiers hailed from Ohio.¹

The Nancy Harts

By Al Fonner
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2025, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in February 2025.

On April 17, 1865, fresh off the capture of Fort Tyler, Union Colonel Oscar H. La Grange led a force of 3,000 cavalry to LaGrange, Georgia. Did the colonel find it curious that the town bore his name, or vice versa? Still more curious, I am sure, was that initially there was no Confederate opposition to prevent his entry into the town until the colonel came face to face with some 40 women in line formation just outside of the town at the LaGrange Female College. The women were bedecked in ruffled skirts and floral hats and armed with a variety of old muskets and flintlocks that likely saw better days during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. So befuddled was Colonel La Grange that he was quoted to remark that the women arrayed before him “…might use their eyes with better effect upon the Federal soldiers than their rusty guns (Horton, 14).” It looked as if the colonel had a fight on his hands after all. So who were these stalwart Southern belles standing valiantly against the Yankee invaders?

Clara Barton and Clevelander John J. Elwell: A Civil War Romance

By Dennis Keating
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2025, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in March 2025.

In my book Cleveland and the Civil War, I mention the relationship formed in 1863 between Clara Barton and Clevelander John J. Elwell (pp. 43-44). Born in Massachusetts, Barton moved to Washington City and was employed in the U.S. Patent Office. When the Civil War broke out, she volunteered with the Union Army, first bringing medical supplies after battles beginning with First Bull Run and then also nursing wounded soldiers at Second Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. She became known as “The Angel of the Battlefield,” but she did not join the official Union nurses corps headed by Dorothea Dix.

Emanuel Patterson and the 6th United States Colored Troops (USCT)

By D. Kent Fonner
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in November 2024.

Much has been written about the history of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, and the brave men of that regiment were celebrated in the movie Glory. There were, however, thousands of more Black soldiers in Mr. Lincoln’s army, most serving in a segregated branch of the U.S. Army designated as the United States Colored Troops (USCT).

Gutzon Borglum: Part Deux

By Brian D. Kowell
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2025, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in January 2025.

After writing my article about Gutzon Borglum and his work on Mount Rushmore and at Stone Mountain, I wondered what other Civil War monuments Borglum sculpted. Turns out quite a few.

Gutzon Borglum vs. UDC and the State of Georgia

By Brian D. Kowell
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2024, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in December 2024.

This past summer my wife and I traveled to South Dakota. We visited Mount Rushmore and were awestruck by the magnificence of the sculpted mountain with the visages of Washington, Jefferson, T. Roosevelt, and Lincoln – all done under the skilled guidance of sculptor Gutzon Borglum. This was not Borglum’s first try carving heroes on a mountain’s face.

An Angel from Richmond, the 2nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry and the Long Path of Discovery

By Thomas M. Cooper
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2024, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in December 2024.

The biographical details of our ancestors emerge slowly, and perhaps this is a good thing. History needs to marinate some events over time so that their meaning can be understood by the living, in deeper, broader contexts. This is especially true for wartime histories involving trauma and the years required to remember-and-resolve. This is one of the reasons we study these periods and come together to talk about them.

Surrender? A Better Word Would Be Quit: Eastern Cherokee and the Confederacy

By Al Fonner
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2024, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in December 2024.

When we think of the American Indian’s support of the Confederate States in the American Civil War, we most often think of what occurred west of the Mississippi River and in the Southwest. One name that often comes to mind is General Stand Watie, who raised and commanded a contingent of Cherokee fighters for the Confederate States, operating in the Indian Territory, Kansas, and Missouri. Although not as celebrated as Watie and his Cherokee, the Eastern Cherokee who remained in western North Carolina also threw their lot in with the Confederate States. This remnant formed the backbone of what became known collectively as Thomas’s Legion of Indians and Mountaineers. The Cherokee contingent of the Legion served primarily in the defense of the Appalachian Mountain region of western North Carolina, although they had some involvement in early operations in eastern Tennessee.