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Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign, Part 1

War of Maneuver – Rocky Face Ridge to the Outskirts of Resaca

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 November 2025 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable.

The Roundtable’s 2025 field trip covered the Vicksburg Campaign, and the field trip in 2021 covered the Battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga. The Union’s ultimate success in these military actions in Confederate territory depended on many Northern generals, but most prominently and importantly on the leadership of General Ulyssess S. Grant. As a result of his successes, Grant was summoned by President Abraham Lincoln to come east, and Grant was put in command over all the Union armies.

Vicksburg Field Trip – September 2025

By Steve Pettyjohn
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2025, All Rights Reserved

Dates: September 25-28, 2025
Location: Vicksburg, Mississippi
Participants: 35 members and guests

Editor’s note: The photographs in this field trip report were generously provided by Jose Esparza and Steve Pettyjohn as indicated for each photograph.

The Trip

The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable conducted its 2025 annual fall field trip to Vicksburg, Mississippi from September 25-28 under the leadership of President Judge Charles Patton with the able assistance of Field Captain and Adjutant Bob Pence. The Vicksburg Campaign is one of the most important military campaigns in U.S. history and demonstrates the generalship of Ulysses S. Grant at its best. Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign has been hailed by many military historians as brilliant and worthy of being called Napoleonic. However, due to its geographic location in the Western Theater of the Civil War, the Vicksburg Campaign has always taken second fiddle to Gettysburg in the Eastern Theater.

Union Riverine Logistics at the Battle of Shiloh

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 October 2025 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable.

We just returned from a wonderful field trip to Vicksburg, where we studied General Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign to capture the South’s “Gibraltar of the West.” It was a combined arms operation that included both the Union army and its brown water navy. Grant had employed such tactics previously and arguably under more difficult circumstances at the Battle of Shiloh, where General Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio arrived after being shuttled across the Tennessee River – during the battle, at night in a rainstorm. In Wiley Sword’s book Shiloh: Bloody April, Buell is quoted as saying that it was “A brilliant page in History.” The daunting challenges of using transport ships to move troops and supplies during the Civil War are mentioned in most accounts only in passing. As such, this history brief focuses on part of the multitude of components that made up the logistics of crossing the Army of the Ohio over the Tennessee River, which must have appeared to onlookers to be an assemblage of organized chaos.

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.