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The Sword Was Mightier Than the Pen

By John C. Fazio
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2002, 2008, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in December, 2002.

A funny thing happened on the way to Atlanta. The warriors – William Tecumseh Sherman, 43, lean, tough, methodical, ruthlessly efficient and with a passion for order, and John Bell Hood, 32, impetuous, reckless and incredibly brave (strapped on his horse because of his wounds) – took time out from the business of killing to engage in relatively civil correspondence, but not too civil.

Family Reminiscences of the Confederacy

By Bishop Beverly Tucker
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2001, 2008, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: The article below is a transcript of a talk given to the Roundtable on October 19,1959 by the Rt. Reverend Beverly Tucker, PhD, Bishop of the Episcopal Church of Northeast Ohio. The talk was recorded on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. In 1994, Dr. William Schlesinger, one of our founders, had the recording transferred to cassette tape and submitted it for inclusion in the Roundtable archives. This talk was later transcribed by Robert E. Battisti and published in The Charger in the winter of 2001 and then on the Roundtable’s website in 2008.

Making a Covenant with Death: Slavery and the Constitutional Convention

By Dr. Paul Finkelman
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2008, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: Dr. Paul Finkelman is the President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy and Senior Fellow in the Government Law Center at Albany Law School, Albany, New York. He has published over twenty books and more than one hundred articles and serves on the advisory panel to the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. This article is an excerpt from Dr. Finkelman’s book, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, and appears here through the courtesy of the author. Dr. Finkelman presented to the Roundtable at its February 2009 meeting.

The Barlow-Gordon Controversy: Rest In Peace

By John C. Fazio
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2009, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: An abbreviated version of this article along with biographical sketches of Francis and Arabella Barlow and John and Fanny Gordon first appeared in the Charger in 2005 and then in 2006 on this website. The much expanded article below was published in the July 2009 issue of The Gettysburg Magazine and appears here through the courtesy of the author.

John and Fanny – A Love Story

By John C. Fazio
The Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2006, All Rights Reserved

All right, I admit it. I’m an incurable romantic. I love those touching, poignant scenes that reflect the best that is in us, if not always the strongest. I’m talking about Spencer Tracy grabbing John Carradine’s shirt, under his neck, telling him that he’ll kill him if he lays a finger on the boy, Freddie Bartholomew (Captains Courageous), or Rod Steiger putting a gun into brother Marlon Brando’s ribs in the back seat of a car, pleading with him to “take that job,” the one that will save his life, followed by Brando’s plaintive lament that he could have been a contender (On the Waterfront), or Charles Boyer, Cary Grant and Warren Beatty realizing, at the last split second before walking out on their true loves forever (Irene Dunne, Deborah Kerr and Annette Bening, respectively), that the latter missed their appointment atop the Empire State Building because of an automobile accident (An Affair to Remember, a love story so gripping that it has been filmed three times), and countless others that jerk our tears and put lumps in our throats.

Francis and Arabella – A Love Story

By John C. Fazio
The Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2006, All Rights Reserved

The Civil War is filled with touching, poignant, human interest stories, which is not surprising given the human drama that comprised this American Iliad. Examples abound of men who had cushy private lives and could therefore have easily avoided service, but chose, instead, to storm the roaring cannon because of their sense of duty (the most sublime word in the English language, said Robert E. Lee) and their dedication to their country; of men given up for dead by doctors, but who defied the odds and lived to fight another day; of angels of mercy wending their way through enemy lines to be with their beloveds, finding them, snatching them from the jaws of death, as only love and devotion can do, only to later succumb to disease, disease, disease that was all around them; of combatants who stepped away from the maelstrom for a few golden moments to give care, comfort and kindness to a gravely wounded enemy, only to face that very enemy in mortal combat at another time and on a different field; and of men who, when the national fratricide was over, continued the fight for right, as they saw it, in a different arena, and by different means, and succeeded in felling mighty predators. One Civil War story combines all of these scenes. Here it is.

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain: Scholar, Citizen, Soldier

By William F.B. Vodrey
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2008, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article is adapted from the presentation William Vodrey made to the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable in February 2006.

Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 novel The Killer Angels and the movie Gettysburg reintroduced a new generation to a long-obscure hero of the battle, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Chamberlain, then colonel of the 20th Maine infantry regiment, saved the Union left with a desperate bayonet charge down Little Round Top on July 2, 1863. Chamberlain’s reputation was also boosted by Ken Burns’s PBS series The Civil War. He was a genuine hero, much deserving of our study, admiration and respect. Had he not been where he was, when he was, the Confederacy might well have won the Civil War.

Lovejoy of Illinois

By John C. Fazio
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2010, All Rights Reserved

In a very real sense, the Civil War’s first casualty fell not at Fort Sumter on April 14, 1861 (Pvt. David Hough, killed during a post-bombardment salute to Old Glory), or even in Alexandria, Virginia, on May 24, 1861 (Ephraim Elmer Ellsworth, killed after tearing down a Confederate flag atop the Marshall House Inn), but in Alton, Illinois, on November 7, 1837. For there and then it was that the first volley from a pro-slavery mob ended the life of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a courageous idealist who paid with his life for his defense of free speech and a free press and his opposition to slavery. In so doing, he added his name to a very, very long list of men and women for whom principle was more important than convenience, so much so, in fact, that it was worth dying for. It would be left to another Illinoisan and the Northern coalition he led, twenty-seven and a half years later, to vindicate this Illinoisan’s message.

A Report on American Queen: The Rise and Fall of Kate Chase Sprague, Civil War “Belle of the North” by John Oller

By Jean Rhodes
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2015, All Rights Reserved

Katherine Jane Chase, the daughter of Ohio politician, Salmon P. Chase was the envy of the Washington social set during the war years and beyond.

Scenes from The Fighting McCooks

By Barbara and Charles Whalen
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2009, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: The ‘scenes’ that make up this article were excerpted from The Fighting McCooks – America’s Famous Fighting Family by Barbara and Charles Whalen and appear here through the courtesy of the authors.

It was the winter of 1860-61 in the Ohio Valley. On a wind-swept bank of the Ohio River, the western border between free and slave states, a bellicose doctor named John McCook stood beside a little brass cannon. Soon a steamboat hove into view on the broad bosom of the winding river. Downbound, it was rumored to be carrying munitions from the Pittsburgh arsenal to the arming South. When the boat came into range, Dr. McCook fired his cannon furiously, and the startled deckhands dove for cover. Folklore in the Ohio Valley says it was these artillery salvos, and not those fired a few months later at Fort Sumter, that were the opening shots of the Civil War.