Battles and Military History – Page 9 – The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable

Grierson’s Raid

By Dennis Keating
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2010, All Rights Reserved

After again watching the 1959 film The Horse Soldiers, I decided to revisit Grierson’s Raid. The movie starred John Wayne (as a stand-in for Col. Benjamin Grierson) and William Holden as the surgeon assigned to his brigade for the raid. John Ford directed. Unfortunately, the film veered considerably from the actual raid. It was based on the 1956 novel of the same name by Harold Sinclair. The film included: conflicts between Wayne and Holden over the latter’s medical practices, a love/hate relationship between Wayne (a self-described railroad builder) and a southern belle and plantation owner, a fictional battle at the Newton Station railhead, and another fictional battle based on a caricature of that of New Market, Virginia (May 15, 1864) involving young VMI cadets. (This battle is featured in the Summer 2010 issue of the Civil War Preservation Trust’s Hallowed Ground magazine.) Presumably, these were included for audience appeal. The movie did contain at least some of the actual elements of the incredible Grierson raid.

The Battle of Cedar Creek

By Dennis Keating
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2014, All Rights Reserved

This October 19 marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Cedar Creek in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. It was one of the most dramatic events in the entire Civil War. Riding his horse Rienzi (memorialized in the stirring poem by Thomas Buchanan Read – “Sheridan’s Ride”) from Winchester, an inspiring Phil Sheridan re-organized and rallied his almost defeated Army of the Shenandoah in a few hours to defeat the rebel army of Jubal Early (Robert E. Lee’s “Bad Old Man”), who had launched a successful surprise attack in the fog that morning in Sheridan’s absence.

The 51st Ohio Volunteer Infantry

Compiled by Dick Crews
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2008, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in the spring of 2001.

The 51st Ohio Volunteer Infantry was formed from the Dover/New Philadelphia area of Ohio in October of 1861. After training, the unit was sent to Louisville, Kentucky. Their first casualty was a private who fell off the steamboat and drowned in the Ohio River. The 51st was at the Battle of Perryville but saw no action.

The 8th Ohio Volunteer Infantry

By Dennis Keating
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2012, All Rights Reserved

During the 2009 Cleveland Civil War Roundtable field trip to Gettysburg, our group laid a wreath at the monument honoring the 8th Ohio Volunteer Infantry (OVI). This Ohio regiment, known as “The Fighting Fools,” is perhaps best known for its role in helping to repel the Pickett-Pettigrew charge on July 3, 1863. The 8th OVI was part of the “Gibraltar” brigade of Alexander Hays’s division, in Winfield Hancock’s II Corps of the Army of the Potomac.

Hickenlooper’s Ohio Artillery Anchors the Hornet’s Nest at Shiloh

By Daniel J. Ursu
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2017, All Rights Reserved

Not only did the abolitionist John Brown, the “Meteor of the Civil War” as proffered by poet Walt Whitman, live part of his life in the northeastern Ohio Village of Hudson, but did another military leader of the Civil War actually hail from Hudson – that being Andrew Hickenlooper, Captain of the 5th Independent Battery Ohio Light Artillery.

An Uncivil War: General George G. Meade & the Pennsylvania Reserves in Northern Virginia, October 9 to December 6, 1861

By Peter Holman
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2004, All Rights Reserved

When the news of the surrender of Fort Sumter on April 14, 1861 was telegraphed to Michigan, Captain George Gordon Meade of the U.S. Topographical Bureau anticipated early relief from the remote duty of surveying northern lakes and a return to the true business of the soldier – warfare.

The Battle of Chickasaw Bayou: Grant’s First Attempt to Vanquish Vicksburg

By Daniel J. Ursu, Roundtable Historian
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2019-2020, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was the history brief for the December 2019 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable.

The “war was won in the West” – or so they say – and has been our monthly focus of these history briefs paralleling the same months in 1862. And so we come to December of 1862, which is widely known as the start of Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign.

The Second Battle of Corinth and the Start of the Vicksburg Campaign

By Daniel J. Ursu, Roundtable Historian
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2019-2020, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was the history brief for the November 2019 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable.

We pick up from my September 11, 2019 history brief, with Confederate General Price maneuvering away from Iuka on September 19, 1862. His movement was in a wide southwestwardly arc. (Follow map.) He first went to Baldwyn, Mississippi, then northwest toward Ripley, where he was joined by Van Dorn, and together they headed due north to Pocahontas, Tennessee. Van Dorn assumed command of what was now known as the 22,000 man Confederate Army of Western Tennessee. Positioned thusly, he threatened both Corinth and the Mobile & Ohio Railroad providing a supply line to the Union troops to the south.

“The Civil War Was Won in the West” – or so they say

By Daniel J. Ursu, Roundtable Historian
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2019-2020, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was the history brief for the September 2019 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable.

On September 11, 1862, it could be said that the North was doing well and certainly winning the war in the West. In the East, McClellan had repulsed Lee at Antietam, last year’s field trip at which our guide Steve Recker eloquently argued – whether you agreed with him or not – won the war because it paved the way for Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Coincidentally, it’s Lincoln’s hometown, Springfield, Illinois, that will be the destination of Ellen’s field trip at the end of this month. I tend to agree with Steve; the Emancipation Proclamation and the momentum it produced in so many ways, be it in the heart of the slaves who slowly learned of the document, or the morale boost that it gave many of the soldiers in the North and the resultant moral incentive to fight on to victory – and everything in between – that would overwhelm the South by 1865.

Introduction