Decoration Day & Civic Mourning After the American Civil War
By the spring of 1865, the United States had become a republic of graves. Wooden markers leaned over shallow trenches while work crews still moved among battlefields gathering the dead. Families searched casualty lists for familiar names, often receiving only fragments of information – a hurried burial location, a letter…
Keep readingSlavery, Secession, and the Constitutional Argument of the Confederacy
There are few questions in American history more persistently debated, more politically burdened, or more vulnerable to inherited memory than the cause of the Civil War. For generations, Americans have argued over whether the Confederacy was formed primarily in defense of “states’ rights” or in defense of slavery. The argument…
Keep readingHerman Haupt & The Architecture of Mobility
Part of Series “The Architecture of War” War is often remembered by its collisions…. Armies meet. Lines break. Commanders decide. Men advance into smoke. But beneath those visible moments lies another kind of war: the war of movement. Before an army could fight, it had to arrive. Before it could…
Keep readingJonathan Letterman & The Architecture of Preserved Life
Part of Series “The Architecture of War” War is often remembered in terms of movement. Advances, retreats, charges, and lines drawn across a map. Histories follow ground taken and lost, and the decisions that shaped those outcomes. But there is another kind of movement that rarely receives the same attention.…
Keep reading“The Last of Old Lee”: When Soldiers Became the War’s First Historians
History did not wait. It did not begin with the polished prose of later historians, nor with the formal reports compiled in Washington. It did not require distance, reflection, or even the passage of years. Instead, it began immediately – formed in the minds of the men who marched, fought,…
Keep readingThe 78th Pennsylvania: Homecoming and a Stark Absence
Part of Series: “The Kittanning Regiments – A Portrait of Service” This post is a continuation of our series on the Kittanning regiments. Here we’ll take a look at the 78th Pennsylvania Infantry and their return home, in an attempt to uncover the meaning of their homecoming and piece together the…
Keep readingHe Sent Hancock: Command and the Unprecedented Exercise of Authority at Gettysburg, July 1, 1863
On the morning of July 1, 1863, the Army of the Potomac stood at a moment when authority itself would determine survival. Its advance elements were engaged at Gettysburg. Its commander, Major General George G. Meade, remained miles away. And the officer upon whom the army’s forward direction depended -…
Keep readingSGT Joseph W. Stephens: Ringgold Gap, G.A.R. Post 111, and a Silent Gun in Elizabeth Cemetery
In Elizabeth Cemetery, a Civil War artillery piece rests in silence among graves and the Monongahela River Valley. That gun is an iron 30-pounder Parrott rifle once designed to fire explosive shells across battlefields. To a casual visitor, the artillery piece may appear to be simply another relic of the…
Keep readingFire at the Angle: Alonzo H. Cushing and the Guns That Broke Pickett’s Charge
In the midst of the Battle of Gettysburg, an artillery officer named Alonzo Hereford Cushing faced a test of resolve that would define both his life and his legacy. As the clamor of war enveloped Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863, Cushing made a choice that would immortalize his devotion…
Keep readingPersons, Citizens, and the Constitution: Who the Law Protects and Who the Republic Empowers
In an earlier essay, So Nobly Advanced examined how the Civil War reshaped the meaning of constitutional personhood. Yet an equally important question lies deeper in the Constitution itself: Who does the Constitution protect? Debates over the scope of constitutional rights often begin with the assumption that the Constitution protects…
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