Who writes his memoir 40 years after the fact, writes it in a flowery 19th century flowery style. When wallace says they arrived here in the morning and lit their camp fires, hell Say Something like, you know, the ste ste steely ska gave way to the orange sun and which was great. You have to balance what wallace says in his memoir with his telegrams from the battlefield. His after reaction report two weeks later because wallace had a way of making himself sound really good. And, you know, he did a very brave thing here. Cant get away from that. And as i say in the book, i believe and i think the judgment of history is that what wallace did here did safe washington, d. C. So this battle took place on july 9th, 1864 and right now its november 2nd, 2007. Its a beautiful day. But one thing to keep in mind about this battle is it was very, very hot. They didnt have thermometers, at least no one referred to a thermometer in their memoirs, but it had to have been in the upper 90s and very, ve
There. Units from washington came out to do some skirmishing. The next morning, july 11th, early, whos one of those generals out on the horse leading the men, made it right out here, right to the outskirts of fort stevens. If you can picture washington, d. C. As shaped like a diamond, we are right at the very top of the diamond, in the northwest portion of washington, d. C. Early about noontime was out of the gates of fort stevens right out here. He had the capitol dome in his sight at noontime, and what did he see . He saw this very impressive series of forts. He saw this fort and it was connected to several other forts around here. It looks impregnable and he saw troops here. Early did not know these were 100 days men and the call went out for civilians to come out and help man the barricades, so you had clerks from the state department, men from the Quarter Master corps, people who have never fired a weapon in their life. The word motley comes up more than once, but early did not kn
President will say, mary would not make a very good soldier, as she swooned. So while the president has been under fire, a man has been shot near him, and by 4 00, the 6th corps is ready to take the offensive. And they will move out from in front of fort stevens, moving across the ground that slopes down to where walter reid is now, beyond battleground cemetery, where 40odd men of the Union Soldiers who were killed here are buried and the union troops and the confederates pulled back. Lincoln will not take his eye off the big picture. Tuesday is the 12th. On the 14th, he is back out at the taking care of business. So he is going to do, and i want you to play another little tune there, because hes going to sign a bill calling for 500,000 more men. And theres one of the tunes in that, we are coming father abraham, 500,000 more. So hes showing his commitment to continuing the war. Hes also curtailed negotiations carried out through on the same day with mr. Blair, through frank blair, and
Men took up their stand against the confederate troops, who came straight down that way from where the tracks are, and this is where they held them. This is the actual junction. It says frederick junction, but its known as the monacacy junction then. The old train station was right behind us over here. And, in fact, these are the tracks that the troops came down from baltimore. Anyway, after their vermonters finally couldnt take it anymore, they fled down the tracks, around the bentd, and the old railroad bridge over there, the ones they had to flee for their lives over while they were being shot at by the confederates. What you see in the back behind me, which has been restored by the National Park service to the way it looked the day of the battle in 1864, this was the portion of the battle of monacacy, and what youre hearing is interstate 270 in the background, but what was here then was cornfields and wheatfields and they were crisscrossed by farm fences. It was not an ideal place
Military history professor Christopher Gabel discusses the importance of railroads and Steam Powered locomotives to the union and confederate armies and explains how railroads made the scale of the civil war possible and describes how and why the confederacys powerful Railroad System broke down as the war progressed. The Kansas City Public Library hosted this hourlong event. Thank you very much for the kind introduction and for being here. Folks, you know when we look back at the onset of the american civil war, we view it through the lens of the war, itself. That shapes what were looking at. If you view the onset of the civil war a little more objectively instead of being all seeing all of the differences between north and south, youll tend to spot all the similarities. Think about it. The two sides in this conflict. It was a war of brother against brother and in some cases literally so. The two sides shared a common language. They had similar cultures and religions. They shared a ver