Confederate wizards of the saddle

Forty-eight years and a half have passed, since the last drum-beat of the Confederate States was heard and the furling of their flag forever closed the most wondrous military tr...

During this time, Joseph E. Johnston made his superb retreat from Dalton to Atlanta, regarded by military historians as one of the ablest strategic movements of the campaigns fr...

General Wade Hampton, in the history of the Civil War, must ever be acknowledged to be one of the really great leaders. Of distinguished ancestry and high personal character, an...

General Joseph E. Johnston had one of the most varied and eventful careers of any general officer in the Confederate service. General Robert E. Lee was born January 19th, 1807;...

General Joseph Wheeler’s raid into Tennessee in October, 1863, has few parallels in cavalry campaigns. Removed from the excitement and delirium of war, many of its happenings ap...

At Huntsville, Alabama, John H. Morgan was born on the 28th of June, 1825. He was descended from Virginia ancestry, his father having moved from Virginia to Alabama in early man...

and numerous smaller streams all traversed the pathway of this railroad. The topography of the country through which the Louisville & Nashville Railroad was constructed naturall...

To the great Volunteer State, Tennessee, belongs the credit of having produced, in many respects, the most remarkable cavalry leader in the world—Nathan Bedford Forrest. He was...

General John Bankhead Magruder was born in Winchester, Virginia, on the 15th of August, 1810. He came of not only a distinguished but a martial family. Singularly attractive in...

On the 14th of February, 1863, a small brigade of Kentucky cavalry assembled at McMinnville, Tennessee. Seven hundred and fifty men constituted the organization. The 8th Kentuck...

Certain parts of Missouri were settled, almost entirely, by Kentuckians. In the earlier days there had been a tremendous emigration from Kentucky to Indiana and Illinois, and wh...

In October, 1862, General Braxton Bragg, after the campaign in Kentucky, had brought his army out by Cumberland Gap, and, resting a brief while in East Tennessee, moved his forc...

The tremendous exactions of the Confederate cavalry, in the summer and fall of 1864, gave severest test of both their physical resistance and their patriotism. Food for man and...

October and November, 1864, covered the most successful and aggressive period of General Forrest’s remarkable exploits. Volumes could be written describing the details of his ma...

Only three rivers escape from the American Desert—the Columbia, Colorado and Rio Grande. The last of these, the Rio Grande, rises far up amid the mountains of Colorado, close to...

General J. E. B. Stuart was born on the 16th of February, 1833. At the commencement of the war he had just passed his twenty-eighth year. His father had been an officer in the W...

General Meade, notwithstanding his splendid service to the Federal Army at Gettysburg, did not receive the promotion to which he and many of his associates and friends felt that...

In June, 1863, General Banks was hammering Port Hudson, Louisiana, where General Gardner, the commander of the Confederate forces, made such gallant and fierce resistance. The f...

In all military history, Colonel John S. Mosby and his command had neither a counterpart nor a parallel. Man for man, Mosby and his men did more, proportionately, to damage, to...

The distance between Nashville and Murfreesboro is thirty miles. For sixty days after assuming command of the Federal forces at Nashville, General Rosecrans was making his prepa...

The Battle of Murfreesboro closed on January 2d, 1863. The Army of the Cumberland under Rosecrans and the Army of the Tennessee under Bragg made no important moves or advances u...

The Battle of Chancellorsville was fought on the 3d of May, 1863. It stands in military history as one of the remarkable battles of the world. It was a great victory in one sens...

Fording the Potomac on the morning of the 10th, at early dawn, he proceeded to Mercersburg and thence to Chambersburg. The crossing of the river had been skilfully and bravely d...

General John B. Marmaduke was a thoroughly born and reared Southern man. Descended from Virginia ancestry, he first saw the light on March 14th, 1833, at Arrow Rock, Missouri. P...

By July, 1864, the storms were beating heavily and mercilessly upon the Confederacy. The power of numbers was beginning to tell. The resources of the South, month by month, were...

General Forrest, like most soldiers, had special animosities, and one of his was General Cadwallader Colden Washburn. It might be said that they were men of such disposition tha...

Though Mower had not killed Forrest, on the 12th of August, 1864, he received his commission as major general, and Sherman said to Stanton: “Please convey to the President my th...