Feb 14th - Valentine's Day Meeting

Dr. Charles Roland speaking in Albert Sydney Johnston, Jan. 2009

February Speaker: Greg Biggs
We welcome Greg Biggs on his first visit to our Round Table. He is a former Associate Editor of one of our favorite magazines, Blue and Gray Magazine and is the current President and Program Chair of the Clarkesville, Tennessee Roundtable. Greg is a member of the Advisory Board, Center for the Study of the Civil War in the West; Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, and he has been a flag consultant to various state museums including Tennessee, Georgia, Ohio, Alabama, North Carolina and the Texas Civil War Museum.

He has published many essays and articles in a variety of historical publications. Greg is the author/co-author of forthcoming books: Tattered Banners: Alabama’s Civil War Flags and I Go To Illustrate Georgia: Civil War Flags Of Georgia Troops, and he is currently writing the forthcoming book Volunteer Banners: Tennessee’s Civil War Flags for the Tennessee State Museum/University of Tennessee Press. He has led several tours of Civil War Battlefields including one of the Fort Donelson Campaign for the Filson Historical Society.


The Topic: Nathan Bedford Forrest: Napoleonic Cavalryman


Beginning with an analysis of how Napoleon fought battles using cavalry on a tactical basis as well as in the pursuit phase, this lecture details how most Civil War commanders failed to properly use cavalry in a Napoleonic sense. A brief history of American cavalry and its doctrine transits to how Gen. Forrest properly used cavalry both tactically and in pursuit during all phases of his military career. Napoleonic standards are applied to three of his battles. The lecture is designed to challenge conventional Civil War thought.


2009 Field Trip: Chancellorsville April 15-19

We will be going to Virginia in April 2009 to study the Campaign and Battle of Chancellorsville! National Park historian Greg Mertz will be our tour guide. The dates for this trip are April 15-19. We will be studying the entire campaign including cavalry raids, Second Fredericksburg, and Salem Church. The cost of the trip includes bus transportation, guide, hat, gift for guide, picture quiz, Saturday night meal and pizza/beer night.
Bus riders - $375.00
Car riders - $325.00
Non Tour - $60.00


Field Trip Hats for Sale

We have several different field trip hats of various colors for sale. These caps are top-quality and will be offered at the next meeting for the ridiculously low price of $10.

Book Donations
We are currently accepting book donations for our door prizes. If you have Civil War books you would like to donate, please bring them to one of the meetings and give them to Lowell Griffin, our door prize coordinator.

The Wilderness in Crisis!

Update on the Wilderness: From the Fredericksburg News…
The so-called "Wilderness Wal-Mart" in Orange County is catching grief from both North and South--and elected officials on both ends of the political spectrum.
U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, a conservative Republican from eastern Texas, has expressed to Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott his "profound disappointment" about the giant retailer's plan to build a Supercenter beside the Civil War battlefield. In a letter written last week, he urges Scott to give the matter "immediate reconsideration."
Meanwhile, lawmakers in Vermont--a haven for independent-minded Democrats--are holding hearings on the issue. Vermont troops suffered their worst casualties of the war in the Battle of the Wilderness, turning back a Confederate attack that threatened to split the Union Army.
The Vermont Senate and House are considering whether to ask Wal-Mart to move the store farther from the entrance to Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, according to Howard Coffin, a Civil War historian and author who lives in Montpelier, the state capital.
Wal-Mart is proposing to build a 139,000-square-foot store atop a ridge less than a quarter mile from the park, on commercially zoned land.
Nationally significant Civil War sites, "such as the tract of land for your proposed development, are not where commercial development needs to be in America," Poe wrote Scott. "They should be set aside and untouched for present and future generations of Americans to visit so as to never let them forget the past and the lessons they taught."
Poe noted that the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission, established by Congress to study the historical significance of such places, "defined your proposed land for development as part of The Wilderness [battlefield]. There are countless other locations your company could look at for your development in this region."

January 2009 Quiz Answers:

1. Promoted at age thirty-four to major general after Fort Donelson, who was at that time the youngest of his rank in the entire Union army?
Major General Lew Wallace of Indiana
2. At the 1860 Democratic Convention in Charleston, South Carolina, what future Union general voted fifty-seven times to nominate Jefferson Davis for president of the United States?
Benjamin Butler of New Hampshire
3. Who wrote "The Bonnie Blue Flag" and when and where was it first performed?
English-born entertainer Harry McCarthy wrote the song in the spring of 1861 and performed it first in Jackson, Mississippi.
4. Jefferson Davis regarded what site in the state he called his home state as "the Gibraltar of the West"? Vicksburg, Mississippi
5.During the Confederate retreat to Appomattox, who fought a close range pistol duel at the Battle of High Bridge on April 6, 1865, and what was the result?
Union Colonel Theodore Read fought the duel with Confederate Lieutenant Colonel James Dearing. Read was killed and Dearing was mortally wounded, dying on April 22,1865.

February 2009 Quiz:

1. When did Abraham Lincoln first meet his vice president, Hannibal Hamlin?

2. What two cabinet members tried to force General McClellan's resignation while Lincoln still relied upon him?

3. What political leader slipped into Washington by night in February 1861?

4. What did Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Samuel Clemens, Alexander Stephens and Ulysses S. Grant have in common?

5. What did Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Nathan Bedford Forrest, James Longstreet, Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart and William T. Sherman have in common?