October 29

My name is STUART BERRY, I've not long ago joined the A.C.W.S in THE UNITED KINGDOM. I was browsing through the VISITOR'S BOOK entries when I found yours.
My reason for contacting you is, not only have I joined the A.C.W.S but I have joined the 2nd WISCONSIN in the A.C.W.S, and when I saw your entry in the visitor's book (2nd WISCONSIN web page) I was overjoyed that there was a web page dedicated to my regiment.
I have visited said page and am VERY IMPRESSED.
I would love to here from you and discuses re-enacting in AMERICA/BRITAIN it would be wonderful to have a contact in the U.S. of A.
My hometown is CHORLEY in the RED ROSE COUNTY OF LANCASHIRE (north west ENGLAND) about 10 miles outside PRESTON.

I hope to here from you soon
yours
STUART BERRY

STUARTBERRY@STUARTSMAIL.COM

LIBERARTE TU TEI MAY,X'INFERIS

I hope the 2nd. Wis. Association makes this our Tier 1 National
Event for '01

Craig S. Mickelson

MORE 1st Manassas

October 27

Potential 3rd Battalion is the 79th NY Highlanders....they've expressed
strong interest in Sherman's Brigade...about 90 rifles immediately.....who
knows who else would come aboard......

RJ Samp

October 27

So far then we would have the 2nd WI and Irish forming 2 200 man
battalions in Sherman's Brigade.

Are there others out there that would be interested in forming a 3rd or 4th
battalion? Any other reenactors that fit have a unit impression that fit's
one of the regiment's in the brigade?

October 26

LeBoeuf  Oct-26-00, 12:31 PM (EST)
"1st Manassas/Bull Run Update...."
Just got off the phone with Don Warlick. PRIMEDIA ( Civil War Times &
America's Civil War publishers) 
Will again say "Once more into the breach dear friends!" and sponsor this event. The event date will be August 3rd-5th, 2001 just outside Leesburg Va. 1500+ acres. Registration packages will be sent to all known unit contacts that registered by mail for
"Chancellorsville" by Jan. 5th, 2000.
 Requests for registration packages can be sent to Don Warlick, 13296 Ft. Valley Rd., Fort Valley Va. 22652. Please send a double stamped, legal sized, self-addressed envelope. Web-site to be created. Commanders not yet known. I'de get hotel rooms now if I were so inclined. Even though I can't be involved in helping out at this event...
give me 5 seconds to get back into my bomb-proof before you start shooting!
Later Boys! Glenn (sound effects.."ping....ZIP.....BANG...)

Kevin Air, CO of the Irish Brigade, has enquired if the 2nd would like to
join up with them for a revival of Sherman's Brigade....

RJ Samp

October 26

Found this tongue-in-cheek view of military drilling in the 12 February 1862 Madison, 
IN "Daily Courier."  Wacky as this is, antebellum volunteer militia companies headed by elected officers were, in fact, known to use "polite" drill commands!

THE NEW HARDEE. -- From the fact that the usual mode of giving command by military officers falls so harshly on the ears of sensitive privates, the following style has been adopted by some of the companies attached to a regiment of "Reserve Grays," and is appropriately termed the Chesterfield Manual:

BY COMMANDING OFFICER.

1.  Gentlemen will you please give me your attention?

2.  You will be kind enough to cast your head and eyes right, and endeavor
to observe the immaculate bosom of the third gentleman from you.

3.  Oblige me now by casting your visual organs to the front.

4.  Allow me to suggest the propriety of coming to an order arms.

5.  Gentlemen, you will condescend to order arms.

6.  You will confer a special favor by coming to a support.

7.  If it meets your approbation, I beg leave to propose that you carry
arms.

8.  Now, gentlemen, you will please present arms.

9.  I shall consider myself under an everlasting obligation if you will
once more oblige by carrying arms.

10. Having a high appreciation of your intrinsic worth, as well as your
exalted postion in society, I humbly trust that I am not infringing upon
your good nature when I request you to trail arms.

11. Gentlemen, for the last time, permit me to remark that it is my
earnest desire that you should come to a shoulder arms.

12. If it is not too laborious, I should be delighted to see you change
your position by coming to a right face.

13. To conclude your arduous exercises, I will still further trespass upon
your well known affability by desiring you to come to arms port.

***

How's THAT for excrutiatingly correct behavior?

Regards,

Mark D. Jaeger
Purdue University Libraries
Special Collections

RJ Samp

October 16, 2000

A $1.1 million Civil War trail 
underway in Maryland

10/12/2000
Associated Press Newswires

SHARPSBURG, Md. (AP) - History buffs will soon be able to retrace the path
of the Confederate Army that Gen. Robert E. Lee led to the bloodiest day of the Civil War.

A 70-mile trail set for completion in 2002 will lead visitors from White's
Ferry in Montgomery County to Antietam National Battlefield in Sharpsburg.

"We'll put in unified interpretive markers that talk about actual events in
the order they happened," said Marci Ross of the Maryland Office of Tourism Development.

Travelers can take up to three or four days to complete the tour, learning
about sites such as Best Grove, where a Union soldier found Lee's written combat strategy wrapped around three cigars.

Markers adorned with red bugles will be set up in Poolesville, Beallsville,
Sugarloaf Mountain, Monocacy National Battlefield, Crampton's Gap and Boonsboro.

The trail, called "Antietam Campaign: Lee Invades Maryland," will cost
about $1.1 million, including a $689,530 federal grant announced Tuesday, Ross
said.
Organizers plan to have the trail ready by Sept. 17, 2002, the 140th
anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, which ended Lee's first invasion of
the North. Nearly 23,000 soldiers were killed or wounded, making it the
bloodiest single day of the war between the states. 

On the Net:
Maryland Office of Tourism Development: <http://www.mdisfun.org>

 GARBAGE FROM THE NY TIMES:
History's Judgment of the 2 Civil War Generals Is Changing

Beware the revisionists. Check with people who know before you buy a new book recounting the events of the Civil War! The Establishment "scholars" are swarming. Two that I know are reliable: LEIBSBOOKS@aol.com and Cpprhd10@aol.com. There are many more of you out there to be sure, and sorry if we left you out. lrreasor wrote IDEAS

(Garbage? I guess the message as to who lost that war is still lost on some) Ed.

History's Judgment of  the
 2 Civil War Generals Is Changing
By JENNY SCOTT

 For the better part of the last century the images of two of the greatest icons of the Civil War remained fixed in the American imagination: Robert E. Lee as the noble and tragic leader of the Confederate forces, the brilliant tactician fighting against overwhelming odds, and Ulysses S. Grant as the heavy-drinking butcher who used the North's superior resources to grind down the South, then became one of the worst presidents in the nation's history.

Those characterizations are now being challenged by a string of books that are both more admiring of Grant and more skeptical of Lee than would have seemed imaginable only a short time ago. Some historians trace the change to broader shifts over the last few decades in scholars' attitudes toward the Civil War and Reconstruction and in public attitudes toward race. There is now what Gary W. Gallagher, a Civil War historian at the University of Virginia, calls a cottage industry in books criticizing Lee's generalship — faulting him for his aggressiveness, accusing him of having squandered limited manpower and arguing that he needlessly prolonged the war. The long-held idea that Lee opposed slavery, at least at times, has   also been discounted.

Meanwhile, several new books on Grant portray him as an extraordinary general who gave a new dimension to American military strategy, whose casualties were proportionally fewer than Lee's, who not only fought to save the Union and free the slaves but also worked hard to enforce Reconstruction and black equality in the South long after it ceased to be popular. Even the extent of his drinking is in doubt.

"There's no question that a re-evaluation is under way," said Jean Edward Smith, a historian at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va., whose biography, "Grant," is scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster on April 9, the anniversary of Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House. "And that has several roots. The first is the re-evaluation of the Civil War and the aftermath and the whole question of slavery and our reassessment of the white South."

James M. McPherson, a historian at Princeton and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era" (Oxford University Press, 1988), said, "The kind of romanticized sympathy-with-the-underdog attitude to the Confederacy has been increasingly outweighed by the recognition that what the Confederacy was fighting for was a society based on slavery. And what the North was fighting for, if not initially and always enthusiastically, was a society moving toward biracial democracy."

Though some earlier writers, like J. F. C. Fuller and Bruce Catton, had challenged the dominant perceptions of Grant and Lee, the current change in tone seems to have begun in 1991 with the publication of "Lee Considered: Gen. Robert E. Lee and Civil War History," in which Alan T. Nolan, a now- retired labor relations lawyer, argued that Lee's aggressiveness led to his defeat.

At least four other books have followed: "Uncertain Glory: Lee's Generalship Re- examined" by John D. McKenzie, "How Robert E. Lee Lost the Civil War" by Edward H. Bonekemper III, "Robert E. Lee's Civil War" by Bevin Alexander and "Lee Moves North: Robert E. Lee on the Offensive" by Michael A. Palmer. "I think there was a constituency out there that was kind of fed up with the Lee myth, and once somebody started nailing it, they all came out of the woodwork," said Mr. Nolan, whose book was favorably reviewed by historians but was also excoriated on the editorial page of The Richmond News Leader as "a lawyer's brief" against Lee. At least as many recent histories and biographies are reassessing Grant's military and political careers, among them: "President Grant Reconsidered" by Frank J. Scaturro, "Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier & President" by Geoffrey Perret and "Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity, 1822- 1865" by Brooks D. Simpson, a historian at Arizona State University who is working on a second volume. Three novels about Grant were published last summer. The PBS series "American Experience" is preparing a two-part biography of Grant. And Joan Waugh, a historian at the University of California at Los Angeles, is writing a book on the memorialization of Grant in the 19th century. "I wanted to unravel the puzzle of how someone could be literally equated with Washington and Lincoln in almost every memorial — how could and why did his reputation fall so low?" Ms. Waugh said in an interview. "I think his reputation was under serious challenge as early as the 1890's. Because with the rise of Robert E. Lee and `the Lost Cause' came the diminution of the Union cause."

Ms. Waugh and others trace the glorification of Lee to the turn of the last century and the attempt to reunify the country and move beyond the war. As Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia University, explained, Lee was held up as someone the entire nation could look back on with pride, an embodiment of the nobility of the South, courage against great odds and devotion to principle.

To put the best possible spin on the war, Southern writers in the post-bellum years characterized the South's shattering defeat as an honorable effort against impossible odds, Mr. Gallagher said. And to distance the Confederacy from the taint of slavery, those so-called Lost Cause writers suggested that the war was not about slavery but about constitutional issues.

"Lee as the exemplar of slave-owning aristocracy was romanticized by three generations of Southern historians," said Mr. Smith, the Grant biographer. "Grant was denigrated by this same school of historiography, which really dominated American thought through World War II." John Y. Simon, a historian at Southern Illinois University and the editor of Grant's papers, who in recent years has collected and published many documents that had previously been inaccessible, said Grant's reputation dropped to an all-time low in the 1930's, at the time of the country's complete abandonment of the Reconstruction policies Grant had worked to uphold. Now, however, Mr. Smith in his new book emphasizes Grant's dedication to racial equality, his support for black suffrage and for Lincoln's policy of admitting black soldiers into the Army, his efforts as president to crush the Ku Klux Klan and his pursuit of a peace policy in the West, under which he reversed a planned war of extermination against the Plains Indians.

To be sure, the current reassessments have not gone entirely unchallenged, especially with regard to Lee. Mr. Gallagher, who says that Mr. Nolan did a good job of getting people to look more realistically at important aspects of Lee's life, dismisses much of the criticism of Lee as a soldier. "I think they're almost dead wrong in terms of Lee's impact on Confederate fortunes," he said. "In many ways, much of the negative work on Lee is as much a caricature of him as the unabashedly hagiographic work was a caricature of him before," Mr. Gallagher said. "But I think inevitably in the long run it's going to be harder and less likely that any Confederate figure could be as widely extolled as Lee was in the past."