September 16, 2025

In December, 1864, the Confederate Army of Tennessee laid siege to the massive Union fortifications and garrison of Nashville.  In a two-day fight, that army was all but destroyed.  Their arrival at the city’s door was the culmination of Confederate strategy that began when the city was captured by Union forces in February, 1862.  Nashville, thereafter, became the “Siren’s song” for Confederate strategy in the west luring Confederate offensives no less than five times from 1862 through 1864.  This program details the city’s importance and each of the five attempts to retake Nashville for the Confederacy.    

Greg Biggs has studied military history for over 50 years.  He is a former Associate Editor of Blue & Gray magazine, which has published several of his articles.  He has also been published in Civil War Regiments, North-South Trader and Citizens’ Companion and in Sons of Confederate Veterans programs in Tennessee.  He is also an authority on Civil War flags and consults with museums, auction firms, and private collectors and has contributed to books on Georgia and Tennessee Civil War flags.  Greg also has done research on flags and military events for several noted Civil War authors including Eric Wittenberg, Dave Powell, Tim Smith, Gordon Rhea, Dan Masters, Art Bergeron and others.  Greg is a Civil War tour guide for campaigns of the Western Theater for the U.S. Army and Civil War groups and is President of the Clarksville Civil War Roundtable as well as Program Chair of the Nashville Civil War Roundtable.  He lives in Clarksville, TN with his wife Karel, a recently retired middle school teacher, and their three cats named for Civil War cavalry officers – Minty, Rucker and Ashby.

October 15, 2024

On a sultry evening in July, 1864, six men were marched into the stockade at Andersonville Prison.  There, in front of 24,000 witnesses, they were forced to mount a hastily erected gallows and were hanged. They had been tried, convicted and sentenced by their fellow prisoners for robbing and assaulting – and rumor had it, murdering – their fellow prisoners.  They were part of a group of rogue prisoners known throughout the prison as “Raiders.”

 Who were these six men?  Were they actually guilty of the crimes they were accused of?  Were they really murderers?  Why are the names on some of their graves not found in any military records?  What led them to the gallows?  Drawing from diaries, military records, the recently discovered transcript of the raiders’ trial and prisoners’ memoirs that were published within five years of the prison’s closing, a detailed, clearer and more accurate picture of the raiders and the events leading up to their hanging finally answers these questions.

 An unexpected offer to read a friend’s collection of letters from a Civil War sailor who died at Andersonville changed the course of Gary Morgan’s life.  The letters led to the discovery of the sailor’s diary, kept while he was a prisoner of war at Libby, Salisbury, and Andersonville prisons.  The sailor, Frederic Augustus James, wrote in his diary daily, and in the nine months that he kept it, he left only one blank – the name of the six men who were hanged at Andersonville as raiders.  Because by now she was slightly obsessed by the sailor and his story, Gary went to look up the missing names and was surprised to find that there were seven names recorded, but only six men who were hanged.  Sorting that out took two years and multiple trips up and down the east coast, looking at diaries, military records, and prisoner’s letters home, but by the time she was finished, she had it all sorted out an had enough material to write a book about the raiders incident, which she did, publishing The Andersonville Raiders: Yankee vs Yankee in the Civil War’s Most Notorious Prison with Stackpole Books in March, 2020.

 Gary Morgan is a History teacher in Western Massachusetts.  She has spoken about the raiders all over the country, including three times at the National Prisoner of War Museum at Andersonville, Georgia. Her hobbies include crocheting, volunteering at a cat shelter, and genealogy (or, as her brother calls it, “Collecting dead people”).  She is currently working on a second Andersonville related book, called Unknown Andersonville, which explores some of the lesser known aspects of the prison.

November 18, 2024

Benjamin Grierson’s Union cavalry thrust through Mississippi is one of the most well-known operations of the Civil War. There were other simultaneous operations to distract Confederate attention from the real threat to Vicksburg posed by U. S. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee, but Grierson’s operation, mainly conducted with two Illinois cavalry regiments, has become the most famous, and for good reason. For 16 days (April 17 to May 2) Grierson led Confederate pursuers on a high-stakes chase through the entire state of Mississippi, entering the northern border with Tennessee and exiting its southern border with Louisiana. The daily rides were long, the rest stops short, and the tension high. Ironically, the man who led the raid was a former music teacher who some say disliked horses. Throughout, he displayed outstanding leadership and cunning, destroyed railroad tracks, burned trestles and bridges, freed slaves, and created as much damage and chaos as possible. Grierson’s Raid broke a vital Confederate rail line at Newton Station that supplied Vicksburg and, perhaps most importantly, consumed the attention of the Confederate high command. While Confederate Lt. Gen. John Pemberton at Vicksburg and other Southern leaders looked in the wrong directions, Grant moved his entire Army of the Tennessee across the Mississippi River below Vicksburg, spelling the doom of that city, the Confederate chances of holding the river, and perhaps the Confederacy itself. Novelists have attempted to capture the large-than-life cavalry raid in the popular imagination, and Hollywood reproduced the daring cavalry action in The Horse Soldiers, a 1959 major motion picture starring John Wayne and William Holden. Although the film replicates the raid’s drama and high-stakes gamble, cinematic license chipped away at its accuracy. Based upon years of research and presented in gripping, fast-paced prose, Timothy B. Smith’s The Real Horse Soldiers: Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Civil War Raid through Mississippi captures the high drama and tension of the 1863 horse soldiers in a modern, comprehensive, academic study. This talk, based on the book, will bring you along for the ride.

 Timothy B. Smith (Ph.D. Mississippi State University, 2001) is a veteran of the National Park Service and currently teaches history at the University of Tennessee at Martin. In addition to numerous articles and essays, he is the author, editor, or co-editor of more than twenty books with several university and commercial presses. His books have won numerous book awards, his trilogy on the American Civil War’s Tennessee River campaign (Forts Henry and Donelson, Shiloh, and Corinth) winning a total of nine book awards. He has recently finished a five-volume study of the Vicksburg Campaign for the University Press of Kansas and a new study of Albert Sidney Johnston for LSU Press. He lives with his wife Kelly and daughters Mary Kate and Leah Grace in Adamsville, Tennessee.

December 16, 2025

In August, 1862, a number of men from Monticello, greater Wright County, and surrounding areas answered the call to arm.  These volunteers eventually became Company E of the Eighth Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The Eighth Regiment had an extraordinary experience.  During the last year of the Civil War, this regiment traveled more miles than any other unit, North or South.  Beginning in Minnesota, they campaigned west to the Yellowstone River as part of the Dakota War and then turned around to go south through Tennessee to North Carolina.  Along the way, they endured extreme weather, three train derailments and but still fought bravely when needed, including against such noted foes, as Sitting Bull and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest.  This is the story of the Eight Minnesota told through the eyes of the soldiers, primarily those in Company E.

Paul Hodnefield is a commercial finance attorney and skilled researcher. For as long as he can remember, Paul has had a passion for American history, with particular interest in the Revolutionary, Civil War, and frontier eras. A Minnesota native, Paul lives in the Twin Cities with his wife, Patty.

January 21, 2025

After a year and a half of fighting some Northerners began to express increasing concern about the direction the Civil War was taking. In the lower Midwest, Democrats lamented the growing human cost of the war, the expansive powers wielded by the federal government, and President Lincoln’s decision to free the enslaved people of the rebel states. Vilified by soldiers and Republicans as “Copperhead” snakes, many at the time saw the anti-war faction of the Democratic Party as a serious threat to the Union war effort, while the Copperheads themselves declared they sought only to return the Union to its pre-war status quo. In a moment of candid desperation Lincoln referred to them as the “fire in the rear.” Dr. Lund will discuss the role of the Copperheads in the Civil War political landscape; why they inspired such anger in Union soldiers, why their rivals regarded them as such a danger, and how they and the rest of the Democrats nearly defeated Lincoln’s re-election campaign. Though small in number, the Copperheads’ shadow looms large over the political world of the Lincoln administration.

Stefan Lund, PhD is a teacher and editor from Minneapolis. His essay “Inexcusable by Us as Soldiers: Wartime Dissent and the 1863 Keokuk Soldier Mob,” appeared in the Annals of Iowa (2021), and he has edited multiple educational texts with Oxford University Press. Dr. Lund holds a PhD in history from the University of Virginia where he studied press censorship during the American Civil War.

February 17, 2026

The Battle of Stones River (December 31, 1862 – January 2, 1863) was the bloodiest battle by percentage of loss in the Civil War. It also occurred at a critical time in the war and for the United States; Abraham Lincoln believed the Union victory there may have saved the Union. This talk will explore the battle and its context. 

Christopher L. Kolakowski is Director of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum in Madison, WI. He received his BA in History and Mass Communications from Emory & Henry College, and his MA in Public History from the State University of New York at Albany. Chris has spent his career interpreting and preserving American military history with the National Park Service, New York State government, the Rensselaer County (NY) Historical Society, the Civil War Preservation Trust, Kentucky State Parks, the U.S. Army, and the MacArthur Memorial. He has written and spoken on various aspects of military history from 1775 to the present and is the author of six books on the American Civil War and World War II in the Pacific. He is a contributor to the Emerging Civil War Blog, a Senior Fellow of the Consortium of Indo-Pacific Researchers, and a reviewer and contributor to the Air Force Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs.

March 17, 2026

The election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in November 1860 precipitated an unprecedented national emergency. The secession of seven southern states between December and February triggered a flurry of efforts in Washington to peacefully reunite the country, even as Secessionist forces seized U.S. arsenals and menaced federal troops occupying forts in South Carolina and Florida. Within the halls of lame-duck Congress, advocates of compromise grappled with hardliners to draft legislation and constitutional amendments that would diffuse the crisis. In this lecture, Dr. Ian Iverson will outline the difficult choices facing President-elect Lincoln, detail the political machinations that stymied the so-called “Crittenden Compromise,” and walk through the chain of events that culminated in the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861.

Ian T. Iverson is an associate editor at the John Dickinson Writings Project. A graduate of Princeton University, he holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Virginia. His doctoral dissertation won the 2023 Hay-Nicolay Dissertation Prize, awarded by the Abraham Lincoln Association and the Abraham Lincoln Institute for the best dissertation on Lincoln’s legacy. His first book, Holding the Political Center in Illinois: Conservatism and Union on the Brink of the Civil War, was published by the Kent State University Press in 2024.

May 20, 2025 

Long known a place of cross-border intrigue the Rio Grande’s unique role in the history of the American Civil War has largely been forgotten or overlooked.  Few know of the dramatic events that took place here or the complex history of ethnic tensions and international intrigue.