The Chicago Civil War Round Table Monthly Meetings Marc Kunis

Lynn and Julianne Herman on
"The Allegheny Arsenal Explosion"

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The Allegheny Arsenal, near Pittsburgh, produced
ammunition for the Union army. By 1862 the workers
turned out some 128,000 cartridges daily by working
six days a week, twelve hours a day. The arsenal
employed one hundred fifty-six ladies and girls. In the
summer of 1861, the arsenal had dismissed over one
hundred young boys when they discovered their
careless behavior with matches and tobacco. They
discovered replacing the boys with girls was just as
efficient and by 1862 had employed many young girls
and women using their small hands and fingers to
pack the cartridges at a rapid rate. Although they all
are aware of the danger working with black powder,
the chief ingredient in making the ammunition, they continue on filling the cartridges as
fast as possible depending on the supervisors to keep them safe.
On September 17, 1862 (the day of the Battle of Antietam), a spark from a horse's shoe
ignited that powder. The resulting explosion and fire saw 78 workers lose their lives, 72
of whom were women. The Allegheny Arsenal explosion was the worst civilian disaster
during the Civil War.
Julianne Herman worked for 45 years as a Registered Nurse in the operating room.
She has long been drawn to the study of historical events, both nationally and
2
worldwide. Her interest in the Civil War increased during the 125th Anniversary
commemorations, and she began reenacting and studying various aspects of the war.
As a civilian reenactor (with her husband Lynn), she became increasingly interested in
women's roles during that time period, including the seemingly unlikely role of women
working in a military arsenal. She is secretary of the Central PA CWRT.

Wilson Greene on 
“Opening the Cracker Line and Keeping it Open: The Decisive Battles of the Chattanooga Campaign” 

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 Following the battle of Chickamauga in September 1863, General William S. Rosecrans' Army of the Cumberland retreated into Chattanooga. Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee surrounded the city on three sides and laid a quasi-siege for more than a month. Supplies for the Union forces gradually dwindled, reaching crisis level by the third week of October. Rosecrans, who seemed incapable of lifting the siege, gave way to Ulysses S. Grant, who approved a daring plan to open a new line of supply. That plan succeeded on October 27, opening what the Federal soldiers called the "Cracker Line." The Confederates' effort to redeem the situation resulted in one of the Civil War's rare night battles near a railroad junction called Wauhatchie. Will Greene will argue that these two relatively minor actions decided the outcome of the campaign for Chattanooga and that the famous battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge should have never occurred. A. Wilson "Will" Greene is a native Chicagoan who grew up in Western Springs and Wheaton. Following a sixteen-year career with the National Park Service, Greene became the first executive director of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites, now the American Battlefield Trust. He then became the founding director of Pamplin Historical Park and the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier. Greene is the author of six books and a dozen published articles and essays dealing with the Civil War. His current project with the University of North Carolina Press is a three-volume history of the Petersburg Campaign. The first volume, A Campaign of Giants, was published in 2018 and Volume 2 is due out early in 2025. Greene was the recipient of the Nevins-Freeman Award in 2012. Greene now lives in Walden, Tennessee, hard by the Anderson Pike, about which he will speak at our meeting. 

CWRT Feb 2024

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 Often small individual encounters in history, experienced by common people like us, caught in the maelstrom of events, hold larger truths. Sometimes these experiences have meaning—not only for those who experience them, but for us in today’s world. This program follows twelve members of the 17th Connecticut Regiment through the three-day Battle of Gettysburg and beyond in July 1863. It focuses on the stories of the wounded, the caregivers, and the honored dead. These men fought for their lives, lost friends, and suffered themselves at Gettysburg. Their sacrifices are still with us today and from them we inherited great social and medical advances. Because of their sacrifices we began to understand the hidden costs of war, and that not all wounds are visible. The stories of these twelve citizen soldiers highlight the meaning that their lives and experiences have for our generation today: socially, medically, and psychologically. These are their stories. 

Carolyn Ivanoff is a retired high school administrator and independent historian. She writes and speaks frequently on American history at local, state, and national venues. In 2003, Carolyn was named Civil War Trust’s Teacher of the Year. We Fought at 2 



Gettysburg is her first book. It follows the 17th Connecticut Regiment through the Gettysburg Campaign and beyond in June and July of 1863. 

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 The Union XII Corps was formed in June 1862. The corps, which joined the Army of the Potomac only a week before Antietam was small, numbering just over 7,600 men. Easily overlooked, Army of the Potomac leadership and historians since have largely glossed over this corps’ contribution at Antietam. Nevertheless, this small corps ended Confederate attacks into the Miller Cornfield and East Woods, successfully defended the Dunker Church Plateau from Confederate assaults, and captured the West Woods, which had been the goal on the Federal right all morning. Chris Bryan will provide a brief overview of the period from the Battle of Cedar Mountain until the corps’ entry into Maryland, including its condition resulting from this period. The talk will then examine the XII Corps’ participation in the Maryland Campaign and its fighting at Antietam, including some new findings discovered through recent archival research. 

M. Chris Bryan’s Cedar Mountain to Antietam: A Civil War Campaign History of the Union XII Corps, July –September 1862 begins with the formation of this often-luckless command as the II Corps in Maj. Gen. John Pope’s Army of Virginia on June 26, 1862. Bryan explains in meticulous detail how the corps endured a bloody and demoralizing loss after coming within a whisker of defeating Maj. Gen. “Stonewall” Jackson at Cedar Mountain on August 9; suffered through the hardships of Pope’s campaign before and after the Battle of Second Manassas; and triumphed after entering Maryland and joining the reorganized Army of the Potomac. The men of this small corps earned a solid reputation in the Army of the Potomac at Antietam that would only grow during the battles of 1863. 

Chris Bryan is a native of Greencastle, Pennsylvania. He earned a B.S. in History from the United States Naval Academy, an M.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, Annapolis, and a Masters in Historic Preservation from the University of Maryland, College Park, with a focus on architectural investigations of Chesapeake region antebellum domestic and agricultural outbuildings. The former Naval Aviator works as a project manager in Southern Maryland. Cedar Mountain to Antietam is his first book. 

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 Patrick Brennan, a long-time student of the Civil War and published author, has teamed up with his technology-astute daughter Dylan Brennan to bring the largest Civil War battle to life in the remarkable 2-volume study: Gettysburg in Color. Volume 1 covers Brandy Station to the Peach Orchard, and Volume 2 covers The Wheatfield to Falling Waters. Rather than guess or dabble with the colors, the Brennans used an artificial intelligence-based computerized color identifier to determine the precise color of uniforms, flesh, hair, equipment, terrain, houses, and much more. The result is a monumental full-color study of the important three-day battle that brings the men, the landscape, and the action into the 21st Century. The deep colorization of battle-related woodcuts, for example, reveals a plethora of details that have passed generations of eyes unseen. The photos of the soldiers and their officers look as if they were taken yesterday. 2 



The use of this modern technology shines a light on one Gettysburg photographic mystery in particular. Colorizing some of the battle's "death" images revealed the presence of Union and Confederate dead that may help determine the previously unknown location of the photographs. That may also be a "first" when it comes to Civil War photography. Pat Brennan is the author of Secessionville: Assault on Charleston (1996), To Die Game: General J. E. B. Stuart, CSA (1998), and more than twenty articles for a variety of Civil War magazines and journals. Pat is on the Editorial Advisory Board for The Civil War Monitor and his work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune. He has lectured around the country on the Civil War and Bob Dylan. Dylan Brennan works on the broadcast video production team at Tasty Trade, a real time, online financial network based in Chicago. 

 Scott Mingus on “Texans at Chickamauga” 

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 Although the Civil War’s second-largest battle in terms of casualties, Chickamauga has had far fewer books written about it than the thousands of books penned about the war’s bloodiest battle, Gettysburg. What has been remarkable has been the dearth of books about specific brigades, regiments, or state troops at Chickamauga, unlike Gettysburg which has a plethora of specialty books. Scott Mingus’s and Joe Owen’s Unceasing Fury: Texans at the Battle of Chickamauga, September 18-20, 1863, is the first full-length book to examine in detail the role of troops from the Lone Star State. 

Chickamauga was deemed as “the soldiers’ battle” because of the perception in the ranks of a lack of direct involvement of senior-level leadership. More than 4,400 of these soldiers were from the state of Texas. One out of every four of the Lone Star boys who fought at Chickamauga fell there. The surviving Texans gave us vivid descriptions of battle action, the anguish of losing friends, the pain and loneliness of being so far away from home, and their often-colorful opinions of their generals. 

Texans fought in almost every major sector of the sprawling Chickamauga battlefield, from the first attacks on September 18 on the bridges spanning the creek to the final attack on Snodgrass Hill on the third day of fighting. Ultimately, Union mistakes led to a tactical Confederate victory, one that was marred by the strategic mistake of not aggressively pursuing the retreating Federals and seizing the vital transportation hub at Chattanooga. 

York County, PA resident Scott Mingus is a retired scientist and executive in the global specialty paper industry. The Ohio native graduated from Miami University. He has written more than 30 Civil War and Underground Railroad books and numerous articles for Gettysburg Magazine and other historical journals. The Gettysburg Civil War Round Table recently presented Scott and co-author Eric Wittenberg with the 2023 Bachelder-Coddington Award for the best