Today Joseph Andrew Jackson Lightburn, a Baptist minister and boyhood friend of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, is appointed a brigadier general and ordered to report to the Army of Tennessee. He serves admirably throughout the war, afterwards retiring to spend the rest of his life serving as a minister, including at the Broad Run…
Festive moments are hard to come by for many families during the nearly two-year old war. Few are the families not impacted by the great conflict, and times of laughter and joy inevitably fade away against the backdrop of a vast canvas of death and destruction from which there is no true escape. And yet,…
Today the First Kansas Colored Infantry, the first African Americans recruited in the Northern states for service in the Civil War, experience their first battlefield engagement. At Island Mound in Missouri’s Bates Country, a detachment of some 225 Kansas African American soldiers clash with five hundred Confederates. Although ten Kansas soldiers are killed and twelve…