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NED MYERS or, A Life Before the Mast

By James Fenimore Cooper.

Thou unrelenting Past!
  Strong are the barriers round thy dark domain,
And fetters sure and fast
  Hold all that enter thy unbreathing reign.

BRYANT

Entered, according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1843, by J. Fenimore Cooper
Comment: The events around the War of 1812 as seen from one perspective.
Release Date: January, 2006  [EBook #9788]


"Shiloh" As Seen By A Private Soldier.

War Paper No. 5. Commandery of the State of California Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States. A paper read before California Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, May 31, 1889. By Companion Warren Olney, Late Captain 65th U. S. C. Inf.(Insignia No. 4862.)

The Battle of Shiloh.

With Some Personal Reminiscences.

"The complete absence of the ordinary precautions, always taken by military commanders since the beginning of history, is inexplicable. The only reason I can conjecture for it grows out of the character of General Grant and his distinguished subordinate, and their inexperience. They had had then little practical knowledge of actual warfare. General Sherman, except on one occasion, had never heard a hostile gun fired. They had to learn their art, and the country and their army had to pay the cost of their teaching. Happily, they were able to profit by every lesson, and soon had no equals among our commanders. But because they have since deserved so well of their country, is no reason why history should be silent as to their mistakes. The Confederates would have made a great mistake in attacking us at all in such a position, if we had been prepared to receive them. But this want of a preparation prevented us from taking advantage of the opportunity, and inflicting a crushing defeat upon the South. By it the war was prolonged, and every village and hamlet in the West had its house of mourning." 


Comment: A strange, sad place like the Antietam battlefield near Sharpsburg, Maryland I've also visited. Antietam,  fought later in 1862, was enough of a victory to give President Abraham Lincoln the confidence to announce his Emancipation Proclamation. (Wikipedia)  At Shiloh, three R.P. Parrott rifled cannons, cast in the West Point Foundry in New York, are pointed in a tripod, their muzzles pointed in the sky, as a symbol of peace, next to the small formal cemetery where one of the fiercest battles of the American Civil War was fought, in Tennessee near the Mississippi border. Aaron Burr was found to be in the area earlier, after the duel with Alexander Hamilton in New Jersey, near Tishomingo, Mississippi they found out in the US Bicentennial research of 1976. The Tennessee-Tombigbee Barge Canal starts in  this general vicinity. Archaeologists worked nearby in the summer of 1979. My grandfather worked on the S.S. Beauregard on the North Atlantic convoys to Russia in WWII before serving on the U.S.S. Buckner. His brother when they both worked for Savannah, Georgia shipping lines, a harbor pilot, captained the S.S. City of Atlanta, which my grandfather was almost on, which was torpedoed by U-123 in "Operation Drumbeat" in early January of 1942 having left the dock in New York City. The ship and 43 of 45 were lost  in what has sometimes been called the "Graveyard of the Atlantic" off of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, a badly magnetic anomalous region for navigation besides, and was to be a hazard to further shipping.
Release Date: February 8, 2008 [EBook #24548]