THIS WEEK IN THE CIVIL WAR: Aug. 10-16, 1862

Storm Clouds

It’s another of those in-between times in the Civil War, with no major battles but plenty of action nonetheless. From Virginia to Missouri, firefights are erupting almost no one ever heard of then or since (e.g., Switzler’s Mill, Missouri; Brown’s Plantation, Mississippi; Medon, Tennessee; Clarendon, Arkansas). Each clash is of little significance in itself, but taken together, they form a thunderous and deadly chorus. More importantly, the military forces of each spend this week moving with grim intent.

In Virginia, Union Gen. George B. McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign against Richmond has proven a flop, so his immense Army of the Potomac is leaving Harrison’s Landing on the James River, heading in the general direction of Washington. Shadowing McClellan, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of the Northern Virginia is moving towards Gordonsville, part-way between the opposing capitals of Richmond and Washington. Having left the Shenandoah Valley and moved into north central Virginia, Stonewall Jackson’s force has already whipped one division of the Union Gen. John Pope’s newly created three-division Army of Virginia. Pope and McClellan are expected to link up and turn their mighty host on the Confederates.

Meanwhile, Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith is leading 21,000 men from Knoxville to the strategic Cumberland Gap (which he will bypass), isolating the Union force there), then into Kentucky to wreak havoc on Union forces based there. Meanwhile, Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg is sending those redoubtable raiders, Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Hunt Morgan, into middle Tennessee. Soon, Bragg will advance into Kentucky and join forces with Kirby Smith. That forces Union Gen. Don Carlos Buell to abandon his snail’s pace advance on Chattanooga and head north from Alabama to turn back the Confederates in Tennessee and Kentucky. Meanwhile, Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant is stuck in Corinth, Mississippi, surrounded by enemies, his troops too dispersed to mount a significant offensive. He is further handicapped by having to supply reinforcements to Buell.

So far this year, the bottom line in Virginia has been stalemate, while in the Western Theater Union forces have enjoyed a succession of victories, but are under heavy pressure form the Confederates. The war has not reached a turning point, but the weeks to come will bring a number of critical moments.

THIS WEEK IN THE CIVIL WAR: April 20-26, 1862

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Effective April 25, “Blood, Tears, and Glory—The American Civil War, Day by Historical Day," changes to a weekly format, presenting a summary of that week’s events in the war. While the emphasis will continue to be on the Western Theater, all major events in the war will be recognized.

New Orleans Falls!

With warming weather, troops on both sides come alive, with skirmishes breaking out like brushfires across the nation. The Confederacy has seen little but failure since the beginning of the year, and it looks as if the worst is yet to come. McClellan has a huge force on the Virginia Peninsula, his objective the Confederate capital of Richmond. Another huge force, under Halleck, is hunkered down in southwestern Tennessee with the crucial Confederate rail center of Corinth, Mississippi, as its objective. Smaller forces are moving in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where the Federals have pretty much had their own way. And in the Mississippi estuary a fleet of Union warships is about to start moving against the Confederacy’s busiest port: New Orleans.

On Sunday, April 20, a daring party of Federals uses explosives to weaken the Confederate barricade of chains and old hulks that block the Mississippi River and access to New Orleans.

On Monday, the Confederate Congress agrees on exemptions to the sweeping conscription bill it passed last week requiring three years’ military service from all white males ages 18 to35.

On Wednesday, April 23, Capt. David G. Farragut ponders the failure of his 19 mortar boats to destroy two Confederate masonry forts (Forts Jackson and St. Philip) guarding the passage upriver to New Orleans. The mortars had rained hundreds of shells on the forts, to no avail. Swamps in the area prevent a land attack on the city as well. Farragut decides on a daring dash of his wooden warships between the defiant forts, which are on opposite shores of the Mississippi.

The fleet gets underway the next morning, Thursday, at 3 a.m. Farragut’s first eight ships creep by undetected. Then the moon rises and the next nine ships, including Farragut’s own, suddenly come under heavy fire from the forts. A bedlam of noise and smoke ensues in the darkness, with the desperate Confederate even launching fire rafts against Farragut’s fleet. However, only three of Farragut’s smaller vessels are disabled. (Farragut's "dash" is pictured above.)

Next, Farragut’s warships encounter a small Confederate defense fleet, including the ram CSS Manassas. The ram and other vessels, though fighting bravely, fail to stop Farragut and the Rebel fleet is demolished, while the Union navy loses only one vessel. The Confederates lose eight. Farragut keeps moving and on Friday anchors outside the city of New Orleans. Braving jeers and threats from city residents, a party of Union naval officers comes ashore to begin surrender talks with the city’s mayor and the commander of Confederate forces in the area.

The city’s mayor claims not to have the authority to surrender the city. Confederate Maj. Gen. Mansfield Lovell, commander of Confederate forces, chooses to withdraw rather than surrender.

The way is clear for Union troops, under Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, to march into the city unopposed. New Orleans was the Confederacy’s second largest city and its busiest port, the gateway to the Mississippi and the nation’s heartland. Its loss is a tremendous psychological blow to the Confederacy. It makes Farragut a Union hero, and is one of the most decisive victories of the war.

ELSEWHERE:

Maj. Gen. Charles F. Smith, sidelined by a seemingly minor scrape on his leg, dies on Friday, April 25, at Savannah, Tennessee. The Union loses a brave soldier and Grant a friendly mentor. At Pittsburg Landing (“Shiloh“) on Saturday, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant writes Smith’s widow in New York City, saying, “In his death the nation has lost one of its most gallant and most able defenders.”

Also at Pittsburg Landing, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck is getting ready to launch an attack—the first important military action “Old Brains” has ever led in person. His target is the Confederate base at Corinth, Mississippi, 22 miles southwest of the Union encampment. To reinforce Halleck—a man who hates to take chances— Brig. Gen. John Pope’s Army of the Mississippi has arrived to join Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio and Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee. Halleck spends the week issuing orders to shape up the volunteer forces, which he considers undisciplined.

On Saturday, April 26, Union Brig Gen. John G. Parke accepts the surrender of a small body of Confederates holding Fort Macon, a pentagon-shaped structure of brick and stone built on one of the barrier islands along coastal North Carolina. The old fort, a Federal facility built before the war but seized by Rebels in 1861, has been under Union artillery fire from gunboats and land batteries for nearly a month. It’s all part of Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s invasion of eastern North Carolina.

In the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, Union Generals Nathaniel P. Banks and John C. Frémont have 15,000 troops each with which to deal with Stonewall Jackson’s 14,000 men. As the month ends, the Federals are threatening Staunton, held by the Confederates. So far, here in the Valley the tide has been running in the Union’s favor.

On the Virginia Peninsula, Maj. George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac has halted in front of Yorktown and McClellan is preparing a siege.

Things do not look good for the Confederacy, and President Jefferson Davis is taking increasing criticism for his conduct of the war. But a little known commander named Robert E. Lee is serving as military adviser to Davis and soon will emerge into prominence.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—scarcely 3 years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Thursday, April 17, 1862

Shaping Up the Volunteers

Having taken personal charge of the troops gathering at Pittsburg Landing, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, commander of the Union’s Department of the West, has his hands full whipping thousands of free-spirited volunteers into shape. He is trying to impose Old Army rules on New Army men.

Today, a long, complicated directive from Halleck goes out to Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, commanders of the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Ohio respectively. Halleck tells them to establish a system of drills and inspections immediately. All defective arms are to be collected. All troops are to be arranged in line of battle. Cavalry guards will keep men from wandering down to the boat landing. Bridges are to be built and roads repaired

Working parties that fail to do their duty will be arrested and punished. All stragglers will be arrested and confined. Bars on the boats will be shut down and no more liquors sold. Boards will be established to examine the “character and capacity” of volunteer officers. These orders are to be read out loud to all soldiers, and they are to be told, “Every regiment and corps should take pride in preparing itself, with the least possible delay, to again meet the enemy in battle….”

No doubt the volunteer armies, composed mostly of citizen-soldiers just off the farm, can benefit. But these are soldiers willing to fight for their country, under leaders they respect for their courage and concern for their own men. They will only reluctantly follow martinets who live by the rulebook. Halleck is demanding too much at once.

ELSEWHERE IN THE CIVIL WAR: As if Confederate authorities didn’t already have enough to worry about, Federal soldiers are gathering on Ships Island, not far from New Orleans. Flag Officer David F. Farragut has organized a large fleet of Union warships nearby as well. David Dixon Porter is present with a fleet of mortar boats, and Gen. Benjamin Butler has transports loaded with troops. To defend the Crescent City, the Confederates have two forts manned by a small number of militiamen, an improvised barricade of chain and hulks, and a small river fleet. New Orleans is the gateway to the Mississippi and of great importance commercially and militarily.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—scarcely 3 years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Wednesday, April 9, 1862

“Inexcusable Inefficiency?”

Today, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant sends his report of the battle of Pittsburg Landing (later to become known as the “battle of Shiloh”) to the St. Louis headquarters of his commander, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck. (Grant’s statement in his Memoirs that he never made “a full official report” of Shiloh is misleading.)

Grant’s account of the battle itself is technically correct, if brief. More than half his report is devoted instead to praising various members of his command, most of all for Brig. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, “a gallant and able officer [who] displayed great judgment and skill.” Grant does not say his army was surprised, nor how far back it was driven, nor how thousands of men—“skulkers”—deserted the battlefield for the shelter of the bluff by the river. And, though he gives Don Carlos Buell some words of praise, he does not--nor ever will--say Buell's Army of the Ohio made the critical difference on the second day of the battle.

When, in days to come, criticism of Grant rings out in northern newspapers, Sherman will stoutly defend him. To the end of their days, Grant and Sherman will deny they were surprised at Shiloh.

Others will be less generous. Within a few days, Capt. Emerson Opdycke, who served as acting major of the 41^st Ohio during the second day’s battle, will write his wife a withering assessment of Grant.

“Such inexcusable inefficiency ought to cost Gen. Grant his office if not his life,” wrote Opdycke. “No good officer need ever be surprised to the extend he was if he but regard the plainest rules of war.”

Opydcke’s forthrightness emulates that of his immediate commander, Col. William B. Hazen, who was never one to mince words. In his post-war memoir, Hazen was tart about whether Grant was surprised at Shiloh.

“The question whether our men were surprised seems scarcely to merit attention,” Hazen will write. “The facts covering this point are well known, and all that remains is to define the military meaning of ‘a surprise’…If a hostile force secretly places itself where it can force a battle before this [preparation of defensive forces] can be done and the troops can in all respects make themselves ready, then a surprise is effected.”

Among the evidences of the surprise, according to Hazen, were that the enemy captured Union officers’ horses at the picket line and took their blankets, and that civilian sutlers’ supplies—which would have been long gone if a battle had been anticipated—remained to tempt the Confederates.

Grant will pay a price for having been surprised, but will recover and go on to great success. Journalist Whitelaw Reid, one of the general’s critics immediately after the battle, will later recall how Grant remained calm and optimistic after the first day’s battle, telling Sherman, “Lick ‘em tomorrow, though.” From Shiloh, Reid wrote, “I date, in my own case at least, the beginnings of any belief in Grant’s greatness.”

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Monday, April 7, 1862

The Tide Turns

Last Saturday—one day before the Johnston and Beauregard’s Confederates attacked Grant at Pittsburg Landing—Brig Gen. Don Carlos Buell ’s Army of the Ohio arrived at Savannah, which is on the opposite bank, about seven miles downriver, from the battlefield. The weary soldiers, who had marched all the way from Nashville, set up camp and spend the night in peaceful slumber.

Yesterday morning, however, early risers greeting the spring sunshine could hear what one called “a dull, distant sound like the heavy breathing of some great animal below the horizon.” Soon, bugle calls were calling the men to arms.

Ordered by Buell, an advance brigade of three regiments, commanded by Col. Jacob Ammen, an Ohioan, made a forced march, arriving at the riverbank opposite Pittsburg Landing at dusk. They were quickly ferried over and fed into Grant’s defensive line.

Throughout the night, packed steamers shuttle most of the rest of Buell’s men from Savannah to Pittsburg Landing. In addition to Buell’s men, Brig. Gen. Lew Wallace’s division of Grant’s army shows up in this morning, delayed in its march from Crumps Landing by confusion over orders.

The new arrivals tramp past thousands of skulkers, huddled under a river bluff, who taunt them with warnings of disaster. All night long, two Union gunboats keep up a bombardment of Confederate positions. Union field hospitals wor through the night, amputated limbs piling up nearby.

Seeking shelter from the rain, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant goes into one of the surgical tents, but soon leaves, unable to bear the sights and sounds. He spent the rest of the night under a tree.

In the morning, Grant’s reinforced army begins moving across the battlefield. It is a sea of mud, with dead men and horses everywhere, scattered debris—hats, rifles, blankets, knapsacks. Trees have been riddled and shattered by gunfire.

Soon, the Union are attacking, and this time it is the Confederates’ turn to be surprised.

Among the 17,000 men who had marched all the way from Nashville are 5,000 to 6,000 Ohioans, the most from any state in Buell’s army. Lew Wallace’s division adds another 7,500 men to the Federals, and now Grant has 25,000 fresh soldiers, as well as his veterans of yesterday. The Confederates have no reserves to draw upon, having used them yesterday.

Although the Southerners fight bravely, they are driven back and by 2:30 in the afternoon Beauregard is ready to order a retreat. The battered army of Mississippi begins making its way back to Corinth, the promise of early victory shattered.

The Confederates have suffered 24% casualties—killed, wounded or captured—and the Union 22%.With a total of nearly 24,000 men lost, it is the costliest two-day battle of the war. It shocks Northerners and Southerners alike. Grant gives up all hope of ending the war quickly.

Although Shiloh will be greeted at first in the North as a great victory, reports of how Grant was surprised soon prompt demands for his removal. A close friend of Lincoln will spend two hours trying to convince the President to dismiss Grant. Finally, Lincoln will reply, “I can’t spare this man; he fights.”

It will turn out to be one of the most fortunate decisions of the war.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY, Saturday, April 5, 1862

Shiloh: The Day Before

Late in day, Confederate Maj. Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston’s Army of Mississippi, numbering 45,000 men, arrives at the launch point designated for their attack on Grant’s encampment. As they settle down for the night, they are, in places, only half a mile from the outer edges of the Union Army of the Tennessee at Pittsburg Landing. (Johnston is pictured here)

Johnston’s second-in-command, Maj. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, is in despair. “The Little Creole,” as the fiery officer is nicknamed, is not one to shrink from fighting, but he fears the element of surprise has been lost. The inexperienced Confederate soldiers have taken two days longer than expected to make the march and they made it noisily, carelessly yelling and firing off their guns to try them out. Soldiers on the outer edges of each army have clashed several times, both sides taking small numbers of casualties.

Surely, Grant must be ready and waiting for Johnston.

But he isn’t.

Speculation that something is looming has been rising among the Union rank-and-file. Several Confederate prisoners have bragged to their captors that an attack is coming. One, dying from his wounds, has warned, “More will die.”

The commander of the 53^rd Ohio, Col. Jesse J. Appler, orders his regiment into line of battle after he learns some scouts have been fired on by a Confederate picket line. When he tries to warn his division commander, Brig. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, Sherman snaps back, “Take your damned regiment to Ohio. There is no enemy nearer than Corinth:”

So nervous in Kentucky (and, later, Missouri) about the possibility of enemy attack, Sherman now has completely reversed himself, refusing to acknowledge whatsoever any sign of danger.

This afternoon, Sherman sends a message to Grant at Savannah, who is waiting for Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s reinforcements to arrive. Although Sherman provides some information about yesterday’s skirmishes between forward units, he concludes that the enemy is only being “saucy.” He concludes, “I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position.”

Sherman’s opinion counts, because his division, now counting about 8,500 men “present for duty,” occupies the Union encampment’s most forward position, about two miles inland from the Tennessee River. Four other divisions are scattered about the rolling plateau and a fifth, Lew Wallace’s, is stationed several miles away.

Because Grant’s mind is fixed on making his own attack on the Confederates, who ordinarily would be expected to remain in Corinth, protected by their earthworks, Grant has ordered no earthworks of his own. His 41,000 troops at Pittsburg Landing are scattered about, arranged more for convenience than defense.

From his headquarters at Savannah, a few miles downriver from Pittsburg Landing, Grants wires two messages to his superior, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck in St. Louis. In the first, he asserts that “the main force of the enemy is at Corinth” and their number “cannot be far from 80,000 men.” In the second, Grant mentions yesterday’s clashes, but concludes, “I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack (general one) being made upon us but will be prepared should such a thing take place.”

At almost the same time as Grant is reassuring Halleck, the Confederate generals are gathered around a fire only a few miles from Pittsburg Landing. They are pondering their options. Beauregard argues for cancelling the attack and returning to Corinth, fearing a “victory turned into defeat” by an alert Union army. But Johnston—who is suffering public scorn for withdrawing from Nashville—apparently feels he cannot afford another seeming sign of weakness. The attack will go forward in the morning. Their horses will drink from the Tennessee River.

As the weary soldiers try to rest, some of them can hear a distant band playing. It is a Union band and it is playing “Home Sweet Home.”

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—scarcely 3 years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Tuesday, March 25, 1862

The Unbearable Lightness of…Nothing

A slow day. There’s no combat, aside from those never-ending flashes here and there of pickets and scouts popping off at each other. In Washington, President Lincoln visits the Navy Yard. In Tennessee, Federal reconnaissance missions crisscross Tennessee, which is beginning to slip away from the Confederates.

In southwestern Tennessee, Grant is still thinking about a pre-emptive strike against the Confederate forces gathering a few miles away at Corinth, Mississippi. He is wondering where Buell’s reinforcements are. Buell’s Army of the Ohio is moving ever so slowly in Grant’s direction. In St. Louis, the ever-anxious Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck is trying to savor his expanded span of control, which is most troops west of the Appalachians. He, too, worries. Among forces on both sides there’s a sense that something is going to happen—but when? And how?

With Gen. Lew Wallace’s division a few miles from Pittsburg Landing, Pvt. Andrew Altman of the 68^th Ohio begins scratching out, with difficulty, another letter to his family in Henry County, Ohio. “We are expecting a battle,” he writes. “A [Secesh] gave him self up [and said] “they are getting a little down in the mouth.”

After complaining about a lack of mail from home “(I want you to wright to me as son as posible,”) Altman took note of the local weather: “It is very warm and the peach trees are in blossom.”

It was very different in the hills and valleys of western Virginia, where the occupying Ohioans are suffering from boredom and bad weather. No battles seem imminent, although there is hope of aggresive leadership from John C. Fremont, who is taking command of the newly christened Mountain Department, formerly the Department of Western Virginia. The only military activity here is the slow, hard, dangerous search for bushwhackers. The quality of the soldiers' food has degenerated: “Our living is hard, the grub I mean,” Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes of the 23^rd Ohio writes. “and not likely to improve. Salt pork and crackers [the almost inedible hardtack issued by the army]. “The armies have swept off all fresh meats and vegetables. A few eggs once in a great while.”

The weather—blamed on the “equinox,” marking the change from winter to spring—is getting tiresome as well. Hayes notes that it has been snowing since the previous Friday afternoon. On Saturday, it was “still snowing. What a snow-storm is blowing. Whew!” On Monday, “It is snowing still. What a climate!” In a letter that day to his uncle, he adds, “We have had about enough of the snows, winds, and rains of the mountains.”

The snow will end by Thursday, and then the deep mud season will begin. More delays, more tedium. The desperate search for something—anything—to enliven the day as a subject for conversation and letter writing. Fortunately, regimental surgeon Dr. Joseph T. Webb, Lucy’s brother and Rutherford’s brother-in-law, brings back a good story, one that will probably be told and re-told to the accompaniment of much thigh slapping.

Dr. Webb loves children and always stops to talk them and, according to Rutherford, “generally manages to get them on his knee.” Stopping at a farmhouse and spying a three-year-old, he approached the child, who, he soon discovered, could not speak very clearly. “Come, my fine little fellow. I want to talk to you,” the doctor said. The little boy turned, saying something the doctor did not understand. “On a second approach,” Colonel Hayes wrote his uncle, “the doctor made it out ‘Go to Hell, you dam Yankee!’ This from the little codger was funny enough….”

And that, for several days, was the high point of life in the mountains for Colonel Hayes.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Saturday, March 22, 1862

The Patron

It always helps to have friends in high places, and the United States Army’s generals in the Civil War were no exception to the rule. Nor should the danger from enemies in high place be underestimated. Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan made the mistake of thinking Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton was a friend—an illusion the dissembling Stanton did nothing to dispel. Meanwhile, Stanton was dissecting McClellan in secret conferences with McClellan’s critics in Congress. Stanton took office in January 1862; by March, McClellan had lost his title as general-in-chief of all the armies, and by November he would be removed from all command. President Lincoln, who was perfectly capable of making up his own mind, made the final decision in both cases, but his thinking certainly was encouraged by Stanton.

Other generals, such as Don Carlos Buell and William S. Rosecrans, made the mistake of getting crossways with Washington with no advocate to plead their case. They, too, would pay the price. On the other hand, Ulysses S. Grant, by nature one of the most straight-forward and least political of men, repeatedly benefitted from the influence of Congressman Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois (pictured above).

Both Grant and Washburne lived in Galena, Illinois, at the outbreak of the Civil War. Grant initially avoided special help in finding a longed-for appointment to command, but, unable to secure a place, he finally acceded to Washburne’s assistance. Discovering that Grant had military experience, the Congressman requested his appointment as colonel of the 21^st Illinois Volunteer Infantry, and by July, Grant—in well-worn civvies, lacking a uniform—took command of the fractious regiment and soon tamed it. And the rest is history.

Fortunately, the military command and political systems of the time (fortified by the wisdom of Lincoln and Stanton) allowed talent to trump political influence. The meritorious cream often rose to the top, as Grant’s performance will stunningly demonstrate. But Washburne’s help was always useful, when, for example, Grant’s forces needed better weapons, more manpower, or a well-earned promotion here and there.

Today, Grant sits down at his field headquarters at Savannah, Tennessee, to write three long letters. One goes to his superior, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, in St. Louis, who Grant is making sure to inform of every smidgen of intelligence to be found along the Tennessee River. (“The temper of the rebel troops is such that there is but little doubt that Corinth will fall much more easily than Donelson did, when we do move,” Grant tells Halleck. We shall see about that.) Grant also writes an affectionate letter to his wife, Julia (“Give my love to all at home and kiss the children for me….Kisses for yourself dear Julia.”) Finally, he writes his patron, Congressman Washburne, in Washington: “There are some things which I wish to say to you in my own vindication, not that I care one straw what is said individually, but because you have taken so much interest in my welfare that I think you are entitled to all the facts connected with my acts.”

Grant then tells Washburne the other side of the story in his falsely reported failure to report regularly to Halleck as requested. He clarifies some other issues and concludes, “I will not tire you with a longer letter but assure you again that you shall not be disappointed in me if it is in my power to prevent it.”

There will be more letters, and Washburne will not be disappointed.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Wednesday, March 19, 2008

A Little Anxiety

Barely, just barely, you can feel nerves beginning to tingle, all the way from Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck’s command post at St. Louis, Missouri, to Ulysses S. Grant’s Tennessee River expedition headquarters at Savannah, Tennessee.

Something big—“a big lick,” as Grant calls it—is going to happen, although no one knows when or exactly where. But it almost certainly is going to happen somewhere in this poor, swampy land of creeks, cornfields, and small farms in western Tennessee, just north of the Tennessee-Mississippi border.

Yesterday, Grant sent a letter to Halleck reporting the scattered locations of his various divisions, as he found them on his arrival here on Monday. Today, he sends Halleck a brief telegram about the use of gunboats on the river. Tomorrow, Halleck will reply by wire, stating “I do not fully understand” (a not uncommon Halleck reply), followed by an imperative with the sound of urgency about it: “By all means keep your forces together until you connect with General Buell…Don’t let the enemy draw you into an engagement now.”

Grant has proven, at Fort Donelson, to be an aggressive commander who moved faster than Halleck might have wished. Probably the ever-cautious Halleck is worried Grant might slip the leash again. But Grant is trying to be careful and he admits something about himself when he writes Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell. Buell’s Army of the Ohio is who-knows-where and moving slowly from Nashville to Grant. Buell is being delayed by a swollen river and burned bridges. But then, something was always delaying Buell.

Sounding a tad fretful in his message to Buell, Grant writes, “Feeling a little anxious to learn your whereabouts, and as much as possible of your present movements, I send two scouts…to you. Any information you will send by them I will be glad to receive.”

Buell will eventually arrive, and just in the nick of time. In the meantime, there will be anxiety at Savanna and at Pittsburg Landing, but, in one of the war's great ironies, not enough.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Saturday, March 15, 1862

Storm Clouds Building

Storm clouds are building in western Tennessee. General William Tecumseh Sherman’s division of the Tennessee River expedition, on steamboats escorted by two gunboats, has probed as far south as Eastport, Mississippi.Their objective was to tear up the track of the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, an important transportation link for the Confederacy. Streams swollen by heavy rain defeated the effort; several men drowned and artillery had to be dragged back through the bayous, with water washing over the guns.

Now Sherman backtracks downriver to Savannah, where Gen. Charles F. Smith (shortly to be replaced by General Grant) had made his headquarters. Smith tells Sherman to disembark his division, and that of Gen. Stephen Hurlbut, at Pittsburg Landing, a few miles back upriver at a place called Pittsburg Landing. Sherman and Hurlbut are to position their forces “well back,” so as to leave room for still more Union divisions to come. The forces to assemble here will become known as the Army of the Tennessee.

Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, now commander of all western forces, orders Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio to move out of Nashville and head southwest to support the forces assembling at Pittsburg Landing.

Back at Fort Donelson, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant is busily issuing orders preparatory to resuming command of the Tennessee Rive r expedition. At Corinth, Mississippi, a railroad junction about 22 miles south of Pittsburg Landing, Confederate troops are massing to block any further invasion of the South.

And so the stage will be set for the battle called Shiloh, a name that will stand for one of the bloodiest encounters of the war.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Tuesday, March 11, 1862

Back in the Saddle

Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s immediate superior, is a desk jockey who soldiers by the book (which he wrote) and has never met a bold idea that didn’t scare him. A few days ago, he removed Grant from command of an important expedition up the Tennessee. The reasons had as much to do with Halleck’s personal ambitions and jealousies as a breakdown in communication (which was not Grant’s fault).

Today, however, Grant has learned that Halleck will be sending him more troops for the Tennessee River expedition and that Grant should "be ready...to take the general command." Grant's time in purgatory is over.

(Grant is pictured above, on top and looking rather tired, as a newly minted major general, and below, in idealized form.)

At first, Grant, who is still upset and confused, considers refusing the restoration to command, but before the day is over he is issuing orders and writing to Julia, “Soon more troops will join us, then I will go in command of the whole.”

He gives Julia no further explanation of his strange removal, then restoration, because he himself has yet to understand it. Years later, however, he will write in his memoirs that it was Halleck’s “own reports that had created all the trouble.”

The troubles began with Halleck’s desire to take overall command of western forces instead of dividing them, awkwardly, with Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell. Halleck based his appeal to Washington on his claim of the Fort Donelson victory, although the credit properly belonged to Grant. When a disloyal telegrapher disrupted communications between Grant and Halleck, the latter used the situation to remove Grant from command of the Tennessee River expedition.

On March 11, however, President Lincoln formally issues his General War Order No. 3. In the West, departments are consolidated under Halleck, just as he wished. In the East, Maj. Gen. George George B. McClellan is relieved of overall command of Union forces, ostensibly so the slow-footed McClellan can concentrate his energies on moving the Army of the Potomac against the Confederate capital of Richmond. For the time being, no general-in-chief is appointed. In western Virginia, a new Mountain Department is created under the problematical but politically powerful John Charles Fremont.

So Halleck has what he wanted and, moreover, President Lincoln is asking for proof of Grant’s alleged dereliction of duty (of which there is none). That could be embarrassing--to Halleck--so he folds his cards and moves on. Thus, Grant regains the position that never should have been taken away from him. And once again we learn how politics, jealousy, and personal ambition are so often part of the story in the conduct of war.

ELSEWHERE IN THE CIVIL WAR: Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, refuses to accept the reports of Generals Floyd and Pillow, who cravenly fled Fort Donelson before its surrender. They are relieved from duty, as well they should be.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Friday, Feb. 28, 1862

Grant “in readiness”

Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant has returned to Fort Donelson after visiting Nashville, now held by elements of Buell’s Army of the Ohio. Just as Grant was leaving, he met Buell at the edge of the Cumberland River and learned that the retreating Confederate forces are now thought to be at Murfreesborough, about 30 miles away, weakened and offering a tempting target. Always ready to advance, Grant writes Halleck’s headquarters, “I will hold my force in readiness for a move on very short notice.” Grant has no idea that the wrath of Halleck will descend on his head very shortly.

ELSEWHERE IN THE CIVIL WAR: With Sen. Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, chairman of the Committee on Conduct of the War present, President Lincoln interviews Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan about the failure of the “Harper’s Ferry plan.” Responding to Lincoln’s “General Order No. 1” to get Union troops marching on all fronts, McClellan has led 40,000 men up the Potomac to Harper’s Ferry, where they and their supply trains were supposed to cross the river on a bridge resting on some canal boats sent up from Washington. Then it was discovered the canal boats were a few inches too wide to pass through the locks on their way to the bridge site. Fiasco. Embarrassment all around. And now McClellan is being interrogated by a frustrated Lincoln, who only yesterday said, “The general impression is daily gaining ground that the General [McClellan] does not intend to do anything.”

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Tuesday, Feb. 25, 1862

The colonel arrives

Col. William Babcock Hazen, acting commander of the 19^th Brigade of Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio, rides into Nashville. Recently deserted by their Confederate defenders, many unhappy citizens remain in the city. It is Hazen‘s observation that “the people showed great bitterness.”

Riding a short distance in front of his brigade, Hazen has barely turned a corner when a well-dressed woman ahead of him “stamped vigorously upon the sidewalk and cheered for Jeff Davis.” Then Hazen’s brigade, marching smartly with arms glistening in the sun, follows him around the corner. The woman took one look at the oncoming thousands and “betook herself at double-quick to the nearest house.”

Hazen halts at the St. Cloud Hotel, where the host, a Mr. Carter, invited the colonel and his staff for drinks at his bar. Carter “tasted everything first…to assure us.” Out of curiosity, Hazen examines the hotel’s register, discovering his immediate predecessor was William Babcock of Illinois, “a cousin I had not seen since a child of three years, and never since.” Throughout the war, symbolic incidents like these will remind soldiers North and South again and again how closely they were related, whether by blood or in spirit—fellow Americans all.

Hazen and his men found something else in the hotel: “Fast asleep and very drunk, one Rebel soldier, the largest man I ever saw in uniform.” Hazen sent him away with a single guard, the pair looking like “a veritable giant guarded by a pygmy. We all wondered if he was a sample of the men we were about to encounter.”

ELSEWHERE IN THE CIVIL WAR: In Richmond, the Confederate capital, the bitter words of politicians reflect the Confederacy’s anxiety over the losses in Tennessee. The people’s representatives are angry and demanding investigation into the performance of their generals and even President Jefferson Davis.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Monday, Feb. 24, 1862

Grant bulls ahead

Ordered by Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck not to move on Nashville, Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant waits impatiently at Fort Donelson, handling the routine duties required by a large encamped army.

Between chores Grant writes his wife, Julia, telling her that Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, the Confederacy’s western commander, has “fallen back about forty miles south from Nashville leaving the river clear to our troops.” Grant has already ordered some of Buell’s troops—without Buell’s knowledge—to move up the Cumberland on steamboats, preceded by a gunboat. If Grant himself can’t advance on Nashville, he will make sure somebody does…in this case, under the command of Brig. Gen. William “Bull” Nelson (pictured).

Until he dies a most unusual death later this year, Nelson will serve as one of the war’s most colorful characters. A huge man—300 pounds of muscle and bone—Nelson is notorious for enormous rages, which alternate with an overwhelming geniality. He had served in the navy during the Mexican War and began service in the Civil War commanding gunboats on the Ohio River. A native Kentuckian, Nelson rallied other Kentuckians to the Union side and in September 1861 was appointed a brigadier general in the army.

Nelson’s troop transports will arrive at Nashville just as the first elements of Buell’s Army of the Ohio begin appearing on the north bank of the river. Without even being there, Grant has reached Nashville first.

Grant’s letter belies his later, undeserved, nickname of “Butcher Grant.” He tells Julia, “”These terrible battles are very good things to read about for persons lose no friends but I am decidedly in favor of having as little of it as possible. The way to avoid it is to push forward as vigorously as possible.”

ELSEWHERE IN THE CIVIL WAR: Skirmishes occur in Missouri. At the White House, a simple funeral service is conducted in the East room for little Willie Lincoln, who had died four days before of typhoid. A bright boy, mature for his age, Willie was 11.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Sunday, Feb. 23, 1862

Nashville is doomed

The streets of the Confederate capital of Tennessee are filled with rushing soldiers, men, and wagons, struggling to escape the city as Federal soldiers and gunboats approach.

Losing Nashville will be a severe blow to the Confederacy, for it is the breakaway nation’s main supply depot and rail center in the Western Theater. The Confederacy’s eight largest city, it is also an important industrial center and one the agrarian South can ill afford to lose.

With Grant’s capture of Fort Donelson, downriver from Nashville on the Cumberland, the city can no longer be defended. Grant has punched a hole through the center of the Confederacy’s so-called “Kentucky Line”—once a nearly straight line of defiance, running from Arkansas to the Appalachians.

Now Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio is descending on Nashville from the North. Federal gunboats are cruising the Cumberland. Grant’s victorious army is waiting ominously at Fort Donelson, where it captured 15,000 Rebel soldiers, and Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston’s diminished army is split into two wings—one at Columbus, Kentucky, on the Mississippi River, the other at Nashville, but scrambling fast to get out.

For reasons having to do more with army politics than winning the war, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck has denied Grant’s plan to advance on Nashville himself. But with a cunning and a determination that belie his quiet, self-effacing manner, Grant comes up with a work-around.

Imbued with the confident authority that comes from success in battle (and promotion to major general), he ignores department lines and orders two of Brigadier General Buell’s divisions, now near Paducah and separated from Buell, to advance on Nashville. These divisions had been ordered west to aid Grant’s attack on Fort Donelson, but had arrived too late. Grant co-opts them without asking Buell’s permission.

Buell will arrive in Nashville the day after tomorrow to discover that Grant has beaten him to the punch—using Buell’s own men. However, Grant is content to let Buell take the limelight for entering Nashville, so long as the point is won for the Union. Now Grant hopes to make an advance of his own.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Monday, Jan. 27, 1862

“I love you more than ever!”

Since driving out the Federals two weeks ago, Stonewall Jackson’s Confederates have occupied Romney, a key point near the eastern edge of Unionist western Virginia. The Feds want Romney back. and the 67^th Ohio is among the forces rushed from Camp Chase in Columbus, Ohio, to western Virginia to deal with Jackson. Capt. Marcus Spiegel is a company commander in the 67^th.

As usual in the army, however, it’s hurry up and wait. Tonight, Spiegel and 67^th find themselves camped near New Creek, Virginia, and not doing much. Romney is less than 20 miles away, but Romney will be liberated without the help of the 67^th, and Spiegel’s men will not see action for another month.

Captain Spiegel uses the time to write “My dear and much beloved Wife and Children!” and tell them “I am hale and hearty and God only knows that I love you more than ever!” (A German immigrant, he has not adopted the more laconic speech of his fellow Midwesterners.) Spiegel relates the regiment’s peripatetic existence since leaving Columbus January 19^th. Flooding of the Ohio River prevented the regiment from setting up camp the first night of its journey. Instead, the soldiers had to spend the night in dirty freight and cattle cars.

The next night, Spiegel’s men had hardly escaped from the inexorable train cars and set up their tents beside the track when the 67^th’s colonel came along and ordered them move to another spot. The next day the men reboarded the train to spend 26 straight hours riding in the filthy cars with only one two-hour break. Finally, last Saturday, the men were allowed off the train and were given a hearty breakfast before setting up their tents on a branch of the Potomac River.

All this activity has been demanding. “I never in my life have been kept as busy and constantly engaged. No place to write and no rest if I had [a] place, for [listening to] thousands of questions of the Boys.” The use of the word “boys” is significant. Many of the best commanders take a fatherly interest in their men, who feel warmest toward officers who take a nurturing interest in them.

Spiegel adds a postscript to this letter to Caroline: “My good little wife it is just 2 o’clock….Everybody sleeps. I suppose you do. Pleasant dreams and 1000 kisses to you and the children from your ever true Marcus….”

ELSEWHERE IN THE CIVIL WAR: President Abraham Lincoln is fed up to his eyeteeth with his major generals’ lack of aggressiveness. In the east, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, general in chief and commander of the Army of the Potomac, has done except claim an advance on Confederate defenses at Manassas was high risk; his claims of enemy force were later learned to be wildly inaccurate. In Kentucky, Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, commander of the Army of the Ohio, has openly admitted he opposes Lincoln’s wish for an advance on eastern Tennessee. Further west, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck seems unable to figure out how to work in concert with Buell (and, unbeknownst to Lincoln, he has just turned down Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s proposal for an advance. Today, Lincoln finally acts like the commander in chief. He issued General War Order No. 1, demanding—not asking—that “the 22^nd of February 1862 be the day for a general movement of the Land and Naval forces of the United States against the insurgent forces.”

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg

ON THIS DAY: Saturday, Jan. 18, 1862

Marching with (a) Custer

Nineteen-year-old Pvt. Liberty Warner of Company H, 21^st Ohio Volunteer Infantry, keeps up a steady correspondence with the folks at home in Tontogany, a farm village in northwest Ohio. Like other soldiers, he yearns for letters from home, and to encourage responses, he sometimes resorts to crude sketches to fill out his own epistles.

Sometime this month (Liberty occasionally loses track of dates) he fills out a letter to his brother listing fellow occupants of his tent, complete with a diagram of where in the tent the 12 men slept. The 12 men constitute a “mess” or grouping for feeding purposes. All the members of this mess are from Tontogany; all are members of Company H.

They occupy a Sibley Tent, a conical structure resembling a large wigwam. A single pole in the center holds it up, and guy ropes about two feet apart around the perimeter steady it. Arrayed in a clock-like circle, the men sleep two to a bunk, feet to the center of the tent. Crowded into the tent with them are a gun rack, a “dish box” for eating utensils, and various tools. (Warner doesn’t include it in his diagram, but there’s a stove in there somewhere. Keeping stoves like Warner’s fed always causes the denuding of areas around army camps: not only trees, but wooden structures are apt to disappear.)

After the war, the surviving members of this mess can look back on the time they were only two degrees of separation from one of the most famous and flamboyant figures in the war, and, after the Battle of Little Big Horn, one of the most famous figures in the Indian wars.

One of the 12 men from Tontogany is Thomas Ward (“Tom”) Custer, younger brother of none other than George Armstrong Custer. Born in eastern Ohio, the Custer family came to Tontogany in 1860. George graduated from West Point in 1861, entered the war immediately, and, for his remarkable leadership skills, in June 1863 will be named brigadier general, age 23. Thanks to demerits for his conduct, he had graduated last in his class at West Point, but he will become one of the war’s most outstanding cavalry commanders.

Tom Custer entered the war as a mere private but in late 1864 will join his brother’s staff as an aide, with the rank of lieutenant. (Lt. Tom Custer, is pictured above, standing behind brother George and his wife, Libbie.) A daring fighter, Tom will win two Medals of Honor and repeated promotions. An admiring George will say of him, “Tom should have been the general and I the lieutenant.” Tom and another Custer brother will die with George at Little Big Horn.

ELSEWHERE IN THE CIVIL WAR: Cooped up in winter quarters in western Virginia, Lt. Col. Rutherford B. Hayes complains to his diary, “How impatiently we look for action on Green River [and] at Cairo.” Green River lies within Don Carlos Buell’s command in Kentucky; Cairo refers to Brig. Gen. Ulysses s. Grant’s command further west. Both commands will see action soon, first of all in Kentucky, where Union forces under Brig. Gen. George H. Thomas are approaching Confederates in the vicinity of Mill Springs.

IT’S COMING SOONER THAN YOU THINK: April 12, 2011—less than 3½ years from now!—will be the 150^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, April 12 was the day Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Your suggestions, comments, and questions about this blog are always welcome. Address the author: Ohioan@bloodtearsandglory.com

For more information about the author and his newest book, please go to http://www.orangefrazer.com/btg