Rec'd: Losing a Distinguished Soldier

Recommendations for a light week

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"The Small Politicians in Congress Cackling at Gen. McClellan" (Harper's Weekly)

Two hundred and thirty-nine days earlier, Gustave Toutant Beauregard arrived by train at Manassas Junction to organize the defense of Northern Virginia. He built the Army of the Potomac and decisively won the largest battle of the war up to that point. But on January 30, he was dismissed.

Beauregard had been done in by a number of factors, most of them within his control. First he had annoyed Jefferson Davis with his insistence on composing grand strategy for the whole Confederacy, then, after Manassas, he had thwarted Davis' intended structure for the Army of the Potomac, and he had used his close friends in the Confederate Congress to publish his grievances over the conduct of the war in the Richmond newspapers. But in addition to angering the President, Beauregard had simply become redundant, with Joe Johnston increasingly making more and more of the decisions.

By mid-January, Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin, who had immigrated to Louisiana and was able to appeal to their common home, had worked out that Beauregard would accept an appointment elsewhere. The hero of Fort Sumter's career had fallen to Earth as sharply and quickly as it had risen.

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Over at All Not So Quiet Along the Potomac, check out the two parter on winter around Washington. The first deals with daily life, and the second deals with organization.

Here's a good piece on the defenses of Washington and the importance of a national capital in warfare.

To the Sounds of the Guns looks at Virginia's upcoming decision about uranium mining in light of battlefield preservation.

A blog called Booktryst got its hands on some not so savory Currier and Ives plates last February.