Recent content by Arnold d.c

Nope, when he commanded the Department of California, Ord declared the Apache to be “vermin to be killed when met.” The most sympathetic general is surprisingly John Pope, who advocated hard war in Virginia in 1862. I always dismissed him as an arrogant braggart, but Peter Cozzens' biography on...

I think he did at an earlier chapter... ah, it was chapter 34 where he was defeated in a battle at Iuka. I always just assumed he was killed or that his career never shot up and he was left in some backwaters/garrison posting. On that note, it does get Grant to be more politically involved in...

You mean West Virginia separating itself from Virginia? It is already done; IIRC WV is called Kanawha now.

IIRC the letters were written pre-war in the 1840s, when Davis was still a Mississippi Senator. The letters were discovered in August 1863, when a Union raiding party found Jefferson Davis’ paper and books in a Southern plantation. Sherman found the letters while perusing Davis’ papers and...

You're right that most offenders don't have to deal with the secession question. Dealing with the perpetrators of mistreatment/massacre of Unionists and USCT along with the supervisors of horrendous POW camps is easy enough. It's mostly the political figures like Howell Cobb and Robert Barnwell...

It’s a solid policy, beats having to rely on merchants that will wring them dry and offer a chance to build wealth. That would definitely help the South’s rebuilding. Historically, merchants charged higher interest rates than banks because they themselves were borrowing funds and had greater...

It's a possibility, but I expected one of the main figures of the Lost Cause to get his due.

IIRC Kirby-Smith has already fled to Mexico, with his army practically mutinying to dissolve itself. The epilogue in 'Until Every Drop of Blood is Paid' states that several civilians and military men were executed: - Wade Hampton : cavalry commander in the Army of Northern Virginia - Jeb Stuart...

As I understand it, it was more than just that. The act basically implied that the U.S. was dropping the gold standard for bimetallism and that by Gresham's Law (bad money will displace good money), the cheaper & overvalued (by the U.S. gov't) silver would become the U.S.' main currency in a...

You raise a good point that I really had not thought of. Analyzing the impact is a bit tricky as the way their monetary system functioned is so very different from ours. Still, IIRC some of the bigger cities that relied on silver such as San Francisco got hit particularly hard by the removal of...

Good update! We've seen the better conditions of the freedman vs. OTL building up in the ACW. Now, it's time to develop and actually defend those developments. I assume that more home farms will be formed along with their defending regiments. I'm sure there's plenty of discarded small arms from...

The honest answer is that we don't know. I have not seen any serious attempts by economists to analyze the impact of the Inflation Bill. The prosed addition to the greenback supply was considerable. The main benefactors to this policy would probably be debtors, most notably farmers - whose debts...

Chapter 1 already states that one hundred thousand soldiers were left for peacekeeping, which largely lines up with OTL. IOTL, more than 800,000 men had been discharged and another 190,000 by spring 1866. Demobilization was popular and in line with the anti-military disposition . That said, the...

Let me turn the question around: when the Union armies in the west were clearly winning in 1862, capturing Nashville, Corinth and Memphis, why did Lincoln not order them to head east and reinforce the Army of the Potomac? It’s simple: the Confederate armies of the west remained a potent force...

In regards to the early Eastern Theater victories, my opinions are as follows: 1. To me, the most direct benefit to Western Theater lies in draining the Confederacy's reserve pool of coastal units. IOTL, there were considerable reinforcements that were entrained to the Western Theater. Of the...