Major General Richard Taylor was a subordinate of Lt. Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith in the Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederacy in the spring of 1863, and he would be tasked with trying to break through to relieve Vicksburg from the more »
150 years ago, the entire reason for the Civil War changed. Although the majority of men in the Northern ranks enlisted to restore the Union, on Jan. 1, 1863, President Lincoln’s final Emancipation Proclamation declared that all persons held in more »
The story of Davis Bend is not what you’d expect. Confederate President Jefferson Davis made his home at Brierfield. His older brother, Joseph, had his home nearby at Hurricane. Both of these estates were located on a thumb-like pennisula of more »
In the spring of 1863, Adjutant General of the United States, Lorenzo Thomas, traveled to the Mississippi Valley as an ambassador of the government. “I can act precisely as if the President of the United States were himself present,” he more »
In this final installment of my Archives Month series, I want to continue by highlighting another small repository. The Special Collections and Genealogy Departments at the Ouachita Parish Public Library in Monroe, Louisiana provided me with outstanding resources. Not only more »