Battered and bloodied at the Battle of the Wilderness days before and now engaged in a titanic struggle at the “Mule Shoe” at Spotsylvania, Ulysses S. Grant doggedly affirmed his intentions in a dispatch: “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”
And fight it out he did. Day after day, battle after brutal battle, the Overland Campaign raged for 40 consecutive days between May 4th and June 12th, 1864. The campaign pitted the Union’s best general, Grant, fresh from the West, against the Confederacy’s best, the legendary Robert E. Lee, for the first time in the war.
Weeks of savage fighting in the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania Court House, at the North Anna River, and at Cold Harbor, where 7,000 Union soldiers fell in just thirty minutes, exhausted the resources and tested the will of both the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia. On the home front and in the capitals North and South, a great hue and cry arose as casualty reports were posted and the scale of the carnage became manifest.
The war had entered a new and even-deadlier phase. Through it all, Grant remained implacable. Though the Overland Campaign failed to deliver the knockout blow he had hoped for, Grant had succeeded in stealing the initiative from Lee. The oft-beaten and much-maligned Army of the Potomac would not retreat again.
Come join us on Feb. 12 for an unforgettable evening as General Grant himself addresses his assumption of command of all Federal armies, his build-up for the Overland Campaign, and why he chose to go through the Wilderness rather than around it. He will speak to the Battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania and the deadly dance between the armies up to and through Cold Harbor to the beginning of the siege of Petersburg.
Welcome to Knoxville, Curt Fields
Dr. E. C. (Curt) Fields, Jr., is an avid and lifelong student of the American Civil War. His interest in portraying General Ulysses S. Grant was driven by that study and his deep respect and admiration for General Grant. Dr. Fields is the same height and body type as General Grant and therefore presents a convincing, truetolife image of the man as he really looked. He researches and reads extensively about General Grant to deliver an accurate persona of the General. His presentations are in first person, quoting from General Grant’s Memoirs, articles and letters the General wrote, and statements he made in interviews.
Dr. Fields holds a Bachelor and Master’s degrees in Education from the University of Memphis. He later earned a Master’s degree in Secondary Education and a Ph.D. in Educational Administration and Curriculum from Michigan State University. He is a career educator who taught for eight years at the junior and senior high school levels and then served for 25 years as a high school administrator. He also has taught as an adjunct Sociology Professor at the University of Memphis and in Education for Belhaven University’s Memphis campus.
Dr. Fields is now an educational consultant and living historian. As a consultant, he has worked in leadership development as espoused and practiced by General Grant with several corporate and civic groups. As a living historian, Dr. Fields portrayed General Grant at the 150th Sesquicentennial observations of Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Raymond, Vicksburg, and at Appomattox Court House in 2015. He has portrayed the general on film, as well starring as General Grant in the Visitor Center film shown at Appomattox Court House National Historic Park and in the Discovery Channel’s three-part documentary series “How Booze built America.”
Dr. Fields also was featured as General Grant, giving his life story, on the Civil War Trust website. A frequent contributor to “The Civil War Courier” (A Civil War monthly newspaper), Dr. Fields is a member of The Tennessee Historical Society, The West Tennessee Historical Society, The Shelby County Historical Society, The Nathan Bedford Forrest Historical Society, The Tennessee Civil War Preservation Association, The Appomattox 1865 Foundation, The 290 Foundation (dedicated to the Civil War Navies), The Civil War Trust, and the Ulysses S. Grant Association.
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When the United States Army entered Knoxville in September 1863, riding alongside Gen. Ambrose Burnside was Capt. Orlando Poe. An 1856 West Point graduate with the Corps of Engineers, Poe not only designed and coordinated the construction of the defenses of Knoxville; he was meticulous in his methods, record keeping and documentation.
Volunteers across America spurred on by the American Battlefield Trust turned out on Saturday, April 6, 2019 to attend to the maintenance needs of museums and historic sites across the country. For us in the Knoxville Civil War Roundtable, this meant attending to the ongoing needs of our adopted site, Fort Dickerson. Seventeen people showed up for the event including eleven Roundtable members, four police explorers, and two of event-organizer Eric Wayland’s extended family. The beautiful morning made the work a joy, and much was accomplished. Thanks to the ongoing work at the fort by the Roundtable and the City of Knoxville, Fort Dickerson has never looked better. A steady stream of visitors to the site throughout the morning and early afternoon testified to the interest the fort now holds for the community.
