Welcome to Knoxville, Gen. Grant (Curt Fields)

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Curt Fields, Ulysses S. Grant

Curt Fields will be the speaker at the Knoxville Civil War Roundtable on Tuesday, March 14, at 7 p.m. (See details for the dinner on the left side of the page.

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, true-to-life 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.

Curt Fields as Gen. Grant

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 staring 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.

Up next (March 14, 2017): the days leading to Appomattox

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Appomattox, Curt Fields, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant

In the last days of March, 1865, Lieutenant General U. S. Grant had planned to assault General Robert E. Lee’s thinly-manned lines around Petersburg, Virginia.

Curt Fields as U.S. Grant

He felt that enough time had dragged by in the nearly year-long campaign and that Lee could not withstand a simultaneous attack all along his lines. However, General Lee, anticipating the assault, attacked Grant first. That attempted break-out failed, and Lee began to fall back, abandoning Richmond in the process. The next few days were a blur as one savage battle after another was fought by a far- from-dead Army of Northern Virginia. But Lee was running out of time and food.

On April 7th, Grant sent the first letter to Lee of what became a short series of exchanges between the two generals, a series that culminating in the surrender meeting in the most unlikely of places for such a momentous event.

At the next KCWRT meeting, General Grant (played by historian Curt Fields) will talk of those letters and what was transpiring during the two days they were exchanged.

The General will also speak about the actual meeting between himself and General Lee, what was said, and what happened in the 75 or so minutes they were together in Wilmer McLean’s parlor. He will address what he said in the surrender letter he wrote to General Lee effectively ending the war, and why he wrote what he did. He will also touch briefly on the unintended ramifications his letter later had on President Andrew Johnson’s Cabinet and administration.

The next KCWRT meeting is Tuesday, March 14. Details are at the left of this page.

Marszalek: Sherman was ‘no villain’

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John Marszalek, Knoxville Civil War Rountable, Shiloh, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman

The members of the Knoxville Civil War Roundtable will have to wait until Tuesday (July 12, 2016) to find out what historian John Marszalek has to say about William Tecumseh Sherman being “the South’s best friend.”

Before then, however, we can read a bit of what Marszalek has written about Sherman.

Here are some excerpts from Marszalek’s biography John F.. Sherman : A Soldier’s Passion for Order.

This from the Prologue:

William Tecumseh Sherman, photo by Matthew Brady

The destructive methods Sherman employed in the march to the sea were controversial, but he was no villain; he was one of the great military leaders of the Civil War. He knew how to outmaneuver a major Confederate army and how to destroy the Confederate will. He was an appealing individual, whom soldiers, family, and friends idolized. As a major public figure, he was in demand for both the office of the presidency and small social gatherings and public speeches. He impressed his contemporaries, influenced his age, and left a name for posterity.

Marszalek, John F.. Sherman : A Soldier’s Passion for Order. Carbondale, US: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 7 July 2016.
Copyright © 2007. Southern Illinois University Press. All rights reserved.

‘Sherman: The South’s Best Friend’ is topic for July KCWRT meeting

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Assault at West Point, Civil War, generals, John Marszalek, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman

John F. Marszalek, the Giles Professor Emeritus of History at Mississippi State University, will be the speaker for the July meeting of the Knoxville Civil War Roundtable.

John Marszalek

Marzalek’s topic will be “William Tecumseh Sherman: The South’s Best Friend.”

Marzalek is the author of a number of books, including three on the life and career of Sherman.

The talk will begin  at 8 p.m., Tuesday, July 12, at the Bearden Banquet Hall, 5806 Kingston Pike. The cost for just attending the talk is $5; students may attend for free. Dinner is at 7 p.m. and costs $17 for non-members of the roundtable and $15 for members.  Those wishing to attend should RSVP by noon,  Monday July 11, by calling 865-671-9001.

Marzalek began teaching at MSU in 1973 and retired in 2002. He served as director and mentor of MSU’s Scholarship Program.

Civil War Trust provides excellent video introduction to Gettysburg

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Abraham Lincoln, Civil War Trust, George Meade, Gettysburg, Gettysburg Address, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Vicksburg, video

With the approach of the anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3), KCWRT.org will be providing some information about the battle during the next couple of weeks.

A great place to start is the video introduction to the battle produce by the Civil War Trust, which you can see below.

 

Historian Garry Adelman gives a quick run-through of the battle with lots of animation and supplementary footage.

Gettysburg is so iconic — particularly because of the Gettysburg Address that Abraham Lincoln delivered four months after the battle — that we tend to lose sight of what it meant to the people who lived during the war.

Civil War images: Authors explore the Mosby Myth

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Civil War, Ed Caudill, Gray Ghost, John Singleton Mosby, Paul Ashdown, The Mosby Myth, Ulysses S. Grant, Virginia

• What we think about John Singleton Mosby is a mixture of what he did on the battlefields of the Civil War and the myth-making that occurred during and after the war. In this post, author Ed Caudill talks about his book on this expert image-maker.

What is real, and what just exists in our mind’s eye, about our past?

Those were the questions two journalism historians had when they took on John Singleton Mosby, the famous Gray Ghost of the Confederate Army. What they produced is an insightful and interesting book titled The Mosby Myth: A Confederate Hero in Life and Legend.

Paul Ashdown and Ed Caudill (two colleagues and good friends) were fascinated by the fact that Mosby, a minor character in the gigantic events that occurred in America between 1861 and 1865, should have such a large place in the consciousness of America. Mosby is said to be the most famous non-general to emerge from the smoke of the war.

Even before the war ended, Mosby and his “raiders” had gained an outsized reputation due not just to their courageous exploits but also because of Mosby’s careful attention to his own image. Ulysses Grant once ordered that they be executed immediately if they were caught.

James Longstreet

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Ambrose Burnside, Battle of the Wilderness, Braxton Bragg, Centreville, Chattanooga, Chickamauga, Civil War in East Tennessee, Civil War in Knoxville, Fredericksburg, Ft. Sanders, George McClellan, Gettysburg, James Longstreet, Jefferson Davis, Joseph Hooker, Manassas Junction, Robert E. Lee. George Pickett, Rutherford B. Hayes, T.J. "Stonewall" Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, United States Military Academy, West Point

By J. C. Tumblin, O.D., Past President, Knoxville Civil War Roundtable

Copyright 1998 by J. C. Tumlbin All rights reserved.

James Longstreet

CHILDHOOD, YOUTH, AND WEST POINT YEARS (1821- 1842)

James Longstreet was born the fifth child of James and Mary Ann Dent Longstreet, on January 8, 1821, in the Edgefield District of South Carolina. His mother had traveled to her mother-in-law’s home for his birth. Both of his parents, owners of a cotton plantation near present-day Gainesville in the Piedmont section of northeastern Georgia, were descendants of families dating to the colonial period — James born in New Jersey, Mary Ann in Maryland. The future general always regarded Georgia as his home, as he came there within weeks of his birth and spent the first nine years of his life there. It had required hard physical labor and resilience to carve a farm out of the forest and wilderness that had been the frontier only a few years previous. Under the tutelage of his older brother and sister, William and Anna, young James rode horseback, hunted, fished, and developed the strong physique that would characterize him throughout life. He also developed self-confidence, self-reliance, and a work ethic.