(Directions to Caldwell Hall-Enter the McCallie School campus off of Dodds Avenue opposite the end of Bailey Avenue. Take the main drive into the campus and follow the signs for the Academic Quadrangle. There is a parking area there beside the Chapel and you will have passed Caldwell Hall on the right as you approach the parking area. Find a place and park. Caldwell Hall will be behind you as you park. Come in either the first or second floor doors and follow the signs to the Millis-Evans Room.)

At the Vicksburg National Military Park, as you drive the tour road along the Union siege lines, you'll see monuments to outfits from the same Western states as at Chickamauga but with a heavy leavening of monuments to regiments from such still more Western places as Missouri and Iowa. The experience at those three national military parks is only natural. The monuments by and large accurately reflect the make up of those three principal Union armies. Due primarily to the Northern transportation networks, the Army of the Potomac was mostly made up of regiments and batteries of Eastern and Northeastern states; the Army of the Cumberland units from the Western states; and the Army of the Tennessee the same with just a number of outfits from the more western of Western states.

But, in the last year of the war, by detachments of reinforcements and strategic concentrations, one Union army, actually more an army group, Sherman's field force of the Military Division of the Mississippi became nearly a mirror of the states of the Union war effort. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Michigan, Kentucky and units from other Western states were joined by larger numbers of regiments from the East until nearly all the Union was represented in 'Cump' Sherman's army that drove south from Chattanooga in that fourth spring and summer of the war. His force, nearly a manifestation of the Union on the march, included regiments and batteries from seventeen of the then twenty-three Union states with only those most northeastern of the Northeastern states not represented.

Three of those regiments were from New Jersey. Those three New Jersey units will variously charge up the steep slopes at Dug Gap on May 8; help turn back Hood's Corps at Resaca on the 15th; stop Hood cold in his tracks at Kolb's Farm; fight in the valley of Peachtree Creek; and be amongst the first of those to occupy Atlanta at the end of more than one hundred hard days of fighting.

Our speaker this month, Rebecca Karcher, a New Jersey native herself, will put an Eastern spin on this most important of Western campaigns as she examines the roll of New Jersey's troops in the drive on the "Gate City of the South." Rebecca Karcher is an interpretative Park Ranger at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. A 1999 graduate of Rutgers University, she has worked at Gettysburg National Military Park, Antietam National Battlefield, and Independence National Historical Park. She has worked at Chickamauga and Chattanooga NMP since April, 2001.

There are four items again this month for the Speaker's Fund. The first is a copy of John G. Zinn's recently published The Mutinous Regiment: The Thirty-third New Jersey in the Civil War, a history of one of the regiments that is a subject of our talk this month. The second item is a copy of War at Every Door: Partisan Politics & Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860-1869 by Noel C. Fisher. The third item is a copy of the old National Park Service historical handbook for the Custis-Lee Mansion Arlington. The final item is all six issues of Civil War Times Illustrated for 1996 with articles on Forrest's gunboat fleet, the Mississippi Marine Brigade, and Grierson's Raid, our topic from last month. The last three of the four items this month were donated to the Round Table to support the Speaker's Fund. To those donors go our thanks. Proceeds from the Speaker's Fund go toward bringing speakers in from outside the area. Your support of the Speaker's Fund is appreciated.

On a related electronic note is the issue of potential distribution of the Canister by email. Postage is getting more and more and there is talk of rates rising to forty-two cents soon. A few years ago we inquired about how many members were using email and might want to receive the Canister that way. At that time, there weren't too many email users. That's probably changed. Thoughts on this possibility as well?

There are a couple of WBTS programs of note on the tube in the coming week or so for once. They include:

HISTORY CHANNEL

[Webmaster's note: additional information about this tour can be found at: CWRT of the District of Columbia Tour]

June 20, 2006 - To be announced.
July 18, 2006 - To be announced.
August 15, 2006 - To be announced.
September 19, 2006 - Since it will be the 143rd anniversary of the fighting on September 19 at Chickamauga, we'll have an evening walking tour meeting on the Chickamauga Battlefield; bring a flashlight.
October 17, 2006 - Russell K. Brown, author of To The Manner Born: The Life of William H. T. Walker, Augusta's "Pet Company:" The Washington Light Artillery of August, Georgia, and "Our Connection With Savannah:" History of the FIrst Battalion Georgia Sharpshooters, 1862-1865, presenting a subject from the latter book, "Sharpshooters in the Valley of the River of Death: A Georgia Sharpshooter Battalion at Chickamauga."
November 21, 2006 - Sam Davis Elliott, "The Southern End of the Battle of Missionary Ridge"
December 19, 2006 - To be announced.

November 9-11, 2006--14th Annual Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression, sponsored by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's Department of Communications; more details later.

[Note from the webmaster: a chart with the appropriate dues can be found at: Membership Dues. An application can be found at: application]