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A Union general stood on a rise at Spotsylvania Court House, mocking his men for flinching under sniper fire. “They couldn’t hit an elephant from that distance,” he said. Ten seconds later, he was dead, struck in the face by a bullet fired from a rifle he never saw, by a man he never knew … Read more

On the morning of July 3, 1863, Confederate General James Longstreet stood on a low ridge near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, looked across roughly a mile of open farmland, and told his commanding officer what no one wanted to hear. He said the plan before them would fail. Not that it might fail, or that it carried … Read more

In June 1876, a former sergeant of the Seventh Cavalry, Stannis Loss Roy, set down his recollections of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. His account, written in 1910, offers a rare enlisted man’s perspective on the desperate fight that became one of the most infamous defeats in American military history. Roy’s narrative begins on … Read more

One day after Robert E. Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox, James Longstreet stood in the yard outside the McLean house and watched Ulysses Grant walk toward him. The Confederate general had spent four years trying to kill Grant’s soldiers, and had nearly died himself less than a year earlier when he was shot through … Read more

For over four decades, the disappearance of Margaret and Elizabeth Hensley from their home near Dante, Virginia, was a mystery relegated to local legend. That changed in 1961, when road workers expanding what is now Route 58 unearthed a metal box containing the sisters’ personal effects, prompting a renewed investigation into a case that had … Read more

A 62-year-old dying man, a former cavalry corporal named Wendell Crane, confessed a story to a Catholic priest in the mining town of Bavispe, Sonora, that he had carried for half a century. The priest, fearing the words were too dangerous, copied the confession into the back of a parish register in Latin. The register … Read more

A cache of long-buried correspondence from the summer of 1876 has surfaced, exposing the cascade of tactical blunders and flawed decisions that doomed Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his immediate command at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The newly revealed documents, penned by journalist Mark Kellogg just days before the catastrophic assault, offer … Read more