On the occasion of our 10th anniversary, we look back with pride at promises made and kept.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in America's Civil War magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Ten years ago this month, a sergeant in the 4th Alabama Infantry defiantly waved his new national banner from the cover of an equally new magazine–America’s Civil War. Fittingly enough, the painting on the cover, by contemporary artist Don Troiani, depicted the Battle of First Manassas, the first major battle of the Civil War. Since that time, it has been our privilege at ACW to accompany you, our readers, on a decade-long trip through dozens of battles large and small, as we have traveled together through the not-so-distant past to look over the shoulders, as it were, of the remarkable men and women who made our nation what it is today.

Anniversaries, like birthdays, are a time for looking back, and perhaps it is proper to begin at the beginning. The maiden issue of America’s Civil War included four feature-length articles that, taken together, exemplify the direction–or directions–the magazine has attempted to follow over the last 10 years. There were articles on the battles of Glorieta Pass, N.M., and Gaines’ Mill, Va., on the Confederate attack at St. Albans, Vt., and on Union General James H. Wilson’s cavalry raid through Georgia and Alabama. Glorieta Pass was one of the westernmost battles of the Civil War, while St. Albans was the northernmost action of the war. Gaines’ Mill was a major early battle in the eastern theater of the war, and Wilson’s raid was one of the last actions on the western front.

Then as now, it was our intention to provide the broadest possible coverage of the Civil War, both literally and figuratively. In doing so, we have ranged widely across the American continent, from the Outer Banks of North Carolina to San Francisco Bay, from Montreal, Canada, to Key West, Fla. And since the Civil War was in some ways an international conflict, we have followed Union and Confederate warships from the Bering Strait of Alaska to the warm-water harbors of Nassau and Bermuda, from Tangiers, Morocco, to the coast of Australia. Nor have we limited ourselves strictly to the war years of 1861­1865. Instead, we have published articles looking back as far as the 1820s, when the first malignant seeds of war began to sprout, and flashed forward to the bittersweet last encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic, the once mighty Union veterans group, in 1949, and the death of the last Confederate veteran in 1952.

In our first issue we promised to “go behind the myths to recover the true war,” and to feature the common soldiers as well as the great generals. With the help of our talented writers and artists, we have striven to keep that promise. The giants of the war–Lee, Jackson, Grant, Sherman, Lincoln, Davis, Sheridan, Stuart–have all received their due share of coverage. But we have also looked at such little-known heroes as Sergeant Amos Humiston, the Portville, N.Y., harnessmaker who died at Gettysburg clutching a photograph of his three small children; Private James Grant of Monroe, Wis., whose condition was perhaps the first documented case of what we now know as posttraumatic stress disorder; and Thomas Hines, the shadowy Confederate spy who managed to disappear entirely from the pages of history.

Nor have we limited ourselves strictly to soldiers–or to men. In the past 10 years we have looked at such extraordinary women as Mother Bickerdyke, the great Northern nurse; Captain Sally Tompkins, the only woman to hold an officer’s commission in the Confederate Army; Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”; Elizabeth Keckley, the former slave who became Mary Todd Lincoln’s closest confidant; and the high-spirited young women in the Rhea County, Tenn., Spartans, who carried secret messages for the Confederate cavalry. We have profiled “Albert Cashier,” the Northern woman who disguised herself as a man to serve in the Union Army; and M.J. Clarke, the smooth-faced Kentucky guerrilla who masqueraded in petticoats as “Sue Mundy.” We have even covered the humble horses and mules who gave their equine lives in service to their country, and Old Abe, the much-beloved “war eagle” of the 8th Wisconsin Infantry.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to