Much attention has been paid to what occurred on the extreme left flank of the Union army on July 2; the dramatic battle for Little Round Top. Comparatively little public attention goes to Culp's Hill, which represented the extreme right of the Union line. This hill was actually far more important to the integrity of the Union position. Culp's Hill represented the hook of the famous "fishhook." A Confederate force holding it would have potentially rendered the Union line untenable; the...

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As Salah rightly noted in his thread on Darius Couch, there are overrated and underrated generals in the American Civil War. The most criminally underrated of them all, in my view, is Samuel Ryan Curtis, victor of Pea Ridge and Westport. Curtis was born in 1805, and graduated from West Point in 1831. He soon resigned from the army to work as a civil engineer, and was also admitted to the bar. He served...

The Battle of Westport was the largest engagement west of the Mississippi River in the Civil War, sometimes referred to as the "Gettysburg of the West". In September, Sterling Price had launched an invasion of Missouri. All his units were mounted, as the infantry units intended to support him had been sent elsewhere, turning the invasion into more of a grand cavalry raid. Price called his force the Army of Missouri. On September 27th, Price suffered horrific casualties for no gain...

Born in Kingston, New York, in 1828, George H. Sharpe was a lawyer, Republican politician, soldier, and most importantly, spymaster and intelligence pioneer. He graduated from Rutgers in 1847 at the age of 19, giving the salutary address in Latin. He passed the bar in 1849, but then spent time traveling and studying in Europe for several years, spending some time at U.S. diplomatic posts in Vienna and Rome. He...

Horatio Gouverneur Wright, 1820-1899
USMA 1841, 2/52



Horatio Gouverneur Wright was born in Connecticut in 1820. At the age of 14, he entered a military academy that would later become Norwich University. He entered West Point in 1837, graduating in 1841; his classmates included Josiah Gorgas, future Confederate ordnance chief, John F. Reynolds, Nathaniel Lyon,...