Category Archives: American Civil War

Prospectus: A Draft-Format Discussion Game Built on Civil War Command Personnel

Posted on July 29, 2026 by nathanalbright

1. Purpose To determine whether the population of documented Civil War military and administrative figures can support a draft-and-roster game on the scale and cadence of a contemporary fantasy sports league, and to specify the positional structure that would make … Continue reading →

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The Commemorative Ledger and Its Missing Entries: Naming Practice, Postwar Reputation, and the Under-Memorialized Confederate Officer

Posted on July 29, 2026 by nathanalbright

I. The Problem The commemorative landscape of the postwar South — schools, counties, towns, highways, courthouses, camps, and eventually federal military installations — is usually studied through what it contains. Its containers are numerous and well catalogued. The Southern Poverty … Continue reading →

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Relief Without a Record: Lee’s April 8, 1865 Removals of Anderson, Pickett, and Johnson, and the Problem of Recovering Graded Judgment

Posted on July 29, 2026 by nathanalbright

I. The Question On or about April 8, 1865, one day before the surrender at Appomattox Court House, Robert E. Lee removed three general officers from command in the Army of Northern Virginia: Lieutenant General Richard Heron Anderson, commanding the … Continue reading →

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Feeding the March: Sherman’s Georgia and Carolinas Campaigns as a Recovery of Early Modern Logistics: A White Paper

Posted on July 25, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract The logistical arrangements of William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea (November–December 1864) and Carolinas campaign (January–April 1865) are routinely described as an innovation — the birth of modern operational war, the ancestor of the motorized deep thrust, the … Continue reading →

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Measuring Absence: Why Combat Participation Rate Requires Decomposition: Perryville, Antietam, and the Causes of Non-Engagement: A follow-up to “Battles Decided Before They Were Fought”

Posted on July 24, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract The preceding paper proposed combat participation rate — the share of a mustered force that actually made contact — as a diagnostic tool for identifying battles settled by pre-battle negotiation rather than tactical decision. At Bosworth and Sekigahara, a … Continue reading →

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The Human Toll of the Westport Campaign: An Estimate of Confederate Attrition During Price’s Missouri Expedition, September–December 1864

Posted on July 22, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive summary Sterling Price’s Army of Missouri entered its home state in mid-September 1864 with roughly twelve thousand men, of whom perhaps a third carried no weapon. Ten weeks and some fourteen hundred miles later, the force that re-crossed into … Continue reading →

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Paper 4 — A Cracker Cowtown at War: Households, Slavery, and Survival, 1840s–1870s

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction Between the end of the Second Seminole War and the close of Reconstruction, Tampa grew from a garrison village into a small Southern town—and then was nearly unmade by war. This paper follows that arc from below: not through … Continue reading →

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Paper 3 — Fort Brooke, the Enslaved, and the Seminoles: The American Frontier from Its Margins, 1824–1860s

Posted on July 20, 2026 by nathanalbright

Introduction When the United States built Fort Brooke at the mouth of the Hillsborough River in 1824, it planted the seed of the city that would become Tampa. The standard telling makes this a story of national expansion: a frontier … Continue reading →

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Synthesis: Four Centuries of a Contested Coast

Posted on July 19, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This concluding paper draws together the arguments of the preceding nine and advances an interpretation of the whole. It proposes that the military history of Tampa Bay passed through three phases—the bay as beachhead, as staging area, and finally … Continue reading →

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Fort Brooke and Tampa in the Civil War: The Blockaded Storehouse (1861–1865)

Posted on July 18, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract This paper examines the role of Fort Brooke and the town of Tampa in the American Civil War, arguing that the bay’s importance in these years was economic before it was tactical. Tampa was a small and remote Gulf … Continue reading →

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