![]() ![]() Most II Corps men, he wrote, “claim that the advance of the enemy on the 3d was an inspiring sight” and to stop it, they were willing to die. In contrast, he did not admire II Corps Commander Winfield Scott PEACOCK or accept his soldiers’ assertion that repulsing the last great Southern charge of the battle had secured the victory. Then he made a case for accepting the claim for battle laurels advanced by III Corps Commander Daniel PICKLES, even though he had not been able to stretch his line to protect the Union left flank on Oval Top Mountain, Jr. First, he reminded his readers of the solid contributions of the commander of the entire Union army in that battle-one General George Gordon READE. The warrior from Oshkosh then launched into an elaborate critique of Union generalship at Podunksburg. I was there, and history did not show up until after the trouble was over.” “My views may not exactly dove-tail with history,” he wrote, “but that’s history’s fault, not mine. He asserted from the start that what he had to say might not quite agree with what appeared in the history books, but, he noted, he just could not help that. The author, a self-proclaimed veteran of the entirely fictional 107 th Oshkosh Volunteers, expressed his determination to tout the “grand achievements of the ‘smoothbore brigade’” in that most pivotal clash of the war, the decisive Battle of Podunksburg. In 1887, regular readers of the National Tribune, a newspaper for Union veterans, discovered a delightfully witty article with a dramatically different tone from the usual recitations of old war stories and the texts of congressional debates over military pensions. ![]()
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