Sunday, March 16, 2014

March 17, 1864---One by land, two by sea



MARCH 17, 1864:      

After both attending the Virginia conference of all senior Union Generals, Grant and Sherman meet privately in Cincinnati, Ohio to discuss their overall strategy for the war. Like General Winfield Scott’s naval blockade begun in 1861, the land-based Grant-Sherman Plan eventually acquires the same name, the “Anaconda Plan.” In sum, the Union land-based armies are to do as the Union Navy has done --- envelope geographic regions of the Confederacy, isolate them, and squeeze the life out of them one by one. 


Confederate States General Patrick Ronayne Cleburne was born on St. Patrick's Day 1828, in Ovens, County Cork, Ireland. He was only eighteen months of age when his mother died, and fifteen when his father died. He failed the entrance examinations to Trinity College in that year. Frustrated in his choice of the medical profession, Cleburne joined the British army. In 1851, he emigrated to the United States and became a citizen in 1860. He settled first in Arkansas and then moved to Mississippi, where he was admitted to the Bar.

When the Civil War came, he sided with the South. He rose to become a Confederate Major General. General Cleburne was publicly engaged to Susan Tarleton of Mobile, Alabama, though he was openly gay. His sexuality did not trouble the Southern leadership, however. General Robert E. Lee referred to him as “a meteor shining in the clouded sky”.

Cleburne fought with distinction in the Battles of Shiloh, Richmond, Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Ringgold Gap and Franklin. He was killed at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee on November 30, 1864.

He despised slavery, and was the first leading Southerner to advocate arming and emancipating slaves who fought for the Confederacy.

150,000 Irishmen fought for the Union during the Civil War. 30,000 Irishmen fought for the Confederacy. Among the most famous of the Union's Irish units was the "Fighting 69th" of New York, but the 8th Alabama, the 10th Louisiana and the 10th Tennessee of the Confederacy were also all-Irish units.

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