Saturday, November 10, 2007

ON THIS DAY: Monday, Nov. 11, 1861

In the nation’s capital, President Abraham Lincoln witnesses a torchlight parade honoring General-in-Chief. George B. McClellan. As he watches, Lincoln is probably wondering when McClellan is going to put his army to the use for which it was intended. McClellan never seems to think the time is right to move against the Confederacy.

In Louisville, Ellen Sherman remains at her troubled husband’s side, awaiting the arrival of his successor, Don Carlos Buell. She sent the three Sherman boys home yesterday and has written Cump’s brother John, urging him to come to Cump’s support.

In the western Virginia camp of the 23rd Ohio, Pvt. William Roach of Company I is killed by the accidental discharge of a comrade’s pistol. He will be buried nearby and after the war reinterred in the Grafton, West Virginia, Military Cemetery. Nearly a century and a half later, he remains there in Section E, Site 610.

The war has subsided into low-level, localized clashes, important only to the men involved and the families who suffer losses. At Little Blue River in Missouri, a detachment of Kansas cavalry is drawn into a clash between secessionists and “Jayhawkers” (Kansas guerrilla fighters opposed to slavery) and seven cavalrymen are killed, nine wounded. And in western Virginia, a skirmish at Blake’s farm, Cotton Hill, involves the 2nd Kentucky and 11th Ohio. The affair ends with two Union soldiers dead, one wounded, and six missing.

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