At 6 p.m. on November 3 I'll be at the Kankakee Valley Civil War Round Table Meeting at the Bradley Public Library in Bradley, Illinois discussing the 39th Illinois Veteran Volunteer Infantry's role in the battle of Fussell's Mill, about 10 miles southeast of Richmond, Virginia, on August 16, 1864. The regiment's color bearer, a member of Company G, "the Preacher's Company," won a Medal of Honor that day. Despite receiving a wound in the charge that broke the Confederate line, the color bearer picked himself up and continued onward, capturing the flag of an Alabama regiment and killing its bearer. The incident appears in my book, The Siege of Petersburg: The Battles for the Weldon Railroad, August 1864 (Savas Beatie, 2019) and indeed is depicted on the dust jacket, taken from a painting by Keith Rocco.
