Sarasota, Florida Civil War Round Table 7 p.m., February 9, 2022: "The Battles for the Weldon Railroad, August 1864"

At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, February 9, 2022, I'll be at the Sarasota, Florida Civil War Round Table at VFW Post 3233 at 141 S. Tuttle in Sarasota for an in-person presentation about one of my books, The Siege of Petersburg: The Battles for the Weldon Railroad, August 1864 (Savas Beatie, 2015).

The title of my talk will be, "The Battles for the Weldon Railroad, August 1864."

The Weldon Railroad ran from Petersburg, Virginia to Weldon, North Carolina, where it connected with the port at Wilmington, North Carolina, and the Deep South.  Lee regarded it as indefensible but defended it successfully from the beginning of the Siege of Petersburg in June 1864 until the Federals severed it in August 1864.  The railroad is America's Railroad of Death not because of the deaths in battle in the fighting for the railroad, but because of the deaths among the approximately 9,000 Federal prisoners taken in the fighting.  More than half of them may have died of malnutrition and disease in Confederate prison camps. As many as 25 percent of the relatively few Confederate prisoners may have died in captivity at such places as "Hellmira" (Elmira, New York).

The Siege of Petersburg: The Battles for the Weldon Railroad, August 1864 covers one of Grant's most important offensives during the siege.  It forced Lee to recall forces on their way to Northern Virginia in an attempt to lift the siege by threatening Washington.

The late Edwin C. Bearss, former Chief Historian of the National Park Service, called my book The Siege of Petersburg: The Battles for the Weldon Railroad, August 1864 (Savas Beatie, 2015) "a superior piece of Civil War scholarship."  The dust jacket is based on a Keith Rocco painting depicting the 39th Illinois' charge at Fussell's Mill on August 16, 1864, in which its color bearer won a Medal of Honor and a battlefield commission.  The color bearer belonged to the 39th's Company G, the Preacher's Company, raised in part in Tinley Park, Illinois, where I have my law office.  I attended college in Sarasota, Florida from 1969 to 1973.

Map by Hampton Newsome