It’s a dreary overcast day here on the East Coast. Even Charlie the Westie dog cut his morning walk short in the wet, cold weather. Once he finished what he needed to do, Charlie promptly headed back to the house, jumped into his bed, rearranged his blankets, and settled in for a long nap. I looked at my pile of Civil War things to read and pulled out the magazine shown below.

I found this issue of Military Heritage at a Books A Million over the Christmas holidays that contained an article about the Siege of Yorktown by David A Norris. I have spent a lot of time walking the Yorktown battlefield and was interested in reading more. It was well written and also had a copy of the erroneous map of the Virginia Peninsula that the Union was using made by Colonel Thomas Jefferson Cram!

Union General George McClellan leaving Fort Monroe (south of Big Bethel off the bottom of the map) had hoped to send one of his Corps west to Warwick Court House and on to the Halfway house to flank Confederate General Magruder out of Yorktown. From the map he did not expect to need to cross the Warwick River. The river, however, ran across the peninsula and the Federals would be unable to force a crossing leading to the “Siege of Yorktown”.

On my bookshelf is an excellent book I had read a couple of years ago also written by Mr. Norris, shown below.

The book describes an obscure cavalry raid through Eastern North Carolina. I had first come across the raid on a trip through the area when I encountered a series of Civil War Trails markers about it, shown on the map below. I’ll do a post on it at some point in the future. This was the same Brigadier General Edward Potter who conducted a cavalry raid through South Carolina near the end of the war. That raid was covered in a previous post (link).

Time now to get back to two books about places on my Civil War bucket list. Five chapters into the outstanding Savas Beatie book, shown below, on Castle Pinckney, which I have done a post on (link). I’ll update the post once I finish the recently released book.

Followed by the book below on Fort Jefferson on Garden Key in the Dry Tortugas off Key West.