The next meeting of the Middle Tennessee CWRT will be at 7 PM on Tuesday May 20, 2008 at Bradley Academy. This meeting will feature author Gregg Clemmer who will present a program based on his 2005 Douglas Southall Freeman History Award winning book, Old Alleghany: The Life and Wars of General Ed Johnson
“Maj. Gen. Edward Johnson (1816-1873) is one of the wickedest men I ever heard of, ”wrote a member of the Stonewall Brigade. Declared another, he is “a large and rather rough looking man on horseback...whom the men jeered.” Others recalled Johnson as an irascible character who, “always carried a big hickory club or cane, and when he got mad could work his ears like a mule.”
Modern historians have eagerly plucked such scrofulous literary plums to color their accounts of Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign, Gettysburg’s Culp’s Hill, and Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle. But is history’s assessment of this soldier whom his men tagged with a dozen colorful sobriquets including Fence Rail, Old Clubby, and Brute accurate and fair?
Mr. Clemmer will paint a picture of a man who was much more than his homely appearance and rough behavior. We will get to know a man who railed against genocidal policies towards native Americans and floundered in his relationships with women. He also proved to be one of the most competent officers in Army of Northern Virginia. Praised by his superiors and subordinates with words like those of artillerist William P. Carter. “No bolder soldier ever donned the Southern gray or followed the storm-tossed colors of the immortal Lee.”
The Middle Tennessee Civil War Round Table meets every third Tuesday of the month at Bradley Academy, located on Academy Street in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Membership applications are available at each meeting. Membership costs $10 per year for individuals and $15 for families. All meetings are open to the public regardless of membership status. Each meeting will include time for interested parties to share stories and memorabilia from the Civil War era with the membership.
For more information, visit our web site at http://www.mtcwrt.org or contact Jim Lewis at 615-243-6830
(before 8 PM) or by e-mail at mtcwrt@comcast.net.