James McPherson, a nationally known historian, describes the Battle of Chancellorsville to St. Mary's College students at Hazel Grove, one of the sites where fighting raged in 1863. smc View More Images from this story Visit the Photo Place

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Tour leader makes war real, riveting for visitors

Students and staff from Maryland college get intimate account of local Civil War fighting from famed author

By LAURA MOYER

Date published: 11/12/2004

By LAURA MOYER

Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian James M. McPherson hopped a creek and headed cross country, double-timing it through the high grass and brambles of a Spotsylvania County battlefield.

Two dozen Maryland college students, college staff members and a pack of journalists huffed and puffed to keep up.

They didn't want to miss a word of McPherson's commentary yesterday during a tour of Fredericksburg-area Civil War battlefields for St. Mary's College of Maryland.

Those lucky enough to go on the daylong tour knew they were in the presence of greatness--of Gens. Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant and the tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides who died during the Fredericksburg-area fighting of 1862, 1863 and 1864.

They also recognized greatness in McPherson, renowned author of numerous essays and more than a dozen Civil War histories including "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era," winner of a 1989 Pulitzer Prize for history.

McPherson, a Princeton University professor emeritus, is visiting the southern Maryland college this week as the first guest of its Center for Democracy. He'll give a public lecture at the college, about a two-hour drive from Fredericksburg, at 8 tonight.

Yesterday's tour, for history majors and others enrolled in a St. Mary's College class on the Civil War, meandered through several Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park sites in chronological order of the battles.

McPherson took the group first to Fredericksburg, focusing on the 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg; to Chancellorsville, site of fierce fighting and the wounding of "Stonewall" Jackson in 1863; and to the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House battlefields, contested in 1864.

He spoke of the advantages of surprise used by both sides in an era when communication was slow and unreliable, and of the shrewd generalling of Lee and of Grant, seemingly the only Union leader with the brains and grit not to be unmanned by the mystique of his Confederate adversary.

Local knowledge, too, was important, McPherson told students. Here the Confederates had all the edge, as Fredericksburg-area sympathizers showed them back roads, forest paths and unfinished railbeds that could get them stealthily to advantageous positions.

The students, most in their late teens or early 20s, had less trouble following McPherson mentally than physically.

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Date published: 11/12/2004