Feb. 24, 2017 10:30 AM
Lake of the Woods Clubhouse, Lower Level
"Vile Spirits or War Transformed?
The Looting and Bombardment of Fredericksburg"
Speaker: John Hennessy, National Park Service Historian
The program will explore how the bombardment and looting of Fredericksburg came to be, how it meshed (or not) with Union policies and the prevailing rules of war, how the public and the army reacted to it, and whether or not it can be seen as an anomaly or part of a larger trend.
Our speaker, John Hennessy, is the Chief Historian at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. While he has written four books and dozens of articles on the Civil War, most of his energy for the last 21 years has been devoted to improving media and interpretation at the park. He has encouraged visitors to see the Civil War through a broader lens, and so a good deal of his work has dealt with the impact of the war on the local civilian population. His talk on the 24th is an outgrowth of that work.