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Description

With Civil War papers already a white plague, why add to the epidemic? The answer involves mention of another disease, local pride. But should we be proud or not?  No one in a full 100 years has marshaled the facts of 1863, when the Confederate army rolled to the West Shore of the Susquehanna River.

This study proceeds from the assumption that local pride must be fed fact or it will grow fat on fiction. And most of the facts are scattered. Take Oyster Point, then and now. Then it was a fact that alarmed the Secretary of War and the President of the United States. It was the tip of a dagger aimed at the vitals of the nation.  It was the front line of the war to thousands of subscribers to the New York Times, the Philadelphia Press and Harper’s. Now scarcely a soul either locates the Point with precision or tells its story with perception. The savants do little better— a recent doctoral dissertation identified the Point as a headland projecting into the waters of the Susquehanna.

Read online at the Gardner Digital Library.

44 pages