Please join us for a Chambersburg Civil War Seminars & Tours Lecture Series! Our next lecture will be: The Bombardment and Looting of Fredericksburg: "Vile Spirits" or War Transformed? by John Hennessy. Cost is $6 per person. Zoom Login details will be sent with your email registration confirmation.

Synopsis: 

Was what happened at Fredericksburg in December 1862, a symbol of emerging Union policy?  Was it a proper and deserved remedy for Southern recalcitrance, or simply a Union army run amok—the work of “vile spirits” (as one Fredericksburger wrote) seeking revenge against what they saw as one of the Confederacy’s most rabidly sessionist bastions? This program will look at these questions—not through the eyes of understandably outraged Southerners, but through the lens of how this event fit (or not) into an evolving Union war effort.

Biography:

John Hennessy started his National Park Service career at Manassas National Battlefield Park in the early 1980s and has since written extensively on a number of Civil War subjects. He is presently the chief historian at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park.