443rd Regular Meeting, Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Dr. Terry Beckenbaugh, associate professor with the Department of Military History at the United States Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, delivered a presentation entitled, “A Very Bloody Mess: The Battle of Stone’s River.”

Dr. Terry Beckenbaugh received his BA and MA in History from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania in 1989 and 1993, respectively. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville in 2002, where his research focused on Major General Samuel Curtis Ryan and the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi. Dr. Beckenbaugh taught for four years at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana before moving to Washington, D.C. where he worked at the U.S. Army Center for Military History (CMH), and then moved to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas where he worked as a historian at the Combat Studies Institute. 

He is currently working on a book, tentatively titled, Pragmatic Abolitionists: Contrabands, Samuel Ryan Curtis and the Army of the Southwest in the White River Campaign in Arkansas, 1862. This study examines the bottom up process of how runaway slaves convinced many Federal soldiers that emancipation and hard war were the only ways to defeat the Confederacy. The impact of runaway slaves on whites and the destruction of their property used to aid the rebellion had a devastating impact on Southern morale long before it became official Federal policy. Thus, the White River campaign proved to be an experiment in hard war and emancipation before the release of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

Link to more works by Dr. Terry Beckenbaugh.