You're going to. Oh, Hey everyone. Thanks for tuning in to the 465th episode of our Civil War

podcast. My name is Rich and I'm Tracy. Hello y'all welcome to the

podcast. To start off this episode we're going to take you back to a federal federal officer of a muddy road near Stevensville, Virginia.

He was 21-year-old Colonel Ulruk Dahlgren, and documents later found on his body

would set off a public and political firestorm in both the Union and the Confederacy.

Dahlgren was killed there northeast of the Confederate capital of Richmond in the early spring of 1864 during a bold raid conceived by Union

Cavalry General Judson Kilpatrick. What became known as the Kilpatrick

Dahlgren raid

would merely be an interesting footnote in Civil War history

if it wasn't for those papers that were found

on Ulrich Dahlgren's body.

But rather than simply being remembered as a bold plan that went awry,

the Copatric Dahlgren raid, because of those documents,

instead generated one of the most enduring controversies of the Civil War.

With this little story arc, we'll talk about the story of the raid itself,

and then we'll discuss the controversy

that erupted in its aftermath. We've met Judson Kilpatrick before on the podcast and noted that during the Civil War he would earn the rather

unflattering nickname Kill Cavalry for the way he used up men and horses.

In February 1864 Kilpatrick was 28 years old, a Brigadier General and commander of a

cavalry division in the Army of the Potomac.

He was also a man of boundless ambition. He was born in Decortown, New Jersey in January

1836, the second son of Simon and Julia Kilpatrick.

...