Talk:Battle of Appomattox Court House

Grammar

This article has some serious run-on sentences. We need commas, STAT! I don't have time to do it now; hopefully, someone else can get to it first.

Grant's Headache

"Grant who's headache had suddenly disappeared when he received Lee's note arrived in a dirty private's uniform with only his shoulder straps showing his rank."

It's not mentioned previously that Grant had a headache. Does anyone know more about this? -- Arekku

• A quick Google search reveals a few mentions of Grant's physical condition prior to and during Appomattox, including this reference from PBS.org's site on Ken Burn's Civil War documentary :

Grant noted at several points in his memoirs that he was suffering "very severely" with a "sick headache". He used what was probably the traditional remedy for that in the mid 19th Century, which included bathing his feet in hot water and mustard as well as putting mustard plasters on his wrists and back part of his neck.

Grant noted that as soon as he read Lee’s note suggesting they meet to formalize the surrender of the Confederate army, his headache disappeared.

• I suggest something more be added earlier in the article about Grant's headache. For now, I'll revise the existing line. --Nick 17:01, Feb 9, 2005 (UTC)

Confederate casualties

I noticed that the "Casualties" column for the Confederate side lists 28,000. I assume that the intention here is to indicate that Lee's army surrendered, and so the entire army was a "casualty." However, I'm not sure that this is appropriate. I've always known casualties to mean soldiers killed and injured in action, and while I could see this being extended to missing and captured soldiers I don't think it applies well to an army that surrenders and is allowed to return home. Does anyone else have an opinion? Perhaps the best solution might be to give a figure for soldiers injured and killed, and then note that the army surrendered and was dispersed. TomTheHand 19:19, Feb 9, 2005 (UTC)

Something weird is happening to the edit button

In both the Firefox and Opera internet browsers, the edit buttons for the first three paragraphs are in the wrong spot. In Firefox, they're overlapping the last battle section, and in Opera, all three are at the bottom of "The last battle" section. I checked in Internet Explorer, and it's working, so I don't know what's going on. Could someone please look at it?

Daniel

I find that Campaignboxes following the Infoboxes make many articles rather fragile in this regard. Oddly enough, although I have been Wikipedia-ing for a couple of years, I have no idea where to report bugs like this. Perhaps someone can enlighten us. In the meantime, can you reconsider your edits that put these comparatively large flag images into battle articles? Either reduce them to a manageable size (50px?) or forget about it, pls. (I see that Internet Explorer, which I rarely use, displays them quite clumsily in comparison to Firefox.) Hal Jespersen 02:33, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Surrender Importance

I've included the actual text written by Grant to Lee in the McLean House, which was needed. The surrender was just too important to be stated as a minor entry. Could a separate article on the surrender be written, if not already? Carajou 05:14, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I think this is the appropriate place for the information you have added. The problem with having a second article is that I cannot imagine a name that people would immediately think of: Surrender of Robert E. Lee? Surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia? Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse? In any event, since the detail you have added is not overly long, I see no problem with leaving it here. Hal Jespersen 16:56, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

True, and I thought of that after I included some of Grant's and Chamberlain's details. If I may suggest, since what happened at Appomattox is one of the most important days in this country's history, we go into detail by including as much as possible from those people who were there at the time, not just Grant and Chamberlain, but Lee, Longstreet, Gordon, etc. It should provide the reader with something that could be really used (like a kid doing homework). I think this should also clear up the grammar problem as well. Carajou 19:40, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

You need to balance human interest material with the content and formatting requirements of an encyclopedia. If the material about the other generals is primarily personal in nature, such as their thoughts and reactions, I think it would be better placed into their biography articles than here. Hal Jespersen 20:00, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

The Last Battle

Minor edit of quotations from Gordon and Lee. I checked against what was written in Freeman's book on Lee as well as more current books for accuracy. Carajou 07:05, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

saluting

I have removed the following unencyclopedic editorial comment from the main article:

The reference to the V Corps saluting the Confederates (Gordon) was a myth perpetuated by Chamberlain (his Union peers came to despise the man as the man to boast his political goals blew the Gettysburg incidents out of portion). This was a common thing for the age Mrs. Jackson did the same for Thomas as did Mrs. Pickett and later Mrs. Custer. It just was not acceptable and considered in bad taste when done by the indiviual. In reality the salute was nothing more then relieving the men who standing in one position became very tired; they were ordered to change positions every few minutes. (Diaries show that the men rather then being friendly had to be relived of the ammunition to ensure shots were not taken).

Before this paragraph is restored to the article, we will need to have some citations from secondary sources to back up this claim. We also can do without the POV opinions on the characters of Chamberlain and the other Civil War generals mentioned. Hal Jespersen 21:05, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

ever-expanding article

I just took an editing pass over some of the recent additions to the article. In my opinion, we are adding too much detail about activities that are not directly related to the battle that occurred on April 9. I think it would be more appropriate to move most of the voluminous material (actually, a lot of detail has been omitted even from this lengthy description) about prior battles, surrender negotiations, and the following surrender ceremonies to the currently brief Appomattox Campaign article. It is on my to-do list to expand the campaign article and, unless someone beats me to it, I think this particular battle article should be focused much more sharply on the battle itself. Hal Jespersen (talk) 00:13, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

It was my intent to just add more information, and worry about trimming later; it's a lot easier than having to go back. I don't have access to the sources I need to expand the rest of it at this time. I don't think it makes much sense to redirect the surrender info to the Appomattox Campaign article, because I doubt even once it's been expanded it will be that large. It makes much more sense to just discuss the natural outgrowth of the day's fighting here, because it's more directly relevant than the campaign in general. Also, I would like to know why you are reverting formatting changes. Martin Raybourne (talk) 18:30, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

The reason it makes more sense in the campaign article is that the prelude to surrender--all of the notes and responses and preparations to meet between the lines at various times--coincided with the results of three or four individual battles. Therefore, putting it all into the article about the minor battle that preceded the surrender, relying on a very long Background section to cover all of that information seems less than optimal. On a procedural note, I think you will find over time that writing articles and then going back later to add citation is actually more work. The first few hundred articles I wrote were in the early days of Wikipedia, when citations were not emphasized as being very important, and going back to improve those with reasonable citations has been a lot of work, which is not nearly complete after over five years.

I modified the formatting to match the formatting used by the original author of the work and of other comparable articles in the campaign and the American Civil War space. One of the tenets of Wikipedia editing is that if multiple formats are allowable, when you make incremental edits to an article you do not arbitrarily change them to another format, you conform to the format already in place. Hal Jespersen (talk) 22:45, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

You misunderstand me. I'm saying it's best to add more information and cut it down; the only unsourced information that's been added has been added by you. There's no sort of article precedent about formatting. You are trying to own this article and control its changes, preventing good-faith additions to this article. I would like to see this reach GA, and that can't happen if any sort of background information is removed. Not everyone is a Civil War buff, and articles must be accessible. Martin Raybourne (talk) 17:35, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

From WP:MOS:

Stability of articles
The Arbitration Committee has ruled that editors should not change an article from one guideline-defined style to another without a substantial reason unrelated to mere choice of style, and that revert-warring over optional styles is unacceptable.[1] Where there is disagreement over which style to use in an article, defer to the style used by the first major contributor.

If by "the only unsourced information that's been added has been added by you" you mean in the old days before citations were common in Wikipedia, you're right. If you mean in the last few days, I don't know what you're referring to and we should correct it, if so. I have no objection to good-faith content additions to this article or any article. I am merely suggesting that there are better places for such info, given the structure of the articles we currently have. Hal Jespersen (talk) 22:14, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

The surrender was a result of this battle, not the campaign. To place it anywhere else would be disingenuous and misleading. Martin Raybourne (talk) 21:09, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

That is really a very narrow view of the events of the campaign. After the debacles of Sayler's Creek and High Bridge, Lee was in active communication with Grant about the possibility of surrendering. This process coincided with at least three battles, each of which has a separate article. The military events of April 9 were a high-risk, last-gasp effort to break out of the Union army's grip, a possibility that Lee thought had very little chance of success. The battle lasted only briefly until Lee saw what he was up against and then he gave up. Hal Jespersen (talk) 23:35, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Well I'm trying to improve this article, with all the available sources that I have. I would prefer if you didn't stand in the way of that. Martin Raybourne (talk) 20:17, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

commanders in information box

The general guideline we used for information boxes is to list the uppermost commander on each side. We sometimes list key subordinate commanders if they have some particularly noted role, such as command in an isolated part of the battle, or if a famous one is killed, such as Jackson at Chancellorsville. In the case of this minor battle, George Meade played almost no personal role. (He is not even mentioned in the main text of the article, other than an unlinked reference to his last name in the aftermath section.) Hal Jespersen (talk) 23:25, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Still, he was the commander of the Army of the Potomac, therefore it wouldn't matter what little he did.Red Wiki 18:00, 13 December 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Valkyrie Red (talk • contribs)

One could make that claim for any of the subordinate commanders, but as I said above, our guideline to list only the uppermost commander on each side unless a subordinate had some unique contribution (and we don't do that very often, either). Hal Jespersen (talk) 22:16, 13 December 2009 (UTC)