Pensions, Retirement and Old Age

Civil War author Howard Coffin will be the guest speaker at the Friends of Special Collections event May 23, at 7 p.m., in Special Collections, Bailey/Howe Library.

His presentation, "The Battered Stars: Vermont's Ordeal in Grant's Overland Campaign, Spring, 1864," is excerpted from his current book, The Battered Stars.

When Ulysses S. Grant took command of Union armies in March, 1864, he resolved to fight until the Confederate forces under Gen. Robert E. Lee were stopped. In the campaign that began May 4, 1864, Vermont troops played a pivotal but costly role in some of the war's most terrible battles. Many hundreds of Vermont men were killed or wounded in the course of a few weeks. Vermont lost more men in the Overland Campaign, in proportion to its population, than any other state.

Coffin is the author of Full Duty: Vermonters in the Civil War and Nine Months to Gettysburg: Stannard's Vermonters and the Repulse of Pickett's Charge. Formerly press secretary to Sen. James Jeffords, Coffin has played a leading role in Civil War battlefield preservation.

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