One Million

    I was kind of looking forward to this day – 1,000,000 hits on Looking for the Confederate War (6:00 pm on July 3, 2023). It was a dream earlier this year when I checked my stats. I thought just maybe I just might get that number by the end of the year. Little did I imagine that it would only take about three or four weeks in the middle of the year – 21,000 hits in that amount of time. Nope, it was not that I had put up some great post that generated a lot of views. Those 21,000 hits came from Singapore. As the youngsters say these days, I got Scraped. I’m quite certain that some AI bot is pulling my information for their cloud (or whatever it is called).

   But I think I am going to celebrate anyway. Maybe one of those students who use one of the chatbots to write their papers will actually read the paper before they turn it in. Maybe a teacher will read the same paper. Maybe, just maybe, I can share a slightly different perspective on a very complicated part of American History.

   I started blogging back in October 2006. It was not called Looking for the Confederate War back then. The title had something to do with North Carolina and the War. I used the format to share what I was working on and information about events in North Carolina dealing with the War. In 2016 (I think), I changed the name to Looking for the Confederate War, and I started to write about much more than just North Carolina. I started to write about the whole South. Of course, I’ve yet to write a detailed, series of long posts on the big events, like Gettysburg, or Chickamauga. No, most of these posts look at little events, things that have slipped by the notice of other scribes. Many of these events are just footnotes in history.

   There have been some favorites. “Sherman burning towns on the March to the Sea;” “Killing Confederates at Fort Gregg”; “Et Tu Dahlgren?: The Plot against Jefferson Davis”; “Confederate Wagon Trains, Teamsters, and Wagoneers”; “Robert E. Lee’s Cooks”; “Who carried Robert E. Lee’s flag”; “Witnesses”, just to name a few. There are some posts I thought would do better, like the one on Southern Lighthouses. Maybe one of these days it will catch someone’s attention.

   I’ve also used the platform to look at bad history as well, such as bad information on flags, and more than once, on the role of the Blalocks in the war. Then there is the post on Tom Dula (Tom Dooley). I drop this one frequently when the image pops up of that Federal soldier that many carelessly use as Dula.

   There have also been book reviews – not enough, considering how many I read, but I have tried to share some of the better books I have read.  

   Fan favorites? “Confederate Soldiers, Christmas, and Eggnog,” (December 2020) has accrued 1,150 hits so far. “Stonewall Jackson’s Lemons” (October 2019), 1,561 hits; “Who Rode with Lee at Appomattox” (September 2018), 1,873 hits; “Stonewall Jackson’s Requiem” (September 2018), 1,972 hits; “Was it really Witcher’s Cavalry?” (June 2017), with 1,977 hits. Many of the posts that came out prior to 2016 have over 3,000 hits. There have even been a few cases where some of these posts have been cited in articles and books.

   Occasionally, I wade into the fray, with posts like “No room for nuance in NPR’s narrative.” That one has 2,703 hits to date. “Why do people think Zeb Vance was in the Klan?” has 2,369 hits.

   So, what happens next? Now that I’ve been “Scraped” do I continue to put out material? Is blogging really worth it anymore? When I started in 2006, blogging was all the craze. There seemed to be scores of CW blogs – Rantings of a Civil War Historian, Old Virginia Blog, USS Monitor Center, CivilWarTime, Mysteries and Conundrums, and others. Now, there are just a handful. I think I will continue, but I’m also looking at new platforms. Maybe a substack, or a podcast. Of course, writing about Confederate history is like swimming upstream. Most months, I get 4,000-5,000 hits. That’s probably why it has taken me all these years to get to 1,000,000 hits. But then again, if I am going to get 25,000 hits a month like last month, that next one million should not take too long.

   By the way, thanks for taking the time to read, comment, and share! At least 970,000 hits came from (mostly) real people. It is really for you that I continue to put out more content.