During the Civil War, Cincinnati played a crucial role in preserving the United States. Not only was the city the North’s most populous in the west, but it was also the nation’s third-most productive manufacturing center. Instrumental in the Underground Railroad prior to the conflict, the city became a focal point for curbing Southern incursion into Union territory, and nearby Camp Dennison was Ohio’s largest camp in the Civil War and one of the largest in the United States. Cincinnati historian David L. Mowery examines the many different facets of the Queen City during the war, from the enlistment of the city’s area residents in more than 590 Federal regiments and artillery units to the city’s production of seventy-eight U.S. Navy gunboats for the nation’s rivers. As the Union’s “Queen City,” Cincinnati lived up to its name.
David L. Mowery is a native resident of Cincinnati, Ohio, and a graduate of the University of Cincinnati. American military history piqued his interest at an early age. Since childhood, he has researched and visited more than seven hundred battlefields across fifty states and nine countries. In 2001, David joined the all-volunteer Ohio Civil War Trail Commission as its Hamilton County representative, but over the years, his role expanded to include the final design and historical validation of the entire length of the John Hunt Morgan Heritage Trail of Ohio. He is the coauthor of Morgan’s Raid Across Ohio: The Civil War Guidebook of the John Hunt Morgan Heritage Trail (Ohio Historical Society, 2014) and the author of Morgan’s Great Raid: The Remarkable Expedition from Kentucky to Ohio (The History Press, 2013). Since 1995, David has been a member of the Cincinnati Civil War Round Table, for which he has written various papers on Civil War subjects and has led many Civil War tours of the Cincinnati region. He has also served with the Buffington Island Battlefield Preservation Foundation, the grass-roots organization working to preserve Ohio’s largest Civil War battlefield.