A lifelong Civil War enthusiast, Jim Morgan was born in New Orleans where his family eventually settled after moving from the destroyed Morganza Plantation some 40 miles upriver from Baton Rouge. He grew up in Pensacola, Florida, and now lives near Lovettsville, Virginia.
Jim is a past president of the Loudoun County Civil War Roundtable and a member of the Loudoun County Civil War Sesquicentennial Committee. He serves on the advisory boards of the Mosby Heritage Area Association and the Thomas Balch History and Genealogy Library in Leesburg. He also is a volunteer guide at Ball's Bluff for the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority and Chairman of the Friends of Ball's Bluff Battlefield.
As a reenactor he has done both Union and Confederate artillery and infantry impressions with several different units. Some years ago he wrote a brief artillery unit history titled "Always Ready, Always Willing: A History of Battery M, Second United States Artillery, From Its Organization Through the Civil War." His tactical study of Ball's Bluff, titled "A Little Short of Boats: the Civil War Battles of Ball's Bluff and Edwards Ferry, October 21-22, 1861," first published in 2004, was reissued in a revised, updated, sesquicentennial edition, in 2011. It is widely acknowledged as the definitive work on Ball's Bluff.
Jim's writings on Ball's Bluff appear on the websites of the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority (www.nvrpa.org) and the Civil War Trust (www.civilwar.org). He also has written on a variety of topics for "Civil War Times," "America's Civil War," "Blue and Gray," and "The Artilleryman" among others.
Jim served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1969-71 and in the Foreign Service from 1980-86. He holds a master's degree in Political Science from the University of West Florida and a master's in Library Science from Florida State University. He currently works as the Acquisitions Librarian for the State Department's Office of International Information Programs in Washington, D.C.
