This program highlights the relationship between General George G. Meade and his wife, Margaretta. The daughter of a prominent Philadelphian politician, Margaretta Sergeant married George Meade on December 31, 1840. Without question, Margaretta was Meade’s most intimate confident and loyalist, a relationship that sustained Meade through the trials of the American Civil War. Dr. Jennifer Murray, author of a forthcoming biography of General Meade, will look at several of their wartime letters and explore their relationship and marriage.
Dr. Jennifer M. Murray is an Assistant Professor of History at Shepherd University and the Director of the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War. Her most recent publication is On A Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933-2023, published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2014 and printed as a second edition in 2023. Murray is currently working on a full-length biography of General George Meade, tentatively titled Meade at War. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming, “They Are Dead, And Yet They Live”: Civil War Memories in a Polarized America to be published by the University of Nebraska Press in February 2026. Prior to joining the faculty at Shepherd, Murray taught at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. A native of Maryland, Murray worked as a seasonal interpretive park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park for nine summers.