In the first comprehensive study of the experience of Virginia soldiers and their families in the Civil War, Aaron Sheehan-Dean captures the inner world of the rank-and-file. Utilizing new statistical evidence and first-person narratives, Sheehan-Dean explores how Virginia soldiers--even those who were nonslaveholders--adapted their vision of the war's purpose to remain committed Confederates.

Sheehan-Dean challenges earlier arguments that middle- and lower-class southerners gradually withdrew their support for the Confederacy because their class interests were not being met....

In a series of columns published in the African American newspaper The Christian Recorder, the charismatic preacher Henry McNeal Turner described his experience of the Civil War, first from the perspective of a civilian observer in Washington, D.C., and later as one of the Union army's first black chaplains. Freedom's Witness restores this important figure to the historical and literary record.

With an introduction by Jean Lee Cole and a foreword by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Freedom's Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner restores this important figure to the historical and literary record.

Discarding tidy abstractions about the conduct of war, Aaron Sheehan-Dean shows that the notoriously bloody US Civil War could have been much worse. Despite agonizing debates over Just War and careful differentiation among victims, Americans could not avoid living with the contradictions inherent in a conflict that was both violent and restrained.

This volume considers how the Civil War reshaped Americans' spiritual, cultural, and intellectual habits. It analyzes the ways that participants made sense of the conflict and its impact on their lives, uncovering how the war changed attitudes about gender, religion, ethnicity, and race.