The Mississippi Secession Convention is the first full treatment of any secession convention to date. Studying the Mississippi convention of 1861 offers insight into how and why southern states seceded and the effects of such a breech. Based largely on primary sources, this book provides a unique insight into the broader secession movement.

There was more to the secession convention than the mere act of leaving the Union, which was done only three days into the deliberations. The rest of the three-week January 1861 meeting as well as an additional week in March saw the delegates...

-When the Mississippi school boy is asked who is called the 'Great Commoner' of public life in his State, - wrote Mississippi's premier historian Dunbar Rowland in 1901, -he will unhesitatingly answer James Z. George.- While George's prominence has decreased through the decades since then, many modern historians still view him as a supremely important Mississippian, with one writing that George (1826-1897) was -Mississippi's most important Democratic leader in the late nineteenth century.-

Certainly, the Mexican War veteran, prominent lawyer and planter, Civil War officer,...

The Mississippi Secession Convention is the first full treatment of any secession convention to date. Studying the Mississippi convention of 1861 offers insight into how and why southern states seceded and the effects of such a breech. Based largely on primary sources, this book provides a unique insight into the broader secession movement.

There was more to the secession convention than the mere act of leaving the Union, which was done only three days into the deliberations. The rest of the three-week January 1861 meeting as well as an additional week in March saw the delegates...

In Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front, Timothy B. Smith examines Mississippi's Civil War defeat by both outside and inside forces. From without, the Union army dismantled the state's political system, infrastructure, economy, and fighting capability. The state saw extensive military operations, destruction, and bloodshed within her borders. One of the most frightful and extended sieges of the war ended in a crucial Confederate defeat at Vicksburg, the capstone to a tremendous Union campaign.

As Confederate forces and Mississippi became overwhelmed militarily, the...

McLemore Prize

In the spring of 1862, there was no more important place in the western Confederacy--perhaps in all the South--than the tiny town of Corinth, Mississippi.

Major General Henry W. Halleck, commander of Union forces in the Western Theater, reported to Washington that "Richmond and Corinth are now the great strategical points of war, and our success at these points should be insured at all hazards." In the same vein, Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard declared to Richmond that "If defeated at Corinth, we lose the Mississippi...

Doughlas Southall Freeman Award

A critical moment in the Civil War, the Battle of Shiloh has been the subject of many books. However, none has told the story of Shiloh as Timothy Smith does in this volume, the first comprehensive history of the two-day battle in April 1862--a battle so fluid and confusing that its true nature has eluded a clear narrative telling until now.

Unfolding over April 6th and 7th, the Battle of Shiloh produced the most sprawling and bloody field of combat since the Napoleonic wars,...