Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - Civil War Period (1850-1877)

During the last nine months of the Civil War, virtually all of the news reports and President Jefferson Davis's correspondence confirmed the imminent demise of the Confederate States, the nation Davis had striven to uphold since 1861. But despite defeat after defeat on the battlefield, a recalcitrant Congress, naysayers in the press, disastrous financial conditions, failures in foreign policy and peace efforts, and plummeting national morale, Davis remained in office and tried to maintain the government -- even after the fall of Richmond -- until his capture by Union forces on May 10,...

Appointed by Abraham Lincoln to the U.S. Supreme Court during the Civil War, Samuel Freeman Miller (1816--1890) served on the nation's highest tribunal for twenty-eight tumultuous years and holds a place in legal history as one of the Court's most influential justices. Michael A. Ross creates a colorful portrait of a passionate man grappling with the difficult legal issues arising from a time of wrenching social and political change. He also explores the impact President Lincoln's Supreme Court appointments made on American constitutional history.

Best known for his opinions in cases...

Newcomers to the South often remark that southerners, at least white southerners, are still fighting the Civil War -- a strange preoccupation considering that the war formally ended more than one hundred and thirty-five years ago and fewer than a third of southerners today can claim an ancestor who actually fought in the conflict. But even if the war is far removed both in time and genealogy, it survives in the hearts of many of the region's residents and often in national newspaper headlines concerning battle flags, racial justice, and religious conflicts. In this sweeping narrative of...

Residents of antebellum northwest Louisiana held strong pro-Union sentiments, and the Pierson family of Bienville Parish, Louisiana, were no exception, opposing secession in 1861. Yet once war began, the region contributed its full share of support to the southern army, and four of William H. Pierson's eight sons enlisted. Ranging from the early battles of the Trans-Mississippi to the epic battles of the Army of Northern Virginia, and from the brutal trenches of Vicksburg to provost guard duty in north Louisiana, this extensive collection of Civil War letters, written by three of the...

Ted Tunnell's superbly researched biography of Marshall H. Twitchell is a major addition to Reconstruction literature. New England native, Union soldier, Freedmen's Bureau agent, and Louisiana planter, Twitchell became the radical political boss of Red River Parish in the 1870s. He forged an economic alliance with entrepreneurial Jewish merchants and rose to power during the first upswing of the southern economy after the war. The Panic of 1873, however, undermined his regime and virtually overnight the New Englander quickly went from financial benefactor to scapegoat for northwest...

A volunteer officer with the 9th Texas Cavalry Regiment from 1861 to 1865, James Campbell Bates saw some of the most important and dramatic clashes in the Civil War's western and trans-Mississippi theaters. Bates rode thousands of miles, fighting in the Indian Territory; at Elkhorn Tavern in Arkansas; at Corinth, Holly Springs, and Jackson, Mississippi; at Thompson's Station, Tennessee; and at the crossing of the Etowah River during Sherman's Atlanta campaign. In a detailed diary and dozens of long letters to his family, he recorded his impressions, confirming the image of the Texas...

In this first modern biography of Nathaniel P. Banks, James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., reveals the complicated and contradictory nature of the man who called himself the "fighting politician." Despite a lack of formal education, family connections, and personal fortune, Banks (1816--1884) advanced from the Massachusetts legislature to the governorship to the U.S. Congress and Speaker of the House. He learned early in his political career that the pretext of conviction can be more important than the conviction itself, and he practiced a politics of expedience, espousing popular beliefs but...

A well-to-do planter and slave owner in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, Levi Holloway Naron was an unlikely supporter of the Union. And yet, at the outbreak of war in 1861, his agitation against the Confederacy so outraged his fellow Mississippians that they drove him from his home. Bent on retaliation, Naron headed North, contacted the Union army, and was ushered into the presence of General William T. Sherman, who quickly saw the possibilities for employing such a man. Thus began Levi Naron's career as "Chickasaw," Federal scout, spy, and raider.

Dictated in 1865, when his memory of...

"They say I'm a Yankee -- but if wanting peace is Yankee -- then "I am one." I am tired of "Disunion" of husband & wife."

In 1858, nineteen-year-old Priscilla "Mittie" Munnikhuysen began a new diary that saw her marry, leave her family in the genteel Protestant seaboard culture of Chesapeake Bay, and take up residence with her wealthy husband, Howard Bond, in the frontier plantation society of Catholicsouth Louisiana. By 1865, Priscilla Bond had witnessed trials and disillusionments enough to fill a two-volume journal: her father-in-law's brutality toward his slaves; her husband's...

In this masterpiece of research, a splendid supplement to Ezra J. Warner's Generals in Gray, Bruce S. Allardice brings to light a neglected class of officers: the Confederacy's "other" generals -- men who attained their rank outside the usual avenue of appointment by President Jefferson Davis and who had been virtually forgotten as a consequence. Explaining that the process of becoming a general was fraught with politics, lobbying, intrigue, accident, mismanagement, and chance, Allardice identifies six main categories of legitimate claimants to the rank of Confederate General -- two more...

When Generals in Gray was published in 1959, scholars and critics immediately hailed it as one of the few indispensable books on the American Civil War. Historian Stanley Horn, for example, wrote, "It is difficult for a reviewer to restrain his enthusiasm in recommending a monumental book of this high quality and value." Here at last is the paperback edition of Ezra J. Warner's magnum opus with its concise, detailed biographical sketches and -- in an amazing feat of research -- photographs of all 425 Confederate generals. The only exhaustive guide to the South's command, Generals in Gray...

Besides his illustrious name, the Union general Jefferson Columbus Davis is best known for two appalling actions: the September 1862 murder of General William "Bull" Nelson -- his former commanding officer -- and the abandonment of hundreds of African American refugees to the mercy of Confederate cavalry at Ebenezer Creek during Sherman's march through Georgia in 1864. Historians have generally dismissed Davis (1828--1879) as a reckless assassin, a racist, a journeyman soldier at best, and an embarrassment to the Lincoln war effort. But Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr., and Gordon D. Whitney...

As provisional governor of Missouri during the Civil War, Hamilton Gamble (1798--1864) worked closely with the Lincoln administration to keep the state from seceding from the Union. Without Gamble and other loyal Unionist governors, the war in the West might have been lost. Dennis Boman's full-scale account of Gamble's life tells the little-known story of a prominent frontier lawyer who became chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court and boldly dissented in the infamous Dred Scott decision. Revealing how Gamble, one of the wealthiest and most renowned citizens of pre--Civil War...

Hinton Rowan Helper (1829--1909) gained notoriety in nineteenth-century America as the author of The Impending Crisis of the South (1857), an antislavery polemic that provoked national public controversy and increased sectional tensions. In his intellectual and cultural biography of Helper -- the first to appear in more than forty years -- David Brown provides a fresh and nuanced portrait of this self-styled reformer, exploring anew Helper's motivation for writing his inflammatory book.

Brown places Helper in a perspective that shows how the society in which he lived influenced his...

On July 8, 1860, fire destroyed the entire business section of Dallas, Texas. At about the same time, two other fires damaged towns near Dallas. Early reports indicated that spontaneous combustion was the cause of the blazes, but four days later, Charles Pryor, editor of the Dallas Herald, wrote letters to editors of pro-Democratic newspapers, alleging that the fires were the result of a vast abolitionist conspiracy, the purpose of which was to devastate northern Texas and free the region's slaves. White preachers from the North, he asserted, had recruited local slaves to set the fires,...

Far more than a documentation of the horrors and banality of the Civil War, John Preston Sheffey's literate and witty writings demonstrate his ardor for battle, his love of Virginia, and his passion in waging a most arduous and suspenseful campaign: to win Josephine Spiller as his wife. Superbly edited by James I. Robertson, Jr., Sheffey's letters are the first published correspondence by a member of the 8th Virginia Cavalry. A native of Marion, Virginia, Sheffey provides an invaluable picture of socio-military affairs in the overlooked western and southwestern regions of the state. His...