In this comprehensive examination of British sympathy for the South during and after the American Civil War, Michael J. Turner explores the ideas and activities of A.J. Beresford Hope - one of the leaders of the pro-Confederate lobby in Britain - to provide fresh insight into that seemingly curious allegiance. Hope and his associates cast famed Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson as the embodiment of southern independence, courage, and honour, elevating him to the status of a hero in Britain. Historians have often noted that economic interest, political attitudes, and concern about Britain's global reach and geostrategic position led many in the country to embrace the Confederate cause, but they have focused less on the social, cultural, and religious reasons enunciated by Hope and ostensibly represented by Jackson, factors Turner suggests also heightened British affinity for the South. During the war, Hope noticed a tendency among British people to view southerners as heroic warriors in their struggle against the North. He and his pro-southern followers shared and promoted this vision, framing Jackson as the personification of that noble mission and raising the general's profile in Britain so high that they collected enough funds to construct a memorial to him after his death in 1863. Unveiled twelve years later in Richmond, Virginia, the statue stands today as a remarkable artifact of one of the lesser-known strands of British pro-Confederate ideology. Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain serves as the first in-depth analysis of Hope as a leading pro-southern activist and of Jackson's reputation in Britain during and after the Civil War. It places the conflict in a transnational context that reveals the reasons British citizens formed bonds of solidarity with the southerners whom they perceived shared their social and cultural values.

In this provocative new work, Heather Cox Richardson argues that while the North won the Civil War, ending slavery, oligarchy, and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," the victory was short-lived. Settlers from the East pushed into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies. The Old South found a new home in the West. Both depended on extractive industries-cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter-giving rise to a white ruling elite, one that thrived despite the abolition of slavery, the assurances provided by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the economic opportunities afforded by Western expansion. How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and white domination that were woven into the nation's fabric from the beginning. Who was the archetypal "new American"? At the nation's founding it was Eastern "yeoman farmer," independent and freedom-loving, who had galvanized and symbolized the Revolution. After the Civil War the mantle was taken up by the cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land and his women against "savages," and protecting his country from its own government. As new states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century, western and southern leaders found common ground. Resources, including massive amounts of federal money, and migrants continued to stream into the West during the New Deal and World War II. "Movement Conservatives"-starting with Barry Goldwater-claimed to embody cowboy individualism, working with Dixiecrats to renew the ideology of the Confederacy. The "Southern strategy" worked. The essence of the Old South never died and the fight for equality endures.

African American women enslaved by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek Nations led lives ranging from utter subjection to recognized kinship. Regardless of status, during Removal, they followed the Trail of Tears in the footsteps of the slaveholders, suffering the same life-threatening hardships and poverty. As if Removal to Indian Territory weren't cataclysmic enough, the Civil War shattered the worlds of these slave women even more, scattering families, destroying property, and disrupting social and family relationships. Suddenly free, they had nowhere to turn. Freedwomen found themselves negotiating new lives within a labyrinth of federal and tribal oversight, Indian resentment, and intruding entrepreneurs and settlers. Remarkably, they reconstructed their families and marshaled the skills to fashion livelihoods in a burgeoning capitalist environment. They sought education and forged new relationships with immigrant black women and men, managing to establish a foundation for survival. Linda Williams Reese is the first to trace the harsh and often bitter journey of these women from arrival in Indian Territory to free-citizen status in 1890. In doing so, she establishes them as pioneers of the American West equal to their Indian and other Plains sisters.

Historians of the American Civil War have debated a wide range of questions raised by the war and its outcome. None have been more vigorously argued as those surrounding its outcome. One of the leading explanations for Confederate defeat has been the argument that the Civil War South lacked a national identity. Related to and supporting this argument is the contention that the Civil War South failed to produce a distinct and vibrant literary culture. These contentions have been challenged by a growing body of literature which argues that the Civil War South did produce a sense of cultural and national identity. This book adds to this counter current through an examination of the Civil War experiences and writings of the Antebellum South's leading literary figure. Surprisingly, given William Gilmore Simms' well-known status prior to the war, his life and work during the course of the war itself has been understudied. This examination reveals the depth and extent to which Simms not only supported the Confederate war effort but how Simms conceptualized and articulated a vision of Confederate nationalism.

Highlighting recent and new directions in contemporary research in the field, So Conceived and So Dedicated offers a complete and updated picture of intellectual life in the Civil War-era Union. Compiling essays from both established and young historians, this volume addresses the role intellectuals played in framing the conflict and implementing their vision of a victorious Union. Broadly defining "intellectuals" to encompass doctors, lawyers, sketch artists, college professors, health reformers, and religious leaders, the essays address how these thinkers disseminated their ideas, sometimes using commercial or popular venues and organizations to implement what they believed. Offering a vast range of perspectives on how northerners thought about,experienced, and responded to the Civil War, So Conceived and So Dedicated is organized around three questions: To what extent did educated Americans believe that the Civil War exposed the failure of old ideas? Did the Civil War promote new strains of authoritarianism in northern intellectual life or did the war reinforce democratic individualism? How did the Civil War affect northerners' conception of nationalism and their understanding of their relationship to the state? Essays explore myriad topics, including: how antebellum ideas about the environment and the body influenced conceptions of democratic health; how leaders of the Irish American community reconciled their support of the United States and the Republican Party with their allegiances to Ireland and their fellow Irish immigrants; how intellectual leaders of the northern African American community explained secession, civil war, and emancipation; the influence of southern ideals on northern intellectuals; wartime and postwar views from college and university campuses; the ideological acrobatics that professors at midwestern universities had to perform in order to keep their students from leaving the classroom; and how northern sketch artists helped influence the changing perceptions of African American soldiers over the course of the war. Collectively, So Conceived and So Dedicated offers relevant and fruitful answers to the nation's intellectual history and suggests that antebellum modes of thinking remained vital and tenacious well after the Civil War.

American Mobbing, 1828-1861 is a comprehensive history of mob violence in antebellum America. David Grimsted argues that, though the issue of slavery provoked riots in both the North and the South, the riots produced two different reactions. In the South anti-slavery rioting was widely tolerated and effectively encouraged Southern support for slavery. In the North, both pro-slavery and anti-slavery riots were put down, often violently, by the authorities, resulting usually in a public reaction against slavery. Grimsted thus demonstrates that mob violence was a major cause of the social split that led to the Civil War.

The first full investigation of John Brown's trusted co-conspirator and his betrayal of the doomed Harper's Ferry raiders John Brown's Spy tells the nearly unknown story of John E. Cook, the person John Brown trusted most with the details of his plans to capture the Harper's Ferry armory in 1859. Cook was a poet, a marksman, a boaster, a dandy, a fighter, and a womanizer-as well as a spy. In a life of only thirty years, he studied law in Connecticut, fought border ruffians in Kansas, served as an abolitionist mole in Virginia, took white hostages during the Harper's Ferry raid, and almost escaped to freedom. For ten days after the infamous raid, he was the most hunted man in America with a staggering $1,000 bounty on his head. Tracking down the unexplored circumstances of John Cook's life and disastrous end, Steven Lubet is the first to uncover the full extent of Cook's contributions to Brown's scheme. Without Cook's participation, the author contends, Brown might never have been able to launch the insurrection that sparked the Civil War. Had Cook remained true to the cause, history would have remembered him as a hero. Instead, when Cook was captured and brought to trial, he betrayed John Brown and named fellow abolitionists in a full confession that earned him a place in history's tragic pantheon of disgraced turncoats.

Often neglected, except for specific battles in the region, the Civil War in Missouri and Kansas had a profound influence in the course of the war; not to mention the effects on the towns and people in that region. The attempt here is to bring to life the experiences of the soldiers, civilians and officers of both sides. Outside of Virginia and Tennessee, Missouri was the third most fought over ground in the American Civil War. The story brings to life the influences and events in Missouri that contributed to the outbreak of the internecine strife. The war in Missouri culminates with a military expedition that re-wrote the book of military tactics and the application of how to use and not use Mounted Infantry. It is important not to see history through rose colored glasses, but from a time very different from our own. Let it be your guide.

In a time of great national division, a time of threats of resistance and counterthreats of suppression, a controversial president takes drastic measures to rein in his critics, citing national interest, national security, and his obligations as chief executive. If this seems familiar in our current moment of intense political agitation, that is all the more reason to attend to Thomas Mackey's gripping, learned, and eminently readable account of the Civil War-era case of Clement L. Vallandigham, an Ohio congressman arrested for campaigning against the war and President Lincoln's policies. In Mackey's telling, the story of this prominent 'Copperhead,' or Southern sympathizer, illuminates the problem of internal security, loyalty, and disloyalty faced by the Lincoln administration during wartime - and, more generally, the problem of determining the balance between executive power and tyranny, and between dissent and treason. Opposing Lincoln explores Vallandigham's opposition not only to Lincoln and his administration but also to Lincoln's use of force and his executive orders suspending habeas corpus. In addition to tracing Vallandigham's experiences of being arrested, tried, convicted by military commission instead of civilian courts, and then banished from the United States, this historical narrative introduces readers to Lincoln's most important statements on presidential powers in wartime, while also providing a primer on the wealth of detail involved in such legal and military controversies. Examining the long-standing issue of the limits of political dissent in wartime, the book asks the critical historical question of what reasonable lengths a legitimate government can go to in order to protect itself and its citizens from threats, whether external or internal. The case of Clement Vallandigham is, Mackey suggests, a quintessentially American story. Testing the limits of dissent in a political democracy in wartime, and of the scope and power of constitutional government, it clarifies a critical aspect of the American experience from afar.

In DIXIE BETRAYED, David Eicher reveals for the first time the story of the political conspiracy, discord and dysfunction in Richmond that cost the South the Civil War. Drawing on a wide variety of previously unexploited sources, Eicher shows how President Jefferson Davis fought not only with the Confederate House and Senate and with State Governers but also with his own vice-president and secretary of state. He interfered with his generals in the field, micro-managing their campaigns and playing favourites, ignoring the chain of command. He trusted a number of men who were utterly incompetent. Secession didn't end with the breakaway of the Confederacy and Davis' election as president; some states, led by their governors, debated setting themselves up as separate nations, further undermining efforts to conduct a unified war effort. Sure to be one of the most provocative and controversial books about the Civil War to be published in decades, DIXIE BETRAYED blasts away previous theories with the force of a cannonball and the grace of a gentleman.

After more than three years of grim fighting, General Ulysses Grant had a plan to end the Civil War-laying siege to Petersburg, Virginia, thus cutting off supplies to the Confederate capital at Richmond. He established his headquarters at City Point on the James River, requiring thousands of troops, tons of supplies, as well as extensive medical facilities and staff. Nurses flooded the area, yet many did not work in medical capacities-they served as organizers, advocates and intelligence gatherers. Nursing emerged as a noble profession with multiple specialties. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, this history covers the resilient women who opened the way for others into postwar medical, professional and political arenas.

Michael Gorra asks provocative questions in this historic portrait of William Faulkner and his world. He explores whether William Faulkner should still be read in this new century and asks what his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the American Civil War, the central quarrel in America's history. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such iconic novels as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha County the richest gallery of characters in American fiction, his achievements culminating in the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. But given his works' echo of "Lost Cause" romanticism, his depiction of black characters and black speech, and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South, Faulkner demands a sobering reevaluation. Interweaving biography, absorbing literary criticism and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words recontextualises Faulkner, revealing a civil war within him, while examining the most plangent cultural issues facing American literature today.

Formed in 1851 by Irish immigrants, the Fighting Sixty-Ninth has served with distinction since the Civil War. The regiment's flagstaff boasts 23 streamers (for each campaign) and 62 silver battle rings (for each battle), more than any other regiment in the United States Army at the close of World War II. Initially known as 69th New York State Militia (and seeing action under that name at the Battle of Bull Run), the regiment later ""cadred"" the 69th New York Volunteers. This is a complete illustrated history of the regiment's service in the Irish Brigade and the Rainbow Division. Functioning as the 1st Regiment, Irish Brigade, 2nd Corps, Army of the Potomac throughout the Civil War, the regiment made history at Malvern Hill, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg and Appomatox. Confederate generals Lee christened them the ""Fighting Sixty-Ninth"". According to legend, an exasperated General Jackson (who rarely cursed) recognized them as part of ""that damn brigade"". Functioning as the 165th Infantry, 42nd Division (Rainbow Division) throughout World War I, the regiment helped turn back the last German offensive, counterattacked at the Ourq river, spearheaded one of Pershing's pincer at St. Mihiel, and helped break the Hindenburg Line in the Argonne Forest. Today, the regiment is known as 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry (Mechanized), New York Army National Guard.

Alfred Thomas Wood was nothing and everything. One hundred years before the Hollywood film "The Great Impostor," Wood, the Great Absquatulator, roved through the momentous mid-19th century events from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to New England, Liberia, Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, Canada, the U.S. Mid-West and the South. An Oxford-educated preacher in Maine and Boston, he claimed to be a Cambridge-educated doctor of divinity in Liberia, whereas neither University admitted black students then. He spent 18 months in an English prison. In Hamburg in 1854, he published a history of Liberia in German. Later, in Montreal, he claimed to have been Superintendent of Public Works in Sierra Leone. He served the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois as an Oxford-educated DD, then toiled in post-Civil War Tennessee as a Cambridge-trained MD. People who knew him couldn't wait to forget him.In his Foreword, Rapper Webster (Aly Ndiaye) compares Wood to a mid-19th-century Forrest Gump but also to Malcolm X, before Malcolm became political.

"This may be the most important story ever written by a slave woman, capturing as it does the gross indignities as well as the subtler social arrangements of the time."-Kirkus Review "Of female slave narratives, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself is the crowning achievement. Manifesting a command of rhetorical and narrative strategies rivaled only by that of Frederick Douglass, Jacobs's autobiography is one of the major works of Afro-American literature"-Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Incidents In the Life of a Slave Girl, the autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, was initially written with the intention of illuminating white abolitionists to the appalling treatment of female slaves in the pre-Civil War South of the United States. The book was later rediscovered in the 1960's, and it was not until the 1980s that it was proved to be an extraordinary work of autobiographical memoir as opposed to fiction. In this astonishing book, Harriet Jacobs uses the pseudonym of Linda Brent to recount her story as a slave, a mother, and her eventual escape to the north. Born into a relatively calm life as a young child to slaves, she is taken into the care of a kind mistress when her mother dies. Linda is taught to read and write, and is generally treated with respect. When the mistress passes away Linda is handed over to Dr. Flint. He is a negligent and cruel new master who subsequently pressures Linda for sexual favors, yet she resists his demands for years. In an attempt to circumvent the situation, Linda enters into a relationship with Mr. Sands, a white neighbor who ends up fathering her two children. Expecting that she and her children will be sold to Mr. Sands, Dr. Flint instead decides to subject them to further degradation. Linda escapes and goes into hiding in a small attic, and her children are eventually sold to Mr. Sand. For over seven years, Linda remains in hiding, until she ultimately escapes North to be reunited with her children. Incidents In the Life of a Slave Girl is a devastating yet empowering document that uniquely focuses on the psychological and spiritual effects that bondage had on women slaves and their families. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is both modern and readable.

Conventional wisdom says that marriage was rare or illegal for slaves and that if African Americans married at all, their vows were tenuous ones: "until death or distance do us part." It is believed that this history explains the dysfunction of the African American family to this day. In this groundbreaking book, Frances Smith Foster shows that this common wisdom is flawed as it is based upon partial evidence and it ignores the writings African Americans created for themselves. Rather than relying on documents produced for abolitionists, the state, or other biased parties, Foster draws upon a trove of little-examined alternative sources and in so doing offers a correction to this widely held but misinformed viewpoint. The works examined include family histories, folkloric stories, organizational records, personal memoirs, sermons and especially the fascinating and varied writings published in the Afro-Protestant Press of the times. She shows that "jumping the broom" was but one of many wedding rituals and that love, marriage and family were highly valued and central to early African American society. Her book offers a provocative new understanding of a powerful belief about African American history and sheds light on the roles of memory and myth, story and history in defining contemporary society and shaping the future.

On April 14, 1860, the day Fort Sumter fell to Confederate forces, Washington, D.C.-surrounded by slave states and minimally defended-was ripe for invasion. In The Siege of Washington, John and Charles Lockwood offer a heart-pounding, minute-by-minute account of the first twelve days of the Civil War, when the fate of the Union hung in the balance. The fall of Washington would have been a disaster: it would have crippled the federal government, left the remaining Northern states in disarray, and almost certainly triggered the secession of Maryland. Indeed, it would likely have ended the fight to preserve the Union before it had begun in earnest. On April 15, Lincoln quickly issued an emergency proclamation calling upon the Northern states to send 75,000 troops to Washington. The North, suddenly galvanized by the attack on Sumter, responded enthusiastically. Yet one crucial question gripped Washington, and the nation at large-who would get to the capital first, Northern defenders or Southern attackers? Drawing from rarely seen primary documents, this compelling history places the reader on the scene with immediacy, brilliantly capturing the precarious first days of America's Civil War.

Robert Emmett Curran's masterful treatment of American Catholicism in the Civil War era is the first comprehensive history of Roman Catholics in the North and South before, during, and after the war. Curran provides an in-depth look at how the momentous developments of these decades affected the entire Catholic community, including Black and indigenous Americans. He also explores the ways that Catholics contributed to the reshaping of a nation that was testing the fundamental proposition of equality set down by its founders. Ultimately, Curran concludes, the revolution that the war touched off remained unfinished, indeed was turned backward, in no small part by Catholics who marred their pursuit of equality with a truncated vision of who deserved to share in its realization.

This book examines the Civil War from the perspective of the northern laity, those religious civilians whose personal faith influenced their views on politics and slavery, helped them cope with physical separation and death engendered by the war, and ultimately enabled them to discern the hand of God in the struggle to preserve the national Union. From Lincoln's election to his assassination, the book weaves together political, military, social, and intellectual history into a religious narrative of the Civil War on the northern home front. Packed with compelling human interest stories, this account draws on letters, diaries, newspapers and church records along with published sources to conclusively demonstrate that many devout civilians regarded the Civil War as a contest imbued with religious meaning. In the process of giving their loyal support to the government as individual citizens, religious Northerners politicized the church as a collective institution and used it to uphold the Union so the purified nation could promote Christianity around the world. Christian patriotism helped win the war, but the politicization of religion did not lead to the redemption of the state.

Lincoln and Leadership offers fresh perspectives on the 16th president-making novel contributions to the scholarship of one of the more studied figures of American history. The book explores Lincoln's leadership through essays focused, respectively, on Lincoln as commander-in-chief, deft political operator, and powerful theologian. Taken together, the essays suggest the interplay of military, political, and religious factors informing Lincoln's thought and action and guiding the dynamics of his leadership. The contributors, all respected scholars of the Civil War era, focus on several critical moments in Lincoln's presidency to understand the ways Lincoln understood and dealt with such issues and concerns as emancipation, military strategy, relations with his generals, the use of black troops, party politics and his own re-election, the morality of the war, the place of America in God's design, and the meaning and obligations of sustaining the Union. Overall, they argue that Lincoln was simultaneously consistent regarding his commitments to freedom, democratic government, and Union but flexible, and sometimes contradictory, in the means to preserve and extend them. They further point to the ways that Lincoln's decision making defined the presidency and recast understandings of American "exceptionalism." They emphasize that the "real" Lincoln was an unabashed party man and shrewd politician, a self-taught commander-in-chief, and a deeply religious man who was self-confident in his ability to judge men and to persuade them with words but unsure of what God demanded from America for its collective sins of slavery. Randall Miller's Introduction in particular provides essential weight to the notion that Lincoln's presidential leadership must be seen as a series of interlocking stories. In the end, the contributors collectively remind readers that the Lincoln enshrined as the "Great Emancipator" and "savior of the Union" was in life and practice a work-in-progress. And they insist that "getting right with Lincoln" requires seeing the intersections of his-and America's-military, political, and religious interests and identities.

""Lincoln and the Indians" has stood the test of time and offers this generation of readers a valuable interpretation of the U.S. government's Indian policies--and sometimes the lack thereof--during the Civil War era. Providing a critical perspective on Lincoln's role, Nichols sets forth an especially incisive analysis of the trial of participants in the Dakota War of 1862 in Minnesota and Lincoln's role in sparing the lives of most of those who were convicted."
--James M. McPherson, Pulitzer P rize-winning author of "Battle Cry of Freedom"
"For the Dakota people, the Indian System started with the Doctrine of Discovery and continued through Abraham Lincoln's presidency and beyond. The United States was bound to protect the rights of Indian parties. But in the end, the guilty were glorified and the laws for humanity disgraced. This book tells that story, and it should be required reading at all educational institutions."
--Sheldon Wolfchild, independent filmmaker, artist, and actor
"Undoubtedly the best book published on Indian affairs in the years of Lincoln's presidency."
--"American Historical Review"
David A. Nichols was vice president of academic affairs and dean of the faculty at Southwestern College in Kansas. He is a leading expert on the Eisenhower presidency, and his most recent book is "Eisenhower 1956."

The 18th North Carolina Regiment has the dubious distinction of firing the volley at Chancellorsville, Virginia, that mortally wounded General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. This tragic accident has overshadowed the regiment's otherwise valiant service during the Civil War. One of Robert E. Lee's "fighting regiments," the 18th North Carolina was a part of two famous Confederate military machines, A.P. Hill's Light Division and Jackson's foot cavalry. This revealing history chronicles the regiment's exploits from its origins through combat with the Army of Northern Virginia at Hanover Court House, the Seven Days' Battles, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and other battles to its surrender at Appomattox Court House as a battered, much smaller shell of its former self. A roster of those surrendering officers and enlisted men and brief biographical sketches of those who fought with the regiment for most of the war complete this enlightening account.

Soldiers in the Union Army volunteered for many reasons--to reunite the country, to put down the southern rebellion. For most, however, slavery was a peripheral issue. Sympathy for slaves often came only after the soldiers actually witnessed their plight.
In November 1863, thirty-eight men of the Minnesota Ninth Regiment responded to a fugitive slave's desperate plea by holding a train at gunpoint and liberating his wife, five children, and three other family members who were being shipped off to be sold. But this rescue happened in Missouri, where Union soldiers had firm orders not to interfere with loyal slaveholders. Charged with mutiny, the Minnesotans were confined for two months without being tried. Their case was even debated in the U.S. Senate. This remarkable and unprecedented incident remains virtually unknown today.
"One Drop in a Sea of Blue" is the story of these thirty-eight Liberators and of the Ninth Minnesota through the entire Civil War. After a humiliating defeat at Brice's Crossroads, Mississippi, many were held at Andersonville and other notorious Confederate prisons, where the Ninth Minnesota as a whole suffered a death rate exceeding 60 percent. Yet the regiment also helped destroy the Confederate Army of Tennessee at Nashville and capture Mobile. In August 1865, when the Ninth Minnesota was mustered out, only fourteen Liberators stood in its ranks. With vital details won through assiduous research, John Lundstrom uncovers the true stories of ordinary men who lived and died in extraordinary times.
John B. Lundstrom, curator emeritus of history at the Milwaukee Public Museum, is the award-winning author of "Black Shoe Carrier Admiral" and four other books of military history.