From the earliest stirrings of southern nationalism to the defeat of the Confederacy, analysis of European nationalist movements played a critical role in how southerners thought about their new southern nation. Southerners argued that because the Confederate nation was cast in the same mold as its European counterparts, it deserved independence. In Newest Born of Nations, Ann Tucker utilizes print sources such as newspapers and magazines to reveal how elite white southerners developed an international perspective on nationhood that helped them clarify their own national values, conceive of the South as distinct from the North, and ultimately define and legitimize the Confederacy. While popular at home, claims to equivalency with European nations failed to resonate with Europeans and northerners, who viewed slavery as incompatible with liberal nationalism. Forced to reevaluate their claims about the international place of southern nationalism, some southerners redoubled their attempts to place the Confederacy within the broader trends of nineteenth-century nationalism. More conservative southerners took a different tack, emphasizing the distinctiveness of their nationalism, claiming that the Confederacy actually purified nationalism through slavery. Southern Unionists likewise internationalized their case for national unity. By examining the evolution of and variation within these international perspectives, Tucker reveals the making of a southern nationhood to be a complex, contested process.

George Crook was one of the most prominent military figures of the late-nineteenth-century Indian Wars. Yet today his name is largely unrecognized despite the important role he played in such pivotal events in western history as the Custer fight at the Little Big Horn, the death of Crazy Horse, and the Geronimo campaigns. As Paul Magid portrays Crook in this highly readable second volume of a projected three-volume biography, the general was an innovative and eccentric soldier, with a complex and often contradictory personality, whose activities often generated intense controversy. Though known for his uncompromising ferocity in battle, he nevertheless respected his enemies and grew to know and feel compassion for them. Describing campaigns against the Paiutes, Apaches, Sioux, and Cheyennes, Magid's vivid narrative explores Crook's abilities as an Indian fighter. The Apaches, among the fiercest peoples in the West, called Crook the Gray Fox after an animal viewed in their culture as a herald of impending death. Generals Grant and Sherman both regarded him as indispensable to their efforts to subjugate the western tribes. Though noted for his aggressiveness in combat, Crook was a reticent officer who rarely raised his voice, habitually dressed in shabby civilian attire, and often rode a mule in the field. He was also self-confident to the point of arrogance, harbored fierce grudges, and because he marched to his own beat, got along poorly with his superiors. He had many enduring friendships both in- and outside the army, though he divulged little of his inner self to others and some of his closest comrades knew he could be cold and insensitive. As Magid relates these crucial episodes of Crook's life, a dominant contradiction emerges: while he was an unforgiving warrior in the field, he not infrequently risked his career to do battle with his military superiors and with politicians in Washington to obtain fair treatment for the very people against whom he fought. Upon hearing of the general's death in 1890, Chief Red Cloud spoke for his Sioux people: ""He, at least, never lied to us. His words gave the people hope.

Winchester lever-action repeating rifles are an integral part of the folklore of the American West. Introduced after the American Civil War, the first Winchester, the M1866, would go on to see military service as far afield as Bulgaria, but it was in the hands of civilians that it would become known as 'The gun that won the west'. Offering a lethal combination of portability, ruggedness and ammunition interchangeability with pistol sidearms, the Winchesters and their innovative and elegant breech-loading system represented a revolutionary design. They were used by a staggering variety of military and civilian groups - gold-miners, trappers, hunters, farmers, lawmen, professional gunmen and Native Americans. It equipped a whole generation of settlers and as such left an imprint on American culture that continues to resonate today. This book explores the Winchesters' unique place in history, revealing the technical secrets of their success with a full array of colour artwork, period illustrations and close-up photographs.

Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party was the first party built on opposition to slavery to win on the national stage-but its victory was rooted in the earlier efforts of under-appreciated antislavery third parties. Liberty Power tells the story of how abolitionist activists built the most transformative third-party movement in American history and effectively reshaped political structures in the decades leading up to the Civil War. As Corey M. Brooks explains, abolitionist trailblazers who organized first the Liberty Party and later the more moderate Free Soil Party confronted formidable opposition from a two-party system expressly constructed to suppress disputes over slavery. Identifying the Whigs and Democrats as the mainstays of the southern Slave Power's national supremacy, savvy abolitionists insisted that only a party independent of slaveholder influence could wrest the federal government from its grip. A series of shrewd electoral, lobbying, and legislative tactics enabled these antislavery third parties to wield influence far beyond their numbers. In the process, these parties transformed the national political debate and laid the groundwork for the success of the Republican Party and the end of American slavery.

Charles Dew's Apostles of Disunion has established itself as a modern classic and an indispensable account of the Southern states' secession from the Union. Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of our great national crisis. The fifteen years since the original publication of Apostles of Disunion have seen an intensification of debates surrounding the Confederate flag and Civil War monuments. In a powerful new afterword to this anniversary edition, Dew situates the book in relation to these recent controversies and factors in the role of vast financial interests tied to the internal slave trade in pushing Virginia and other upper South states toward secession and war.

This volume explores the political and social dimensions of the Civil War in both the North and South. Millions of Americans lived outside the major campaign zones so they experienced secondary exposure to military events through newspaper reporting and letters home from soldiers. Governors and Congressmen assumed a major role in steering the personnel decisions, strategic planning, and methods of fighting, but regular people also played roles in direct military action, as guerrilla fighters, as nurses and doctors, and as military contractors. Chapters investigate a variety of aspects of military leadership and management, including coverage of technology, discipline, finance, the environment, and health and medicine. Chapters also consider the political administration of the war, examining how antebellum disputes over issues such as emancipation and the draft resulted in a shift of partisan dynamics and the ways that people of all stripes took advantage of the flux of war to advance their own interests.

One of the cruelest abuses of slavery in America was that slaves were forbidden to read and write. Consigned to illiteracy, they left no records of their thoughts and feelings apart from the few exceptional narratives of Frederick Douglass and others who escaped to the North-or so we have long believed. But as Christopher Hager reveals, a few enslaved African Americans managed to become literate in spite of all prohibitions, and during the halting years of emancipation thousands more seized the chance to learn. The letters and diaries of these novice writers, unpolished and hesitant yet rich with voice, show ordinary black men and women across the South using pen and paper to make sense of their experiences. Through an unprecedented gathering of these forgotten writings-from letters by individuals sold away from their families, to petitions from freedmen in the army to their new leaders, to a New Orleans man's transcription of the Constitution-Word by Word rewrites the history of emancipation. The idiosyncrasies of these untutored authors, Hager argues, reveal the enormous difficulty of straddling the border between slave and free. These unusual texts, composed by people with a unique perspective on the written word, force us to rethink the relationship between literacy and freedom. For African Americans at the end of slavery, learning to write could be liberating and empowering, but putting their hard-won skill to use often proved arduous and daunting-a portent of the tenuousness of the freedom to come.

More than 16,000 Californians served as soldiers in the Union Army during the Civil War. One California unit, the 1st Battalion of Native Cavalry, consisted largely of Californio Hispanic volunteers from the ""Cow Counties"" of Southern California and the Central Coast. Out-of-work vaqueros who enlisted after drought decimated the herds they worked, the Native Cavalrymen lent the army their legendary horsemanship and carried lances that evoked both the romance of the Californios and the Spanish military tradition. Californio Lancers, the first detailed history of the 1st Battalion, illuminates their role in the conflict and brings new diversity to Civil War history. Author Tom Prezelski notes that the Californios, less than a generation removed from the U.S.-Mexican War, were ambivalent about serving in the Union Army, but poverty trumped their misgivings. Based on his extensive research in the service records of individual officers and enlisted men, Prezelski describes both the problems and the accomplishments of the 1st Battalion. Despite a desertion rate among enlisted men that exceeded 50 percent for some companies, and despite the feuds among its officers, the Native Cavalry was the face of federal authority in the region, and their presence helped retain the West for the Union during the rebellion. The battalion pursued bandits, fought an Indian insurrection in northern California, garrisoned Confederate-leaning southern California, patrolled desert trails, guarded the border, and attempted to control the Chiricahua Apaches in southern Arizona. Although some ten thousand Spanish-surnamed Americans served during the Civil War, their support of the Union is almost unknown in the popular imagination. Californio Lancers contributes to our understanding of the Civil War in the Far West and how it transformed the Mexican-American community.

During the crucial three days of combat at Gettysburg, the most nightmarish place on the entire battlefield was appropriately named the Devil's Den. This jumble of huge boulders situated at the southern end of Houck's Ridge was truly a hell on earth during the decisive afternoon of July 2, 1863. The tenacious struggle that raged beyond control at the battle-line's southern end was all-important, because the Devil's Den and Houck's Ridge anchored the left flank of the over-extended Union battle-line, before Federal troops occupied Little Round Top to the east. The battle-hardened veterans of Lieutenant General James Longstreet's First Corps captured this vital sector-- the first Union left flank--in one of the few Southern successes of the second day, after some of the war's most bitter fighting. Nevertheless, the dramatic story of the successful turning of the first Union left flank has been long overlooked and ignored largely because of the giant historical shadow cast by the more famous struggle at Little Round Top, which was only the second and last fight for the southern flank of both armies on July 2. Therefore, the important contest for possession of the first Union left flank at the Devil's Den and Houck's Ridge was crucial on the bloody afternoon that decided the fate of America.

This new volume deals with two momentous and interrelated events in American history --the American Civil War and Reconstruction--and offers students a collection of essential documentary sources for these periods.
Provides students with over 60 documents on the American Civil War and ReconstructionIncludes presidential addresses, official reports, songs, poems, and a variety of eyewitness testimony concerning significant events ranging from 1833-1879Contains an informative introduction focused on the kinds of materials available and how historians use themEach chapter ends with questions designed to help students engage with the material and to highlight key issues of historical debate

This first volume of three discusses the tactical decisions made on day one and the ensuing combat, while also including a brief summary of the grand strategy in the Eastern Theater of the war, the conduct of the Pennsylvania Campaign from June 6 to 30, 1863, and the plight of civilians caught up in the conflict. The Battle of Gettysburg, which took place July 1-3, 1863 in and around the town of Gettysburg, PA resulted in the largest number of casualties of the entire American Civil War and is seen as the key turning point in the conflict. On its first day, Confederate General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia sought to destroy the Union army, forcing its men to retreat through the streets of the Pennsylvania town to the hills just to the south. This volume, the first of three to cover the battle in depth, includes the morning cavalry skirmish, the morning clash at the Herbst's Woodlot and at the railroad cut, the afternoon clash at Oak Ridge, the afternoon fight at the Edward McPherson farm, the afternoon rout of the 11th Corps, the last stand of the 1st Corps at Seminary Ridge, the Union retreat through town, and the positions of the armies at nightfall.

An innovative recasting of US legal and economic history through the power of clothing for those who lacked power and status in American society. What can dresses, bedlinens, waistcoats, pantaloons, shoes, and kerchiefs tell us about the legal status of the least powerful members of American society? In the hands of eminent historian Laura F. Edwards, these textiles tell a revealing story of ordinary people and how they made use of their material goods' economic and legal value in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War. Only the Clothes on Her Back uncovers practices, commonly known then, but now long forgotten, which made textiles-clothing, cloth, bedding, and accessories, such as shoes and hats-a unique form of property that people without rights could own and exchange. The value of textiles depended on law, and it was law that turned these goods into a secure form of property for marginalized people, who not only used these textiles as currency, credit, and capital, but also as entree into the new republic's economy and governing institutions. Edwards grounds the laws relating to textiles in engaging stories from the lives of everyday Americans. Wives wove linen and kept the proceeds, enslaved people traded coats and shoes, and poor people invested in fabrics, which they carefully preserved in trunks. Edwards shows that these stories are about far more than cloth and clothing; they reshape our understanding of law and the economy in America. Based on painstaking archival research from fifteen states, Only the Clothes on Her Back reconstructs this hidden history of power, tracing it from the governing order of the early republic in which textiles' legal principles flourished to the textiles' legal downfall in the mid-nineteenth century when they were crowded out by the rising power of rights.

'My dear, I don't give a damn.'

Margaret Mitchell’s page-turning, sweeping American epic has been a classic for over eighty years. Beloved and thought by many to be the greatest of the American novels, Gone with the Wind is a story of love, hope and loss set against the tense historical background of the American Civil War.

The lovers at the novel’s centre – the selfish, privileged Scarlett O’Hara and rakish Rhett Butler – are magnetic: pulling readers into the tangled narrative of a struggle to survive that cannot be forgotten.

WINNER OF NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND PULITZER PRIZE

'For sheer readability I can think of nothing it must give way before' The New Yorker

'What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong, and brave, go under?’ Margaret Mitchell

The initial confrontation between Union general Ulysses S. Grant and Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Virginia during the Overland Campaign has not until recently received the same degree of scrutiny as other Civil War battles. The first round of combat between the two renowned generals spanned about six weeks in May and early June 1864. The major skirmishes Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor rivaled any other key engagement in the war. While the strength and casualties in Grant s army remain uncontested, historians know much less about Lee s army. Nonetheless, the prevailing narrative depicts Confederates as outstripped nearly two to one, and portrays Grant suffering losses at a rate nearly double that of Lee. As a result, most Civil War scholars contend that the campaign proved a clear numerical victory for Lee but a tactical triumph for Grant. Questions about the power of Lee s army stem mainly from poor record keeping by the Confederates as well as an inordinate number of missing or lost battle reports. The complexity of the Overland Campaign, which consisted of several smaller engagements in addition to the three main clashes, led to considerable historic uncertainty regarding Lee s army. Significant doubts persist about the army s capability at the commencement of the drive, the amount of reinforcements received, and the total of casualties sustained during the entire campaign and at each of the major battles. In Lee s Army during the Overland Campaign, Alfred C. Young III addresses this deficiency by providing for the first time accurate information regarding the Confederate side throughout the conflict. The results challenge prevailing assumptions, showing clearly that Lee s army stood far larger in strength and size and suffered considerably higher casualties than previously believed.

Pulitzer Prize Finalist Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winner of the Merle Curti Award "McCurry strips the Confederacy of myth and romance to reveal its doomed essence. Dedicated to the proposition that men were not created equal, the Confederacy had to fight a two-front war. Not only against Union armies, but also slaves and poor white women who rose in revolt across the South. Richly detailed and lucidly told, Confederate Reckoning is a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read." -Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic "McCurry challenges us to expand our definition of politics to encompass not simply government but the entire public sphere. The struggle for Southern independence, she shows, opened the door for the mobilization of two groups previously outside the political nation-white women of the nonslaveholding class and slaves...Confederate Reckoning offers a powerful new paradigm for understanding events on the Confederate home front." -Eric Foner, The Nation "Perhaps the highest praise one can offer McCurry's work is to say that once we look through her eyes, it will become almost impossible to believe that we ever saw or thought otherwise...At the outset of the book, McCurry insists that she is not going to ask or answer the timeworn question of why the South lost the Civil War. Yet in her vivid and richly textured portrait of what she calls the Confederacy's 'undoing,' she has in fact accomplished exactly that." -Drew Gilpin Faust, New Republic "A brilliant, eye-opening account of how Southern white women and black slaves fatally undermined the Confederacy from within." -Edward Bonekemper, Civil War News The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. When the grandiosity of Southerners' national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people-white women and slaves-and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise. Wartime scarcity of food, labor, and soldiers tested the Confederate vision at every point and created domestic crises to match those found on the battlefields. Women and slaves became critical political actors as they contested government enlistment and tax and welfare policies, and struggled for their freedom. The attempt to repress a majority of its own population backfired on the Confederate States of America as the disenfranchised demanded to be counted and considered in the great struggle over slavery, emancipation, democracy, and nationhood. That Confederate struggle played out in a highly charged international arena. The political project of the Confederacy was tried by its own people and failed. The government was forced to become accountable to women and slaves, provoking an astounding transformation of the slaveholders' state. Confederate Reckoning is the startling story of this epic political battle in which women and slaves helped to decide the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.

In the decade before the Civil War, Northern Democrats, although they ostensibly represented antislavery and free-state constituencies, made possible the passage of such proslavery legislation as the Compromise of 1850 and Fugitive Slave Law of the same year, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and the Lecompton Constitution of 1858. In Northern Men with Southern Loyalties, Michael Todd Landis forcefully contends that a full understanding of the Civil War and its causes is impossible without a careful examination of Northern Democrats and their proslavery sentiments and activities. He focuses on a variety of key Democratic politicians, such as Stephen Douglas, William Marcy, and Jesse Bright, to unravel the puzzle of Northern Democratic political allegiance to the South. As congressmen, state party bosses, convention wire-pullers, cabinet officials, and presidents, these men produced the legislation and policies that led to the fragmentation of the party and catastrophic disunion.

Through a careful examination of correspondence, speeches, public and private utterances, memoirs, and personal anecdotes, Landis lays bare the desires and designs of Northern Democrats. He ventures into the complex realm of state politics and party mechanics, drawing connections between national events and district and state activity as well as between partisan dynamics and national policy. Northern Democrats had to walk a perilously thin line between loyalty to the Southern party leaders and answering to their free-state constituents. If Northern Democrats sought high office, they would have to cater to the "Slave Power." Yet, if they hoped for election at home, they had to convince voters that they were not mere lackeys of the Southern grandees.

During the American Civil War, Union and Confederate soldiers commonly fraternized, despite strict prohibitions from the high command. When soldiers found themselves surrounded by privation, disease, and death, many risked their standing in the army, and ultimately their lives, for a warm cup of coffee or pinch of tobacco during a sleepless shift on picket duty, to receive a newspaper from a "Yank" or "Johnny," or to stop the relentless picket fire while in the trenches. In Friendly Enemies Lauren K. Thompson analyzes the relations and fraternization of American soldiers on opposing sides of the battlefield and argues that these interactions represented common soldiers' efforts to fight the war on their own terms. Her study reveals that despite different commanders, terrain, and outcomes on the battlefield, a common thread emerges: soldiers constructed a space to lessen hostilities and make their daily lives more manageable. Fraternization allowed men to escape their situation briefly and did not carry the stigma of cowardice. Because the fraternization was exclusively between white soldiers, it became the prototype for sectional reunion after the war-a model that avoided debates over causation, honored soldiers' shared sacrifice, and promoted white male supremacy. Friendly Enemies demonstrates how relations between opposing sides were an unprecedented yet highly significant consequence of mid-nineteenth-century civil warfare.

"This fine volume leaps straight onto the roster of essential reading for anyone even vaguely interested in Grant and the Civil War. The book is deeply researched, but it introduces its scholarship with a light touch that never interferes with the reader's enjoyment of Grant's fluent narrative."-Ron Chernow, author of Grant Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs, sold door-to-door by former Union soldiers, were once as ubiquitous in American households as the Bible. Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Henry James, and Edmund Wilson hailed them as great literature, and countless presidents, including Clinton and George W. Bush, credit Grant with influencing their own writing. Yet a judiciously annotated edition of these memoirs has never been produced until now. The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant is the first comprehensively annotated edition of Grant's memoirs, clarifying the great military leader's thoughts on his life and times through the end of the Civil War and offering his invaluable perspective on battlefield decision making. An introduction contextualizes Grant's life and significance, and lucid editorial commentary allows his voice and narrative to shine through. With annotations compiled by the editors of the Ulysses S. Grant Association's Presidential Library, this definitive edition enriches our understanding of the pre-war years, the war with Mexico, and the Civil War. Grant provides essential insight into how rigorously these events tested America's democratic institutions and the cohesion of its social order. The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant is a work of profound political, historical, and literary significance. This celebrated annotated edition will introduce a new generation of readers of all backgrounds to an American classic.

Lt. Benjamin Loring (1824-1902) lived the life of an everyman Civil War sailor. He commanded no armies and devised no grand strategies. Loring was a sailor who just wanted to return home, where the biggest story of his life awaited him. Covering almost a year of Loring's service, I Held Lincoln describes the lieutenant's command of the gunboat USS Wave, the Battle of Calcasieu Pass, the surrender of his ship, and his capture by the Confederates. He was incarcerated in Camp Groce, a deadly Confederate prison where he endured horrific conditions and abuse. Loring attempted to escape, evading capture for ten days behind enemy lines, only to be recaptured just a few miles from freedom. After an arduous second escape, he finally reached the safety of Union lines and gained his freedom. On the night of April 14, 1865, Loring attended Ford's Theater and witnessed one of the single most tragic events in American history: the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. After the shot rang out, Loring climbed into the presidential box and assisted the dying president, helping to carry him across the street to the Peterson House. Using Loring's recently discovered private journal, Richard E. Quest tells this astonishing now-recovered story, giving insight into a little-known Confederate prison camp during the last days of the Civil War and providing much-deserved recognition to a man whose journey was nearly lost to American history.

In Two Captains from Carolina, Bland Simpson twines together the lives of two accomplished nineteenth-century mariners from North Carolina-one African American, one Irish American. Though Moses Grandy (ca. 1791- ca. 1850) and John Newland Maffitt Jr. (1819-1886) never met, their stories bring to vivid life the saga of race and maritime culture in the antebellum and Civil War-era South. With his lyrical prose and inimitable voice, Bland Simpson offers readers a grand tale of the striving human spirit and the great divide that nearly sundered the nation. Grandy, born a slave, captained freight boats on the Dismal Swamp Canal and bought his freedom three times before he finally gained it. He became involved in Boston abolitionism and ultimately appeared before the General Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1843. As a child, Maffitt was sent from his North Carolina home to a northern boarding school, and at thirteen he was appointed midshipman in the U.S. Navy, where he had a distinguished career. After North Carolina seceded from the Union, he enlisted in the Confederate navy and became a legendary blockade runner and raider. Both Grandy and Maffitt made names for themselves as they navigated very different routes through the turbulent waters of antebellum America.

Pickett's charge has just ended, the battle of Gettysburg is over. The Confederate army is defeated and must retreat to the Potomac River forty miles away with thousands of wagons full of wounded soldiers, provisions and tens of thousands of animals. Asa Helms, a private in the Twenty-Sixth North Carolina Infantry, joined the army to oppose the Yankee's invasion of his "country." He is torn between serving his country with honor and going home to take care of his wife who is in great need. He faces a long, seemingly impossible march with little food, little hope and the Yankees on his heels. Captain Louis Young, aide-to-camp to Confederate General James Pettigrew, is fighting to preserve a culture and a lifestyle and possible domination by the despicable Yankees. The defeat at Gettysburg, the horrendous condition of the army and the endless resources of the enemy are causing him to doubt the ability of the Confederacy to gain another major victory and thus independence. His objective is to get the rebel army across the Potomac River to preserve it to fight another day. Colonel George Gray, an Irishman, is colonel of the Sixth Michigan Cavalry. He is hell-bent on putting down the rebellion before it divides the country that has been so good to him. He is neither a soldier, nor an accomplished equestrian, and has gotten on the wrong side of his superior, General George Custer, with whom he is in constant conflict. He sees a chance to cut off the Confederate army and end the war before it reaches the Potomac River. The journey ends at the Potomac River where each soldier must face the bitter realities of this unnatural war. Asa must choose between escaping across the river or remaining with his wounded friend and facing certain captivity.