Although he took command of the Army of the Potomac only three days before the first shots were fired at Gettysburg, Union general George G. Meade guided his forces to victory in the Civil War's most pivotal battle. Commentators often dismiss Meade when discussing the great leaders of the Civil War. But in this long-anticipated book, Kent Masterson Brown draws on an expansive archive to reappraise Meade's leadership during the Battle of Gettysburg. Using Meade's published and unpublished papers alongside diaries, letters, and memoirs of fellow officers and enlisted men, Brown highlights how Meade's rapid advance of the army to Gettysburg on July 1, his tactical control and coordination of the army in the desperate fighting on July 2, and his determination to hold his positions on July 3 insured victory. Brown argues that supply deficiencies, brought about by the army's unexpected need to advance to Gettysburg, were crippling. In spite of that, Meade pursued Lee's retreating army rapidly, and his decision not to blindly attack Lee's formidable defenses near Williamsport on July 13 was entirely correct in spite of subsequent harsh criticism. Combining compelling narrative with incisive analysis, this finely rendered work of military history deepens our understanding of the Army of the Potomac as well as the machinations of the Gettysburg Campaign, restoring Meade to his rightful place in the Gettysburg narrative.

As the sectional crisis gripped the United States, the rancor increasingly spread to the halls of Congress. Preston Brooks's frenzied assault on Charles Sumner was perhaps the most notorious evidence of the dangerous divide between proslavery Democrats and the new antislavery Republican Party. But as disunion loomed, rifts within the majority Democratic Party were every bit as consequential. And nowhere was the fracture more apparent than in the raging debates between Illinois's Stephen Douglas and Mississippi's Jefferson Davis. As leaders of the Democrats' northern and southern factions before the Civil War, their passionate conflict of words and ideas has been overshadowed by their opposition to Abraham Lincoln. But here, weaving together biography and political history, Michael E. Woods restores Davis and Douglas's fatefully entwined lives and careers to the center of the Civil War era. Operating on personal, partisan, and national levels, Woods traces the deep roots of Democrats' internal strife, with fault lines drawn around fundamental questions of property rights and majority rule. Neither belief in white supremacy nor expansionist zeal could reconcile Douglas and Davis's factions as their constituents formed their own lines in the proverbial soil of westward expansion. The first major reinterpretation of the Democratic Party's internal schism in more than a generation, Arguing until Doomsday shows how two leading antebellum politicians ultimately shattered their party and hastened the coming of the Civil War.

The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal but it took the Civil War and the adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as law. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed due process and the equal protection of the law, and equipped black men with the right to vote. By grafting the principle of equality onto the Constitution, the amendments marked the second founding of the United States. Eric Foner conveys the dramatic origins of these revolutionary amendments and explores the court decisions that then narrowed and nullified the rights guaranteed in these amendments. Today, issues of birthright citizenship, voting rights, due process and equal protection are still in dispute; the ideal of equality yet to be achieved.

Winner of the Jefferson Davis Award Winner of the Johns Family Book Award Winner of the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award "A work of deep intellectual seriousness, sweeping and yet also delicately measured, this book promises to resolve longstanding debates about the nature of the Civil War." -Gregory P. Downs, author of After Appomattox Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg-tens of thousands of soldiers died on these iconic Civil War battlefields, and throughout the South civilians suffered terrible cruelty. At least three-quarters of a million lives were lost during the American Civil War. Given its seemingly indiscriminate mass destruction, this conflict is often thought of as the first "total war." But Aaron Sheehan-Dean argues for another interpretation. The Calculus of Violence demonstrates that this notoriously bloody war could have been much worse. Military forces on both sides sought to contain casualties inflicted on soldiers and civilians. In Congress, in church pews, and in letters home, Americans debated the conditions under which lethal violence was legitimate, and their arguments differentiated carefully among victims-women and men, black and white, enslaved and free. Sometimes, as Sheehan-Dean shows, these well-meaning restraints led to more carnage by implicitly justifying the killing of people who were not protected by the laws of war. As the Civil War raged on, the Union's confrontations with guerrillas and the Confederacy's confrontations with black soldiers forced a new reckoning with traditional categories of lawful combatants and raised legal disputes that still hang over military operations around the world today. In examining the agonizing debates about the meaning of a just war in the Civil War era, Sheehan-Dean discards conventional abstractions-total, soft, limited-as too tidy to contain what actually happened on the ground.

Lieutenant Benjamin Loring lived the life of an everyman Civil War soldier. He commanded no armies; he devised no grand strategies. Lt. Loring was a soldier who just wanted to return home, where he awaited the biggest story of his life. In I Held Lincoln: A Union Sailor's Journey Home, Richard E. Quest tells the story of Lt. Loring and his noteworthy impact on American history. Covering almost a year of Lt. Loring's service, I Held Lincoln includes the Lieutenant's command of the gunboat Wave, the Battle of the Calcasieu River, the surrender of the ship, and Lt. Loring's 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 arduous days behind enemy lines, only to be recaptured just a few miles from freedom. After his second escape, Lt. Loring finally gained his freedom behind Union lines. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lt. 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, Lt. Loring climbed up the presidential box where he assisted the dying president and helped carry him across the street to the Peterson House. Using a recently discovered private journal of Lt. Loring, Quest tells this astonishing lost story, giving insight into a little-known Confederate prison camp during the last days of the Civil War, along with providing much-deserved recognition to a man whose journey has been overlooked and lost to American history.

In Armies of Deliverance, Elizabeth R. Varon argues that Northerners imagined the war as a crusade to deliver the Southern masses from slaveholder domination and to bring democracy, prosperity, and education to the region. And that Confederates, fighting to establish an independent slaveholding republic, were determined to preempt, discredit, and silence Yankee appeals to the Southern masses. Interweaving military and social history, Varon shows how the Union's politics of deliverance helped it to win the war but also ultimately sowed the seeds of postwar discord.

With The Weaker Sex in War, Kristen Brill shows how white women's wartime experiences shaped Confederate political culture-and the ways in which Confederate political culture shaped their wartime experiences. These white women had become passionate supporters of independence to advance the cause of Southern nationalism and were used by Confederate leadership to advance the cause. These women, drawn from the middle and planter class, played an active, deliberate role in the effort. They became knowing and keen participants in shaping and circulating a gendered nationalist narrative, as both actors for and symbols of the Confederate cause. Through their performance of patriotic devotion, these women helped make gender central to the formation of Confederate national identity, to an extent previously unreckoned with by scholars of the Civil War era.In this important and original work, Brill weaves together individual women's voices in the private sphere, collective organizations in civic society, and political ideology and policy in the political arena. A signal contribution to an increasingly rich vein of historiography, The Weaker Sex in War provides a definitive take on white women and political culture in the Confederacy.

From the first shots fired at Fort Sumter in 1861 to the final clashes on the Road to Appomattox in 1864, The Atlas of the Civil War reconstructs the battles of America's bloodiest war with unparalleled clarity and precision. Edited by Pulitzer Prize recipient James M. McPherson and written by America's leading military historians, this peerless reference charts the major campaigns and skirmishes of the Civil War. Each battle is meticulously plotted on one of 200 specially commissioned full-color maps. Timelines provide detailed, play-by-play maneuvers, and the accompanying text highlights the strategic aims and tactical considerations of the men in charge. Each of the battle, communications, and locator maps are cross-referenced to provide a comprehensive overview of the fighting as it swept across the country. With more than two hundred photographs and countless personal accounts that vividly describe the experiences of soldiers in the fields, The Atlas of the Civil War brings to life the human drama that pitted state against state and brother against brother.

"A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction" is an extraordinary collection of 23 essays addressing the key topics and themes of the most divisive era in United States history. These original essays by top scholars in the field are organized chronologically into three parts: "Sectional Conflict and the Coming of the Civil War," "The Civil War and American Society," and "Reconstruction and the New Nation." Each essay is an interpretive summary of the key literature in the field, and places the topic in historical context. Contributors include bibliographies and suggest future directions of the historiography. This volume provides students, scholars, and informed general readers of Civil War and Reconstruction history with a valuable guide to their research and teaching.

Buffalo Bill Cody was bigger than life. He was also braver, handsomer, and kinder-in short, just about perfect, as any reader of Prentiss Ingraham's dime novels could tell you. Along with his nearly 600 novels and plays, Ingraham (1843-1904), Confederate colonel and mercenary, penned a biography of his hero. The Buffalo Bill Cody who emerges from this book is not so very different from the paragon in Ingraham's novels, but as Cody's close companion, Ingraham had the inside story on this iconic figure of the American West. Add to that the dime novel-writer's bravura style, and Ingraham's Buffalo Bill Cody: A Man of the West becomes an irresistible work of Americana, in many ways an apt portrait of its larger-than-life subject. And because both men were firsthand witnesses to historic moments-the struggle between slavers and abolitionists, the Civil War, the building of the railroads, the Indian Wars, the golden age of circuses- - the biography offers a close-up perspective of life on the American frontier. Published here with an introduction and notes by Cody aficionado Sandra K. Sagala, who transcribed and edited the text of the biography from the original that was serialized in 1895 by Duluth Press, and illustrated with line drawings by one of Ingraham's contemporaries, Buffalo Bill Cody: A Man of the West is at once a unique view of an outsize figure of the Wild West, an original document of American history, and a performance as entertaining as any the self-styled cowboy and showman Buffalo Bill Cody ever staged.

Fought on July 28, 1864, the Battle of Ezra Church was a dramatic engagement during the Civil War's Atlanta Campaign. Confederate forces under John Bell Hood desperately fought to stop William T. Sherman's advancing armies as they tried to cut the last Confederate supply line into the city. Confederates under General Stephen D. Lee nearly overwhelmed the Union right flank, but Federals under General Oliver O. Howard decisively repelled every attack. After five hours of struggle, 5,000 Confederates lay dead and wounded, while only 632 Federals were lost. The result was another major step in Sherman's long effort to take Atlanta. Hess's compelling study is the first book-length account of the fighting at Ezra Church. Detailing Lee's tactical missteps and Howard's vigilant leadership, he challenges many common misconceptions about the battle. Richly narrated and drawn from an array of unpublished manuscripts and firsthand accounts, Hess's work sheds new light on the complexities and significance of this important engagement, both on and off the battlefield.

Much has been written about place and Civil War memory, but how do we personally remember and commemorate this part of our collective past? How do battlefields and other historic places help us understand our own history? What kinds of places are worth remembering and why? In this collection of essays, some of the most esteemed historians of the Civil War select a single meaningful place related to war and narrate its significance. Included here are meditations on a wide assortment of places-Devil's Den at Gettysburg, Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, the statue of William T. Sherman in New York's Central Park, Burnside Bridge at Antietam, the McLean House in Appomattox, and more. Paired with a contemporary photograph commissioned specifically for this book, each essay offers an unusual and accessible glimpse into how historians think about their subjects. In addition to the editors, contributors include Edward L. Ayers, Stephen Berry, William A. Blair, David W. Blight, Peter S. Carmichael, Frances M. Clarke, Catherine Clinton, Stephen Cushman, Stephen D. Engle, Drew Gilpin Faust, Sarah E. Gardner, Judith Giesberg, Lesley J. Gordon, A. Wilson Greene, Caroline E. Janney, Jaqueline Jones, Ari Kelman, James Marten, Carol Reardon, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Brenda E. Stevenson, Elizabeth R. Varon, and Joan Waugh.

General William T. Sherman's 1865 Carolinas Campaign receives scant attention from most Civil War historians, largely because it was overshadowed by the Army of Northern Virginia's final battles against the Army of the Potomac. Career military officers Mark A. Smith and Wade Sokolosky rectify this oversight with No Such Army Since the Days of Julius Caesar, a careful and impartial examination of Sherman's army and its many accomplishments. The authors dedicate their professional training and research and writing abilities to the critical days of March 11-16, 1865-the overlooked run-up to the seminal Battle of Bentonville (March 19-21, 1865). They begin with the capture of Fayetteville and the demolition of the arsenal there, before chronicling the two-day Battle of Averasboro in more detail than any other study. At Averasboro, Lt. Gen. William J. Hardee's Confederates conducted a well-planned and brilliantly executed defense-in-depth that held Sherman's juggernaut in check for two days. With his objective accomplished, Hardee disengaged and marched to concentrate his corps with Gen. Joseph E. Johnston for what would become Bentonville. This completely revised and updated edition of"No Such Army Since the Days of Julius Caesar": Sherman's Carolinas Campaign from Fayetteville to Averasboro, March 1865 is based upon extensive archival and firsthand research. It includes new original maps, orders of battle, abundant illustrations, and a detailed driving and walking tour for dedicated battlefield enthusiasts. Readers with an interest in the Carolinas, Generals Sherman and Johnston, or the Civil War in general will enjoy this book.

Irish-born and Irish-descended soldiers and sailors were involved in every major engagement of the American Civil War. Throughout the conflict, they shared their wartime experiences through songs and song lyrics, leaving behind a vast trove of ballads in songbooks, letters, newspaper publications, wartime diaries, and other accounts. Taken together, these songs and lyrics offer an underappreciated source of contemporary feelings and opinions about the war. Catherine V. Bateson's Irish American Civil War Songs provides the first in-depth exploration of Irish Americans' use of balladry to portray and comment on virtually every aspect of the war as witnessed by the Irish on the front line and home front. Bateson considers the lyrics, themes, and sentiments of wartime songs produced in America but often originating with those born across the Atlantic in Ireland and Britain. Her analysis gives new insight into views held by the Irish migrant diaspora about the conflict and the ways those of Irish descent identified with and fought to defend their adopted homeland. Bateson's investigation of Irish American song lyrics within the context of broader wartime experiences enhances our understanding of the Irish contribution to the American Civil War. At the same time, it demonstrates how Irish songs shaped many American balladry traditions as they laid the foundation of the Civil War's musical soundscape.

Along with Confederate flags, the men and women who recently gathered before the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts carried signs proclaiming "Heritage Not Hate." Theirs, they said, was an "open and visible protest against those who attacked us, ours flags, our ancestors, or our Heritage." How, Nicole Maurantonio wondered, did "not hate" square with a "heritage" grounded in slavery? How do so-called neo-Confederates distance themselves from the actions and beliefs of white supremacists while clinging to the very symbols and narratives that tether the Confederacy to the history of racism and oppression in America? The answer, Maurantonio discovers, is bound up in the myth of Confederate exceptionalism-a myth whose components, proponents, and meaning this timely and provocative book exploresThe narrative of Confederate exceptionalism, in this analysis, updates two uniquely American mythologies-the Lost Cause and American exceptionalism-blending their elements with discourses of racial neoliberalism to create a seeming separation between the Confederacy and racist systems. Incorporating several methods and drawing from a range of sources-including ethnographic observations, interviews, and archival documents-Maurantonio examines the various people, objects, and rituals that contribute to this cultural balancing act. Her investigation takes in "official" modes of remembering the Confederacy, such as the monuments and building names that drive the discussion today, but it also pays attention to the more mundane and often subtle ways in which the Confederacy is recalled. Linking the different modes of commemoration, her work bridges the distance that believers in Confederate exceptionalism maintain; while situated in history from the Civil War through the civil rights era, the book brings much-needed clarity to the constitution, persistence, and significance of this divisive myth in the context of our time.

Peer through history at Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet, whose steady nature and dominating figure earned him the nicknames "War Horse," "Bulldog," and "Bull of the Woods." Years after the war, Longstreet's reputation swung between Confederate hero and brutish scoundrel. A dutiful soldier with a penchant for drink and gambling, Longstreet spoke little but inspired many, and he continues to fascinate Civil war historians. In his memoir From Manassas to Appomattox, Longstreet reveals his inner musings and insights regarding the War between the States. Ever the soldier, he skims over his personal life to focus on battle strategies, war accounts, and opinions regarding other officers who were as misunderstood as him. The principle subordinate under General Robert E. Lee, Longstreet provides several accounts of Lee's leadership and their strong partnership. An invaluable firsthand account of life during the Civil War, From Manassas to Appomattox not only illuminates the life and ambitions of Lieutenant General James Longstreet, but it also offers an in-depth view of army operations within the Confederacy. An introduction and notes by prominent historian James I. Robertson Jr. and a new foreword by Christian Keller offer insight into the impact of Longstreet's career on American history.

In the summer of 1862, after a year of protracted fighting, Abraham Lincoln decided on a radical change of strategy-one that abandoned hope for a compromise peace and committed the nation to all-out war. The centerpiece of that new strategy was the Emancipation Proclamation: an unprecedented use of federal power that would revolutionize Southern society. In The Long Road to Antietam, Richard Slotkin, a renowned cultural historian, reexamines the challenges that Lincoln encountered during that anguished summer 150 years ago. In an original and incisive study of character, Slotkin re-creates the showdown between Lincoln and General George McClellan, the "Young Napoleon" whose opposition to Lincoln included obsessive fantasies of dictatorship and a military coup. He brings to three-dimensional life their ruinous conflict, demonstrating how their political struggle provided Confederate General Robert E. Lee with his best opportunity to win the war, in the grand offensive that ended in September of 1862 at the bloody Battle of Antietam.

Independence Day, 1861. The schooner S. J. Waring sets sail from New York on a routine voyage to South America. Seventeen days later, it limps back into New York's frenzied harbor with the ship's black steward, William Tillman, at the helm. While the story of that ill-fated voyage is one of the most harrowing tales of captivity and survival on the high seas, it has, almost unbelievably, been lost to history. Now reclaiming Tillman as the real American hero he was, historian Brian McGinty dramatically returns readers to that riotous, explosive summer of 1861, when the country was tearing apart at the seams and the Union army was in near shambles following a humiliating defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run. Desperate for good news, the North was soon riveted by reports of an incident that occurred a few hundred miles off the coast of New York, where the Waring had been overtaken by a marauding crew of Confederate privateers. While the white sailors became chummy with their Southern captors, free black man William Tillman was perfectly aware of the fate that awaited him in the ruthless, slave-filled ports south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Stealthily biding his time until a moonlit night nine days after the capture, Tillman single-handedly killed three officers of the privateer crew, then took the wheel and pointed it home. Yet, with no experience as a navigator, only one other helper, and a war-torn Atlantic seaboard to contend with, his struggle had just begun. It took five perilous days at sea-all thrillingly recounted here-before the Waring returned to New York Harbor, where the story of Tillman's shipboard courage became such a tabloid sensation that he was not only put on the bill of Barnum's American Museum but also proclaimed to be the "first hero" of the Civil War. As McGinty evocatively shows, however, in the horrors of the war then engulfing the nation, memories of his heroism-even of his identity-were all but lost to history. As such, The Rest I Will Kill becomes a thrilling and historically significant work, as well as an extraordinary journey that recounts how a free black man was able to defy efforts to make him a slave and become an unlikely glimmer of hope for a disheartened Union army in the war-battered North.

The Lost Cause ideology that emerged after the Civil War and flourished in the early twentieth century in essence sought to recast a struggle to perpetuate slavery as a heroic defense of the South. As Adam Domby reveals here, this was not only an insidious goal; it was founded on falsehoods. The False Cause focuses on North Carolina to examine the role of lies and exaggeration in the creation of the Lost Cause narrative. In the process the book shows how these lies have long obscured the past and been used to buttress white supremacy in ways that resonate to this day. Domby explores how fabricated narratives about the war's cause, Reconstruction, and slavery-as expounded at monument dedications and political rallies-were crucial to Jim Crow. He questions the persistent myth of the Confederate army as one of history's greatest, revealing a convenient disregard of deserters, dissent, and Unionism, and exposes how pension fraud facilitated a myth of unwavering support of the Confederacy among nearly all white Southerners. Domby shows how the dubious concept of "black Confederates" was spun from a small number of elderly and indigent African American North Carolinians who got pensions by presenting themselves as "loyal slaves." The book concludes with a penetrating examination of how the Lost Cause narrative and the lies on which it is based continue to haunt the country today and still work to maintain racial inequality.