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.

Linked by declarations of emancipation within the same five-year period, two countries shared human rights issues on two distinct continents. In this book, readers will find a case-study comparison of the emancipation of Russian serfs on the Yazykovo Selo estate and American slaves at the Palmyra Plantation. Although state policies and reactions may not follow the same paths in each area, there were striking thematic parallels. These findings add to our understanding of what happens throughout an emancipation process in which the state grants freedom, and therefore speaks to the universality of the human experience. Despite the political and economic differences between the two countries, as well as their geographic and cultural distances, this book re-conceptualizes emancipation and its aftermath in each country: from a history that treats each as a separate, self-contained story to one with a unified, global framework.

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition combines the two most important African American slave narratives into one volume.
Frederick Douglass's Narrative, first published in 1845, is an enlightening and incendiary text. Born into slavery, Douglass became the preeminent spokesman for his people during his life; his narrative is an unparalleled account of the dehumanizing effects of slavery and Douglass's own triumph over it. Like Douglass, Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery, and in 1861 she published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, now recognized as the most comprehensive antebellum slave narrative written by a woman. Jacobs's account broke the silence on the exploitation of African American female slaves, and it remains crucial reading. These narratives illuminate and inform each other. This edition includes an incisive Introduction by Kwame Anthony Appiah and extensive annotations.

"From the Trade Paperback edition.

In this never before published diary, 29-year-old surgeon James Fulton transports readers into the harsh and deadly conditions of the Civil War as he struggles to save the lives of the patients under his care. Fulton joined a Union army volunteer regiment in 1862, only a year into the Civil War, and immediately began chronicling his experiences in a pocket diary. Despite his capture by the Confederate Army at Gettysburg and the confiscation of his medical tools, Fulton was able to keep his diary with him at all times. He provides a detailed account of the next two years, including his experiences treating the wounded and diseased during some of the most critical campaigns of the Civil War and his relationships with soldiers, their commanders, civilians, other health-care workers, and the opposing Confederate army. The diary also includes his notes on recipes for medical ailments from sore throats to syphilis. In addition to Fulton's diary, editor Robert D. Hicks and experts in Civil War medicine provide context and additional information on the practice and development of medicine during the Civil War, including the technology and methods available at the time, the organization of military medicine, doctor-patient interactions, and the role of women as caregivers and relief workers. Civil War Medicine: A Surgeon's Diary provides a compelling new account of the lives of soldiers during the Civil War and a doctor's experience of one of the worst health crises ever faced by the United States.

When Louisiana seceded from the Union on January 26, 1861, no one doubted that a battle to control the Mississippi River was imminent. Throughout the war, the Federals pushed their way up the river. Every port and city seemed to fall against the force of the Union Navy. The capitol was forced to retreat from Baton Rouge to Shreveport. Many of the smaller towns, like Bayou Sara and Donaldsonville, were nearly shelled completely off the map. It was not until the Union reached Port Hudson that the Confederates had a fighting chance to keep control of the mighty Mississippi. They fought long and hard, under supplied and under manned, but ultimately the Union prevailed.

Colonel Elmer Ellsworth was the first Union officer killed in the American Civil War. When it happened, on May 24, 1861, the entire North was aghast. Ellsworth was a celebrity and had just finished traveling with his famed and entertaining U. S. Zouave Cadets drill team. They had performed at West Point, in New York City, and for President Buchanan before returning home to Chicago. Ellsworth then joined his friend and law mentor Abraham Lincoln in his quest for the presidency. When Lincoln put out the call for troops after Fort Sumter was fired upon, Ellsworth responded. Within days he was able to organize over a thousand New York firefighters into a regiment of volunteers. Was it youthful enthusiasm or a lack of formal training that resulted in his death? There is evidence on both sides. What is definite is that the Lincolns rushed to the Navy Yard to view the body of the young man they had loved as a son. Mary Lincoln insisted that he lie in state in the East Room of their home. The elite of New York brought flowers to the Astor House en memoriam. Six members of the 11th New York accompanied their commander's coffin. When the young colonel's remains were finally interred in the Hudson View Cemetery, the skies opened up. A late May afternoon thunderstorm broke out in the middle of the procession, referred to as "tears from God himself." Only eight weeks later, the results of the battle of First Bull Run knocked Ellsworth out of the headlines. The trickle of blood had now become a torrent, not to end for four more years of war. Groeling's well-written biography is grounded in years of examining archival resources, diaries, personal letters, newspapers, and other accounts. In the sixty intervening years since the last portrait of Ellsworth was written, new information has arisen that gives readers and historians a better understanding of the Ellsworth phenomenon. The author's interwoven accounts of John Hay, George Nicolay, Abraham Lincoln, and the Lincoln family put Ellsworth clearly at the forefront of the excitement that led up to the election of a president. First Fallen: The Life of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, the North's First Civil War Hero examines every facet of Ellsworth's complex, fascinating life. It is the story of many young men who fought and died for the Union. Elmer, however, was the first and - according to those who remember him - perhaps the best.

In the summer of 1864, the American Civil War had been dragging on for over three years with no end in sight. Things had not gone well for the Union, and the public blamed the president for the stalemate against the Confederacy and for the appalling numbers of killed and wounded. Lincoln was thoroughly convinced that without a favorable change in the trajectory of the war he would have no chance of winning a second term against former Union general George B. McClellan, whom he had previously dismissed as commander of the Army of the Potomac. This vivid, engrossing account of a critical year in American history examines the events of 1864, when the course of American history might have taken a radically different direction. It's no exaggeration to say that if McClellan had won the election, everything would have been different-McClellan and the Democrats planned to end the war immediately, grant the South its independence, and let the Confederacy keep its slaves. What were the crucial factors that in the end swung public sentiment in favor of Lincoln? Johnson focuses on the battlefield campaigns of Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. While Grant was waging a war of attrition with superior manpower against the quick and elusive rebel forces under General Robert E. Lee, Sherman was fighting a protracted battle in Georgia against Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston. But then the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, made a tactical error that would change the whole course of the war. This lively narrative, full of intriguing historical facts, brings to life an important series of episodes in our nation's history. History and Civil War buffs will not want to put down this real-life page-turner.

Was the Civil War inevitable? What really caused it? Drawing on original sources--from Jefferson Davis to Frederick Douglass--and interpretive essays by today's most influential historians, this collection of essays gives a vivid sense of the political, economic, and cultural currents that swept the nation to war.

At a cost of at least 800,000 lives, the Civil War preserved the Union, aborted the breakaway Confederacy, and liberated a race of slaves. Civil War Memories is the first comprehensive account of how and why Americans have selectively remembered, and forgotten, this watershed conflict since its conclusion in 1865. Drawing on an array of textual and visual sources as well as a wide range of modern scholarship on Civil War memory, Robert J. Cook charts the construction of four dominant narratives by the ordinary men and women, as well as the statesmen and generals, who lived through the struggle and its tumultuous aftermath. Part One explains why the Yankee victors' memory of the "War of the Rebellion" drove political conflict into the 1890s, then waned with the passing of the soldiers who had saved the republic. It also touches on the leading role southern white women played in the development of the racially segregated South's "Lost Cause"; explores why, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of Americans had embraced a powerful reconciliatory memory of the Civil War; and details the failed efforts to connect an emancipationist reading of the conflict to the fading cause of civil rights. Part Two demonstrates the Civil War's capacity to thrill twentieth-century Americans in movies such as The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. It also reveals the war's vital connection to the black freedom struggle in the modern era. Finally, Cook argues that the massacre of African American parishioners in Charleston in June 2015 highlighted the continuing relevance of the Civil War by triggering intense nationwide controversy over the place of Confederate symbols in the United States. Written in vigorous prose for a wide audience and designed to inform popular debate on the relevance of the Civil War to the racial politics of modern America, Civil War Memories is required reading for informed Americans today.

In December 1860, South Carolinians voted to abandon the Union, sparking the deadliest war in American history. Led by a proslavery movement that viewed Abraham Lincoln's place at the helm of the federal government as a real and present danger to the security of the South, southerners, both slaveholders and nonslaveholders, willingly risked civil war by seceding from the United States. Radical proslavery activists contended that without defending slavery's westward expansion American planters would, like their former counterparts in the West Indies, become greatly outnumbered by those they enslaved. The result would transform the South into a mere colony within the federal government and make white southerners reliant on antislavery outsiders for protection of their personal safety and wealth. Faith in American exceptionalism played an important role in the reasoning of the antebellum American public, shaping how those in both the free and slave states viewed the world. Questions about who might share the bounty of the exceptional nature of the country became the battleground over which Americans fought, first with words, then with guns. Carl Lawrence Paulus's The Slaveholding Crisis examines how, due to the fear of insurrection by the enslaved, southerners created their own version of American exceptionalism, one that placed the perpetuation of slavery at its forefront. Feeling a loss of power in the years before the Civil War, the planter elite no longer saw the Union, as a whole, fulfilling that vision of exceptionalism. As a result, Paulus contends, slaveholders and nonslaveholding southerners believed that the white South could anticipate racial conflict and brutal warfare. This narrative postulated that limiting slavery's expansion within the Union was a riskier proposition than fighting a war of secession. In the end, Paulus argues, by insisting that the new party in control of the federal government promoted this very insurrection, the planter elite gained enough popular support to create the Confederate States of America. In doing so, they established a thoroughly proslavery, modern state with the military capability to quell massive resistance by the enslaved, expand its territorial borders, and war against the forces of the Atlantic antislavery movement.

James Montgomery was a leader of the free-state movement in pre-Civil War Kansas and Missouri, associated with its direct-action military wing. He then joined the Union Army and fought through most of the war. A close associate and ally of other abolitionists including John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Colonels Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Robert G. Shaw, Montgomery led his African-American regiment along with Tubman and other civilians in the 1863 Combahee River raid, which freed almost 800 slaves from South Carolina plantations. He then commanded a brigade in the siege of Fort Wagner, near Charleston. In 1864, still in brigade command, he fought at the Battle of Olustee in Florida, helping prevent the collapse and disintegration of Union General Truman Seymour's army. Later that year he returned home and played a significant role in defeating Confederate General Sterling Price's great raid, especially at the Battle of Westport. This is the first published biography of Montgomery, who was and remains a controversial figure. It uncovers and deals honestly with his serious flaws, while debunking some wilder charges, and also bringing to light his considerable attributes and achievements. Montgomery's life, from birth to death, is seen in the necessary perspective and clear delineation of the complex racial, political and military history of the Civil War era.

During the American Civil War, the mounted soldiers fighting on both sides of the conflict carried a wide array of weapons, from sabers and lances to carbines, revolvers, and other firearms. Though some sections of the cavalry placed their trust in the sabre, the advent of viable breechloading carbines -- especially repeaters such as the Spencer -- was to transform warfare within little more than a decade of General Lee's final surrender at Appomattox. However, output struggled to keep up with unprecedented demands on manufacturing technology and distribution in areas where communication was difficult and in states whose primary aim was to equip their own men rather than contribute to the arming of Federal or Confederate regiments. In addition, the almost unparalleled losses of men and equipment ensured that almost any firearm, effectual or not, was pressed into service. Consequently, the sheer variety of weaponry carried reflected the mounted soldiers' various roles in different theatres of operation, but also the availability -- or otherwise -- of weapons, notably on the Confederate side. Fully illustrated, this study assesses the effectiveness of the many different weapons arming the Civil War cavalryman and analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the decisions made after 1865 concerning the armament of the US cavalry.

Boston Congregationalist ministers Charles Chauncy (1705-1787) and Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766) were significant political as well as religious leaders in colonial and revolutionary New England. Scholars have often stressed their influence on major shifts in New England theology, and have also portrayed Mayhew as an influential preacher, whose works helped shape American revolutionary ideology, and Chauncy as an active leader of the patriot cause. Through a deeply contextualised re-examination of the two ministers as 'men of their times', Oakes offers a fresh, comparative interpretation of how their religious and political views changed and interacted over decades. The result is a thoroughly revised reading of Chauncy's and Mayhew's most innovative ideas. Conservative Revolutionaries unearths strongly traditionalist elements in their belief systems, focussing on their shared commitment to a dissenting worldview based on the ideals of their Protestant New England and British heritage. Oakes concludes with a provocative exploration of how their shifting theological and political positions may have helped redefine prevailing notions of human identity, capability, and destiny.