Prior to the 2020 presidential election, historians considered the disputed 1876 contest-which pitted Republican Rutherford B. Hayes against Democrat Samuel J. Tilden-the most controversial in American history. Examining the work and conclusions of the Potter Committee, the congressional body tasked with investigating the vote, Adam Fairclough's Bulldozed and Betrayed: Louisiana and the Stolen Elections of 1876 sheds new light on the events surrounding the electoral crisis, especially those that occurred in Louisiana, a state singled out for voter intimidation and rampant fraud. The Potter Committee's inquiry led to embarrassment for Democrats, uncovering an array of bribes, forgeries, and even coded telegrams showing that the Tilden campaign had attempted to buy the presidency. Testimony also exposed the treachery of Hayes, who, once installed in the White House, permitted insurrectionary Democrats to overthrow the Republican government in Louisiana that had risen to power during the early days of Reconstruction.

About Railroad Raiders The focus of this selection concerns both the Federal and Confederate efforts to disable or maintain the railroads within the active theaters of the war. Real railroads of iron and steam and ribbons of steel vanishing into the horizon quickly became a strategic objective of both armies in the Civil War. Raiders and protectors were deployed both North and South. The damage inflicted on roadways and rolling stock was not always easy to accomplish. The simplest method of slowing a train was to remove a small section of rail, but once spotted the gap was not difficult to repair. Both sides learned to tear up long sections of track, pile up and set fire to the ties, and heat and bend the iron. This was temporarily effective, but the rails could often be reheated, straightened out, and spiked back into place. The destruction of bridges, trestles, rolling stock, and especially engines was more difficult and expensive to undo. It was found that to permanently disable a locomotive, however, smashing cylinder heads, pumps, links, and valve stems was not enough. The parts had to be scattered, taken away, or buried or thrown into an inaccessible body of water. It is the author's purpose to record this often under-reported aspect of the Civil War for both military and railroading enthusiasts. Most Civil War historians concentrate on the strategic and military aspects of the railroading industry, and they rather uncritically mention engineering and other technical factors as if they were simply founded or well established. They were not. In many cases, the same sources and traditions are always quoted with no investigation into their accuracy, and no further understanding of the matter at hand is attempted. The Confederate Railroads, for instance, have only been given a detailed examination once. The Railroads of the Confederacy, by Robert Black (1952), was written sixty years ago. To the topic, the present author brings both the wide knowledge of a military historian and the technical knowledge of a professor of physics. Those readers who are impatient to read about the raids without a knowledge of the foundations of Civil War railroading may scroll to "In the War Zone" midway through this book, but they will miss much of the underlying meaning and should return to read the earlier sections. Those unfamiliar with the geography of the region should look to the maps in the rear.

*Includes the entire text of Cleburne's 1864 letter proposing to free the Confederacy's slaves.
*Includes pictures of Cleburne and important people, places, and events in his life.
*Includes maps of the battles Cleburne fought in, including Shiloh, Chickamauga, and Missionary Ridge.
*Includes a Bibliography for further reading.
"As between the loss of independence and the loss of slavery, we assume that every patriot will freely give up the latter..." - Patrick Cleburne, 1864
During the Civil War, the eyes of the nation usually stayed fixed to the Eastern theater, where Confederate General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia constantly bedeviled the Union Army of the Potomac and its many commanders. Instrumental to that success at places like Second Manassas and Chancellorsville was Lee's corps commander Stonewall Jackson, who became one of the most popular and respected generals of the Civil War.
Despite the Confederates' success in holding off the Union's offensives in the East, however, the Union made steady progress in the Western theater, winning battles like Shiloh, capturing New Orleans, and sealing off the Mississippi River at Vicksburg. Like the Union generals in the East, Confederate generals in the West were either mortally wounded in battle (Albert Sidney Johnston) or proved ineffective (Braxton Bragg, John Pemberton). One of the only bright spots in the West for the Confederacy was Irish immigrant Patrick Cleburne, whose successes earned him the nickname "Stonewall of the West." Where so many Confederates were failing, Cleburne's strategic tactics and bold defensive fighting earned him fame and recognition throughout the South, even leading Lee to call him "a meteor shining from a clouded sky."
Unfortunately for Cleburne, he is also remembered today for reasons other than his battlefield successes. Cleburne was tasked with leading an assault that he heartily opposed during the Battle of Franklin near the end of 1864, but he obeyed the command and was killed in the assault within the Union lines. The general was so legendary even among Union soldiers that the valuables on his body were looted before his body came back to Confederate lines Upon hearing of his death, Cleburne's old corps commander noted, "Where this division defended, no odds broke its line; where it attacked, no numbers resisted its onslaught, save only once; and there is the grave of Cleburne."
Cleburne is also remembered for a bold and novel idea that he proposed to the Army of Tennessee in 1864. Realizing the Confederates' deficiency in manpower and resources, Cleburne suggested freeing the South's slaves so that they would fight for the Confederacy. It was such a radical idea that the Army buried it, and even when the Confederacy was on its last legs entering 1865, it could not muster the political support to emancipate some of their slaves to fight.
The Stonewall of the West: The Life and Career of General Patrick Cleburne chronicles the life and career of the Stonewall of the West, analyzing his record in the war and assessing his legacy. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events in his life, you will learn about General Cleburne like you never have before, in no time at all.

Trans-Mississippi Civil War history focusing on the First Arkansas Cavalry, U.S.

The Civil War - A Biblical Perspective Why was the Civil War fought? What was God's purpose in allowing the War? The American Civil War is one of the most written about topics in American history; however, most authors fail to relate the reason why the war was fought and God's purposes during this time. In this book, we outline the cause of the War from source documents of the men who lived during this time and made the decisions which led to the conflict. The unique aspect of this book is utilizing the truth of God's Word to shed light on the reason why the War was fought and God's purpose for America by allowing the War. Major battles and personalities, the life of the soldier and many other fascinating aspects of the Civil War will be covered in this book. You will see the hand of God as He worked His purposes in America during the greatest fiery trial in United States history. John Eyth, CPA, CMA, CFM is a financial executive. His experience includes for profit and non-profit organizations. He has studied the Bible and Civil War history for over thirty years. Rebecca Eyth is a college student pursuing a double major in History and English. While in high school, she was a nationally ranked, award winning public speaker. She has studied the Bible for over twelve years and Civil War history for over nine years. This father-daughter writing team uses their analytical, investigative and critical thinking skills, as applied to historical evidence, to draw valid conclusions of Civil War history from a Biblical worldview. John and his wife Antionette, along with their daughters Rebecca and Hannah, live in Pennsylvania. The Eyth family has visited eighty-eight Civil War related sites, including thirty-two Civil War battlefields.

Enhanced by excerpts from primary documents as well as numerous illustrations, this collection of essays by some of the country's most prominent Civil War historians intends to move women to the center stage of Civil War history. Topics range from the experiences of female slave contrabandists, to the lives of rural refugee women, to the effects of the postwar era on African-American women, to the Civil War's legacy in women's suffrage movements.

A vast and desolate region, the Texas-New Mexico borderlands have long been an ideal setting for intrigue and illegal dealings-never more so than in the lawless early days of cattle trafficking and trade among the Plains tribes and Comancheros. This book takes us to the borderlands in the 1860s and 1870s for an in-depth look at Union-Confederate skullduggery amid the infamous Comanche-Comanchero trade in stolen Texas livestock. In 1862, the Confederates abandoned New Mexico Territory and Texas west of the Pecos River, fully expecting to return someday. Meanwhile, administered by Union troops under martial law, the region became a hotbed of Rebel exiles and spies, who gathered intelligence, disrupted federal supply lines, and plotted to retake the Southwest. Using a treasure trove of previously unexplored documents, authors James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely trace the complicated network of relationships that drew both Texas cattlemen and Comancheros into these borderlands, revealing the urban elite who were heavily involved in both the legal and illegal transactions that fueled the region's economy. Confederates and Comancheros deftly weaves a complex tale of Texan overreach and New Mexican resistance, explores cattle drives and cattle rustling, and details shady government contracts and bloody frontier justice. Peopled with Rebels and bluecoats, Comanches and Comancheros, Texas cattlemen and New Mexican merchants, opportunistic Indian agents and Anglo arms dealers, this book illustrates how central these contested borderlands were to the history of the American West.

Rhoda is just eighteen when her family arranges for her to marry a wealthy and powerful plantation owner from Quincy, Florida, in 1853. Rhoda quickly adjusts to life on a plantation with 160 slaves, but it takes more time getting used to her husband, William.

The couple grows closer with time, and William promises Rhoda she "can have the moon" if she gives him a son. On Jan. 15, 1858, she gives birth to Albert Waller Gilchrist, who will eventually become Florida's governor. Mary Elizabeth is born the next year. Not long after, however, Rhoda finds herself a young widow. While she is still coping with William's death, another tragedy strikes; Rhoda's daughter dies of illness two years after her husband.

In the fall of 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, she discovers a new love when she meets Captain James Barrow, who is fighting for the Southern cause. When he asks her to marry him, she stalls, but she already knows the answer will be "yes." Throughout her life, she never loses her fighting spirit, remembering where she comes from and stays true to her ideals.

Based on the true story of Rhoda Elizabeth Waller Kilcrease Gibbes, this biographical narrative describes how her life in and around Quincy, Florida, took her indomitable spirit to the heights of leadership in Florida society.

After Major General William Tecumseh Sherman's forces ravaged Atlanta in 1864, Ulysses S. Grant urged him to complete the primary mission Grant had given him: to destroy the Confederate Army in Georgia. Attempting to draw the Union army north, General John Bell Hood's Confederate forces focused their attacks on Sherman's supply line, the railroad from Chattanooga, and then moved across north Alabama and into Tennessee. As Sherman initially followed Hood's men to protect the railroad, Hood hoped to lure the Union forces out of the lower South and, perhaps more important, to recapture the long-occupied city of Nashville.
Though Hood managed to cut communication between Sherman and George H. Thomas's Union forces by placing his troops across the railroads south of the city, Hood's men were spread over a wide area and much of the Confederate cavalry was in Murfreesboro. Hood's army was ultimately routed. Union forces pursued the Confederate troops for ten days until they recrossed the Tennessee River. The decimated Army of Tennessee (now numbering only about 15,000) retreated into northern Alabama and eventually Mississippi. Hood requested to be relieved of his command. Less than four months later, the war was over.
Written in a lively and engaging style, "The Western Confederacy's Final Gamble" presents new interpretations of the critical issues of the battle. James Lee McDonough sheds light on how the Union army stole past the Confederate forces at Spring Hill and their subsequent clash, which left six Confederate generals dead. He offers insightful analysis of John Bell Hood's overconfidence in his position and of the leadership and decision-making skills of principal players such as Sherman, George Henry Thomas, John M. Schofield, Hood, and others.
McDonough's subjects, both common soldiers and officers, present their unforgettable stories in their own words. Unlike most earlier studies of the battle of Nashville, McDonough's account examines the contributions of black Union regiments and gives a detailed account of the battle itself as well as its place in the overall military campaign. Filled with new information from important primary sources and fresh insights, Nashville will become the definitive treatment of a crucial battleground of the Civil War.

USS United States Ships Listing of the 252 combatants the North sent south for the American Civil War. Included are 125 photos/drawings of various vessels. This book and its counterpart CSS are meanth to be general introductions to the ships of the War for Southern Independence.

This book contains transcriptions of extant pension applications for the state of Tennessee's African American Confederate Veterans. In most cases the entire application presents a picture of their lives that would lie otherwise hidden. More than 225 applications are presented in this rare treasure trove of genealogy and history.

Lincoln and the Democrats describes the vexatious behavior of a two-party system in war and points to the sound parts of the American system which proved to be the country's salvation: local civic pride, and quiet nonpartisanship in mobilization and funding for the war, for example. While revealing that the role of a noxious 'white supremacy' in American politics of the period has been exaggerated - as has the power of the Copperheads - Neely revives the claim that the Civil War put the country on the road to 'human rights', and also uncovers a previously unnoticed tendency toward deceptive and impractical grandstanding on the Constitution during war in the United States.

An alternative history about Rose Greenhow and her activities as a spy before and during the American Civil War. She was the Confederate spy who gave the South the information it needed to win at the first Battle of Bull's run, but had she been a spy all along, working for the French and British in their efforts to undermine American Manifest Destiny and split the nation into two or more new countries? The story begins in 1850 in Mexico City and San Francisco.

2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalists - Multicultural Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove grew up in the Bible Belt in the American South as a faithful church-going Christian. But he gradually came to realize that the gospel his Christianity proclaimed was not good news for everybody. The same Christianity that sang, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound" also perpetuated racial injustice and white supremacy in the name of Jesus. His Christianity, he discovered, was the religion of the slaveholder. Just as Reconstruction after the Civil War worked to repair a desperately broken society, our compromised Christianity requires a spiritual reconstruction that undoes the injustices of the past. Wilson-Hartgrove traces his journey from the religion of the slaveholder to the Christianity of Christ. Reconstructing the gospel requires facing the pain of the past and present, from racial blindness to systemic abuses of power. Grappling seriously with troubling history and theology, Wilson-Hartgrove recovers the subversiveness of the gospel that sustained the church through centuries of slavery and oppression, from the civil rights era to the Black Lives Matter movement and beyond. When the gospel is reconstructed, freedom rings for both individuals and society as a whole. Discover how Jesus continues to save us from ourselves and each other, to repair the breach and heal our land.

The Gettysburg Campaign Exam Study Guide, Volume One contains 700+ questions and answers regarding the armies, chronologies, maps, cemeteries, commanders of the 1863 Pennsylvania Campaign. The book's format and content help a students' exam performance.

This volume narrates the major battles and campaigns of the conflict, conveying the full military experience during the Civil War. The military encounters between Union and Confederate soldiers and between both armies and irregular combatants and true non-combatants structured the four years of war. These encounters were not solely defined by violence, but military encounters gave the war its central architecture. Chapters explore well-known battles, such as Antietam and Gettysburg, as well as military conflict in more abstract places, defined by political qualities (like the border or the West) or physical ones (such as rivers or seas). Chapters also explore the nature of civil-military relations as Union armies occupied parts of the South and garrison troops took up residence in southern cities and towns, showing that the Civil War was not solely a series of battles but a sustained process that drew people together in more ambiguous settings and outcomes.

Grinding, bloody, and ultimately decisive, the Petersburg Campaign was the Civil War's longest and among its most complex. Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee squared off for more than nine months in their struggle for Petersburg, the key to the Confederate capital at Richmond. Featuring some of the war's most notorious battles, the campaign played out against a backdrop of political drama and crucial fighting elsewhere, with massive costs for soldiers and civilians alike. After failing to bull his way into Petersburg, Grant concentrated on isolating the city from its communications with the rest of the surviving Confederacy, stretching Lee's defenses to the breaking point. When Lee's desperate breakout attempt failed in March 1865, Grant launched his final offensives that forced the Confederates to abandon the city on April 2, 1865. A week later, Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House. Here A. Wilson Greene opens his sweeping new three-volume history of the Petersburg Campaign, taking readers from Grant's crossing of the James in mid-June 1864 to the fateful Battle of the Crater on July 30. Full of fresh insights drawn from military, political, and social history, A Campaign of Giants is destined to be the definitive account of the campaign. With new perspectives on operational and tactical choices by commanders, the experiences of common soldiers and civilians, and the significant role of the United States Colored Troops in the fighting, this book offers essential reading for all those interested in the history of the Civil War.

As a war correspondent, Wilbur Fisk was an amateur, yet his letters to the Montpelier Green Mountain Freeman comprise one of the finest collections of Civil War letters in existence. "Literary gems," historian Herman Hattaway calls them. "It would be believable that some expert novelist had created them."

But Fisk was no novelist. He was a rural school teacher from Vermont, primarily self-educated, who enlisted in the Union Army simply because he believed he would regret it later if he didn't.

Unlike professional war correspondents, Private Fisk had no access to rank or headquarters. Instead, he wrote of life as a private-as one of the foot soldiers who slept in the mud and obeyed orders no matter how incomprehensible. "As for the plans our superiors are laying out for us to execute," he wrote, "we know as little as a horse knows of his driver."

Between December 11, 1861 and July 26, 1865, Fisk wrote nearly 100 letters from the battlefield to the Green Mountain Freeman, all of them signed "Anti-Rebel." At the beginning of the war he was exuberant and eager for contact with the enemy. In his first letter he boasted, "This regiment would relish a fight now extremely well."

Two years later, after the battle of Gettysburg, Fisk was disillusioned and war weary. "The rebel dead and ours lay thickly together, their thirst for blood forever quenched. Their bodies were swollen, black, and hideously unnatural. Their eyes glared from their sockets, their tongues protruded from their mouths, and in almost every case, clots of blood and mangled flesh showed how they had died, and rendered a sight ghastly beyond description. I thought I had become hardened to almost anything, but I cannot say I ever wish to see another sight like that I saw on the battlefield of Gettysburg."

Fisk wrote as eloquently on the moral and political issues behind the war as he did on the everyday hardships of life in the Army of the Potomac. He saw the war as a question of right and wrong-of freedom against slavery and democracy against aristocracy-and he continued to believe that the war had to be fought, even after he was well acquainted with its horror and pointlessness. "When they have done their killing, there remains the question to be settled the same as before. They might as well have settled it before the shooting as afterwards."

In this volume editors Ruth and Emil Rosenblatt have included all of Fisk's existing letters to the Freeman, along with three speeches from the 1890s in which Fisk looks back on his wartime experiences from the vantage point of an older man.

The Civil War started in Kansas in 1856. It was initially fought in towns like Lecompton, Lawrence and Osawatomie. It was fought on battlefields like Black Jack. It was fought along creeks such as the Pottawatomie and the Marias des Cygnes. This book will discuss the background of Bleeding Kansas, and examine the various battles and massacres that were part of it. It will then view the aftermath of the conflict and its effect on the United States. It will use both contemporary photographs and maps (mostly from the Library of Congress), as well as modern photos of the sites described herein. There are 19 color photos and maps, and 17 black and white.

Southern Strategies is the first-ever analysis of Confederate defeat using the lenses of classical strategic and leadership theory. The contributors bring over one hundred years of experience in the field at the junior and senior levels of military leadership and over forty years of teaching in professional military education. Well-aware that the nature of war is immutable and unchanging, they combine their firsthand experience of this truth with solid scholarship to offer new theoretical and historical perspectives about why the South failed in its bid for independence. The contributors identify and analyze the mistakes made by the Confederate political and strategic leadership that handicapped the prospects for independence and placed immense pressure on Confederate military commanders to compensate on the battlefield for what should have been achieved by other instruments of national power. These instruments are the diplomatic, informational (including intelligence and public morale), and economic aspects of a nation's capability to exert its will internationally. When combined with military power, the acronym DIME emerges, a theoretical tool that offers historians and national security professionals alike a useful method to analyze how a state, such as the Union, the Confederacy, or the modern United States, wielded or currently wields its power at the strategic level. Each essay examines how well rebel strategic leaders employed and integrated these instruments, given that the seceded South possessed enough diplomatic, informational, military, and economic power to theoretically win its independence. The essayists also apply the ends-ways-means model of analysis to each topic to offer readers greater insight into the Confederate leadership's challenges. Southern Strategies confirms the reality that the outcome of the American Civil War cannot be boiled down to one or two simple reasons. It offers fresh and theoretically novel interpretations at the strategic level that open new doors for future research and will increase public interest in the big questions surrounding Confederate defeat.

Mary Chesnut kept her diary from early in 1861, just before the Civil War began, to shortly after the end of the war, in 1865. Though not a day-by-day account of the conflict, the diary gives an up-close-and-personal view of this critical period in American history. Her commentary on the conversations and events of her day reveals a keen awareness of the oppression to which women--lack or white, slave or free--were subjected during that period. While she would not consider herself a feminist, her diary reveals sensibilities and concerns that place her far ahead of her time. The wife of a Confederate general, Mary Chesnut moved in the elite circles of Southern society and had a keen interest in politics. Her diary is an important historic document and, because of her sharp wit and often irreverent attitude, a fascinating window into Southern society of the time.