Stephen Neff offers the first comprehensive study of the wide range of legal issues arising from the American Civil War, many of which resonate in debates to this day.

Neff examines the lawfulness of secession, executive and legislative governmental powers, and laws governing the conduct of war. Whether the United States acted as a sovereign or a belligerent had legal consequences, including treating Confederates as rebellious citizens or foreign nationals in war. Property questions played a key role, especially when it came to the process of emancipation. Executive detentions and trials by military commissions tested civil liberties, and the end of the war produced a raft of issues on the status of the Southern states, the legality of Confederate acts, clemency, and compensation. A compelling aspect of the book is the inclusion of international law, as Neff situates the conflict within the general laws of war and details neutrality issues, where the Civil War broke important new legal ground.

This book not only provides an accessible and informative legal portrait of this critical period but also illuminates how legal issues arise in a time of crisis, what impact they have, and how courts attempt to resolve them.

In Drawn With the Sword, James W. McPherson offers a series of thoughtful and engaging essays on some of the most enduring questions of the Civil War. Each essay in Draw With the Sword reveals McPherson's own profound knowledge of the Civil War and of the controversies among historians, presenting all sides in clear and lucid prose.

The 31st Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment was one of only a handful of New England units to serve in Louisiana and the Gulf region during the Civil War, and, of those, it remained there the longest. Its soldiers, most of whom were impressionable young men from small towns in central and western Massachusetts, assumed numerous roles, functioning as infantry, cavalry, and mounted infantry when needed. The regiment operated as an army of occupation; participated in siege warfare at Port Hudson, Louisiana; marched and fought in long field operations such as the Red River campaign; engaged in guerrilla warfare; and garrisoned coastal defense fortifications. It also had the distinction of being the first Federal unit to enter and occupy New Orleans. Larry Lowenthal's authoritative history of the 31st is the first comprehensive examination of this remarkable regiment and its men. When veterans of the unit attempted to write its history in the late nineteenth century, they were not able to complete the task, but they did collect a large quantity of primary-source materials and deposited them in a Springfield, Massachusetts, museum. Lowenthal's work draws heavily from that unpublished cache. Among the documents are highly personal letters, diaries, and first-person recollections that offer vivid and unrivaled accounts of the unit's military experiences, as well as its soldiers' impressions of the people and physical conditions they encountered in Louisiana. The men also offer their unvarnished opinions on a variety of subjects. Lowenthal, a longtime historian and former U.S. National Park Service employee, relays many of the stories in the soldiers' own words. Their impressions of the South- which they viewed as essentially a foreign country- are highly revealing. Critical issues such as slavery and abolition, as well as more private matters such as personal experiences and military life, are also discussed. To all of this, Lowenthal brings a modern perspective, presenting a crucial picture of the period's people and their views of the South and active military life. A Yankee Regiment in Confederate Louisiana is a welcome addition to the literature on occupied Louisiana and the Union Army's service in the Gulf South.

Emory Upton (1839-1881) is widely recognized as one of America's most influential military thinkers. His works - The Armies of Asia and Europe and The Military Policy of the United States - fueled the army's intellectual ferment in the late nineteenth century and guided Secretary of War Elihu Root's reforms in the early 1900s. Yet as David J. Fitzpatrick contends, Upton is also widely misunderstood as an antidemocratic militaristic zealot whose ideas were ""too Prussian"" for America. In this first full biography in nearly half a century, Fitzpatrick, the leading authority on Upton, radically revises our view of this important figure in American military thought. A devout Methodist farm boy from upstate New York, Upton attended the United States Military Academy at West Point and served in the Civil War. His use of a mass infantry attack to break the Confederate lines at Spotsylvania Courthouse in 1864 identified him as a rising figure in the U.S. Army. Upton's subsequent work on military organizations in Asia and Europe, commissioned by Commanding General William T. Sherman, influenced the army's turn toward a European, largely German ideal of soldiering as a profession. Yet it was this same text, along with Upton's Military Policy of the United States, that also propelled the misinterpretations of Upton - first by some contemporaries, and more recently by noted historians Stephen Ambrose and Russell Weigley. By showing Upton's dedication to the ideal of the citizen-soldier and placing him within the context of contemporary military, political, and intellectual discourse, Fitzpatrick shows how Upton's ideas clearly grew out of an American military-political tradition. Emory Upton: Misunderstood Reformer clarifies Upton's influence on the army by offering a new and necessary understanding of the military's intellectual direction at a critical juncture in American history.

Large numbers of slaves worked for the Confederate war effort as wagon drivers, munitions factory workers, and officers' body servants. But contrary to popular wisdom, the number that actually bore arms for the Confederacy was negligible. The Black Experience in the Civil War South is the first comprehensive study of the Southern blacks'wartime experience to appear in a generation. Incorporating the most recent scholarship, this thematically organised book does justice to the richness of its subject, looking at the lives of black men, women, and children in the Confederate states and the non-seceding Southern states; at blacks on farms and plantations and in towns and cities; and at blacks employed in industry and the military. Drawing on memoirs, autobiographies, and other original source materials, Stephen V. Ash details the experiences of blacks who took up residence in Union"contraband camps" and on free-labour plantations and those who enlisted in the Union army. Most significantly, this revealing study deals not only with those who gained freedom during the war but also with those whose freedom came only after the conflict's end. About the Author STEPHEN V. ASH is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. His published works include When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865 (UNC Press, 1995); A Year in the South: 1865 (HarperCollins, 2004); and Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments That Changed the Course of the Civil War (W. W. Norton, 2008). He lives in Tennessee.

In this highly original study of Confederate ideology and politics, Jeffrey Zvengrowski suggests that Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his supporters saw Bonapartist France as a model for the Confederate States of America. They viewed themselves as struggling not so much for the preservation of slavery but for antebellum Democratic ideals of equality and white supremacy. The faction dominated the Confederate government and deemed Republicans a coalition controlled by pro-British abolitionists championing inequality among whites. Like Napoleon I and Napoleon III, pro-Davis Confederates desired to build an industrial nation-state capable of waging Napoleonic-style warfare with large conscripted armies. States' rights, they believed, should not preclude the national government from exercising power. Anglophile anti-Davis Confederates, in contrast, advocated inequality among whites, favoured radical states' rights, and supported slavery-in-the-abstract theories that were dismissive of white supremacy. Having opposed pro-Davis Democrats before the war, they preferred decentralised guerrilla warfare to Napoleonic campaigns and hoped for support from Britain. The Confederacy, they avowed, would willingly become a de facto British agricultural colony upon achieving independence. Pro-Davis Confederates, wanted the Confederacy to become an ally of France and protector of sympathetic northern states. Zvengrowski traces the origins of the pro-Davis Confederate ideology to Jeffersonian Democrats and their faction of War Hawks, who lost power on the national level in the 1820s but regained it during Davis' term as secretary of war. Davis used this position to cultivate friendly relations with France and later warned northerners that the South would secede if Republicans captured the White House. When Lincoln won the 1860 election, Davis endorsed secession. The ideological heirs of the pro-British faction soon came to loathe Davis for antagonizing Britain and for offering to accept gradual emancipation in exchange for direct assistance from French soldiers in Mexico. Zvengrowski's important new interpretation of Confederate ideology situates the Civil War in a global context of imperial competition. It also shows how anti-Davis ex-Confederates came to dominate the postwar South and obscure the true nature of Confederate ideology. Furthermore, it updates the biographies of familiar characters: John C. Calhoun, who befriended Bonapartist officers; Davis, who was as much a Francophile as his namesake, Thomas Jefferson; and Robert E. Lee, who as West Point's superintendent mentored a grand-nephew of Napoleon I.

The civil rights revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s transformed the literature on Reconstruction in America by emphasizing the social history of emancipation and the hopefulness that reunification would bring equality. Much of this revisionist work served to counter and correct the racist and pro-Confederate accounts of Reconstruction written in the early twentieth century. While there have been modern scholarly revisions of individual states, most are decades old, and Michael W. Fitzgerald's Reconstruction in Alabama is the first comprehensive reinterpretation of that state's history in over a century. Fitzgerald's work not only revises the existing troubling histories of the era, it also offers a compelling and innovative new look at the process of rebuilding Alabama following the war. Attending to an array of issues largely ignored until now, Fitzgerald's history begins by analyzing the differences over slavery, secession, and war that divided Alabama's whites, mostly along the lines of region and class. He examines the economic and political implications of defeat, focusing particularly on how freed slaves and their former masters mediated the postwar landscape. For a time, he suggests, whites and freedpeople coexisted mostly peaceably in some parts of the state under the Reconstruction government, as a recovering cotton economy bathed the plantation belt in profit. Later, when charting the rise and fall of the Republican Party, Fitzgerald shows that Alabama's new Republican government implemented an ambitious program of railroad subsidy, characterized by substantial corruption that eventually bankrupted the state and helped end Republican rule. He shows, however, that the state's freedpeople and their preferred leaders were not the major players in this arena: they had other issues that mattered to them far more, like public education, civil rights, voting rights, and resisting the Klan's terrorist violence. After Reconstruction ended, Fitzgerald suggests that white collective memory of the era fixated on black voting, big government, high taxes, and corruption, all of which buttressed the Jim Crow order in the state. This misguided understanding of the past encouraged Alabama's intransigence during the later civil rights era. Despite the power of faulty interpretations that united segregationists, Fitzgerald demonstrates that it was class and regional divisions over economic policy, as much as racial tension, that shaped the complex reality of Reconstruction in Alabama.

Much of the confusion about a central event in United States history begins with the name: the Civil War. In reality, the Civil War was not merely civil--meaning national--and not merely a war, but instead an international conflict of ideas as well as armies. Its implications transformed the U.S. Constitution and reshaped a world order, as political and economic systems grounded in slavery and empire clashed with the democratic process of republican forms of government. And it spilled over national boundaries, tying the United States together with Cuba, Spain, Mexico, Britain, and France in a struggle over the future of slavery and of republics. Here Gregory P. Downs argues that we can see the Civil War anew by understanding it as a revolution. More than a fight to preserve the Union and end slavery, the conflict refashioned a nation, in part by remaking its Constitution. More than a struggle of brother against brother, it entailed remaking an Atlantic world that centered in surprising ways on Cuba and Spain. Downs introduces a range of actors not often considered as central to the conflict but clearly engaged in broader questions and acts they regarded as revolutionary. This expansive canvas allows Downs to describe a broad and world-shaking war with implications far greater than often recognized.

For much of the Civil War, Virginia civilians struggled to keep their homes intact as they faced the threat of Union soldiers on their doorsteps. In this revised and expanded second-edition compilation of stories passed down by word-of-mouth from the generation that experienced that divisive war, Larry Chowning shows his talent for capturing the flavor of an era and the essence of its people. The stories of everyday life in a war zone show not just the fear but the courage, defiance, and ingenuity displayed by the people in Virginia's Tidewater region. While these chronicles are Southern, the same sort of narrative could have come from people in Pennsylvania, where Southern troops roamed.

When thousands of African Americans freed themselves from slavery during the American Civil War and launched the larger process of emancipation, hundreds of northern antislavery reformers traveled to the federally occupied South to assist them. The two groups brought views and practices from their backgrounds that both helped and hampered the transition out of slavery. While enslaved, many Blacks assumed a certain guarded demeanor when dealing with whites. In freedom, they resented northerners' paternalistic attitudes and preconceptions about race, leading some to oppose aid programs-included those related to education, vocational training, and religious and social activities-initiated by whites. Some interactions resulted in constructive cooperation and adjustments to curriculum, but the frequent disputes more often compelled Blacks to seek additional autonomy. In an exhaustive analysis of the relationship between the formerly enslaved and northern reformers, John Cimprich shows how the unusual circumstances of emancipation in wartime presented new opportunities and spawned social movements for change yet produced intractable challenges and limited results. Navigating Liberty serves as the first comprehensive study of the two groups' collaboration and conflict, adding an essential chapter to the history of slavery's end in the United States.

Antietam. For generations of Americans this word - the name of a bucolic stream in western Maryland - held the same sense of horror and carnage that the simple date 9/11 does for modern America. Even today, Antietam eclipses only this modern tragedy as America's single bloodiest day, on which 22,000 Americans became casualties in a war to determine our nation's future. Antietam is forever burned into the American psyche, a battle bathed in blood alone that served no military purpose, brought no decisive victory. This much Americans know. What they didn't know is why this is so face=Calibri>- until now. The Cornfield: Antietam's Bloody Turning Point for the first time tells the full story of the exciting struggle to control "the Cornfield," the action on which the costly battle of Antietam turned, in a thorough yet readable narrative. It explains what happened in Antietam's Cornfield and why. Because Federal and Confederate forces repeatedly traded control of the spot, the fight for the Cornfield is a story of human struggle against fearful odds, of men seeking to do their duty, of simply trying to survive. Many of the included first-hand accounts have never been revealed to modern readers and never have they been assembled in such a comprehensive, readable form. At the same time, The Cornfield offers fresh perspectives about the battle of Antietam, arguing that the battle turned on events in the Cornfield because of two central facts - that Union General George McClellan's linear thinking demanded that the Cornfield must be taken and that because of this, the repeated failure by the generals McClellan charged with fulfilling this task created a self-reinforcing cycle of disaster that doomed the Union's prospects for success - at the cost of thousands of lives. The Cornfield offers new perspectives that may be controversial - particularly to those who accept unchallenged the views of the battle's first historians and its generals, who too often sought to shape our understanding for their own purposes - but which certain to change modern understanding of how the battle of Antietam was fought and its role in American history.

"Ironclad against ironclad, we maneuvered about the bay here and went at each other with mutual fierceness," reported Chief Engineer Alban Stimers following that momentous engagement between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia (ex USS Merrimack) in Hampton Roads, Sunday, March 9, 1862. The day before, the Rebel ram had obliterated two powerful Union warships and was poised to destroy more. That night, the revolutionary - not to say bizarre - Monitor slipped into harbor after hurrying down from New York through fierce gales that almost sank her. These metal monstrosities dueled in the morning, pounding away for hours with little damage to either. Who won is still debated. One Vermont reporter could hardly find words for Monitor: "It is in fact unlike anything that ever floated on Neptune's bosom." The little vessel became an icon of American industrial ingenuity and strength. She redefined the relationship between men and machines in war. But beforehand, many feared she would not float. Captain John L. Worden: "Here was an unknown, untried vessel...an iron coffin-like ship of which the gloomiest predictions were made." The CSS Virginia was a paradigm of Confederate strategy and execution - the brainchild of innovative, dedicated, and courageous men, but the victim of hurried design, untested technology, poor planning and coordination, and a dearth of critical resources. Nevertheless, she obsolesced the entire U.S Navy, threatened the strategically vital blockade, and disrupted General McClellan's plans to take Richmond. From flaming, bloody decks of sinking ships, to the dim confines of the first rotating armored turret, to the smoky depths of a Rebel gundeck - with shells screaming, clanging, booming, and splashing all around - to the office of a worried president with his cabinet peering down the Potomac for a Rebel monster, this dramatic story unfolds through the accounts of men who lived it in Unlike Anything That Ever Floated: The Monitor and Virginia and the Battle of Hampton Roads, March 8-9, 1862 by Dwight Sturtevant Hughes.

This book fills a gap in Civil War literature on the strategies employed by the Union and Confederacy in the East, offering a more integrated interpretation of military operations that shows how politics, public perception, geography, and logistics shaped the course of military operations in the East. For all the literature about Civil War military operations and leadership, precious little has been written about strategy, particularly in what has become known as the eastern theater. Yet it is in this theater where the interaction of geography and logistics, politics and public opinion, battlefront and home front, and the conduct of military operations and civil-military relations can be highlighted in sharp relief. With opposing capitals barely 100 miles apart and with the Chesapeake Bay/tidewater area offering Union generals the same sorts of opportunities sought by Confederate leaders in the Shenandoah Valley, geography shaped military operations in fundamental ways: the very rivers that obstructed Union overland advances offered them the chance to outflank Confederate-prepared positions. If the proximity of the enemy capital proved too tempting to pass up, generals on each side were aware that a major mishap could lead to an enemy parade down the streets of their own capital city. Presidents, politicians, and the press peeked over the shoulders of military commanders, some of who were not reluctant to engage in their own intrigues as they promoted their own fortunes. The Civil War in the East does not rest upon new primary sources or an extensive rummaging through the mountains of material already available. Rather, it takes a fresh look at military operations and the assumptions that shaped them, and offers a more integrated interpretation of military operations that shows how politics, public perception, geography, and logistics shaped the course of military operations in the East. The eastern theater was indeed a theater of decision (and indecision), precisely because people believed that it was important. The presence of the capitals raised the stakes of victory and defeat; at a time when people viewed war in terms of decisive battles, the anticipation of victory followed by disappointment and persistent strategic stalemate characterized the course of events in the East.

Although it was the Civil War's second-largest battle, few books have been written about Chickamauga, and nothing like the thousands penned about the war's largest and bloodiest battle at Gettysburg. You can count on two hands the number of authors who have tackled Chickamauga in any depth, and most of their works cover the entire battle. Left unmined and mostly forgotten are the experiences of specific brigades or regiments or state-affiliated troops. Scott Mingus's and Joe Owen's Unceasing Fury: Texans at the Battle of Chickamauga, September 18-20, 1863, is the first full-length book to examine in detail the role of troops from the Lone Star State. Texas troops fought in almost every major sector of the sprawling Chickamauga battlefield - from the first attacks on September 18 on the bridges spanning the creek to the final attack on Snodgrass Hill on September 20, the third day of fighting. In between, Texas regiments launched attack after attack against Union lines at the Viniard farm, Poe Field, Kelly Field, and North Dyer Field. More than 4,400 Texans participated on foot and on horseback; one out of four fell there. Fortunately, many of the survivors left vivid descriptions of battle action, the anguish of losing friends, the pain and loneliness of being so far away from home, and their often-colorful opinions of their generals. The authors of this richly detailed study base their work on scores of personal accounts, memoirs, postwar newspaper articles, diaries, and other primary sources. Their meticulous work, which includes original maps, photos, and other illustrations, provides the first full exploration of the critical role Texas enlisted men and officers played in the three days of fighting near West Chickamauga Creek in September 1863. Unceasing Fury provides the Lone Star State soldiers with the recognition they have so long deserved.

When thousands of young men in the North and South marched off to fight in the Civil War, another army of men accompanied them to care for these soldiers' spiritual needs. In God's Presence explores how these two cohorts of men, Northern and Southern and mostly Christian, navigated the challenges of the Civil War on battlefields and in military camps, hospitals, and prisons. In wartime, military clergy-chaplains and missionaries-initially attempted to replicate the idyllic world of the antebellum church. Instead they found themselves constructing a new religious world-one in which static spaces customarily invested with religious meaning, such as houses and churches, gave way to dynamic sacred spaces defined by clergy to suit changing wartime circumstances. At the same time, the religious beliefs that soldiers brought from home differed from the religious practices that allowed them to endure during wartime. With reference to Civil War soldiers' diaries, letters, and memoirs, this book asks how clergy shaped these practices; how they might have differed from camp to battlefield, hospital, or prison; and how this experience affected postbellum religious belief and practice. Religion and war have always been at the center of the human condition, with warfare often leading to heightened religiosity. The Civil War cannot be fully explained without understanding religion's role in the conflict. In God's Presence advances this understanding by offering critical insight into the course and consequences of America's epochal fratricidal war.

Letters, journals, and government documents provide a glimpse of life during the Civil War from the Confederate point of view. Among selections from military leaders are General Beauregard's demand for the surrender of Fort Sumter and General Robert E. Lee's farewell to his troops. This volume focuses on the soldier's life, in camp and on the battlefield, and includes songs and historic photographs.

Gettysburg is widely considered to be the turning point of the Civil War and one of the most epic clashes of arms in all of military history, from the legendary stand of Joshua Chamberlain to the disastrous Pickett's Charge on the battle's third and final day. In this installment in the Battle Briefings series, Thomas Flagel provides an accessible and informative introduction to the battle.

Lens of War grew out of an invitation to leading historians of the Civil War to select and reflect upon a single photograph. Each could choose any image and interpret it in personal and scholarly terms. The result is a remarkable set of essays by twenty-seven scholars whose numerous volumes on the Civil War have explored military, cultural, political, African American, women's, and environmental history. The essays describe a wide array of photographs and present an eclectic approach to the assignment, organized by topic: Leaders, Soldiers, Civilians, Victims, and Places. Readers will rediscover familiar photographs and figures examined in unfamiliar ways, as well as discover little-known photographs that afford intriguing perspectives. All the images are reproduced with exquisite care. Readers fascinated by the Civil War will want this unique book on their shelves, and lovers of photography will value the images and the creative, evocative reflections offered in these essays.

The Civil War Relived in 40 Stories! Between the first shots fired at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, to Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, the nation was irrevocably changed, as were the lives of the soldiers and civilians who lived through the war. This is an extraordinary collection of stories about that epochal conflict, bringing the victories and defeats, the valor and the heartbreak, alive with personal intensity. Includes entries by: Ambrose Bierce Stephan Crane Mark Twain Abraham Lincoln Ulysses S. Grant Walt Whitman Frederick L. Hitchcock Louisa May Alcott Carlton McCarthy Abner Doubleday Theodore Roosevelt and many others.