"Leaps straight onto the roster of essential reading for anyone even vaguely interested in Grant and the Civil War." -Ron Chernow, author of Grant "Provides leadership lessons that can be obtained nowhere else... Ulysses Grant in his Memoirs gives us a unique glimpse of someone who found that the habit of reflection could serve as a force multiplier for leadership." -Thomas E. Ricks, Foreign Policy Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs, sold door-to-door by former Union soldiers, were once as ubiquitous in American households as the Bible. Mark Twain and Henry James hailed them as great literature, and countless presidents credit Grant with influencing their own writing. This is the first comprehensively annotated edition of Grant's memoirs, clarifying the great military leader's thoughts on his life and times through the end of the Civil War and offering his invaluable perspective on battlefield decision making. With annotations compiled by the editors of the Ulysses S. Grant Association's Presidential Library, this definitive edition enriches our understanding of the pre-war years, the war with Mexico, and the Civil War. Grant provides essential insight into how rigorously these events tested America's democratic institutions and the cohesion of its social order. "What gives this peculiarly reticent book its power? Above all, authenticity... Grant's style is strikingly modern in its economy." -T. J. Stiles, New York Times "It's been said that if you're going to pick up one memoir of the Civil War, Grant's is the one to read. Similarly, if you're going to purchase one of the several annotated editions of his memoirs, this is the collection to own, read, and reread." -Library Journal

In Rebel Salvation, Kathleen Zebley Liulevicius examines pardon petitions from former Confederate soldiers and sympathizers in Tennessee to craft a unique and comprehensive analysis of the process of Reconstruction in the Volunteer State after the Civil War. These underutilized petitions contain a wealth of information about Tennesseans from an array of social and economic backgrounds, and include details about many residents who would otherwise not appear in the historical record. They reveal the dynamics at work between multiple factions in the state: former Rebels, Unionists, Governor William G. Brownlow, and the U.S. Army officers responsible for ushering Tennessee back into the Union. The pardons also illuminate the reality of the politically and emotionally charged post-Civil War environment, where everyone-from wealthy elites to impoverished sharecroppers-who had fought, supported, or expressed sympathy for the Confederacy was required by law to sue for pardon to reclaim certain privileges. All such requests arrived at the desk of President Andrew Johnson, who ultimately determined which petitioners regained the right to vote, hold office, practice law, operate a business, and buy and sell land. Those individuals filing petitions experienced Reconstruction in personal and profound ways. Supplicants wrote and circulated their exoneration documents among loyalist neighbors, friends, and Union officers to obtain favorable endorsements that might persuade Brownlow and Johnson to grant pardon. Former Rebels relayed narratives about the motivating factors compelling them to side with the Confederacy, chronicled their actions during the war, expressed repentance, and pledged allegiance to the United States government and the Constitution. Although not required, many petitioners even sought recommendations from their former wartime foes. The pardoning of former Confederates proved a collaborative process in which neighbors, acquaintances, and erstwhile enemies lodged formal pleas to grant or deny clemency from state and federal officials. Indeed, as Rebel Salvation reveals, the long road to peace began here in the newly reunited communities of postwar Tennessee.

The Civil War was the greatest health disaster the United States has ever experienced, killing more than a million Americans and leaving many others invalided or grieving. Poorly prepared to care for wounded and sick soldiers as the war began, Union and Confederate governments scrambled to provide doctoring and nursing, supplies, and shelter for those felled by warfare or disease. During the war soldiers suffered from measles, dysentery, and pneumonia and needed both preventive and curative food and medicine. Family members - especially women - and governments mounted organized support efforts, while army doctors learned to standardize medical thought and practice. Resources in the north helped return soldiers to battle, while Confederate soldiers suffered hunger and other privations and healed more slowly, when they healed at all. In telling the stories of soldiers, families, physicians, nurses, and administrators, historian Margaret Humphreys concludes that medical science was not as limited at the beginning of the war as has been portrayed. Medicine and public health clearly advanced during the war-and continued to do so after military hostilities ceased.

The wives of Civil war commanders had widely divergent roles in their marriages before, during, and after the war - some wives changed their roles as their husbands gained prominence. Most of the wives of military commanders in this collection sought to have some influence over their husband's professional career with mixed success. Carol Bleser strongly asserts that Varina Davis's role in running the Confederate government was much larger than many have previously believed. Shirley Leckie depicts Libbie Custer using her considerable charisma and charm to win political support for her husband and promote the Boy General. Virginia Jeans Laas finds Elizabeth Blair Lee continuously counseling her husband on military affairs and using her powerful family connections to help her husband's naval career. Jessie Fremont was essentially her husband's unofficial chief of staff, even going so far as to pay a visit to Abraham Lincoln to urge him to intervene on behalf of General Fremont. Lizinka Ewell similarly swayed her husband with military advice, pressuring him to keep her son out of harm's way in battle. However, there were limits to these wives' influence. Libbie Custer seemed always careful not to overstep her bounds; Lizinka Ewell, Varina Davis and Jessie Fremont each received harsh reminders of their limitations as women when they tried to overstep traditional gender roles and intercede on their husbands' behalf. Mary Lee, Amelia Gorgas, Julia Grant and Ellen Sherman seemed to fit the more traditional female role of nurturing to their husbands privately, but they were important confidantes who provided emotional support necessary to sustain their husbands on the battlefield. Emory Thomas demonstrates that General Lee regularly confided to his wife, Mary, military details from the front; Ellen Sherman and Julia Grant habitually acted as soothing tonics to their husbands during difficult times especially early in the war, when both men were under a good deal of public scrutiny. John Marszalek argues that Sherman regulary ignored his wife's advice. Yet, Ellen Sherman, like Jessie Fremont, boldly visited the president herself in hopes of gaining Lincoln's support in countering the harsh accusations hurled at her husband. Amelia Gorgas became the family's primary caregiver and financial support when a stroke incapacitated her husband Josiah. After his death, she continued to work to support herself and their family with her own income. Their son, William Crawford Gorgas, who eliminated yellow fever from the Panama Canal region, attributed much of his success in life to his mother. For other wives, their influence was not as apparent during the war as after - especially after their husbands' deaths. Mary Anna Jackson, La Salle Corbell Pickett and Libbie Custer became professional widows of military commanders who devoted their long lives after their husbands' deaths to promoting a romaniticized image of their husbands, their marriages and themselves. Jennifer Lund Smith states that Fannie Chamberlain was unqualified to counsel her husband: but none of the other wives in this collection were formally qualified as political or military advisors. These women, like women of most any time and place, had spheres of influence, intimate strategies, outside formal, exclusively male modes of official military and political communication. General Chamberlain's wife however honestly seemed indifferent to her husband's military career. This study brings the field of Women's Studies to Civil War history to show that their were many cultural battles simultaneously occurring on the homefront.

This book examines the complexities of life for African Americans in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. Although the Valley was a site of fierce conflicts during the Civil War and its military activity has been extensively studied, scholars have largely ignored the Black experience in the region until now.Correcting previous assumptions that slavery was not important to the Valley, and that enslaved people were treated better here than in other parts of the South, Jonathan Noyalas demonstrates the strong hold of slavery in the region. He explains that during the war, enslaved and free African Americans navigated a borderland that changed hands frequently-where it was possible to be in Union territory one day, Confederate territory the next, and no-man's land another. He shows that the region's enslaved population resisted slavery and supported the Union war effort by serving as scouts, spies, and laborers, or by fleeing to enlist in regiments of the United States Colored Troops. Noyalas draws on untapped primary resources, including thousands of records from the Freedmen's Bureau and newspapers, to continue the story and reveal the challenges African Americans faced from former Confederates after the war. He traces their actions, which were shaped uniquely by the volatility of the struggle in this region, to ensure that the war's emancipationist legacy would survive.

Your Heritage Will Still Remain details how Mississippians, black and white, constructed their social identity in the aftermath of the crises that transformed the state beginning with the sectional conflict and ending in the late nineteenth century. Michael J. Goleman focuses primarily on how Mississippians thought of their place: asAmericans, as Confederates, or as both. In the midst of secession, white Mississippians held firm to an American identity and easily transformed it into a Confederateidentity venerating their version of American heritage. After the war, black Mississippians tried to etch their place within the Union and as part of transformed American society. Yet they continually faced white supremacist hatred and backlash. During Reconstruction, radical transformations within the state forced all Mississippiansto embrace, deny, or rethink their standing within the Union. Tracing the evolution of Mississippians' social identity from 1850 through the end of the century uncovers why white Mississippians felt the need to create the Lost Cause legend. With personal letters, diaries and journals, newspaper editorials, traveler's accounts, memoirs, reminiscences, and personal histories as its sources, Your Heritage Will Still Remain offers insights into the white creation of Mississippi's Lost Cause and into the battle for black social identity. It goes on to show how these cultural hallmarks continue to impact the state even now.

In the same tradition as Lincoln and the Second American Revolution and Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the Civil War, Pulitzer-prize winner James M. McPherson has gathered an illuminating collection of essays that reflect his latest thinking on the Civil War. Filled with new interpretations and fresh scholarship, these essays address many of the most enduring questions and provocative debates about the Civil War. In some, McPherson distills the wisdom of many years of teaching and writing about the meaning of the war and about slavery and its abolition. In others, he makes use of primary research that breaks new ground on such topics as Confederate military strategy, foreign views of the war, soldiers and the press, the failure of peace negotiations to end the war, and Southern efforts to shape a heroic memory of the war. The selection will include several never-before-published essays, including one on General Robert E. Lee's goals in the Gettysburg campaign, and another on Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief. The book also features a typescript of McPherson's 2000 National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture about Lincoln's legacy that has never been published in its complete form. As a whole, these essays provide a rich interpretive history of the Civil War and its meaning for America - indeed for the world.

From the Introduction...The writer of the following sketch does not attempt, in the space assigned him, to give a complete history of the various commands of Carolinians, who for four years did gallant and noble service in the armies of the Confederacy. A faithful record of their names alone would fill the pages of a volume, and to write a history of their marches and battles, their wounds and suffering, their willing sacrifices, and their patient endurance, would demand more accurate knowledge, more time and more ability than the author of this sketch can command. He trusts that in the brief history which follows he has been able to show that South Carolina did her duty to herself and to the Southern Confederacy, and did it nobly.

The pivotal era of Reconstruction has inspired an outstanding historical literature. In the half-century after W.E.B. DuBois published Black Reconstruction in America (1935), a host of thoughtful and energetic authors helped to dismantle racist stereotypes about the aftermath of emancipation and Union victory in the Civil War. The resolution of long-running interpretive debates shifted the issues at stake in Reconstruction scholarship, but the topic has remained a vital venue for original exploration of the American past. In Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, eight rising historians survey the latest generation of work and point to promising directions for future research. They show that the field is opening out to address a wider range of adjustments to the experiences and effects of Civil War. Increased interest in cultural history now enriches understandings traditionally centered on social and political history. Attention to gender has joined a focus on labor as a powerful strategy for analyzing negotiations over private and public authority. The contributors suggest that Reconstruction historiography might further thrive by strengthening connections to such subjects as western history, legal history, and diplomatic history, and by redefining the chronological boundaries of the postwar period. The essays provide more than a variety of attractive vantage points for fresh examination of a major phase of American history. By identifying the most exciting recent approaches to a theme previously studied so ably, the collection illuminates the creative process in scholarly historical literature.

The time frame is 19th century to the opening of the Civil War and the question the author attempts to elucidate is "What is the nature of Southern culture and Negro$white relations?" The perspective from which an answer is attempted is sometimes that of psychoanalysis.

Winner of the Myrna F. Bernath Book Award "A stunning accomplishment...As the Trump administration works to expatriate naturalized U.S. citizens, understanding the history of individual rights and state power at the heart of Under the Starry Flag could not be more important." -Passport "A brilliant piece of historical writing as well as a real page-turner. Salyer seamlessly integrates analysis of big, complicated historical questions-allegiance, naturalization, citizenship, politics, diplomacy, race, and gender-into a gripping narrative." -Kevin Kenny, author of The American Irish In 1867 forty Irish American freedom fighters, outfitted with guns and ammunition, sailed to Ireland to join the effort to end British rule. They were arrested for treason as soon as they landed. The Fenians, as they were called, claimed to be American citizens, but British authorities insisted that they remained British subjects. Following the Civil War, the Fenian crisis dramatized the question of whether citizenship should be considered an inalienable right. This gripping legal saga, a prelude to today's immigration battles, raises important questions about immigration, citizenship, and who deserves to be protected by the law.

Company F, 1st Regiment Rhode Island Volunteers
by Charles H. Clarke
Company E, 6th Minnesota Regiment of Volunteer Infantry
by Alfred J. Hill
Two bands of brothers in blue
The American Civil War was fought in the middle of the nineteenth century between a common English speaking people who were often literate to a standard unknown to previous generations. Most of the participants-on both sides-were deeply committed to their respective causes and were fiercely proud of the units in which they served by virtue of their close connections to their own states, counties and towns. Nothing could be more guaranteed to provide posterity-in a time before technological communication-with a plethora of books chronicling the event from every perspective. Histories of Civil War units abound as do personal accounts. The subjects of this book concern the activities of companies of men-the most intimate of military histories. They have been brought together because of their comparatively short lengths and for reasons of good value. Nevertheless, those interested in the conflict from a Union perspective and those especially interested in the doings of the forces from Rhode Island and Minnesota will find much to engage them within these pages. Available in soft cover and hard cover with dust jacket.

This Civil War enthusiast's sourcebook organizes the crucial details of the war in an inventive format designed to enhance the reader's knowledge base and big-picture understanding of key events and outcomes. The war's causes, political and economic issues, important personalities, campaigns and battles are examined. Nearly 200 reader challenges stimulate review of critical moments, with suggested reading for further exploration. Photographs and maps have been carefully selected to supplement the topic being explored.

Sixty years after the Civil War, the 121st New York Volunteers (Upton's Regulars) finally published a history of their regiment. Its stated author was a man who had not served directly with the 121st but had based the book on a memoir written by a survivor who had enlisted at age 15. That boy, Dewitt Clinton Beckwith, published his memoir thirty years after the war in an obscure upstate New York newspaper, The Mohawk Democrat. For years, the "origin story" lay in plain sight, until editor Salvatore Cilella discovered the memoir while performing research for a regimental history. The original 53 weekly installments, edited and annotated here, richly detail the horrors and folly of war. They reveal the slow maturation and survival of a boy thrust into nearly four years of war. Beckwith describes his various Tom Sawyer-like adventures with the VI Corps of the Army of the Potomac, dealing with death, disease, loss and ultimate elation at Lee's surrender, which was only tempered by Abraham Lincoln's death. Beckwith was present at nearly all the historic Eastern Theater engagements from Antietam to Appomattox, including an abortive stint with the 91st New York in Florida in 1861.

The Civil War is often credited with giving birth to the modern American state. The demands of warfare led to the centralization of business and industry and to an unprecedented expansion of federal power. But the Civil War did more than that: as Melinda Lawson shows, it brought about a change in American national identity, redefining the relationship between the individual and the government.

Though much has been written about the Civil War and the making of the political and economic American nation, this is the first comprehensive study of the role that the war played in the shaping of the cultural and ideological nation-state. In Patriot Fires, Lawson explains how, when threatened by the rebellious South, the North came together as a nation and mobilized its populace for war.
With no formal government office to rally citizens, the job of defining the war in patriotic terms fell largely to private individuals or associations, each with their own motives and methods. Lawson explores how these "interpreters" of the war helped instill in Americans a new understanding of loyalty to country. Through efforts such as sanitary fairs to promote the welfare of soldiers, the war bond drives of Jay Cooke, and the establishment of Union Leagues, Northerners cultivated a new sense of patriotism rooted not just in the subjective American idea, but in existing religious, political, and cultural values. Moreover, Democrats and Republicans, Abolitionists, and Abraham Lincoln created their own understandings of American patriotism and national identity, raising debates over the meaning of the American "idea" to new heights.

Examining speeches, pamphlets, pageants, sermons, and assemblies, Lawson shows how citizens and organizations constructed a new kind of nationalism based on a nation of Americans rather than a union of states--a European-styled nationalism grounded in history and tradition and celebrating the preeminence of the nation-state.

Original in its insights and innovative in its approach, "Patriot Fires" is an impressive work of cultural and intellectual history. As America engages in new conflicts around the globe, Lawson shows us that issues addressed by nation builders of the nineteenth century are relevant once again as the meaning of patriotism continues to be explored.

Sixteen dark and vivid selections by great satirist and short-story writer. "A Horseman in the Sky," "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "Chickamauga," "A Son of the Gods," "What I Saw of Shiloh," "Four Days in Dixie" and 10 more. Masterly tales offer excellent examples of Bierce's dark pessimism and storytelling power. Note.