The "magisterial" (The New York Times Book Review) second volume of Sidney Blumenthal's acclaimed, landmark biography, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, reveals the future president's genius during the most decisive period of his political life when he seizes the moment, finds his voice, and helps create a new political party. In 1849, Abraham Lincoln seems condemned to political isolation and defeat. His Whig Party is broken in the 1852 election, and disintegrates. His perennial rival, Stephen Douglas, forges an alliance with the Southern senators and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. Violent struggle breaks out on the plains of Kansas, a prelude to the Civil War. Lincoln rises to the occasion. Only he can take on Douglas in Illinois. He finally delivers the dramatic speech that leaves observers stunned. In 1855, he makes a race for the Senate against Douglas, which he loses when he throws his support to a rival to prevent the election of a proslavery candidate. In Wrestling With His Angel, Sidney Blumenthal explains how Lincoln and his friends operate behind the scenes to destroy the anti-immigrant party in Illinois to clear the way for a new Republican Party. Lincoln takes command and writes its first platform and vaults onto the national stage as the leader of a party that will launch him to the presidency. The Washington Monthly hailed Blumenthal's Volume I as, "splendid...no one can come away from reading A Self-Made Man without eagerly anticipating the ensuing volumes." Pulitzer Prize-winning author Diane McWhorter hailed Volume II as "dramatic narrative history, prophetic and intimate." Wrestling With His Angel brings Lincoln from the wilderness to the peak of his career as he is determined to enter into the battle for the nation's soul and to win it for democracy.

Most observers and historians rarely acknowledge the history of civil rights predating the twentieth-century. The book Black Rights in the Reconstruction Era pays significant scholarly attention to the intellectual ferment-legal and political-of the nineteenth-century by tracing the history of black Americans' civil rights to the postbellum era. By revisiting its faulty foundational history, this book lends itself to show that, after emancipation, national and local struggles for racial equality had led to the encoding of racism in the political order in the American South and the proliferation of racism as an American institution.Vanessa Holloway draws upon a host of historical, legal, and philosophical studies as well as legislative histories to construct a coherent theory of the law's relevance to the era, questioning how the nexus of race and politics should be interpreted during Reconstruction. Anchored in the Reconstruction Amendments, Supreme Court decisions and landmark statutes of the 1860s and 1870s-the Black Codes, the Freedmen's Bureau, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Reconstruction Acts, the Enforcement Acts, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875-Black Rights in the Reconstruction Era offers a new perspective on the political history of law between the years 1865 and 1877. It is predominant in the ongoing debates on social justice and racial inequality.

In 1861, Americans thought that the war looming on their horizon would be brief. None foresaw that they were embarking on our nation's worst calamity, a four-year bloodbath that cost the lives of more than half a million people. But as eminent Civil War historian Emory Thomas points out in this stimulating and provocative book, once the dogs of war are unleashed, it is almost impossible to rein them in. In The Dogs of War, Thomas highlights the delusions that dominated each side's thinking. Lincoln believed that most Southerners loved the Union, and would be dragged unwillingly into secession by the planter class. Jefferson Davis could not quite believe that Northern resolve would survive the first battle. Once the Yankees witnessed Southern determination, he hoped, they would acknowledge Confederate independence. These two leaders, in turn, reflected widely held myths. Thomas weaves his exploration of these misconceptions into a tense narrative of the months leading up to the war, from the "Great Secession Winter" to a fast-paced account of the Fort Sumter crisis in 1861. Emory M. Thomas's books demonstrate a breathtaking range of major Civil War scholarship, from The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience and the landmark The Confederate Nation, to definitive biographies of Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart. In The Dogs of War, he draws upon his lifetime of study to offer a new perspective on the outbreak of our national Iliad.

This title, first published in 1995, explores the history of the American Missionary Association (AMA) - an abolitionist group founded in New York in 1846, whose primary focus was to abolish slavery, to promote racial equality and Christian values and to educate African Americans. This title will be of interest to students of history and education.

Our Battery; or the Journal of Company B, 1st O. V. A.
by O. P. Cutter
A Battery at Close Quarters
by Henry M. Neil
Ohio Gunners-two vital accounts in one volume
Gunners for the Union brings together two intimate views of the Ohio Volunteer Artillery. Books concerning the artillery of the Union army are necessarily-and for obvious reasons-fewer in number than those of the infantry or cavalry, so this special Leonaur edition is particularly useful. One of the accounts is quite small and would probably not have seen re-publication in its own right. The first, Our Battery, concerns the first regiment, and the second, A Battery at Close Quarters, the eleventh regiment. In Our Battery the reader joins author O. P Cutter and the 1st Ohio Volunteer Artillery at the engagements of Wild Cat, Mill Springs, Perryville, Stones River and Chickamauga. The story of Company B is entertainingly recounted and the book concludes with a roster role which will be useful to historians and genealogists. In Henry Neil's shorter account of the 11th, A Battery at Close Quarters, we read of the actions of his battery of guns at Iuka and Corinth. Following Neil's account is 'An Army Experience, ' by John B. Sandborn, the Commanding Officer of the First Brigade, Seventh Division, Army of Tennessee. This is another eyewitness account of the Iuka and Corinth battles that describes Captain Neil's part in them. It was originally published in 1884 in the St Paul Pioneer Press newspaper of Minnesota. Keenly observed by an onlooker at the scene it is a valuable contribution to both this book and the historical record.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

Captain George N. Bliss experienced almost every aspect of the Civil War, except death. As an officer in the First Rhode Island Cavalry, Bliss engaged in some twenty-seven actions. He miraculously survived a skirmish in Waynesboro, Virginia, in September 1864, when he single-handedly charged into the Black Horse Cavalry. Badly injured and taken prisoner, Bliss was consigned to the notorious Libby Prison in Richmond. Midway through the war, Bliss also served for nine months at a Conscript Camp in Connecticut, where he sat on several courts-martial. Bliss richly detailed his war experiences in letters to his close friend, David Gerald, who lived in Rhode Island. In absolute candor, Bliss expressed his opinions on many topics and related a plethora of firsthand details. A colorful writer, he also penned dispatches from the field for a Providence newspaper. Meticulously transcribed and annotated, this collection of letters is unusual because Bliss did not mask the devastation and challenges of his intense wartime experiences as he might have done in writing to a family member. In conclusion, the editors describe how, following the war, Bliss sought out the Confederates who almost killed him, forming personal relationships that lasted for decades.

"More Civil War Curiosities" contains strange but true stories from the four-year conflict that raged across a one-thousand-mile battle front with more than three million men in uniform. Anything could and often did happen. Webb Garrison recounts instances of friendly fire casualties, the unperfected art of spying, banishments and deportings, grisly tales of missing limbs, name changes for both people and ships, disguises that worked (and some that did not), and many "firsts" and "lasts."

Fragging, or purposely killing a fellow soldier, was the probable cause of the death of Thomas Wilson, a tyrannical Federal general. He died in action at the battle of Baton Rouge when, according to one account, he was seized by a group of his own men who held him in front of a cannon before it was fired at the enemy.

When Confederate Gen. Jubal Early marched on Frederick, Maryland, he offered not to torch the town for a payment of $200,000. It took the townspeople a day to borrow the money―and 87 years to pay it back. When Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, failed to raise a ransom of $500,000, Early's subordinate, Gen. John McCausland, burned the town to the ground.

The arm of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson was amputated when he was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville. Following the operation, Jackson's corps chaplain gave the arm a respectful burial―complete with a gravestone―in his family's cemetery. When the general died a week later, the rest of him was buried in Lexington, Virginia.

Hiram Ulysses Grant was mistakenly listed as Ulysses Simpson Grant by the congressman appointing him to West Point. Grant did not protest, and the name stayed with him all the way to the presidency of the United States.

If Americans were asked to select the best known and most celebrated outlaws, from among the many bad men produced by the Wild West, chances are Frank and Jesse James would be the choice of most people. The infamous brothers from Missouri, sided with the Confederacy and rode with with maurading guerrillas during the Civil War. Having learned to shoot and kill without moral compunction, they quickly and easily transitioned from Rebel fighters to daring outlaws, making their living by stealing from others. The brothers and their gang, that often included Cole Younger, robbed stage coaches, banks and trains in Missouri and surrounding states. But was the bank robbery in Northfield, Minnesota, the bank robbery gone wrong, followed by an amazing and improbable escape through Minnesota, Dakota and Iowa, that changed the James brothers from ordinary outlaws to legendary characters. The long, hard ride home, was a journey that took them into both history and folklore. And from time to time, like galloping ghosts, they emerge with guns ablazing.

When General E. A. Paine assumed command of the military District of Western Kentucky at Paducah in the summer of 1864, he encountered an unwelcoming and defiant populace, a thriving black market and an undisciplined army plagued by low morale. Outside the picket lines, armed guerrillas were pillaging towns, terrorizing citizens and even murdering the vocal few that supported the Union. Paine was assigned the impossible task to cure the district's many ailments and defend a hostile area that covered over 2,300 square miles. In less than two months, he succeeded where past commanders had failed. To the region's secessionist majority, Paine's tenure was a "reign of terror;" to the Unionist minority, it was a "happy and jubilant" time. An abolitionist, Paine supported the Emancipation Proclamation, promoted the enlistment of African American troops and encouraged fair wages to former slaves. These principled views, however, led to his downfall. His critics and enemies wanted him out. Falsified reports led to his removal from command and court martial. Paine was exonerated on all but one minor charge, yet generations of local and state historians perpetuated the Paine-the-monster myth. This book tells the true story of General E. A. Paine.

The 30th North Carolina Infantry is the story of civilian-soldiers and their families during the Civil War. This narrative follows a regiment of Carolinians from their mustering-in ceremony to the war's final moments at Appomattox. These Tar Heels had the unique distinction of shooting at Abraham Lincoln on July 12, 1864, when the President stood upon the ramparts of Ft. Stevens, outside Washington D. C., as well as earning the right to say they fired the last regimental volley of the Army of Northern Virginia. The Tar Heels tell their stories through the use of over 2,000 quotes, enabling us to hear what they experienced and felt. The 30th North Carolina follows these Carolinians as they changed from exhilarated volunteers to battle-hardened veterans. They rushed to join the regiment, proclaiming, ""we will whip the Yankees, or give them a right to a small part of our soil, say 2 feet by 6 feet."" Later, once the Tar Heels experienced combat, their attitudes changed. One rifleman recorded; ""we came to a Yankee field hospital...we moved piles of arms, feet, hands, all amputated from hundreds of wounded human bodies."" Then, by 1865, the regiment's survivors reflected upon what they had experienced and questioned, ""I wonder--when and if I return home--will I be able to fit in?"" The 30th North Carolina is an intensely personal account based upon the Carolinians' letters, journals, memoirs, official reports, personnel records, and family histories. It is a powerful account of courage and sacrifice.

Here, for the first time, the fighting done by Hilliard's Legion, a part of Archibald Gracie's Brigade of Alabama Confederates, is examined in detail. Lee Elder's research shows conclusively that Gracie's command was never forced from the berm at the top of the Horseshoe Ridge and that some men from Hilliard's Legion penetrated to the top of the Ridge. Using period sources not generally cited by other researchers, including letters from Legion members, this study sheds new light on the Legion's role in the conclusion of the battle. It spotlights the previously untold history of a small number of Gracie's men who joined another Confederate brigade in the final movement of the battle that resulted in the surrender of more than 200 Union soldiers. Readers will explore some of the controversies surrounding the Battle of Chickamauga, and follow the Legion's history before and after it climbed Horseshoe Ridge. The notation on a Congressional Medal of Honor is corrected and the Legion's post-war contributions are explored. The text is followed by a complete roster of Hilliard's Legion with biographical notes on most of the soldiers.

From the little-known Filibuster Wars to the Civil War battlefield of Gaines' Mill, this volume details the fascinating story of one of the South's most colorful military units, the 1st Louisiana Special Battalion, aka Wheat's Tigers. Beginning with a brief look at the Filibuster Wars (a set of military attempts to annex Latin American countries into the United States as slave states), the work takes a close look at the men who comprised Wheat's Tigers: Irish immigrant ship hands, New Orleans dock workers and Filibuster veterans. Commanded by one of the greatest antebellum filibusterers, Chatham Roberdeau Wheat, the Tigers quickly distinguished themselves in battle through their almost reckless bravery, proving instrumental in Southern victories at the battles of Front Royal, Winchester and Port Republic. An in-depth look at Battle of Gaines' Mill, in which Wheat's Tigers suffered heavy casualties, including their commander, completes the story. Appendices provide a compiled roster of the Wheat's Tigers, a look at the 1st Louisiana's uniforms and a copy of Wheat's report about the Battle of Manassas. Never-before-published photographs are also included.

The U.S. government's Indian Policy evolved during the 19th century, culminating in the expulsion of the American Indians from their ancestral homelands. Much has been written about Andrew Jackson and the removal of the Five Nations from the American Southeast to present-day Oklahoma. Yet little attention had been paid to the policies of the Lincoln administration and their consequences. The Civil War was catastrophic for the natives of the Indian Territory. More battles were waged in the Indian Territory than in any other theater of the war, and the Five Nations' betrayal by the U.S. government ultimately lead to the destruction of their homes, their sovereignty and their identity.

William Edmondson "Grumble" Jones was among the most notable Southwest Virginians to fight in the Civil War. The Washington County native graduated from Emory & Henry College and West Point. While an officer in the "Old Army," he watched helplessly as his wife drowned during the wreck of the steamship Independence. He resigned his commission in 1857. Resuming his military career as a Confederate officer, he was a mentor to the legendary John Singleton Mosby. His many battles included a clash with George Armstrong Custer near Gettysburg. An internal dispute with his commanding general, J.E.B. Stuart, resulted in Jones' court-martial in 1863. He rejoined the war during the 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign and died in battle, leaving a mixed legacy.

This lavishly illustrated, richly detailed book presents, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of Minnesota's contribution to the nation's epic struggle during the Civil War. From diaries and letters, diaries and newspaper accounts, the words of the men who fought convey the terror of battle, the drudgery of marching, the fear of death, and the honour of camaraderie. In addition to the extensive use of first-hand accounts of the war, this book contains many seldom-seen contemporary photographs, portraits and artefacts drawn from the Minnesota Historical Society's outstanding collections.

Hemp helped not only to define economic development in southern and border-states, it also played a crucial role in agricultural production in the Mid-Atlantic, as well as industrial development in the North-east. From the founding of the nation, the manufacture of American hemp helped monetize the US economy. US hemp producers also established a range modern labor practices, including the identification and training of skilled labor, the use of seasonal workers, and ultimately, the creation of a sliding scale of wages. This book chronicles this history, as well as the contemporary controversy obstructing the production of both industrial hemp and medical marijuana. The analysis concludes with a survey of current industrial hemp projects, including several promising adaptations - as a potential medicine, a bio-fuel, and most promisingly, a reliable source of clean computing fabrication.

When Mount Auburn opened as the first "rural" cemetery in the United States in 1831, it represented a new way for Americans to think about burial sites. It broke with conventional notions about graveyards as places to bury and commemorate the dead. Rather, the founders of Mount Auburn and the spate of similar cemeteries that followed over the next three decades before the Civil War created institutions that they envisioned being used by the living in new ways. Cemeteries became places for leisure, communing with nature, and creating a version of collective memory. In fact, these cemeteries reflected changing values and attitudes of Americans spanning much of the nineteenth century. In the process, they became paradoxical: they were "rural" yet urban, natural yet designed, artistic yet industrial, commemorating the dead yet used by the living. The Rural Cemetery Movement: Places of Paradox in Nineteenth-Century America breaks new ground in the history of cemeteries in the nineteenth century. This book examines these "rural" cemeteries modeled after Mount Auburn that were founded between the 1830s and 1850s. As such, it provides a new way of thinking about these spaces and new paradigm for seeing and visiting them. While they fulfilled the sacred function of burial, they were first and foremost businesses. The landscape and design, regulation of gravestones, appearance, and rhetoric furthered their role as a business that provided necessary services in cities that went well beyond merely burying bodies. They provided urban green spaces and respites from urban life, established institutions where people could craft their roles in collective memory, and served as prototypes for both urban planning and city parks. These cemeteries grew and thrived in the second half of the nineteenth century; for most, the majority of their burials came before 1910. This expansion of cemeteries coincided with profound urban growth in the United States. Unlike their predecessors, founders of these burial grounds intended them to be used in many ways that reflected their views and values about nature, life and death, and relationships. Emphasis on worldly accomplishments increased with industrialization and growth in the United States, which was reflected in changing ways people commemorated their dead during the period under this study. Thus, these cemeteries are a prism through which to understand the values, attitudes, and culture of urban America from mid-century through the Progressive Era.

This regimental history follows the 111th New York Volunteer Infantry's service from muster through victory. Drawing on many first-hand accounts and primary sources, it provides details on the towns from which the regiment was organized and the backgrounds of the men who served in its ranks. Battles in which the regiment fought, including Harpers Ferry, Gettysburg and Petersburg, are covered in detail, with close unit-level coverage as well as information on the overall strategy and the regiment's place in the greater conflict. An appendix covers in depth the October 1864 capture of 83 111th soldiers by the Confederacy and their subsequent imprisonment, during which many died from hunger and disease.

Thousands of men suffered and died in the massive orgy of gunfire and death that historians call the Civil War. Most have received little or no recognition for their service and sacrifice. On the other hand, the battle deaths of brothers Robert L. and Daniel McCook, Jr., from Ohio, got the full attention of an aroused nation, and the news media, because of the tragic and dramatic manner of their deaths along with their family's social status and political connections. The brothers came from a family that was known throughout the nation as "the Fighting McCooks." After serving at Shiloh and Chickamauga, Col. Daniel McCook was mortally wounded while leading his brigade, including the 52nd Ohio Infantry regiment, in an ill-advised and reckless assault up Georgia's Kennesaw Mountain in June of 1864. McCook was following the orders of his friend and former law partner, General W. T. Sherman. Brigadier General Robert L. McCook organized the 9th Ohio Infantry Regiment and distinguished himself in the western Virginia campaign. In the summer of 1862, he was shot and killed by a Rebel cavalryman while he was riding in an ambulance in northern Alabama. Because it was believed that his death was at the hands of a bushwhacker, it set off a firestorm of anger and outrage throughout the North.

Of the 192 Union military hospitals during the Civil War, 19 circulated self-published newspapers. Editorial policies ranged from defanging copperhead Democrats to providing a record of soldiers' experiences. The horrors of wound infection and amputation were reported in the words of surgeons, medical students, nurses and patients. Those who experienced the war wrote about it in simple narrative, providing insight into wartime health care and a broader understanding of their sacrifices. Convalescent life was painful and terrifying. Surviving fever or bed-ridden for months with festering wounds, disabled veterans wondered who would respond to their needs. Who would hire them? Who would marry them? Relationships with sweethearts, wives and mothers, blacks, Irish and Confederates were frequent subjects. This book covers the founding and development of nine hospital newspapers, each explored by subject matter: patriotism, politics, religion, satire, romance and marriage, battlefield experience and treatment of prisoners of war.

"The Port Royal Experiment" builds on classic scholarship to present not a historical narrative but a study of what is now called development and nation-building. The Port Royal Experiment was a joint governmental and private effort begun during the Civil War to transition former slaves to freedom and self-sufficiency. Port Royal Harbor and the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina were liberated by Union Troops in 1861. As the Federal advance began, the white plantation owners and residents fled, abandoning approximately 10,000 black slaves. Several private Northern charity organizations stepped in to help the former slaves become self-sufficient. Nonetheless, the Point Royal Experiment was only a mixed success and was contested by efforts to restore the status quo of white dominance. Return to home rule then undid much of what the experiment accomplished.

While the concept of development is subject to a range of interpretations, in this context it means positive, continuously improving, and sustained change across a variety of human social conditions. Clearly such an effort was at the heart of the Port Royal Experiment. While the term "nation-building" may seem misplaced given that no "nation" was the beneficiary of these efforts, the requirement to build institutions critical to nation-building operations was certainly a large part of the Port Royal Experiment and offers many lessons for modern efforts at nation building.

"The Port Royal Experiment" divides into ten chapters, each of which is designed to treat a particular aspect of the experience. Topics include planning considerations, philanthropic society activity, civil society, economic development, political development, and resistance. Each chapter presents the case study in the context of more recent developmental and nation-building efforts in such places as Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan and incorporates recent scholarship in the field. Modern readers will see that the challenges that faced the Port Royal Experiment remain relevant, even as their solutions remain elusive.

Near the end of the Civil War, Army Chief of Staff Henry W. Halleck described the 16th New York Volunteer Cavalry as ""cowed and useless"" after they were ""cut up"" by Confederate General John Mosby's Rangers. The following April the New Yorkers made their place in history when 26 men led by Lieutenant Edward P. Doherty captured and killed John Wilkes Booth. An amalgam of three partially formed regiments, the 16th was plagued by early desertions, poor leadership and a near mutiny as its First Battalion prepared to march to northern Virginia to bolster the outer defenses of Washington in October 1863. The regiment spent most of the remainder of the war chasing Mosby's cavalry, winning a handful of tactical victories but mainly confounded by the Confederate guerrillas. Drawing on personal letters, diaries and memoirs by men of the 16th, and the recollections of Mosby's men, this deeply researched history provides fresh perspective on Mosby's exploits and the hunt for Booth.

Soldier mortals would not survive if they were not blessed with the gift of imagination and the pictures of hope,"" wrote Confederate Private Henry Graves in the trenches outside Petersburg, Virginia. ""The second angel of mercy is the night dream."" Providing fresh perspective on the human side of the Civil War, this book explores the dreams and imaginings of those who fought it, as recorded in their letters, journals and memoirs. Sometimes published as poems or songs or printed in newspapers, these rarely acknowledged writings reflect the personalities and experiences of their authors. Some expressions of fear, pain, loss, homesickness and disappointment are related with grim fatalism, and some with glimpses of humor.

Wilson's Wharf was the first major clash between U.S. Colored Troops and the Army of Northern Virginia. The 1st and 10th USCT infantry regiments, supported by two cannon and two U.S. Navy gunboats, faced 11 detachments of veteran Confederate cavalry who were under orders to ""kill every man."" Union commander General Edward Wild, a one-armed abolitionist, refused General Fitzhugh Lee's demand for surrender, telling Lee to ""go to Hell."" The battle resulted in a victory for the mainly black Union force. This book describes the action in detail and in the larger context of the history of black U.S. servicemen, including the British recruitment of runaway slaves during the Revolutionary War, the black Colonial Marines who joined the British in torching Washington in the War of 1812, and the South's attempts to enlist slaves in the final months of the Civil War.