William Mouton was the first commander of the French speaking Arcadian Guards which had been formed by his first cousin, Gen. Alfred Mouton. William enlisted as a First Lieutenant in the Arcadian Guards on Oct. 5, 1861. The two Moutons were grandsons of an Acadian exile from Nova Scotia. and apparently named the unit to honor the ancestral country of many of the men who volunteered. The majority of the men of the Arcadian Guards were also of Acadian ancestry. An exception were the men from Avoyelles Parish whose ancestors were mostly from older Colonoal French Creole families. When the Guards were assigned as Company F of the 18th Louisiana Infantry Regiment, William Mouton was elected captain. By the end of the war he was a lt. colonel. The 18th saw action in Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama before returning to Louisiana. They were one of regiments which made up General Mouton's Army during the Red River Campaign, which brought them right back to their home territory. This book contains a little of the story of their service as they fought as well list the soldiers who were in the Arcadian Guards of the 18th Regiment.

From the first shots fired at Fort Sumter in 1861 to the final clashes on the Road to Appomattox in 1864, The Atlas of the Civil War reconstructs the battles of America's bloodiest war with unparalleled clarity and precision. Edited by Pulitzer Prize recipient James M. McPherson and written by America's leading military historians, this peerless reference charts the major campaigns and skirmishes of the Civil War. Each battle is meticulously plotted on one of 200 specially commissioned full-color maps. Timelines provide detailed, play-by-play maneuvers, and the accompanying text highlights the strategic aims and tactical considerations of the men in charge. Each of the battle, communications, and locator maps are cross-referenced to provide a comprehensive overview of the fighting as it swept across the country. With more than two hundred photographs and countless personal accounts that vividly describe the experiences of soldiers in the fields, The Atlas of the Civil War brings to life the human drama that pitted state against state and brother against brother.

Nathan Bedford Forrest has to be considered one of the most remarkable men of the War Between the States. Although completely untutored in the art and science of war, his aggressive use of rapid movement and concentration of force during his raids have become legendary. The campaigns he led into Union occupied territory anticipated the mobile operations that have become the hallmark of modern land warfare. He achieved these feats of arms through his use of horse soldiers as mounted infantry, thus combining the mobility of cavalry with the hitting power of the foot soldier. This amalgamation of force and rapidity of movement was the key to his great victory on the 10th of June, 1864 at the Battle of Brice's Cross-Roads. This action in north-east Mississippi, also known as Tishomingo Creek by Southerners and Guntown by Yankees, resulted in Forrest's defeating in detail an 8,500 man Union column of cavalry, infantry and artillery, in effect destroyed a force nearly twice the size of his own command. In the following pages is found the testimony of the men who were there, those who fought, and survived that hot day in Mississippi. These are the words, thoughts and stories of the victors and the vanquished, attesting to their pride in triumph, along with excuses and recriminations from the defeated. As editor, I have recorded their testimonies without any alteration and only inserted a few footnotes to clarify some of the more obscure references made by the writers.

A brilliant and novel examination of how Abraham Lincoln mastered the art of leadership "Abraham Lincoln had less schooling than all but a couple of other presidents, and more wisdom than every one of them. In this original, insightful book, Michael Gerhardt explains how this came to be." -H.W. Brands, Wall Street Journal In 1849, when Abraham Lincoln returned to Springfield, Illinois, after two seemingly uninspiring years in the U.S. House of Representatives, his political career appeared all but finished. His sense of failure was so great that friends worried about his sanity. Yet within a decade, Lincoln would reenter politics, become a leader of the Republican Party, win the 1860 presidential election, and keep America together during its most perilous period. What accounted for the turnaround? As Michael J. Gerhardt reveals, Lincoln's reemergence followed the same path he had taken before, in which he read voraciously and learned from the successes, failures, oratory, and political maneuvering of a surprisingly diverse handful of men, some of whom he had never met but others of whom he knew intimately-Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, John Todd Stuart, and Orville Browning. From their experiences and his own, Lincoln learned valuable lessons on leadership, mastering party politics, campaigning, conventions, understanding and using executive power, managing a cabinet, speechwriting and oratory, and-what would become his most enduring legacy-developing policies and rhetoric to match a constitutional vision that spoke to the monumental challenges of his time. Without these mentors, Abraham Lincoln would likely have remained a small-town lawyer-and without Lincoln, the United States as we know it may not have survived. This book tells the unique story of how Lincoln emerged from obscurity and learned how to lead.

Thomas Jonathan Jackson is one of the most famous generals of the Civil War, but the man who earned the nickname Stonewall was killed before he had the chance to tell his Civil War experiences in memoirs or post-war writings. As a result, the man who became a legend at places like Bull Run, the Shenandoah Valley, and Chancellorsville had to have his story told by others. This has led to a log of mythologizing and fanciful tales that depict Stonewall as an incredibly pious and occasionally quirky general.
Of all the people who wrote about him, none knew them as well as his own widow, Mary Anna Jackson, who wrote a memoir about the famous general. This work also includes an introduction by General John Gordon and tributes to Jackson penned by fellow Confederates.

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.

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.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Winner of the Merle Curti award Winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion.In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. The ensuing decades witnessed the triumph of a culture of reunion, which downplayed sectional division and emphasized the heroics of a battle between noble men of the Blue and the Gray. Nearly lost in national culture were the moral crusades over slavery that ignited the war, the presence and participation of African Americans throughout the war, and the promise of emancipation that emerged from the war. Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers' reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial. Blight's sweeping narrative of triumph and tragedy, romance and realism, is a compelling tale of the politics of memory, of how a nation healed from civil war without justice. By the early twentieth century, the problems of race and reunion were locked in mutual dependence, a painful legacy that continues to haunt us today.

Much has been written about the 1862 Sioux Uprising, or Dakota Conflict, in Minnesota, as its impact was dramatic. An immediate result was the flight of nearly 40,000 people from their homes, and an est. 1000 deaths. For many years the value of this work has been recognized by the descendants of those who perished during the conflict. It will aid descendents attempting to identify their ancestors, and also help locate the sites where family members lost their lives. Not for the faint-hearted, this work contains accounts of the massacres, a chronological list of massacres, casualty lists, a description of the "scalp dance," a new introduction and an original full name index.

In 1858, challenger Abraham Lincoln debated incumbent Stephen Douglas seven times in the race for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. More was at stake than slavery in those debates. In Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism, John Burt contends that the very legitimacy of democratic governance was on the line. In a United States stubbornly divided over ethical issues, the overarching question posed by the Lincoln-Douglas debates has not lost its urgency: Can a liberal political system be used to mediate moral disputes? And if it cannot, is violence inevitable? As they campaigned against each other, both Lincoln and Douglas struggled with how to behave when an ethical conflict as profound as the one over slavery strained the commitment upon which democracy depends-namely, to rule by both consent and principle. This commitment is not easily met, because what conscience demands and what it is able to persuade others to consent to are not always the same. While Lincoln ultimately avoided a politics of morality detached from consent, and Douglas avoided a politics of expediency devoid of morality, neither found a way for liberalism to mediate the conflict of slavery. That some disputes seemed to lie beyond the horizon of deal-making and persuasion and could be settled only by violence revealed democracy's limitations. Burt argues that the unresolvable ironies at the center of liberal politics led Lincoln to discover liberalism's tragic dimension-and ultimately led to war. Burt's conclusions demand reevaluations of Lincoln and Douglas, the Civil War, and democracy itself.

Many historical books have been written about the Sand Creek massacre--some were sympathetic to the actions of Colonel Chivington while others acknowledged the injustice. The Sand Creek massacre is a complicated piece of Colorado history with very little consensus. In the mid 1990s, Arapaho and Cheyenne people started visiting the location where the massacre was believed to have occurred with the permission of some local landowners. They claimed that their communities continued to suffer from the collective memories of the event, and they wanted to begin to heal through spiritual cleansing rituals. This sparked a movement to establish a memorial at the Sand Creek location. After nearly ten years of extensive research financial negotiations and state and federal lobbying efforts, the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site was established as a national park by Congress. It opened to the public in April of 2007. The Sand Creek Memorial National Historic Monument stands out because it shows the US federal government not only acknowledging wrongdoing towards American Indian people but also attempting to memorialize that wrongdoing in an official capacity. This memorial has set a unique precedent in American history. Unlike other monuments, this one begins with an acknowledgment of the injustice and tragedy that occurred at the location. For this reason, the Sand Creek Massacre National Park and Monument presents a unique opportunity to examine cultural identity, history and national identity. While memorials that acknowledge tragedy have been examined by scholars, this is usually done after the completion of the design. The present study is therefore unique because it also examines the unfolding of the memorialization process prior to the completion of the memorial design. This unique site posed an opportunity to examine how the US dominant cultural interests would be able to manage such a tragic and unflattering narrative while maintaining a cohesive national identity in the face of such action. The site also presented an excellent opportunity to examine the collective memory and memorialization, in terms of the experience and cultural identity of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people, which is detailed in thus book. Finally, this study also analyzes and interprets how a memorial can contribute to long term peace and reconciliation interests amongst ethnic groups formerly engaged in violent and intractable conflict. Many discussions of collective memory utilize a specific disciplinary perspective and methodology, but this unique book integrates ethnographic, critical, rhetorical, and historical methods of research. It also examines the performative and ritual aspects of collective memory and not just the physical, textual and historical artifacts of memory. As such, this study contributes to the theoretical discussion of how collective memorialization contributes to long term processes of peace and reconciliation. This book will be a valuable resource to cultural anthropologists, rhetoric and communication studies scholars, American Indian studies scholars, peace studies and conflict resolution scholars, historians, as well as critical theory and cultural studies theorists.

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.

"Good fences make good neighbors" comes from Robert Frost's poem Mending Walls which relates to traditions and rituals antedating the Romans. The god of boundaries, which they named Terminus, was not invented by the Romans, but he became one of their important household gods. Annually Terminus was honored in a ritual which not only reaffirmed boundaries but which also provided the occasion for predetermined traditional festivities among neighbors.

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.

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.

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.

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.