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.

"The Confederate Nation has yet to be superseded as the standard title on the subject. " --Journal of Southern History, 2007"Incisive and insightful.... As good a short history of the Southern war effort was we have." --T. Harry Williams, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lincoln and His GeneralsEmory M. Thomas's critically acclaimed chronicle of the Confederacy remains widely recognized as the standard history of the South during the Civil War. Now with a new introduction by the author, The Confederate Nation presents a high readable, highly personal portrait of the Southern experience during the Civil War. Thomas, renowned for his illuminating biographies of Robert E. Lee and other Southern generals, here delivers the definitive account of the political and military events that defined the nation during its period of greatest turmoil.

This is the best biography of one of the most exciting, colorful, and controversial figures of the Civil War. A renowned cavalryman, Nathan Bedford Forrest perfected a ruthless hit-and-run guerrilla warfare that terrified Union soldiers and garnered the respect of warriors like William Sherman, who described his adversary as "that Devil, Forrest . . . the most remarkable man our Civil War produced on either side." Historian Bruce Catton rated Forrest "one of the authentic military geniuses of the whole war," but Brian Steel Wills covers much more than the cavalryman's incredible feats on the field of battle. He also provides the most thoughtful and complete analysis of Forrest's hardscrabble childhood in backwater Mississippi; his rise to wealth in the Memphis slave trade; his role in the infamous Fort Pillow massacre of black Union soldiers; his role as early leader and Grand Wizard of the first Ku Klux Klan; and his declining health and premature death in a reconstructing America.

Jeb Stuart, leader of the cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia, earned the admiration of his enemies and the adulation of his friends during the first three years of the Civil War. Famed for his daring ride around McClellan during the Peninsula Campaign, his raid behind Union lines in Virginia and into Maryland and Pennsylvania, and his dashing good looks, high spirits and bravery, he was a legend long before he was fatally wounded at Yellow Tavern in 1864.

In this, his first book, originally published in 1971, noted historian Emory M. Thomas offers an astute analysis of Civil War Richmond that remains unchallenged to this day. Blending official documents and city council minutes with personal diaries and newspaper accounts, Thomas vividly recounts the military, political, social, and economic experiences of the Confederate capital, providing a compelling drama of home-front war that, in Richmond's case, rivaled the spectacular events on the battlefield. One of the first studies in southern urban history, The Confederate State of Richmonddeftly demonstrates how Richmond responded to the intense demands of war and became a great capital city.

The purpose of this book is to show that the Confederacy not only enacted an external revolution (in terms of its war with the Union), but that it also experienced a very significant internal revolution. Provides an explaination of what things within Southern society were revolutionized and in what ways.

"The best and most balanced of the Lee biographies."—New York Review of Books

The life of Robert E. Lee is a story not of defeat but of triumphtriumph in clearing his family name, triumph in marrying properly, triumph over the mighty Mississippi in his work as an engineer, and triumph over all other military men to become the towering figure who commanded the Confederate army in the American Civil War. But late in life Lee confessed that he "was always wanting something."

In this probing and personal biography, Emory Thomas reveals more than the man himself did. Robert E. Lee has been, and continues to be, a symbol and hero in the American story. But in life, Thomas writes, Lee was both more and less than his legend. Here is the man behind the legend.

• "A gripping, flesh-and-blood portrait."—Barrett R. Richardson, Virginia Pilot and Ledger
• "Splendid. . . . The most even-tempered and sophisticated portrait that we are likely to see for another thirty years."—T. Michael Parrish, Civil War News
• National Book Critics Circle nominee
• Regional bestseller
• A New York Times Notable Book