Download or read book A Rebel War Clerk s Diary Volume 2 written by J. B. Jones and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2015-10-19 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amidst the vast literature of the Civil War, one of the most significant and enlightening documents remains largely unknown. A day-by-day, uninterrupted, four-year chronicle by a mature, keenly observant clerk in the War Department of the Confederacy, the wartime diary of John Beauchamp Jones was first published in two volumes of small type in 1866. Over the years, the diary was republished three more times—but never with an index or an editorial apparatus to guide a reader through the extraordinary mass of information it contained. Published here with an authoritative editorial framework, including an extensive introduction and endnotes, this unique record of the Civil War takes its rightful place as one of the best basic reference tools in Civil War history, absolutely critical to study the Confederacy. A Maryland journalist/novelist who went south at the outbreak of the war, Jones took a job as a senior clerk in the Confederate War Department, where he remained to the end, a constant observer of men and events in Richmond, the heart of the Confederacy and the principal target of Union military might. As a high-level clerk at the center of military planning, Jones had an extraordinary perspective on the Southern nation in action—and nothing escaped his attention. Confidential files, command-level conversations, official correspondence, revelations, rumors, statistics, weather reports, and personal opinions: all manner of material, found nowhere else in Civil War literature, made its meticulous way into the diary. Jones quotes scores of dispatches and reports by both military and civilian authorities, including letters from Robert E. Lee never printed elsewhere, providing an invaluable record of documents that would later find their way into print only in edited form. His notes on such ephemera as weather and prices create a backdrop for the military movements and political maneuverings he describes, all with the judicious eye of a seasoned writer and observer of southern life. James I. Robertson Jr., provides introductions to each volume, over 2,700 endnotes that identify, clarify, and expand on Jones’s material, and a first ever index which makes Jones's unique insights and observations accessible to interested readers, who will find in the pages of A Rebel War Clerk's Diary one of the most complete and richly textured accounts of the Civil War ever to be composed at the very heart of the Confederacy.
Download or read book Rebel War Clerk s Diary written by J. B. Jones and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amidst the vast literature of the Civil War, one of the most significant and enlightening documents remains largely unknown. A day-by-day, uninterrupted, four-year chronicle by a mature, keenly observant clerk in the War Department of the Confederacy, the wartime diary of John Beauchamp Jones was first published in two volumes of small type in 1866. Over the years, the diary was republished three more times-but never with an index or an editorial apparatus to guide a reader through the extraordinary mass of information it contained. Published here with an authoritative editorial framework, inc.
Download or read book A Rebel War Clerk s Diary Volume 1 written by J. B. Jones and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2015-09-18 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amidst the vast literature of the Civil War, one of the most significant and enlightening documents remains largely unknown. A day-by-day, uninterrupted, four-year chronicle by a mature, keenly observant clerk in the War Department of the Confederacy, the wartime diary of John Beauchamp Jones was first published in two volumes of small type in 1866. Over the years, the diary was republished three more times—but never with an index or an editorial apparatus to guide a reader through the extraordinary mass of information it contained. Published here with an authoritative editorial framework, including an extensive introduction and endnotes, this unique record of the Civil War takes its rightful place as one of the best basic reference tools in Civil War history, absolutely critical to study the Confederacy. A Maryland journalist/novelist who went south at the outbreak of the war, Jones took a job as a senior clerk in the Confederate War Department, where he remained to the end, a constant observer of men and events in Richmond, the heart of the Confederacy and the principal target of Union military might. As a high-level clerk at the center of military planning, Jones had an extraordinary perspective on the Southern nation in action—and nothing escaped his attention. Confidential files, command-level conversations, official correspondence, revelations, rumors, statistics, weather reports, and personal opinions: all manner of material, found nowhere else in Civil War literature, made its meticulous way into the diary. Jones quotes scores of dispatches and reports by both military and civilian authorities, including letters from Robert E. Lee never printed elsewhere, providing an invaluable record of documents that would later find their way into print only in edited form. His notes on such ephemera as weather and prices create a backdrop for the military movements and political maneuverings he describes, all with the judicious eye of a seasoned writer and observer of southern life. James I. Robertson Jr., provides introductions to each volume, over 2,700 endnotes that identify, clarify, and expand on Jones’s material, and a first ever index which makes Jones's unique insights and observations accessible to interested readers, who will find in the pages of A Rebel War Clerk's Diary one of the most complete and richly textured accounts of the Civil War ever to be composed at the very heart of the Confederacy.
Download or read book The Civil War The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It LOA 212 written by Brooks D. Simpson and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2011-02-03 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first volume in a four-volume series on the American Civil War—featuring first-hand writings from Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, and more This “mesmerizing and deeply troubling” glimpse into the Civil War era “will forever deepen the way you see this central chapter in our history . . . a masterpiece” (Newsweek). After 150 years the Civil War is still our greatest national drama, at once heroic, tragic, and epic-our Iliad, but also our Bible, a story of sin and judgment, suffering and despair, death and resurrection in a "new birth of freedom.” Drawn from letters, diaries, speeches, articles, poems, songs, military reports, legal opinions, and memoirs, The Civil War: The First Year gathers over 120 pieces by more than sixty participants to create a unique firsthand narrative of this great historical crisis. Beginning on the eve of Lincoln's election in November 1860 and ending in January 1862 with the appointment of Edwin M. Stanton as secretary of war, this volume presents writing by figures well-known—Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Mary Chesnut, Frederick Douglass, and Lincoln himself among them—and less familiar, like proslavery advocate J.D.B. DeBow, Lieutenants Charles B. Haydon of the 2nd Michigan Infantry and Henry Livermore Abbott of the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, and plantation mistresses Catherine Edmondston of North Carolina and Kate Stone of Mississippi. Together, the selections provide a powerful sense of the immediacy, uncertainty, and urgency of events as the nation was torn asunder. Includes headnotes, a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory endnotes, full-color hand-drawn endpaper maps, and an index. Companion volumes will gather writings from the second, third, and final years of the conflict. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Download or read book Confederate Emancipation written by Bruce Levine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early 1864, as the Confederate Army of Tennessee licked its wounds after being routed at the Battle of Chattanooga, Major-General Patrick Cleburne (the "Stonewall of the West") proposed that "the most courageous of our slaves" be trained as soldiers and that "every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy in this war" be freed. In Confederate Emancipation, Bruce Levine looks closely at such Confederate plans to arm and free slaves. He shows that within a year of Cleburne's proposal, which was initially rejected out of hand, Jefferson Davis, Judah P. Benjamin, and Robert E. Lee had all reached the same conclusions. At that point, the idea was debated widely in newspapers and drawing rooms across the South, as more and more slaves fled to Union lines and fought in the ranks of the Union army. Eventually, the soldiers of Lee's army voted on the proposal, and the Confederate government actually enacted a version of it in March. The Army issued the necessary orders just two weeks before Appomattox, too late to affect the course of the war. Throughout the book, Levine captures the voices of blacks and whites, wealthy planters and poor farmers, soldiers and officers, and newspaper editors and politicians from all across the South. In the process, he sheds light on such hot-button topics as what the Confederacy was fighting for, whether black southerners were willing to fight in large numbers in defense of the South, and what this episode foretold about life and politics in the post-war South. Confederate Emancipation offers an engaging and illuminating account of a fascinating and politically charged idea, setting it firmly and vividly in the context of the Civil War and the part played in it by the issue of slavery and the actions of the slaves themselves.
Download or read book Themes of the American Civil War written by Susan-Mary Grant and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Themes of the American Civil War offers a timely and useful guide to this vast topic for a new generation of students. The volume provides a broad-ranging assessment of the causes, complexities, and consequences of America’s most destructive conflict to date. The essays, written by top scholars in the field, and reworked for this new edition, explore how, and in what ways, differing interpretations of the war have arisen, and explains clearly why the American Civil War remains a subject of enduring interest. It includes chapters covering four broad areas, including The Political Front, The Military Front, The Race Front, and The Ideological Front. Additions to the second edition include a new introduction – added to the current introduction by James McPherson – a chapter on gender, as well as information on the remembrance of the war (historical memory). The addition of several maps, a timeline, and an appendix listing further reading, battlefield statistics, and battle/regiment/general names focuses the book squarely at undergraduates in both the US and abroad.
Download or read book Lee is Trapped and Must be Taken written by Thomas J. Ryan and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This award-winning Civil War history examines Robert E. Lee’s retreat from Gettysburg and the vital importance of Civil War military intelligence. While countless books have examined the Battle of Gettysburg, the Confederate Army’s retreat to the Potomac River remains largely untold. This comprehensive study tells the full story, including how Maj. Gen. George G. Meade organized and motivated his Army of the Potomac to pursue Gen. Robert E. Lee’s retreating Army of Northern Virginia. The long and bloody battle exhausted both armies, and both faced difficult tasks ahead. Lee had to conduct an orderly withdrawal from the field. Meade had to assess whether his army had sufficient strength to pursue a still-dangerous enemy. Central to the respective commanders’ decisions was the intelligence they received about one another’s movements, intentions, and capability. The eleven-day period after Gettysburg was a battle of wits to determine which commander better understood the information he received. Prepare for some surprising revelations. The authors utilized a host of primary sources to craft this study, including letters, memoirs, diaries, official reports, newspapers, and telegrams. The immediacy of this material shines through in a fast-paced narrative that sheds significant new light on one of the Civil War’s most consequential episodes. Winner, Edwin C. Bearss Scholarly Research Award Winner, 2019, Hugh G. Earnhart Civil War Scholarship Award, Mahoning Valley Civil War Round Table
Download or read book Riding in Circles J e b Stuart and the Confederate Cavalry 1861 1862 written by and published by Arnold Pavlovsky. This book was released on with total page 894 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Man Who Punched Jefferson Davis written by Ben Wynne and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2018-11-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regarded as one of the most vocal, well-traveled, and controversial statesmen of the nineteenth century, antebellum politician Henry Stuart Foote played a central role in a vast array of pivotal events. Despite Foote’s unique mark on history, until now no comprehensive biography existed. Ben Wynne fills this gap in his examination of the life of this gifted and volatile public figure in The Man Who Punched Jefferson Davis: The Political Life of Henry S. Foote, Southern Unionist. An eyewitness to many of the historical events of his lifetime, Foote, an opinionated native Virginian, helped to raise money for the Texas Revolution, provided political counsel for the Lone Star Republic’s leadership before annexation, and published a 400-page history of the region. In 1847, Mississippi elected him to the Senate, where he promoted cooperation with the North during the Compromise of 1850. One of the South’s most outspoken Unionists, he infuriated many of his southern colleagues with his explosive temperament and unorthodox ideas that quickly established him as a political outsider. His temper sometimes led to physical altercations, including at least five duels, pulling a gun on fellow senator Thomas Hart Benton during a legislative session, and engaging in run-ins with other politicians—notably a fistfight with his worst political enemy, Jefferson Davis. He left the Senate in 1851 to run for governor of Mississippi on a pro-Union platform and defeated Davis by a small margin. Several years later, Foote moved to Nashville, was elected to the Confederate Congress after Tennessee seceded, and continued his political sparring with the Confederate president. From Foote’s failed attempt to broker an unauthorized peace agreement with the Lincoln government and his exile to Europe to the publication of his personal memoir and his appointment as director of the United States mint in New Orleans, Wynne constructs an entertaining and nuanced portrait of a singular man who constantly challenged the conventions of southern and national politics.
Download or read book Rebel Richmond written by Stephen V. Ash and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-08-14 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the spring of 1861, Richmond, Virginia, suddenly became the capital city, military headquarters, and industrial engine of a new nation fighting for its existence. A remarkable drama unfolded in the months that followed. The city's population exploded, its economy was deranged, and its government and citizenry clashed desperately over resources to meet daily needs while a mighty enemy army laid siege. Journalists, officials, and everyday residents recorded these events in great detail, and the Confederacy's foes and friends watched closely from across the continent and around the world. In Rebel Richmond, Stephen V. Ash vividly evokes life in Richmond as war consumed the Confederate capital. He guides readers from the city's alleys, homes, and shops to its churches, factories, and halls of power, uncovering the intimate daily drama of a city transformed and ultimately destroyed by war. Drawing on the stories and experiences of civilians and soldiers, slaves and masters, refugees and prisoners, merchants and laborers, preachers and prostitutes, the sick and the wounded, Ash delivers a captivating new narrative of the Civil War's impact on a city and its people.
Download or read book America s Buried History written by Kenneth R. Rutherford and published by Savas Beatie. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Masterfully researched . . . destined to become a classic study of one of the most horrific weapons ever utilized during the Civil War—landmines.” —Jonathan A. Noyalas, director, Shenandoah University’s McCormick Civil War Institute Despite all that has been published on the American Civil War, one aspect that has never received the in-depth attention it deserves is the widespread use of landmines across the Confederacy. These “infernal devices” dealt death and injury in nearly every Confederate state and influenced the course of the war. Kenneth R. Rutherford rectifies this oversight with America’s Buried History: Landmines in the Civil War, the first book devoted to a comprehensive analysis and history of the fascinating and important topic. Modern landmines were used for the first time in history on a widespread basis during the Civil War when the Confederacy, in desperate need of an innovative technology to overcome significant deficits in material and manpower, employed them. The first American to die from a victim-activated landmine was on the Virginia Peninsula in early 1862 during the siege of Yorktown. Their use set off explosive debates inside the Confederate government and within the ranks of the army over the ethics of using “weapons that wait.” As Confederate fortunes dimmed, leveraging low-cost weapons like landmines became acceptable and even desirable. Dr. Rutherford, who is known worldwide for his work in the landmine discipline, and who himself lost his legs to a mine in Africa, has written an important contribution to the literature on one of the most fundamental, contentious, and significant modern conventional weapons. “A MUST for military history buffs! A thrilling and chilling read.” —His Royal Highness Prince Mired Raad Al-Hussein, UN Special Envoy for Landmine Prohibition Treaty
Download or read book Routes of War written by Yael A. Sternhell and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-16 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War thrust millions of men and women—rich and poor, soldiers and civilians, enslaved and free—onto the roads of the South. During four years of war, Southerners lived on the move. In the hands of Sternhell, movement becomes a radically new means to perceive the full trajectory of the Confederacy’s rise, struggle, and ultimate defeat.
Download or read book Twelve Days written by Tony Silber and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2023-07 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the popular literature and scholarship of the Civil War, the days immediately after the surrender at Fort Sumter are overshadowed by the great battles and seismic changes in American life that followed. The twelve days that began with the federal evacuation of the fort and ended with the arrival of the New York Seventh Militia Regiment in Washington were critically important. The nation's capital never again came so close to being captured by the Confederates. Tony Silber's riveting account starts on April 14, 1861, with President Lincoln's call for seventy-five thousand militia troops. Washington, a Southern slaveholding city, was the focal point: both sides expected the first clash to occur there. The capital was barely defended, by about two thousand local militia troops of dubious training and loyalty. In Charleston, less than two days away by train, the Confederates had an organized army that was much larger and ready to fight. Maryland's eastern sections were already reeling in violent insurrection, and within days Virginia would secede. For half of the twelve days after Fort Sumter, Washington was severed from the North, the telegraph lines cut and the rail lines impassable, sabotaged by secessionist police and militia members. There was no cavalry coming. The United States had a tiny standing army at the time, most of it scattered west of the Mississippi. The federal government's only defense would be state militias. But in state after state, the militia system was in tatters. Southern leaders urged an assault on Washington. A Confederate success in capturing Washington would have changed the course of the Civil War. It likely would have assured the secession of Maryland. It might have resulted in England's recognition of the Confederacy. It would have demoralized the North. Fortunately, none of this happened. Instead, Lincoln emerged as the master of his cabinet, a communications genius, and a strategic giant who possessed a crystal-clear core objective and a powerful commitment to see it through. Told in real time, Twelve Days alternates between the four main scenes of action: Washington, insurrectionist Maryland, the advance of Northern troops, and the Confederate planning and military movements. Twelve Days tells for the first time the entire harrowing story of the first days of the Civil War.
Download or read book The American Civil War written by Ethan S. Rafuse and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 653 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The largest and most destructive military conflict between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War, the American Civil War has inspired some of the best and most intriguing scholarship in the field of United States history. This volume offers some of the most important work on the war to appear in the past few decades and offers compelling information and insights into subjects ranging from the organization of armies, historiography, the use of intelligence and the challenges faced by civil and military leaders in the course of America‘s bloodiest war.
Download or read book Living Hell written by Michael C. C. Adams and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surrounding the war with an aura of nostalgia both fosters the delusion that war can cure our social ills and makes us strong again, and weakens confidence in our ability to act effectively in our own time."—Journal of Military History
Download or read book The Siege of Vicksburg written by Timothy B. Smith and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2021-06-18 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Siege of Vicksburg: Climax of the Campaign to Open the Mississippi River, May 23–July 4, 1863, noted Civil War scholar Timothy B. Smith offers the first comprehensive account of the siege that split the Confederacy in two. While the siege is often given a chapter or two in larger campaign studies and portrayed as a foregone conclusion, The Siege of Vicksburg offers a new perspective and thus a fuller understanding of the larger Vicksburg Campaign. Smith takes full advantage of all the resources, both Union and Confederate—from official reports to soldiers’ diaries and letters to newspaper accounts—to offer in vivid detail a compelling narrative of the operations. The siege was unlike anything Grant’s Army of the Tennessee had attempted to this point and Smith helps the reader understand the complexity of the strategy and tactics, the brilliance of the engineers’ work, the grueling nature of the day-by-day participation, and the effect on all involved, from townspeople to the soldiers manning the fortifications. The Siege of Vicksburg portrays a high-stakes moment in the course of the Civil War because both sides understood what was at stake: the fate of the Mississippi River, the trans-Mississippi region, and perhaps the Confederacy itself. Smith’s detailed command-level analysis extends from army to corps, brigades, and regiments and offers fresh insights on where each side held an advantage. One key advantage was that the Federals had vast confidence in their commander while the Confederates showed no such assurance, whether it was Pemberton inside Vicksburg or Johnston outside. Smith offers an equally appealing and richly drawn look at the combat experiences of the soldiers in the trenches. He also tackles the many controversies surrounding the siege, including detailed accounts and analyses of Johnston’s efforts to lift the siege, and answers the questions of why Vicksburg fell and what were the ultimate consequences of Grant’s victory.
