Download or read book Confederate Minds written by Michael T. Bernath and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-07-10 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Civil War, some Confederates sought to prove the distinctiveness of the southern people and to legitimate their desire for a separate national existence through the creation of a uniquely southern literature and culture. Michael Bernath follows the activities of a group of southern writers, thinkers, editors, publishers, educators, and ministers--whom he labels Confederate cultural nationalists--in order to trace the rise and fall of a cultural movement dedicated to liberating the South from its longtime dependence on Northern books, periodicals, and teachers. By analyzing the motives driving the struggle for Confederate intellectual independence, by charting its wartime accomplishments, and by assessing its failures, Bernath makes provocative arguments about the nature of Confederate nationalism, life within the Confederacy, and the perception of southern cultural distinctiveness.
Download or read book Aberration of Mind written by Diane Miller Sommerville and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 150 years after its end, we still struggle to understand the full extent of the human toll of the Civil War and the psychological crisis it created. In Aberration of Mind, Diane Miller Sommerville offers the first book-length treatment of suicide in the South during the Civil War era, giving us insight into both white and black communities, Confederate soldiers and their families, as well as the enslaved and newly freed. With a thorough examination of the dynamics of both racial and gendered dimensions of psychological distress, Sommerville reveals how the suffering experienced by Southerners living in a war zone generated trauma that, in extreme cases, led some Southerners to contemplate or act on suicidal thoughts. Sommerville recovers previously hidden stories of individuals exhibiting suicidal activity or aberrant psychological behavior she links to the war and its aftermath. This work adds crucial nuance to our understanding of how personal suffering shaped the way southerners viewed themselves in the Civil War era and underscores the full human costs of war.
Download or read book Marching Masters written by Colin Edward Woodward and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2014-03-05 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Confederate army went to war to defend a nation of slaveholding states, and although men rushed to recruiting stations for many reasons, they understood that the fundamental political issue at stake in the conflict was the future of slavery. Most Confederate soldiers were not slaveholders themselves, but they were products of the largest and most prosperous slaveholding civilization the world had ever seen, and they sought to maintain clear divisions between black and white, master and servant, free and slave. In Marching Masters Colin Woodward explores not only the importance of slavery in the minds of Confederate soldiers but also its effects on military policy and decision making. Beyond showing how essential the defense of slavery was in motivating Confederate troops to fight, Woodward examines the Rebels’ persistent belief in the need to defend slavery and deploy it militarily as the war raged on. Slavery proved essential to the Confederate war machine, and Rebels strove to protect it just as they did Southern cities, towns, and railroads. Slaves served by the tens of thousands in the Southern armies—never as soldiers, but as menial laborers who cooked meals, washed horses, and dug ditches. By following Rebel troops' continued adherence to notions of white supremacy into the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, the book carries the story beyond the Confederacy’s surrender. Drawing upon hundreds of soldiers’ letters, diaries, and memoirs, Marching Masters combines the latest social and military history in its compelling examination of the last bloody years of slavery in the United States.
Download or read book No Common Ground written by Karen L. Cox and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.
Download or read book Ends of War written by Caroline E. Janney and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-09-13 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Army of Northern Virginia's chaotic dispersal began even before Lee and Grant met at Appomattox Court House. As the Confederates had pushed west at a relentless pace for nearly a week, thousands of wounded and exhausted men fell out of the ranks. When word spread that Lee planned to surrender, most remaining troops stacked their arms and accepted paroles allowing them to return home, even as they lamented the loss of their country and cause. But others broke south and west, hoping to continue the fight. Fearing a guerrilla war, Grant extended the generous Appomattox terms to every rebel who would surrender himself. Provost marshals fanned out across Virginia and beyond, seeking nearly 18,000 of Lee's men who had yet to surrender. But the shock of Lincoln's assassination led Northern authorities to see threats of new rebellion in every rail depot and harbor where Confederates gathered for transport, even among those already paroled. While Federal troops struggled to keep order and sustain a fragile peace, their newly surrendered adversaries seethed with anger and confusion at the sight of Union troops occupying their towns and former slaves celebrating freedom. In this dramatic new history of the weeks and months after Appomattox, Caroline E. Janney reveals that Lee's surrender was less an ending than the start of an interregnum marked by military and political uncertainty, legal and logistical confusion, and continued outbursts of violence. Janney takes readers from the deliberations of government and military authorities to the ground-level experiences of common soldiers. Ultimately, what unfolds is the messy birth narrative of the Lost Cause, laying the groundwork for the defiant resilience of rebellion in the years that followed.
Download or read book Searching for Black Confederates written by Kevin M. Levin and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth. Moreover, Levin shows that belief in the existence of black Confederate soldiers largely originated in the 1970s, a period that witnessed both a significant shift in how Americans remembered the Civil War and a rising backlash against African Americans' gains in civil rights and other realms. Levin also investigates the roles that African Americans actually performed in the Confederate army, including personal body servants and forced laborers. He demonstrates that regardless of the dangers these men faced in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield, their legal status remained unchanged. Even long after the guns fell silent, Confederate veterans and other writers remembered these men as former slaves and not as soldiers, an important reminder that how the war is remembered often runs counter to history.
Download or read book The Confederate Battle Flag written by John M. COSKI and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the Confederate flag has become as much a news item as a Civil War relic. Intense public debates have erupted over Confederate flags flying atop state capitols, being incorporated into state flags, waving from dormitory windows, or adorning the T-shirts and jeans of public school children. To some, this piece of cloth is a symbol of white supremacy and enduring racial injustice; to others, it represents a rich Southern heritage and an essential link to a glorious past. Polarizing Americans, these flag wars reveal the profound--and still unhealed--schisms that have plagued the country since the Civil War. The Confederate Battle Flag is the first comprehensive history of this contested symbol. Transcending conventional partisanship, John Coski reveals the flag's origins as one of many banners unfurled on the battlefields of the Civil War. He shows how it emerged as the preeminent representation of the Confederacy and was transformed into a cultural icon from Reconstruction on, becoming an aggressively racist symbol only after World War II and during the Civil Rights movement. We gain unique insight into the fine line between the flag's use as a historical emblem and as an invocation of the Confederate nation and all it stood for. Pursuing the flag's conflicting meanings, Coski suggests how this provocative artifact, which has been viewed with pride, fear, anger, nostalgia, and disgust, might ultimately provide Americans with the common ground of a shared and complex history.
Download or read book Wade Hampton written by Rod Andrew Jr. and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-11-30 with total page 635 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the South's most illustrious military leaders, Wade Hampton III was for a time the commander of all Lee's cavalry and at the end of the war was the highest-ranking Confederate cavalry officer. Yet for all Hampton's military victories, he also suffered devastating losses in his family and personal life. Rod Andrew's critical biography sheds light on his central role during Reconstruction as a conservative white leader, governor, U.S. senator, and Redeemer; his heroic image in the minds of white southerners; and his positions and apparent contradictions on race and the role of African Americans in the New South. Andrew also shows that Hampton's tragic past explains how he emerged in his own day as a larger-than-life symbol--of national reconciliation as well as southern defiance.
Download or read book Confederate Emancipation written by Bruce Levine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Levine 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.
Download or read book Confederate Tide Rising written by Joseph L. Harsh and published by Kent State University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This analysis of the military policy and strategy adopted by Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis in the first two years of the Civil War, argues that their policies allowed the Confederacy to survive longer than it otherwise could have and were the policies best designed to win Southern independence.
Download or read book The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy written by Charles M. Hubbard and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2000-08 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Thoroughly researched . . . [Hubbard's] interpretation is solid, well supported, and touches all of the major aspects of Confederate diplomacy."--American Historical Review "As the first examination of the topic since King Cotton Diplomacy (1931), this work deserves widespread attention. Hubbard offers a convincingly bleak portrayal of the limited skills and myopic vision of Rebel diplomacy at home and abroad."--Virginia Magazine of History and Biography Of the many factors that contributed to the South's loss of the Civil War, one of the most decisive was the failure of Southern diplomacy. In this penetrating work, Charles M. Hubbard reassesses the diplomatic efforts made by the Confederacy in its struggle to become an independent nation. Hubbard focuses both on the Confederacy's attempts to negotiate a peaceful separation from the Union and Southern diplomats' increasingly desperate pursuit of state recognition from the major European powers. Drawing on a large body of sources, Hubbard offers an important reinterpretation of the problems facing Confederate diplomats. He demonstrates how the strategies and objectives of the South's diplomatic program--themselves often poorly conceived--were then placed in the hands of inexperienced envoys who were ill-equipped to succeed in their roles as negotiators. The Author: Charles M. Hubbard is associate professor of history at Lincoln Memorial University and executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Museum in Harrogate, Tennessee.
Download or read book Becoming Confederates written by Gary W. Gallagher and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Becoming Confederates, Gary W. Gallagher explores loyalty in the era of the Civil War, focusing on Robert E. Lee, Stephen Dodson Ramseur, and Jubal A. Early--three prominent officers in the Army of Northern Virginia who became ardent Confederate nationalists. Loyalty was tested and proved in many ways leading up to and during the war. Looking at levels of allegiance to their native state, to the slaveholding South, to the United States, and to the Confederacy, Gallagher shows how these men represent responses to the mid-nineteenth-century crisis. Lee traditionally has been presented as a reluctant convert to the Confederacy whose most powerful identification was with his home state of Virginia--an interpretation at odds with his far more complex range of loyalties. Ramseur, the youngest of the three, eagerly embraced a Confederate identity, highlighting generational differences in the equation of loyalty. Early combined elements of Lee's and Ramseur's reactions--a Unionist who grudgingly accepted Virginia's departure from the United States but later came to personify defiant Confederate nationalism. The paths of these men toward Confederate loyalty help delineate important contours of American history. Gallagher shows that Americans juggled multiple, often conflicting, loyalties and that white southern identity was preoccupied with racial control transcending politics and class. Indeed, understanding these men's perspectives makes it difficult to argue that the Confederacy should not be deemed a nation. Perhaps most important, their experiences help us understand why Confederates waged a prodigiously bloody war and the manner in which they dealt with defeat.
Download or read book James D Bulloch written by Walter E. Wilson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2012-01-27 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American naval hero and Confederate secret agent James Dunwoody Bulloch was widely considered the Confederacy's most dangerous man in Europe. As head of the South's covert shipbuilding and logistics program overseas during the American Civil War, Bulloch acquired a staggering 49 warships, blockade runners, and tenders; built "invulnerable" ocean-going ironclads; sustained Confederate logistics; financed covert operations; and acted as the mastermind behind the destruction of 130 Union ships. Ironically, this man who conspired to destroy the Union and kidnap its president later stood as the favorite uncle and mentor to Theodore Roosevelt. Bulloch's astonishing life unfolds in this first-ever biography.
Download or read book Blue and Gray Diplomacy written by Howard Jones and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this examination of Union and Confederate foreign relations during the Civil War from both European and American perspectives, Howard Jones demonstrates that the consequences of the conflict between North and South reached far beyond American soil. Jones explores a number of themes, including the international economic and political dimensions of the war, the North's attempts to block the South from winning foreign recognition as a nation, Napoleon III's meddling in the war and his attempt to restore French power in the New World, and the inability of Europeans to understand the interrelated nature of slavery and union, resulting in their tendency to interpret the war as a senseless struggle between a South too large and populous to have its independence denied and a North too obstinate to give up on the preservation of the Union. Most of all, Jones explores the horrible nature of a war that attracted outside involvement as much as it repelled it. Written in a narrative style that relates the story as its participants saw it play out around them, Blue and Gray Diplomacy depicts the complex set of problems faced by policy makers from Richmond and Washington to London, Paris, and St. Petersburg.
Download or read book C s a confederate States of America written by Howard Means and published by William Morrow. This book was released on 1998-11-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if the South had won the Civil War? Howard Means, author of the acclaimed biography "Colin Powell", offers a riveting alternative-history thriller in the bestselling tradition of "Fatherland".
Download or read book Embattled Banner written by Don Hinkle and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 1997-12 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Southern Invincibility written by Wiley Sword and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1999 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The roots of Southern pride that took hold in the Civil War are examined through letters and diaries of soldiers and civilians. 16-page photo insert.
