Download or read book Confederate Soldier of the American Civil War A Visual Reference written by Denis Hambucken and published by The Countryman Press. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth look at Confederate soldiers' day-to-day lives, equipment, weapons and more, with full-color photos of reenactments and artifacts, historical documents and more.

Download or read book Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers written by John M. Sacher and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2021-12-08 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Jules and Frances Landry Award Finalist for the 2022 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize In April 1862, the Confederacy faced a dire military situation. Its forces were badly outnumbered, the Union army was threatening on all sides, and the twelve-month enlistment period for original volunteers would soon expire. In response to these circumstances, the Confederate Congress passed the first national conscription law in United States history. This initiative touched off a struggle for healthy white male bodies—both for the army and on the home front, where they oversaw enslaved laborers and helped produce food and supplies for the front lines—that lasted till the end of the war. John M. Sacher’s history of Confederate conscription serves as the first comprehensive examination of the topic in nearly one hundred years, providing fresh insights into and drawing new conclusions about the southern draft program. Often summarily dismissed as a detested policy that violated states’ rights and forced nonslaveholders to fight for planters, the conscription law elicited strong responses from southerners wanting to devise the best way to guarantee what they perceived as shared sacrifice. Most who bristled at the compulsory draft did so believing it did not align with their vision of the Confederacy. As Sacher reveals, white southerners’ desire to protect their families, support their communities, and ensure the continuation of slavery shaped their reaction to conscription. For three years, Confederates tried to achieve victory on the battlefield while simultaneously promoting their vision of individual liberty for whites and states’ rights. While they failed in that quest, Sacher demonstrates that southerners’ response to the 1862 conscription law did not determine their commitment to the Confederate cause. Instead, the implementation of the draft spurred a debate about sacrifice—both physical and ideological—as the Confederacy’s insatiable demand for soldiers only grew in the face of a grueling war.

Download or read book Civil War Paper Soldiers in Full Color written by A. G. Smith and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 1985 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meticulously rendered toy soldier collection in paper form includes easy-to-assemble, free-standing Union and Confederate soldiers, cannons, tents, flags, more — all in full color. 16 color plates. Introduction.

Download or read book Faces of the Confederacy written by Ronald S. Coddington and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-01-19 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Extensive research, fascinating characters . . . The author has done an admirable job of literally placing a face on the ordinary Confederate soldier.” —The Journal of Southern History “The history of the Civil War is the stories of its soldiers,” writes Ronald S. Coddington in the preface to Faces of the Confederacy. This book tells the stories of seventy-seven Southern soldiers—young farm boys, wealthy plantation owners, intellectual elites, uneducated poor—who posed for photographic portraits, cartes de visite, to leave with family, friends, and sweethearts before going off to war. Coddington, a passionate collector of Civil War-era photography, conducted a monumental search for these previously unpublished portrait cards, then unearthed the personal stories of their subjects, putting a human face on a war rife with inhuman atrocities. The Civil War took the lives of twenty-two of every hundred men who served. Coddington follows the exhausted survivors as they return home to occupied cities and towns, ravaged farmlands, a destabilized economy, and a social order in the midst of upheaval. This book is a haunting and moving tribute to those brave men. Like its companion volume, Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories, this book offers readers a unique perspective on the war and contributes to a better understanding of the role of the common soldier. “With his meticulous research and a journalist’s eye for good stories, Ron Coddington has brought new life to Civil War photographic portraits of obscure and long-forgotten Confederates whose wartime experiences might otherwise have been lost to history.” —Bob Zeller, cofounder and president of the nonprofit Center for Civil War Photography

Download or read book Faces of the Civil War written by Ronald S Coddington and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archival images and biographical sketches of Union soldiers tell the stories of their lives during and after the Civil War. Before leaving to fight in the Civil War, many Union and Confederate soldiers posed for a carte de visite, or visiting card, to give to their families, friends, or sweethearts. Invented in 1854 by a French photographer, the carte de visite was a small photographic print roughly the size of a modern trading card. The format arrived in America on the eve of the Civil War, fueling intense demand for the keepsakes. Many cards of Civil War soldiers survive today, but the experiences?and often the names?of the individuals portrayed have been lost to time. A passionate collector of Civil War–era photography, Ron Coddington researched the history behind these anonymous faces in military records, pension files, and other public and personal documents. In Faces of the Civil War, Coddington presents 77 cartes de visite of Union soldiers from his collection and tells the stories of their lives during and after the war. These soldiers came from all walks of life. All were volunteers. Their personal stories reveal a tremendous diversity in their experience of war: many served with distinction, some were captured, some never saw combat while others saw little else. The lives of survivors were even more disparate. While some made successful transitions back to civilian life, others suffered permanent physical and mental disabilities, which too often wrecked their families and careers. In compelling words and haunting pictures, Faces of the Civil War offers a unique perspective on the most dramatic and wrenching period in American history.

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 For Cause and Comrades written by James M. McPherson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-04-03 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: General John A. Wickham, commander of the famous 101st Airborne Division in the 1970s and subsequently Army Chief of Staff, once visited Antietam battlefield. Gazing at Bloody Lane where, in 1862, several Union assaults were brutally repulsed before they finally broke through, he marveled, "You couldn't get American soldiers today to make an attack like that." Why did those men risk certain death, over and over again, through countless bloody battles and four long, awful years ? Why did the conventional wisdom -- that soldiers become increasingly cynical and disillusioned as war progresses -- not hold true in the Civil War? It is to this question--why did they fight--that James McPherson, America's preeminent Civil War historian, now turns his attention. He shows that, contrary to what many scholars believe, the soldiers of the Civil War remained powerfully convinced of the ideals for which they fought throughout the conflict. Motivated by duty and honor, and often by religious faith, these men wrote frequently of their firm belief in the cause for which they fought: the principles of liberty, freedom, justice, and patriotism. Soldiers on both sides harkened back to the Founding Fathers, and the ideals of the American Revolution. They fought to defend their country, either the Union--"the best Government ever made"--or the Confederate states, where their very homes and families were under siege. And they fought to defend their honor and manhood. "I should not lik to go home with the name of a couhard," one Massachusetts private wrote, and another private from Ohio said, "My wife would sooner hear of my death than my disgrace." Even after three years of bloody battles, more than half of the Union soldiers reenlisted voluntarily. "While duty calls me here and my country demands my services I should be willing to make the sacrifice," one man wrote to his protesting parents. And another soldier said simply, "I still love my country." McPherson draws on more than 25,000 letters and nearly 250 private diaries from men on both sides. Civil War soldiers were among the most literate soldiers in history, and most of them wrote home frequently, as it was the only way for them to keep in touch with homes that many of them had left for the first time in their lives. Significantly, their letters were also uncensored by military authorities, and are uniquely frank in their criticism and detailed in their reports of marches and battles, relations between officers and men, political debates, and morale. For Cause and Comrades lets these soldiers tell their own stories in their own words to create an account that is both deeply moving and far truer than most books on war. Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Civil War, was a national bestseller that Hugh Brogan, in The New York Times, called "history writing of the highest order." For Cause and Comrades deserves similar accolades, as McPherson's masterful prose and the soldiers' own words combine to create both an important book on an often-overlooked aspect of our bloody Civil War, and a powerfully moving account of the men who fought it.

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 Loyal True and Brave written by Steven E. Woodworth and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2002 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of writings by and about Civil War soldiers. The pieces offer a revealing insight into the life of a Civil War soldier and bring to life the experiences of both Union and Confederate soldiers.

Download or read book Union Soldier of the American Civil War written by Denis Hambucken and published by The Countryman Press. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through photographs and historical documents, profiles the lives of Union soldiers during the American Civil War, discussing their day-to-day activities, weapons, and equipment.

Download or read book The View from the Ground written by Aaron Sheehan-Dean and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2006-12-22 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civil War scholars have long used soldiers' diaries and correspondence to flesh out their studies of the conflict's great officers, regiments, and battles. However, historians have only recently begun to treat the common Civil War soldier's daily life as a worthwhile topic of discussion in its own right. The View from the Ground reveals the beliefs of ordinary men and women on topics ranging from slavery and racism to faith and identity and represents a significant development in historical scholarship -- the use of Civil War soldiers' personal accounts to address larger questions about America's past. Aaron Sheehan-Dean opens The View from the Ground by surveying the landscape of research on Union and Confederate soldiers, examining not only the wealth of scholarly inquiry in the 1980s and 1990s but also the numerous questions that remain unexplored. Chandra Manning analyzes the views of white Union soldiers on slavery and their enthusiastic support for emancipation. Jason Phillips uncovers the deep antipathy of Confederate soldiers toward their Union adversaries, and Lisa Laskin explores tensions between soldiers and civilians in the Confederacy that represented a serious threat to the fledgling nation's survival. Essays by David Rolfs and Kent Dollar examine the nature of religious faith among Civil War combatants. The grim and gruesome realities of warfare -- and the horror of killing one's enemy at close range -- profoundly tested the spiritual convictions of the fighting men. Timothy J. Orr, Charles E. Brooks, and Kevin Levin demonstrate that Union and Confederate soldiers maintained their political beliefs both on the battlefield and in the war's aftermath. Orr details the conflict between Union soldiers and Northern antiwar activists in Pennsylvania, and Brooks examines a struggle between officers and the Fourth Texas Regiment. Levin contextualizes political struggles among Southerners in the 1880s and 1890s as a continuing battle kept alive by memories of, and identities associated with, their wartime experiences. The View from the Ground goes beyond standard histories that discuss soldiers primarily in terms of campaigns and casualties. These essays show that soldiers on both sides were authentic historical actors who willfully steered the course of the Civil War and shaped subsequent public memory of the event.

Download or read book Civil War Soldiers written by Reid Mitchell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1997-07-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The soldiers on both sides of the Civil War were united by a common history, and yet the legacy of this past was ambiguous, upholding both rebellion and union. Union and Confederate men went to war as Americans, convinced they fought an un-American, savage enemy. The war they fought was as emotional and catastrophic as any in history, a violent crucible that forged a new national identity. Civil War Soldiers is a fresh and compelling attempt to fathom the war's significance—then and now—and makes immediate the charged issues and bitter ironies of a nation torn by a conflict over the common ideals of liberty and justice. Drawing on diaries and letters, the focus of this pioneering study is on the men who fought, caught up in a conflict whose causes and consequences seemed as complex and contradictory to the soldiers themselves as they do to us. Reid Mitchell re-creates their experience and discusses the questions one would have most wanted to ask them: Why did you fight? How did you feel about slavery and race? What did you take home from the war? What legacy have you left us? "Fresh insights, startling descriptions, and poignant human detail about the war from the men who fought it."—Chicago Tribune

Download or read book Lincoln s Loyalists written by Richard Nelson Current and published by UPNE. This book was released on 1992 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this path-breaking book, Richard Nelson Current closes a major gap in our understanding of the important role of white southerners who fought for the Union during the Civil War. The ranks of the Union forces swelled by more than 100,000 of these men known to their friends as "loyalists" and to their enemies as "tories". They substantially strengthened the Union, weakened the Confederacy, and affected the outcome of the Civil War. Despite the assertions of southern governors that Lincoln would get no troops from the South to preserve the Union, every Confederate state except South Carolina provided at least a battalion of white troops for the Union Army. The role of black soldiers (including those from the South) continues to receive deserved attention. Curiously, little heed has been paid to the white southern supporters of the Union cause, and nothing has been published about the group as a whole. Relying almost entirely on primary sources, Current here opens the long-overdue investigation of these many Americans who, at great risk to themselves and their families, made a significant contribution to the Union's war effort. Current meticulously explores the history of the loyalists in each Confederate state during the war. Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia provided over 70 percent of the loyalist troops, but 10,000 from Arkansas, 7,000 from Louisiana, and thousands from North Carolina, Texas, and Alabama volunteered as well. The author weaves the separate state stories into an intriguing and detailed tapestry. The loyalists served in a variety of capacities--some performing mundane tasks, some fighting with valor. Whatever his individual role, each southerner joining the Unionconstituted a double loss to the Confederacy: a subtraction from its own ranks and an addition to the Union's. Undoubtedly, this played an important role in the Confederate defeat.

Download or read book Mosquito Soldiers written by Andrew McIlwaine Bell and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-04 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the 620,000 soldiers who perished during the American Civil War, the overwhelming majority died not from gunshot wounds or saber cuts, but from disease. And of the various maladies that plagued both armies, few were more pervasive than malaria -- a mosquito-borne illness that afflicted over 1.1 million soldiers serving in the Union army alone. Yellow fever, another disease transmitted by mosquitos, struck fear into the hearts of military planners who knew that "yellow jack" could wipe out an entire army in a matter of weeks. In this ground-breaking medical history, Andrew McIlwaine Bell explores the impact of these two terrifying mosquito-borne maladies on the major political and military events of the 1860s, revealing how deadly microorganisms carried by a tiny insect helped shape the course of the Civil War. Soldiers on both sides frequently complained about the annoying pests that fed on their blood, buzzed in their ears, invaded their tents, and generally contributed to the misery of army life. Little did they suspect that the South's large mosquito population operated as a sort of mercenary force, a third army, one that could work for or against either side depending on the circumstances. Malaria and yellow fever not only sickened thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers but also affected the timing and success of certain key military operations. Some commanders took seriously the threat posed by the southern disease environment and planned accordingly; others reacted only after large numbers of their men had already fallen ill. African American soldiers were ordered into areas deemed unhealthy for whites, and Confederate quartermasters watched helplessly as yellow fever plagued important port cities, disrupting critical supply chains and creating public panics. Bell also chronicles the effects of disease on the civilian population, describing how shortages of malarial medicine helped erode traditional gender roles by turning genteel southern women into smugglers. Southern urbanites learned the value of sanitation during the Union occupation only to endure the horror of new yellow fever outbreaks once it ended, and federal soldiers reintroduced malaria into non-immune northern areas after the war. Throughout his lively narrative, Bell reinterprets familiar Civil War battles and events from an epidemiological standpoint, providing a fascinating medical perspective on the war. By focusing on two specific diseases rather than a broad array of Civil War medical topics, Bell offers a clear understanding of how environmental factors serve as agents of change in history. Indeed, with Mosquito Soldiers, he proves that the course of the Civil War would have been far different had mosquito-borne illness not been part of the South's landscape in the 1860s.

Download or read book Union Soldier of the American Civil War written by Denis Hambucken and published by The Countryman Press. This book was released on 2012-04-16 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a glimpse at the lives, weapons, and equipment of these soldiers through a collection of artifacts and exacting reproductions. As 1862 dawned, the Civil War, the conflict that had started the year before and that most Americans thought would last only a few months, showed no signs of ending. Hundreds of thousands of men across the divided nation enlisted in state volunteer regiments that poured into the sprawling military camps around Washington, DC, Richmond, Virginia, and other strategic locations. Within a year, thousands of these courageous men had lost their lives on bloody battlefields or died in disease-ridden encampments. This book provides a glimpse at the lives, weapons, and equipment of these soldiers through a collection of artifacts and exacting reproductions. While other books examine the War Between the States from a political, tactical, or military perspective, these books focus on the day-to-day life and the human experience of the men themselves, the Union and Confederate soldiers who enlisted and often fought to the death for their beliefs and those of their home regions of the young United States. Illustrated with full-color photography and historical documents, engagingly written and thoroughly explained, these books are the perfect addition to children’s and adults’ library collections, school libraries, and personal libraries of interested readers and history lovers of all ages.

Download or read book Mending Broken Soldiers written by Guy R. Hasegawa and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The four years of the Civil War saw bloodshed on a scale unprecedented in the history of the United States. Thousands of soldiers and sailors from both sides who survived the horrors of the war faced hardship for the rest of their lives as amputees. Now Guy R. Hasegawa presents the first volume to explore the wartime provisions made for amputees in need of artificial limbs—programs that, while they revealed stark differences between the resources and capabilities of the North and the South, were the forebears of modern government efforts to assist in the rehabilitation of wounded service members. Hasegawa draws upon numerous sources of archival information to offer a comprehensive look at the artificial limb industry as a whole, including accounts of the ingenious designs employed by manufacturers and the rapid advancement of medical technology during the Civil War; illustrations and photographs of period prosthetics; and in-depth examinations of the companies that manufactured limbs for soldiers and bid for contracts, including at least one still in existence today. An intriguing account of innovation, determination, humanitarianism, and the devastating toll of battle, Mending Broken Soldiers shares the never-before-told story of the artificial-limb industry of the Civil War and provides a fascinating glimpse into groundbreaking military health programs during the most tumultuous years in American history. Univeristy Press Books for Public and Secondary Schools 2013 edition

Download or read book More Damning Than Slaughter written by Mark A. Weitz and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Coupled with problems such as speculation, food and clothing shortages, conscription, taxation, and a pervasive focus on the protection of local interests, desertion started as a military problem and spilled over into the civilian world. Fostered by a military culture that treated absenteeism leniently early in the war, desertion steadily increased and by 1863 reached epidemic proportions. A Union policy that permitted Confederate deserters to swear allegiance to the Union and then return home encouraged desertion. Equally important in persuading men to desert was the direct appeal from loved ones on the home front - letters from wives begging soldiers to come home for harvests, births, and other events.".