Download or read book The Confederate Nation 1861 1865 written by Emory M. Thomas and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Confederate Nation has yet to be superseded as the standard title on the subject.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 Generals Emory 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.

Download or read book The Confederate Nation written by Emory M. Thomas and published by Harper Perennial. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Definitive and unsurpassed, The Confederate Nation is the renowned history of the Confederacy by Emory M. Thomas ("one of America's most eminent Civil War historians"—Richmond Times-Dispatch). Thomas's masterful account delivers a clear analysis of the origins of secession, a gripping narrative of the military campaigns that shaped the Civil War, and a compelling portrait of the Southern people during the country's most turbulent era. Now featuring a new introduction by the author, The Confederate Nation is the quintessential exploration of the American South in the Civil War years.

Download or read book Modernizing a Slave Economy written by John Majewski and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would separate Union and Confederate countries look like if the South had won the Civil War? In fact, this was something that southern secessionists actively debated. Imagining themselves as nation builders, they understood the importance of a plan for the economic structure of the Confederacy. The traditional view assumes that Confederate slave-based agrarianism went hand in hand with a natural hostility toward industry and commerce. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, John Majewski's analysis finds that secessionists strongly believed in industrial development and state-led modernization. They blamed the South's lack of development on Union policies of discriminatory taxes on southern commerce and unfair subsidies for northern industry. Majewski argues that Confederates' opposition to a strong central government was politically tied to their struggle against northern legislative dominance. Once the Confederacy was formed, those who had advocated states' rights in the national legislature in order to defend against northern political dominance quickly came to support centralized power and a strong executive for war making and nation building.

Download or read book A Shattered Nation written by Anne Sarah Rubin and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-11-20 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians often assert that Confederate nationalism had its origins in pre-Civil War sectional conflict with the North, reached its apex at the start of the war, and then dropped off quickly after the end of hostilities. Anne Sarah Rubin argues instead that white Southerners did not actually begin to formulate a national identity until it became evident that the Confederacy was destined to fight a lengthy war against the Union. She also demonstrates that an attachment to a symbolic or sentimental Confederacy existed independent of the political Confederacy and was therefore able to persist well after the collapse of the Confederate state. White Southerners redefined symbols and figures of the failed state as emotional touchstones and political rallying points in the struggle to retain local (and racial) control, even as former Confederates took the loyalty oath and applied for pardons in droves. Exploring the creation, maintenance, and transformation of Confederate identity during the tumultuous years of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Rubin sheds new light on the ways in which Confederates felt connected to their national creation and provides a provocative example of what happens when a nation disintegrates and leaves its people behind to forge a new identity.

Download or read book Confederate Visions written by Ian Binnington and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nationalism in nineteenth-century America operated through a collection of symbols, signifiers citizens could invest with meaning and understanding. In Confederate Visions, Ian Binnington examines the roots of Confederate nationalism by analyzing some of its most important symbols: Confederate constitutions, treasury notes, wartime literature, and the role of the military in symbolizing the Confederate nation. Nationalisms tend to construct glorified pasts, idyllic pictures of national strength, honor, and unity, based on visions of what should have been rather than what actually was. Binnington considers the ways in which the Confederacy was imagined by antebellum Southerners employing intertwined mythic concepts—the "Worthy Southron," the "Demon Yankee," the "Silent Slave"—and a sense of shared history that constituted a distinctive Confederate Americanism. The Worthy Southron, the constructed Confederate self, was imagined as a champion of liberty, counterposed to the Demon Yankee other, a fanatical abolitionist and enemy of Liberty. The Silent Slave was a companion to the vocal Confederate self, loyal and trusting, reliable and honest. The creation of American national identity was fraught with struggle, political conflict, and bloody Civil War. Confederate Visions examines literature, newspapers and periodicals, visual imagery, and formal state documents to explore the origins and development of wartime Confederate nationalism.

Download or read book Newest Born of Nations written by Ann L. Tucker and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-06-29 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, American Library Association (2021) From the earliest stirrings of southern nationalism to the defeat of the Confederacy, analysis of European nationalist movements played a critical role in how southerners thought about their new southern nation. Southerners argued that because the Confederate nation was cast in the same mold as its European counterparts, it deserved independence. In Newest Born of Nations, Ann Tucker utilizes print sources such as newspapers and magazines to reveal how elite white southerners developed an international perspective on nationhood that helped them clarify their own national values, conceive of the South as distinct from the North, and ultimately define and legitimize the Confederacy. While popular at home, claims to equivalency with European nations failed to resonate with Europeans and northerners, who viewed slavery as incompatible with liberal nationalism. Forced to reevaluate their claims about the international place of southern nationalism, some southerners redoubled their attempts to place the Confederacy within the broader trends of nineteenth-century nationalism. More conservative southerners took a different tack, emphasizing the distinctiveness of their nationalism, claiming that the Confederacy actually purified nationalism through slavery. Southern Unionists likewise internationalized their case for national unity. By examining the evolution of and variation within these international perspectives, Tucker reveals the making of a southern nationhood to be a complex, contested process.

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 America Aflame written by David Goldfield and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Where past scholars have limned the war as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America's greatest failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere. As the Second GreatAwakening surged through America, political questions became matters of good and evil to be fought to the death. The price of that failure was horrific, but the carnage accomplished what statesmen could not: It made the United States one nation and eliminated slavery as a divisive force in the Union. The victorious North became synonymous with America as a land of innovation and industrialization, whose teeming cities offered squalor and opportunity in equal measure. Religion was supplanted by science and a gospel of progress, and the South was left behind. Goldfield's panoramic narrative, sweeping from the 1840s to the end of Reconstruction, is studded with memorable details and luminaries such as HarrietBeecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman. There are lesser known yet equally compelling characters, too, including Carl Schurz-a German immigrant, warhero, and postwar reformer-and Alexander Stephens, the urbane and intellectual vice president of the Confederacy. America Aflame is a vivid portrait of the "fiery trial"that transformed the country we live in.

Download or read book Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation written by Mark E. Neely Jr. and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-11-21 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War placed the U.S. Constitution under unprecedented--and, to this day, still unmatched--strain. In Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Mark Neely examines for the first time in one book the U.S. Constitution and its often overlooked cousin, the Confederate Constitution, and the ways the documents shaped the struggle for national survival. Previous scholars have examined wartime challenges to civil liberties and questions of presidential power, but Neely argues that the constitutional conflict extended to the largest questions of national existence. Drawing on judicial opinions, presidential state papers, and political pamphlets spiced with the everyday immediacy of the partisan press, Neely reveals how judges, lawyers, editors, politicians, and government officials, both North and South, used their constitutions to fight the war and save, or create, their nation. Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation illuminates how the U.S. Constitution not only survived its greatest test but emerged stronger after the war. That this happened at a time when the nation's very existence was threatened, Neely argues, speaks ultimately to the wisdom of the Union leadership, notably President Lincoln and his vision of the American nation.

Download or read book Confederate Reckoning written by Stephanie McCurry and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-07 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize Finalist Winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize Winner of the Merle Curti Prize “Perhaps the highest praise one can offer McCurry’s work is to say that once we look through her eyes, it will become almost impossible to believe that we ever saw or thought otherwise.”—Drew Gilpin Faust, The New Republic The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. When the grandiosity of Southerners’ national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people—white women and slaves—and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise. Wartime scarcity of food, labor, and soldiers tested the Confederate vision at every point and created domestic crises to match those found on the battlefields. Women and slaves became critical political actors as they contested government enlistment and tax and welfare policies, and struggled for their freedom. The attempt to repress a majority of its own population backfired on the Confederate States of America as the disenfranchised demanded to be counted and considered in the great struggle over slavery, emancipation, democracy, and nationhood. That Confederate struggle played out in a highly charged international arena. The political project of the Confederacy was tried by its own people and failed. The government was forced to become accountable to women and slaves, provoking an astounding transformation of the slaveholders’ state. Confederate Reckoning is the startling story of this epic political battle in which women and slaves helped to decide the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.

Download or read book Inside the Confederate Nation written by Lesley J. Gordon and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2007-02 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (1970) and The Confederate Nation (1979), Emory Thomas redefined the field of Civil War history and reconceptualized the Confederacy as a unique entity fighting a war for survival. Inside the Confederate Nation honors his enormous contributions to the field with fresh interpretations of all aspects of Confederate life -- nationalism and identity, family and gender, battlefront and home front, race, and postwar legacies and memories. Many of the volume's twenty essays focus on individuals, households, communities, and particular regions of the South, highlighting the sheer variety of circumstances southerners faced over the course of the war. Other chapters explore the public and private dilemmas faced by diplomats, policy makers, journalists, and soldiers within the new nation. All of the essays attempt to explain the place of southerners within the Confederacy, how they came to see themselves and others differently because of secession, and the disparities between their expectations and reality.

Download or read book Upon the Altar of the Nation written by Harry S. Stout and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-03-27 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A profound and timely examination of the moral underpinnings of the War Between the States The Civil War was not only a war of armies but also a war of ideas, in which Union and Confederacy alike identified itself as a moral nation with God on its side. In this watershed book, Harry S. Stout measures the gap between those claims and the war’s actual conduct. Ranging from the home front to the trenches and drawing on a wealth of contemporary documents, Stout explores the lethal mix of propaganda and ideology that came to justify slaughter on and off the battlefield. At a time when our country is once again at war, Upon the Altar of the Nation is a deeply necessary book.

Download or read book The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience written by Emory M. Thomas and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2021-11-25 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, first published in 1971, has made us look again at the events surrounding the Civil War. The Confederate Southerners likened themselves to the American revolutionaries of 1776. Although both revolutions sought independence and the overthrow of an existing political system, the Confederates battled for a political separation to conserve rather than to create. The result, however, was a transformation of the antebellum traditions they were fighting to preserve.

Download or read book Reluctant Rebels written by Kenneth W. Noe and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-05-14 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the feverish mobilization of secession had faded, why did Southern men join the Confederate army? Kenneth Noe examines the motives and subsequent performance of "later enlisters." He offers a nuanced view of men who have often been cast as less patriotic and less committed to the cause, rekindling the debate over who these later enlistees were, why they joined, and why they stayed and fought. Noe refutes the claim that later enlisters were more likely to desert or perform poorly in battle and reassesses the argument that they were less ideologically savvy than their counterparts who enlisted early in the conflict. He argues that kinship and neighborhood, not conscription, compelled these men to fight: they were determined to protect their families and property and were fueled by resentment over emancipation and pillaging and destruction by Union forces. But their age often combined with their duties to wear them down more quickly than younger men, making them less effective soldiers for a Confederate nation that desperately needed every able-bodied man it could muster. Reluctant Rebels places the stories of individual soldiers in the larger context of the Confederate war effort and follows them from the initial optimism of enlistment through the weariness of battle and defeat.

Download or read book Colossal Ambitions written by Adrian Brettle and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading politicians, diplomats, clerics, planters, farmers, manufacturers, and merchants preached a transformative, world-historical role for the Confederacy, persuading many of their compatriots to fight not merely to retain what they had but to gain their future empire. Impervious to reality, their vision of future world leadership—territorial, economic, political, and cultural—provided a vitally important, underappreciated motivation to form an independent Confederate republic. In Colossal Ambitions, Adrian Brettle explores how leading Confederate thinkers envisioned their postwar nation—its relationship with the United States, its place in the Americas, and its role in the global order. Brettle draws on rich caches of published and unpublished letters and diaries, Confederate national and state government documents, newspapers published in North America and England, conference proceedings, pamphlets, contemporary and scholarly articles, and more to engage the perspectives of not only modern historians but some of the most salient theorists of the Western World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An impressive and complex undertaking, Colossal Ambitions concludes that while some Confederate commentators saw wartime industrialization as pointing toward a different economic future, most Confederates saw their society as revolving once more around coercive labor, staple crop production, and exports in the war’s wake.

Download or read book Government of Our Own written by William C. Davis and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1994-09-01 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For four crucial months in 1861, delegates from all over the South met in Montgomery, Alabama, to establish a new nation. Davis (Jefferson Davis: The Man and the Hour, LJ 11/15/91) tells their story in this new work, another example of Davis's fine storytelling skill and an indispensable guide to understanding the formation of the Confederate government. Among the issues Davis examines are revising the Constitution to meet Southern needs, banning the importation of slaves, and determining whether the convention could be considered a congress. Also revealed are the many participating personalities, their ambitions and egos, politicking and lobbying for the presidency of the new nation, and the nature of the city of Montgomery itself.

Download or read book This Republic of Suffering written by Drew Gilpin Faust and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.