Download or read book How the South Won the Civil War written by Heather Cox Richardson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-12 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies. The South and West equally depended on extractive industries-cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter-giving rise a new birth of white male oligarchy, despite the guarantees provided by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the economic opportunities afforded by expansion. To reveal why this happened, How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. At the nation's founding, it was the Eastern "yeoman farmer" who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government. New states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century and western and southern leaders found yet more common ground. As resources and people streamed into the West during the New Deal and World War II, the region's influence grew. "Movement Conservatives," led by westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, claimed to embody cowboy individualism and worked with Dixiecrats to embrace the ideology of the Confederacy. Richardson's searing book seizes upon the soul of the country and its ongoing struggle to provide equal opportunity to all. Debunking the myth that the Civil War released the nation from the grip of oligarchy, expunging the sins of the Founding, it reveals how and why the Old South not only survived in the West, but thrived.

Download or read book If the South Had Won the Civil War written by MacKinlay Kantor and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2001-11-03 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just a touch here and a tweak there . . . . MacKinlay Kantor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, master storyteller, shows us how the South could have won the Civil War, how two small shifts in history (as we know it) in the summer of 1863 could have turned the tide for the Confederacy. What would have happened: to the Union, to Abraham Lincoln, to the people of the North and South, to the world? If the South Had Won the Civil War originally appeared in Look Magazine nearly half a century ago. It immediately inspired a deluge of letters and telegrams from astonished readers and became an American classic overnight. Published in book form soon after, Kantor's masterpiece has been unavailable for a decade. Now, this much requested classic is once again available for a new generation of readers and features a stunning cover by acclaimed Civil War artist Don Troiani, a new introduction by award-winning alternate history author Harry Turtledove, and fifteen superb illustrations by the incomparable Dan Nance. It all begins on that fateful afternoon of Tuesday, May 12, 1863, when a deplorable equestrian accident claims the life of General Ulysses S. Grant . . . . At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Download or read book How the South Could Have Won the Civil War written by Bevin Alexander and published by Forum Books. This book was released on 2008-11-25 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Could the South have won the Civil War? To many, the very question seems absurd. After all, the Confederacy had only a third of the population and one-eleventh of the industry of the North. Wasn’t the South’s defeat inevitable? Not at all, as acclaimed military historian Bevin Alexander reveals in this provocative and counterintuitive new look at the Civil War. In fact, the South most definitely could have won the war, and Alexander documents exactly how a Confederate victory could have come about—and how close it came to happening. Moving beyond fanciful theoretical conjectures to explore actual plans that Confederate generals proposed and the tactics ultimately adopted in the war’s key battles, How the South Could Have Won the Civil War offers surprising analysis on topics such as: •How the Confederacy had its greatest chance to win the war just three months into the fighting—but blew it •How the Confederacy’s three most important leaders—President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson—clashed over how to fight the war •How the Civil War’s decisive turning point came in a battle that the Rebel army never needed to fight •How the Confederate army devised—but never fully exploited—a way to negate the Union’s huge advantages in manpower and weaponry •How Abraham Lincoln and other Northern leaders understood the Union’s true vulnerability better than the Confederacy’s top leaders did •How it is a myth that the Union army’s accidental discovery of Lee’s order of battle doomed the South’s 1862 Maryland campaign •How the South failed to heed the important lessons of its 1863 victory at Chancellorsville How the South Could Have Won the Civil War shows why there is nothing inevitable about military victory, even for a state with overwhelming strength. Alexander provides a startling account of how a relatively small number of tactical and strategic mistakes cost the South the war—and changed the course of history.

Download or read book Starving the South written by Andrew F. Smith and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'From the first shot fired at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, to the last shot fired at Appomattox, food played a crucial role in the Civil War. In Starving the South, culinary historian Andrew Smith takes a fascinating gastronomical look at the war and its aftermath. At the time, the North mobilized its agricultural resources, fed its civilians and military, and still had massive amounts of food to export to Europe. The South did not; while people starved, the morale of their soldiers waned and desertions from the Army of the Confederacy increased.....' (Book Jacket)

Download or read book To Make Men Free written by Heather Cox Richardson and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-09-23 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of Democracy Awakening, “the most comprehensive account of the GOP and its competing impulses” (Los Angeles Times) When Abraham Lincoln helped create the Republican Party on the eve of the Civil War, his goal was to promote economic opportunity for all Americans, not just the slaveholding Southern planters who steered national politics. Yet, despite the egalitarian dream at the heart of its founding, the Republican Party quickly became mired in a fundamental identity crisis. Would it be the party of democratic ideals? Or would it be the party of moneyed interests? In the century and a half since, Republicans have vacillated between these two poles, with dire economic, political, and moral repercussions for the entire nation. In To Make Men Free, celebrated historian Heather Cox Richardson traces the shifting ideology of the Grand Old Party from the antebellum era to the Great Recession, revealing the insidious cycle of boom and bust that has characterized the Party since its inception. While in office, progressive Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower revived Lincoln's vision of economic freedom and expanded the government, attacking the concentration of wealth and nurturing upward mobility. But they and others like them have been continually thwarted by powerful business interests in the Party. Their opponents appealed to Americans' latent racism and xenophobia to regain political power, linking taxation and regulation to redistribution and socialism. The results of the Party's wholesale embrace of big business are all too familiar: financial collapses like the Panic of 1893, the Great Depression in 1929, and the Great Recession in 2008. With each passing decade, with each missed opportunity and political misstep, the schism within the Republican Party has grown wider, pulling the GOP ever further from its founding principles. Expansive and authoritative, To Make Men Free is a sweeping history of the Party that was once America's greatest political hope -- and, time and time again, has proved its greatest disappointment.

Download or read book How the South Finally Won the Civil War written by Charles Potts and published by Tsunami, Incorporated. This book was released on 1995 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is a fact based narrative, based on the historical record, of Southern policy commencing with the British colony at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1670. The book traces the way in which these laissez-faire economic ideas of exploitation, racism and contempt for democracy and the environment, were the basis of the difference between the North and the South that lead to the Civil War. During the 85 year period between 1865 and 1945, the South was able to regain control of the American federal government. Today, five of the six things the South was fighting for during the Civil War are public policy. -- Amazon.com.

Download or read book Why the South Lost the Civil War written by and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1991-09-01 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a chronological account of the Civil War, reexamines theories for the South's defeat, and analyzes Confederate and Union military strategy

Download or read book After Lincoln written by A. J. Langguth and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Lincoln's assassination, his "team of rivals" was left adrift. President Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner from Tennessee, was challenged by radical Republicans in Congress, who wanted to punish the defeated South. When Johnson's policies placated the rebels at the expense of the black freed men, radicals in the House impeached him for trying to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Even William Seward, Lincoln's closest ally in his cabinet, seemed to waver. By the 1868 election, united Republicans nominated Ulysses Grant, Lincoln's winning Union general. The night of his victory, Grant lamented to his wife, "I'm afraid I'm elected." His attempts to reconcile Southerners with the Union and to quash the rising Ku Klux Klan were undercut by implacable Southern resistance and by corruption during his two terms.--From publisher description.

Download or read book West from Appomattox written by Heather Cox Richardson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-28 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This thoughtful, engaging examination of the Reconstruction Era . . . will be appealing . . . to anyone interested in the roots of present-day American politics” (Publishers Weekly). The story of Reconstruction is not simply about the rebuilding of the South after the Civil War. In many ways, the late nineteenth century defined modern America, as Southerners, Northerners, and Westerners forged a national identity that united three very different regions into a country that could become a world power. A sweeping history of the United States from the era of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, this engaging book tracks the formation of the American middle class while stretching the boundaries of our understanding of Reconstruction. Historian Heather Cox Richardson ties the North and West into the post–Civil War story that usually focuses narrowly on the South. By weaving together the experiences of real individuals who left records in their own words—from ordinary Americans such as a plantation mistress, a Native American warrior, and a labor organizer, to prominent historical figures such as Andrew Carnegie, Julia Ward Howe, Booker T. Washington, and Sitting Bull—Richardson tells a story about the creation of modern America.

Download or read book Why The North Won The Civil War written by David Herbert Donald and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WHY THE SOUTH LOST What led to the downfall of the Confederacy? The distinguished professors of history represented in this volume examine the following crucial factors in the South’s defeat: ECONOMIC—RICHARD N. CURRENT of the University of Wisconsin attributes the victory of the North to fundamental economic superiority so great that the civilian resources of the South were dissipated under the conditions of war. MILITARY—T. HARRY WILLIAMS of Louisiana State University cites the deficiencies of Confederate strategy and military leadership, evaluating the influence on both sides of Baron Jomini, a 19th-century strategist who stressed position warfare and a rapid tactical offensive. DIPLOMATIC—NORMAN A. GRAERNER of the University of Illinois holds that the basic reason England and France decided not to intervene on the side of the South was simply that to have done so would have violated the general principle of non-intervention to which they were committed. SOCIAL—DAVID DONALD of Columbia University offers the intriguing thesis that an excess of Southern democracy killed the Confederacy. From the ordinary man in the ranks to Jefferson Davis himself, too much emphasis was placed on individual freedom and not enough on military discipline. POLITICAL—DAVID M. POTTER of Stanford University suggests that the deficiencies of President Davis as a civil and military leader turner the balance, and that the South suffered from the lack of a second well-organized political party to force its leadership into competence.

Download or read book What Caused the Civil War Reflections on the South and Southern History written by Edward L. Ayers and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2006-08-17 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An extremely good writer, [Ayers] is well worth reading . . . on the South and Southern history.”—Stephen Sears, Boston Globe The Southern past has proven to be fertile ground for great works of history. Peculiarities of tragic proportions—a system of slavery flourishing in a land of freedom, secession and Civil War tearing at a federal Union, deep poverty persisting in a nation of fast-paced development—have fed the imaginations of some of our most accomplished historians. Foremost in their ranks today is Edward L. Ayers, author of the award-winning and ongoing study of the Civil War in the heart of America, the Valley of the Shadow Project. In wide-ranging essays on the Civil War, the New South, and the twentieth-century South, Ayers turns over the rich soil of Southern life to explore the sources of the nation's and his own history. The title essay, original here, distills his vast research and offers a fresh perspective on the nation's central historical event.

Download or read book Engineering Victory written by Thomas F. Army Jr. and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Superior engineering skills among Union soldiers helped ensure victory in the Civil War. Engineering Victory brings a fresh approach to the question of why the North prevailed in the Civil War. Historian Thomas F. Army, Jr., identifies strength in engineering—not superior military strategy or industrial advantage—as the critical determining factor in the war’s outcome. Army finds that Union soldiers were able to apply scientific ingenuity and innovation to complex problems in a way that Confederate soldiers simply could not match. Skilled Free State engineers who were trained during the antebellum period benefited from basic educational reforms, the spread of informal educational practices, and a culture that encouraged learning and innovation. During the war, their rapid construction and repair of roads, railways, and bridges allowed Northern troops to pass quickly through the forbidding terrain of the South as retreating and maneuvering Confederates struggled to cut supply lines and stop the Yankees from pressing any advantage. By presenting detailed case studies from both theaters of the war, Army clearly demonstrates how the soldiers’ education, training, and talents spelled the difference between success and failure, victory and defeat. He also reveals massive logistical operations as critical in determining the war’s outcome.

Download or read book Dixie Betrayed written by David J. Eicher and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2009-05-30 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Eicher reveals the story of the political conspiracy, discord and dysfunction in Richmond that cost the South the Civil War. He shows how President Jefferson Davis fought not only with the Confederate House and Senate and with State Governers but also with his own vice-president and secretary of state.

Download or read book The Battle of Glendale written by Jim Stempel and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is commonly accepted that the South could never have won the Civil War. By chronicling perhaps the best of the South's limited opportunities to turn the tide, this provocative study argues that Confederate victory was indeed possible. On June 30, 1862, at a small Virginia crossroads known as Glendale, Confederate forces under Robert E. Lee sliced the retreating Army of the Potomac in two and came remarkably close to destroying their Federal foe. Only a string of command miscues on the part of the Confederates--and a stunning command failure by Stonewall Jackson--enabled the Union army to escape a defeat that day, one that may well have vaulted the South to its independence. Never before or after would the Confederacy come as close to transforming American history as it did at the Battle of Glendale.

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 Book Prize Winner of the Merle Curti Award “McCurry strips the Confederacy of myth and romance to reveal its doomed essence. Dedicated to the proposition that men were not created equal, the Confederacy had to fight a two-front war. Not only against Union armies, but also slaves and poor white women who rose in revolt across the South. Richly detailed and lucidly told, Confederate Reckoning is a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read.” —Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic “McCurry challenges us to expand our definition of politics to encompass not simply government but the entire public sphere. The struggle for Southern independence, she shows, opened the door for the mobilization of two groups previously outside the political nation—white women of the nonslaveholding class and slaves...Confederate Reckoning offers a powerful new paradigm for understanding events on the Confederate home front.” —Eric Foner, The Nation “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...At the outset of the book, McCurry insists that she is not going to ask or answer the timeworn question of why the South lost the Civil War. Yet in her vivid and richly textured portrait of what she calls the Confederacy’s ‘undoing,’ she has in fact accomplished exactly that.” —Drew Gilpin Faust, New Republic “A brilliant, eye-opening account of how Southern white women and black slaves fatally undermined the Confederacy from within.” —Edward Bonekemper, Civil War News 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 The Grand Design written by Donald Stoker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-20 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the abundance of books on the Civil War, not one has focused exclusively on what was in fact the determining factor in the outcome of the conflict: differences in Union and Southern strategy. In The Grand Design, Donald Stoker provides for the first time a comprehensive and often surprising account of strategy as it evolved between Fort Sumter and Appomattox. Reminding us that strategy is different from tactics (battlefield deployments) and operations (campaigns conducted in pursuit of a strategy), Stoker examines how Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis identified their political goals and worked with their generals to craft the military means to achieve them--or how they often failed to do so. Stoker shows that Davis, despite a West Point education and experience as Secretary of War, ultimately failed as a strategist by losing control of the political side of the war. Lincoln, in contrast, evolved a clear strategic vision, but he failed for years to make his generals implement it. And while Robert E. Lee was unerring in his ability to determine the Union's strategic heart--its center of gravity--he proved mistaken in his assessment of how to destroy it. Historians have often argued that the North's advantages in population and industry ensured certain victory. In The Grand Design, Stoker reasserts the centrality of the overarching plan on each side, arguing convincingly that it was strategy that determined the result of America's great national conflict.

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 257 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.