Download or read book The Confederate War written by Gary W. Gallagher and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1999-03-15 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If one is to believe contemporary historians, the South never had a chance. Many allege that the Confederacy lost the Civil War because of internal division or civilian disaffection; others point to flawed military strategy or ambivalence over slavery. But, argues distinguished historian Gary Gallagher, we should not ask why the Confederacy collapsed so soon but rather how it lasted so long. In The Confederate War he reexamines the Confederate experience through the actions and words of the people who lived it to show how the home front responded to the war, endured great hardships, and assembled armies that fought with tremendous spirit and determination.Gallagher’s portrait highlights a powerful sense of Confederate patriotism and unity in the face of a determined adversary. Drawing on letters, diaries, and newspapers of the day, he shows that Southerners held not only an unflagging belief in their way of life, which sustained them to the bitter end, but also a widespread expectation of victory and a strong popular will closely attuned to military events. In fact, the army’s “offensive-defensive” strategy came remarkably close to triumph, claims Gallagher—in contrast to the many historians who believe that a more purely defensive strategy or a guerrilla resistance could have won the war for the South. To understand why the South lost, Gallagher says we need look no further than the war itself: after a long struggle that brought enormous loss of life and property, Southerners finally realized that they had been beaten on the battlefield.Gallagher’s interpretation of the Confederates and their cause boldly challenges current historical thinking and invites readers to reconsider their own conceptions of the American Civil War.
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 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 Why Confederates Fought written by Aaron Sheehan-Dean and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-11-05 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first comprehensive study of the experience of Virginia soldiers and their families in the Civil War, Aaron Sheehan-Dean captures the inner world of the rank-and-file. Utilizing new statistical evidence and first-person narratives, Sheehan-Dean explores how Virginia soldiers--even those who were nonslaveholders--adapted their vision of the war's purpose to remain committed Confederates. Sheehan-Dean challenges earlier arguments that middle- and lower-class southerners gradually withdrew their support for the Confederacy because their class interests were not being met. Instead he argues that Virginia soldiers continued to be motivated by the profound emotional connection between military service and the protection of home and family, even as the war dragged on. The experience of fighting, explains Sheehan-Dean, redefined southern manhood and family relations, established the basis for postwar race and class relations, and transformed the shape of Virginia itself. He concludes that Virginians' experience of the Civil War offers important lessons about the reasons we fight wars and the ways that those reasons can change over time.
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 The Seventh Star of the Confederacy written by Kenneth Wayne Howell and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On February 1, 1861, delegates at the Texas Secession Convention elected to leave the Union. The people of Texas supported the actions of the convention in a statewide referendum, paving the way for the state to secede and to officially become the seventh state in the Confederacy. Soon the Texans found themselves engaged in a bloody and prolonged civil war against their northern brethren. During the curse of this war, the lives of thousands of Texans, both young and old, were changed forever. This new anthology, edited by Kenneth W. Howell, incorporates the latest scholarly research on how Texans experienced the war. Eighteen contributors take us from the battlefront to the home front, ranging from inside the walls of a Confederate prison to inside the homes of women and children left to fend for themselves while their husbands and fathers were away on distant battlefields, and from the halls of the governor’s mansion to the halls of the county commissioner’s court in Colorado County. Also explored are well-known battles that took place in or near Texas, such as the Battle of Galveston, the Battle of Nueces, the Battle of Sabine Pass, and the Red River Campaign. Finally, the social and cultural aspects of the war receive new analysis, including the experiences of women, African Americans, Union prisoners of war, and noncombatants.
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 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 334 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 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 Soldier in the Civil War written by and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extensive collection of narratives covering various engagements, including casualty statistics, and illustrated with maps, portraits, drawings and photographs.
Download or read book Rails To Oblivion The Decline Of Confederate Railroads In The Civil War Illustrated Edition written by Dr. Christopher R. Gabel and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes 2 charts, 7 maps, 7 figures and 5 Illustrations. Renowned Military Historian Dr Christopher Gabel charts the decline of the Confederate Railways system that was to spell ultimate doom to the outnumbered soldiers of the Southern states. Military professionals need always to recognize the centrality of logistics to military operations. In this booklet, Dr. Christopher R. Gabel provides a companion piece to his “Railroad Generalship” which explores the same issues from the other side of the tracks, so to speak. “Rails to Oblivion” shows that neither brilliant generals nor valiant soldiers can, in the long run, overcome the effects of a neglected and deteriorating logistics system. Moreover, the cumulative effect of mundane factors such as metal fatigue, mechanical friction, and accidents in the civilian workplace can contribute significantly to the outcome of a war. And no matter how good some thing or idea may look on paper, or how we delude ourselves, we and our soldiers must live with, and die in, reality. War is a complex business. This booklet explores some of the facets of war that often escape the notice of military officers, and as COL Jerry Morelock intimated in his foreword to “Railroad Generalship,” these facets decide who wins and who loses.
Download or read book The Three Cornered War written by Megan Kate Nelson and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History A dramatic, riveting, and “fresh look at a region typically obscured in accounts of the Civil War. American history buffs will relish this entertaining and eye-opening portrait” (Publishers Weekly). Megan Kate Nelson “expands our understanding of how the Civil War affected Indigenous peoples and helped to shape the nation” (Library Journal, starred review), reframing the era as one of national conflict—involving not just the North and South, but also the West. Against the backdrop of this larger series of battles, Nelson introduces nine individuals: John R. Baylor, a Texas legislator who established the Confederate Territory of Arizona; Louisa Hawkins Canby, a Union Army wife who nursed Confederate soldiers back to health in Santa Fe; James Carleton, a professional soldier who engineered campaigns against Navajos and Apaches; Kit Carson, a famous frontiersman who led a regiment of volunteers against the Texans, Navajos, Kiowas, and Comanches; Juanita, a Navajo weaver who resisted Union campaigns against her people; Bill Davidson, a soldier who fought in all of the Confederacy’s major battles in New Mexico; Alonzo Ickis, an Iowa-born gold miner who fought on the side of the Union; John Clark, a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s who embraced the Republican vision for the West as New Mexico’s surveyor-general; and Mangas Coloradas, a revered Chiricahua Apache chief who worked to expand Apache territory in Arizona. As we learn how these nine charismatic individuals fought for self-determination and control of the region, we also see the importance of individual actions in the midst of a larger military conflict. Based on letters and diaries, military records and oral histories, and photographs and maps from the time, “this history of invasions, battles, and forced migration shapes the United States to this day—and has never been told so well” (Pulitzer Prize–winning author T.J. Stiles).
Download or read book Detailed Minuti of Soldier Life in the Army of Northern Virginia 1861 1865 written by Carlton McCarthy and published by . This book was released on 1882 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Civil War Macon written by Richard William Iobst and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Macon was a business community dedicated to supplying the needs of its citizens, of the cotton planters who grew the short-staple upland cotton, the principal foundation of wealth for the antebellum South. This book offers an encyclopedic history of Macon, Georgia, during the Civil War.
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 Lost Colony of the Confederacy written by Eugene C. Harter and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lost Colony of the Confederacy is the story of a grim, quixotic journey of twenty thousand Confederates to Brazil at the end of the American Civil War. Although it is not known how many Confederates migrated to South America-estimates range from eight thousand to forty thousand-their departure was fueled by bitterness over a lost cause and a distaste for an oppressive victor. Encouraged by Emperor Dom Pedro, most of these exiles settled in Brazil. Although at the time of the Civil War the exodus was widely known and discussed as an indicator of the resentment against the Northern invaders and strict governmental measures, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy is the first book to focus on this mass migration. Eugene Harter vividly describes the lives of these last Confederates who founded their own city and were called Os Confederados. They retained much of their Southernness and lent an American flavor to Brazilian culture. First published in 1985, this work details the background of the exodus and describes the life of the twentiethcentury descendants, who have a strong link both to Southern history and to modern Brazil. The fires have cooled, but it is useful to understand the intense feelings that sparked the migration to Brazil. Southern ways have melded into Brazilian, and both are linked by the unbreakable bonds of history, as shown in this revealing account. The late EUGENE C. HARTER retired from the U.S. Senior Foreign Service and lived in Chestertown, Maryland, until his death in 2010. He was the grandson and greatgrandson of Confederates who left Texas and Mississippi as a part of the great Confederate migration in the late 1860s. Harter is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Download or read book Iowa Confederates in the Civil War written by David Connon and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confederates from Iowa were as unusual as slaves in Dubuque. David Connon shares the intensely human stories of Iowa Confederates in the Civil War. Seventy-six of these men entered the Confederate service. Readers will follow their pre-war, war-time, and post-war experiences, ranging from difficult relationships to disease, imprisonment, desertion, and adventure. More stories illuminate the turbulent Iowa home front, where life was hard for parents of Confederates and for Peace Democrats.
