HIS 312: Civil War and Reconstruction

For four years American families on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line were forced to endure the violence and hardship of the Civil War. Don't Hurry Me Down To Hades is the story of these families, expertly crafted from their own words. Revealing the innermost thoughts of both famous citizens and men and women forgotten by history, esteemed Civil War historian Susannah J. Ural explores life on the battlefield and the home front, capturing the astonishing perseverance of the men and women caught up in this most brutal of conflicts.

Back Door to Richmond is the first book-length study of the Bermuda Hundred Campaign. It draws upon hundreds of sources, including more than sixty unpublished accounts. The standard interpretation of the campaign held that the Federal effort was an abject failure caused almost entirely by the blundering of Benjamin Butler, an incompetent who allowed his army to be bottled up by a small confederate force.

Contains much valuable information and engaging narrative passages Memoirs of the Civil War, though relatively little known because of its rarity in the original edition, contains much valuable information and engaging narrative passages. A Virginian whose Confederate career included service in an infantry regiment early in the war, Chamberlaine's most important military service was as a staff officer attached to Brigadier General Reuben Lindsay Walker, who commanded the Third Corps artillery in the Army of Northern Virginia. Includes excellent material on the duties of staff officers, operation of Confederate conscription, and the role of artillery in Lee's campaigns. He is especially eloquent and revealing about a number of famous battles: the Seven Days; Antietam, where Chamberlaine distinguished himself and was wounded; and the Wilderness, where he had a memorable encounter with Lee.

This book is a reprint of the 1907 edition published by Scribners. There is a new introduction by Dr. Maury Klein. Dr. Klein is perhaps the most knowledgeable student of General Alexander living. Also, there is a new section of photos on the career of General Alexander.In 1907, Edward Alexander published his Military Memoirs of a Confederate. Unfortunately, he made so little of his outstanding service as chief of artillery for Longstreet's Corps in the narrative that his memoirs actually assumed the outlines of a history of the Army of Northern Virginia. Nonetheless, Alexander's candid and objective treatment of the campaigns he witnessed make his book one of the best contemporary accounts of the Civil War. Enhanced by twenty-four pages of photographs of Alexander, his family, and associates, as well as a brief introduction by Maury Klein sketching the distinguished career of this Georgia born soldier, educator, railroad administrator, and diplomat, this latest edition of Military Memoirs of a Confederate will be a valuable addition to the libraries of military historians and Civil War buffs alike.

Union general John Pope was among the most controversial and misunderstood figures to hold major command during the Civil War. Before being called east in June 1862 to lead the Army of Virginia against General Robert E. Lee, he compiled an enviable record in Missouri and as commander of the Army of the Mississippi. After his ignominious defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run, he was sent to the frontier. Over the next twenty-four years Pope held important department commands on the western plains and was recognized as one of the army's leading authorities on Indian affairs, but he never again commanded troops in battle. In 1886, Pope was engaged by the National Tribune, a weekly newspaper published in Washington, D.C., to write a series of articles on his wartime experiences. Over the next five years, in twenty-nine installments, he wrote about the war as he had lived it. Collected here for the first time, Pope's "war reminiscences" join a select roster of memoirs written by Civil War army commanders. Pope presents a detailed review of the campaigns in which he participated and offers vivid character sketches of such illustrious figures as Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Clearly written and balanced in tone, his memoirs are a dramatic and important addition to the literature on the Civil War. Originally published in 1998. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Stonewall Jackson depended on him; General Lee complimented him; Union soldiers admired him; and women in Maryland, Virginia, and even Pennsylvania adored him: Henry Kyd Douglas. During and shortly after the Civil War Douglas set down his experiences of great men and great days. In resonant prose, he wrote simply and intimately, covering the full emotional spectrum of a soldier's life. Here is one of the finest and most remarkable stories to come out of any war, written wholly firsthand from notes and diaries made on the battlefield.

"Burns' writing is clear, detailed, and very balanced, and covers countless people. Voices of the Army of the Potomac is a riveting read that brings a human element to the Army of the Potomac that will excite novices and veteran students alike. -- The NMYAS Review Finalist, 2021 Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Awards As historian David W. Bright noted in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, "No other historical experience in America has given rise to such a massive collection of personal narrative 'literature' written by ordinary people." This "massive collection" of memoirs, recollections and regimental histories make up the history of the Civil War seen through the eyes of the participants. This work is an overview of what Civil War soldiers and veterans wrote about their experiences. It focusses on what veterans remembered, what they were prepared to record, and what they wrote down in the years after the end of the war. In an age of increased literacy many of these men had been educated, whether at West Point, Harvard or other establishments, but even those who had received only a few years of education chose to record their memories. The writings of these veterans convey their views on the cataclysmic events they had witnessed but also their memories of everyday events during the war. While many of them undertook detailed research of battles and campaigns before writing their accounts, it is clear that a number were less concerned with whether their words aligned with the historical record than whether they recorded what they believed to be true. This book explores these themes and also the connection between veterans writing their personal war history and the issue of veterans' pensions. Understanding what these veterans chose to record and why is important to achieving a deeper understanding of the experience of these men who were caught up in this central moment in American life.

A major collection of modern commentary from scholars, historians, and Civil War buffs on the significant events of the Civil War, culled from The New York Times' popular Disunion on-line journal. Since its debut, The New York Times' acclaimed web journal entitled 'Disunion' has published hundreds of original articles and won multiple awards, including "Best History Website" from the New Media Institute and the History News Network. Following the chronology of the secession crisis and the Civil War, the contributors to Disunion, who include modern scholars, journalists, historians, and Civil War buffs, offer contemporary commentary and assessment of the Civil War as it unfolded chronologically. Now, this commentary has been gathered together and organized in one volume. In The New York Times: Disunion, historian Ted Widmer has curated more than 100 articles that span events beginning with Lincoln's presidential victory through the Emancipation Proclamation. Topics include everything from Walt Whitman's wartime diary to the bloody guerrilla campaigns in Missouri and Kansas. Esteemed contributors include William Freehling, Adam Goodheart, and Edward Ayers, among others. The book also compiles new essays that have not been published on the Disunion site by well-known historians such as David Blight, Gary Gallagher, and Drew Gilpin Faust. Topics include the perspective of African-American slaves and freed men on the war, the secession crisis in the Upper South, the war in the West (that is, past the Appalachians), the war in Texas, the international context, and Civil War-era cartography. Portraits, contemporary etchings, and detailed maps round out the book.

The library holds two volumes as part of the Rankin Collection in the Special Collection / Archives. These volumes may be viewed by appointment and do not circulate.

A rare and dramatic first-person account by a Union scout who served General William Tecumseh Sherman on his "march to the sea"   After his father-in-law passed away, Stephen Murphy found, among the voluminous papers left behind, an ancestral memoir. Murphy quickly became fascinated with the recollections of George W. Quimby (1842-1926), a Union soldier and scout for General William Tecumseh Sherman.   Before Quimby became a part of Sherman's March, he was held captive by Nathan Bedford Forrest's troops in western Tennessee. He joined Sherman's Army in Vicksburg, destroying railroads and bridges across Mississippi and Alabama on the way to Georgia. As the notorious march began, Quimby became a scout and no longer experienced war as his fellow soldiers did. Scouts moved ahead of the troops to anticipate opportunities and dangers. The rank and file were instructed to be seen and feared, while scouts were required to be invisible and stealthy. This memoir offers the rare perspective of a Union soldier who ventured into Confederate territory and sent intelligence to Sherman.   Written around 1901 in the wake of the Spanish American War, Quimby's memoir shows no desire to settle old scores. He's a natural storyteller, keeping his audience's attention with tales of drunken frolics and narrow escapes, providing a memoir that reads more like an adventure novel. He gives a new twist to the familiar stories of Sherman's March, reminding readers that while the Union soldiers faced few full-scale battles, the campaign was still quite dangerous.   More than a chronicle of day-to-day battles and marches, The Perfect Scout is more episodic and includes such additional elements as the story of how he met his wife and close encounters with the enemy. Offering a full picture of the war, Quimby writes not only about his adventures as one of Sherman's scouts, but also about the suffering of the civilians caught in the war. He provides personal insight into some of the war's historic events and paints a vivid picture of the devastation wreaked upon the South that includes destroyed crops and homes and a shattered economy. He also tells of the many acts of kindness he received from Southerners, including women and African Americans, who helped him and his fellow scouts by providing food, shelter, or information.

The classic tale of battle, roguery, and capture from the Army of Northern Virginia. From his looting of farmhouses during the Gettysburg campaign and robbing of fallen Union soldiers as opportunity allowed to his five arrests for infractions of military discipline and numerous unapproved leaves, John O. Casler's actions during the Civil War made him as much a rogue as a Rebel. Though he was no model soldier, his forthright confessions of his service years in the Army of Northern Virginia stand among the most sought after and cited accounts by a Confederate soldier. First published in 1893 and significantly revised and expanded in 1906, Casler's Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade recounts the truths of camp life, marches, and combat. Moreover, Casler's recollections provide an unapologetic view of the effects of the harsh life in Stonewall's ranks on an average foot soldier and his fellows. A native of Gainesboro, Virginia, with an inherent wanderlust and thirst for adventure, Casler enlisted in June 1861 in what became Company A, 33rd Virginia Infantry, and participated in major campaigns throughout the conflict, including Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Captured in February 1865, he spent the final months of the war as a prisoner at Fort McHenry, Maryland. His postwar narrative recalls the realities of warfare for the private soldier, the moral ambiguities of thievery and survival at the front, and the deliberate cruelties of capture and imprisonment with the vivid detail, straightforward candor, and irreverent flair for storytelling that have earned ""Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade"" its place in the first rank of primary literature of the Confederacy. This edition features a new introduction by Robert K. Krick chronicling Casler's origins and his careers after the war as a writer and organizer of Confederate veterans groups.

In the years following the American Civil War, many participants--generals, politicians, journalists, and soldiers--authored first-hand accounts of their unique experiences. As Alfred E. Smith of the Library of Congress wrote in 1998, "No chapter of American history has been so voluminously recorded." While the quality and reliability of the memoirs vary, a large number provide important perspectives that, taken together, offer vivid descriptions of major battles, political developments, and other momentous events from Fort Sumter to Appomattox. In Remembering the Civil War, historians Michael Barton and Charles Kupfer carefully select excerpts from the memoirs of key participants and weave them together to tell the story of the war in a single volume. Contributors include Union generals Ulysses Grant, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, W.T. Sherman, Abner Doubleday, and Philip Sheridan. Confederate authors include Robert E. Lee, Gen. James Longstreet, Cpl. Sam Watkins, Lt. John W. Worsham, Col. Edward Porter Alexander, Capt. John Wilkinson, and Jefferson Davies. Personal documents provide soldiers' perspectives of what fighting was like on the ground, as well as hospital and prison life. A comprehensive introduction and headnote for each excerpt provide background information and context.

In September 1862, the United States had been ripped apart by a civil war entering its 18th month and it was the nation's, and Mr. Lincoln's, most trying period, as Gen. Robert E. Lee invaded Union soil, panicking cities, destroying political alliances and causing the North to reconsider whether it was best to redouble its war efforts or give up and let the South pursue its own course. The author looks at a cache of newspapers from this time to demonstrate just how fragile the national bond had become by the autumn of 1862

In July 1862, Union Lieutenant Stephen Spalding wrote a long letter from his post in Algiers, Louisiana, to his former college roommate. Equally fascinating and unsettling for modern readers, the comic cynicism of the young soldier's correspondence offers an unusually candid and intimate account of military life and social change on the southern front. A captivating primary source, Spalding's letter is reproduced here for the first time, along with contextual analysis and biographical detail, by Michael D. Pierson. Lt. Spalding in Civil War Louisiana lifts the curtain on the twenty-two-year-old's elitist social attitudes and his consuming ambition, examining the mind of a man of privilege as he turns to humor to cope with unwelcome realities. Spalding and his correspondent, James Peck, both graduates of the University of Vermont, lived in a society dominated by elite young men, with advantages granted by wealth, gender, race, and birth. Caught in the middle of the Civil War, Spalding adopts a light-hearted tone in his letter, both to mask his most intimate thoughts and fears and distance himself from those he perceives as social inferiors. His jokes show us an unpleasantly stratified America, with blacks, women, and the men in the ranks subjected to ridicule and even physical abuse by an officer with more assertiveness than experience. His longest story, a wild escapade in New Orleans that included abundant drinking and visits to two brothels, gives us a glimpse of a world in which men bonded through excess and indulgence. More poignantly, tactless jests about death, told as his unit suffers its first casualties, reveal a man struggling to come to terms with mortality. Evidence of Spalding's unfulfilled aspirations, like his sometimes disturbing wit, allows readers to see past his entitlement to his human weaknesses. An engrossing picture of a charismatic but flawed young officer, Lt. Spalding in Civil War Louisiana offers new ways to look at the society that shaped him.

Though civilians constituted the majority of the nation's population and were intimately involved with almost every aspect of the war, we know little about the civilian experience of the Civil War. That experience was inherently dramatic. Southerners lived through the breakup of basic social and economic institutions, including, of course, slavery. Northerners witnessed the reorganization of society to fight the war. And citizens of the border regions grappled with elemental questions of loyalty that reached into the family itself. These original essays--all commissioned from established scholars, based on archival research, and written for a wide readership--recover the stories of civilians from Natchez to New England. They address the experiences of men, women, and children; of whites, slaves, and free blacks; and of civilians from numerous classes. Not least of these stories are the on-the-ground experiences of slaves seeking emancipation and the actions of white Northerners who resisted the draft. Many of the authors present brand new material, such as the war's effect on the sounds of daily life and on reading culture. Others examine the war's premiere events, including the battle of Gettysburg and the Lincoln assassination, from fresh perspectives. Several consider the passionate debate that broke out over how to remember the war, a debate that has persisted into our own time. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Peter W. Bardaglio, William Blair, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Margaret S. Creighton, J. Matthew Gallman, Joseph T. Glatthaar, Anthony E. Kaye, Robert Kenzer, Elizabeth D. Leonard, Amy E. Murrell, George C. Rable, Nina Silber, Mark M. Smith, Mary Saracino Zboray, and Ronald J. Zboray. Together they describe the profound transformations in community relations, gender roles, race relations, and culture wrought by the central event in American history.

The first-ever oral history of the attack that started the Civil War that combines illuminating historical narrative with intense first-hand accounts.  On April 12, 1861, Confederate troops began firing on Fort Sumter, beginning the bloodiest conflict in American history. Since that time numerous historians have described the attack in many well-regarded books, yet the event still remains overlooked at times in the minds of the public. The Cannons Roar seeks to remedy that. Rather than providing a third-person, after-the-fact description, acclaimed author Bruce Chadwick will tell the story of the attack from the people who were in the thick of it. In so doing, readers can hear from people themselves, telling a compelling story in a new way that both draws readers in and lets them walk away with a better understanding and appreciation of one of the most dramatic and important events in our nation's history. The Cannons Roar will not only provide portraits of the major players that are more descriptive than those offered by historians over the years, it will give voice to dozens of regular people from across the country and socioeconomic spectrum, to provide readers with a true and complete understanding of the mood of the country and in Charleston. Using letters, newspaper articles, diaries, journals, and other written sources, Chadwick describes in vivid detail the events preceding the attack, the attack itself, and its aftermath. While we hear from historic pillars like Abraham Lincoln to PGT Beauregard to Jefferson Davis, Chadwick also features Charleston merchants and Northern farmers, high society doyennes and "the dregs," South Carolina's new governor Francis Pickens, who was the blustery former Minister to Russia. Collectively, readers will obtain a fuller understanding of the politics and thinking of political and military leaders that influenced their decisions or lack thereof.  The book will also capture both the South and North's expectations regarding England entering the war (as well as letters from England's leaders showing their reluctance to do so), as well as an expectation on both sides of a quick resolution. Skillfully combining traditional history with the in-the-moment ethos of an oral history, The Cannons Roar to bring this historic moment in American history to new and vivid life.

In the decades that followed the American Civil War Artist James E. Kelly (1855-1933) conducted in-depth interviews with 40 union Generals in an effort to portray them in their greatest moment of glory.

Abner Doubleday was an 1842 graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point and a veteran of the Mexican War when he was assigned to Fort Moultrie in the summer of 1860. A captain of artillery, he served as second in command of the garrison at the historic fort when the curtain rose on the dramatic events leading to the outbreak of the War Between the States. Doubleday fired the first gun in the defense of Fort Sumter when the fighting began. He was a keen and well-trained observer whose memoir of the federal garrison's efforts to carry out its mission is as fresh and useful to the reader today as it was in 1876 ... a front seat at the opening action. Abner Doubleday fought for the Union at Chancellorsville, Antietam, and Gettysburg, to name a few of the battles in which he commanded troops. At the end of the war, he held the rank of Major General US Volunteers.

Places Chamberlain's known wartime writings within the larger context of the Civil War.

In December 1885, under the watchful eye of Mark Twain, the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster and Company released the first volume of the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. With a second volume published in March 1886, Grant's memoirs became a popular sensation. Seeking to capitalize on Grant's success and interest in earlier reminiscences by Joseph E. Johnston, William T. Sherman, and Richard Taylor, other Civil War generals such as George B. McClellan and Philip H. Sheridan soon followed suit. Some hewed more closely to Grant's model than others, and their points of similarity and divergence left readers increasingly fascinated with the history and meaning of the nation's great conflict. The writings also dovetailed with a rising desire to see the full sweep of American history chronicled, as its citizens looked to the start of a new century. Professional historians engaged with the memoirs as an important foundation for this work. In this insightful book, Stephen Cushman considers Civil War generals' memoirs as both historical and literary works, revealing how they remain vital to understanding the interaction of memory, imagination, and the writing of American history. Cushman shows how market forces shaped the production of the memoirs and, therefore, memories of the war itself; how audiences have engaged with the works to create ideas of history that fit with time and circumstance; and what these texts tell us about current conflicts over the history and meanings of the Civil War.