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As a member of a distinguished South Carolina family, Matthew Calbraith Butler led a most interesting life. His cavalry service during the Civil War saw him rise from regimental captain to major general in command of a division. He began the war with Jeb Stuart and participated in all of his early campaigns. Butler was wounded in the battle at Brandy Station and lost his foot as a result, but he returned to duty and the battles outside of Richmond in 1864, then hurried South to resist Sherman's advance into South Carolina. Unlike many other Confederate generals, Butler remained influential after the War. He served in the U.S. Senate for eighteen years, oversaw the end of Reconstruction in South Carolina, and was a major general during the Spanish-American War.
Burton traces the evolution of Edgefield County from the antebellum period through Reconstruction and beyond. From amassed information on every household in this large rural community, he tests the many generalizations about southern black and white families of this period and finds that they were strikingly similar. Wealth, rather than race or class, was the main factor that influenced family structure, and the matriarchal family was but a myth.
During the last nine months of the Civil War, virtually all of the news reports and President Jefferson Davis's correspondence confirmed the imminent demise of the Confederate States, the nation Davis had striven to uphold since 1861. But despite defeat after defeat on the battlefield, a recalcitrant Congress, naysayers in the press, disastrous financial conditions, failures in foreign policy and peace efforts, and plummeting national morale, Davis remained in office and tried to maintain the government -- even after the fall of Richmond -- until his capture by Union forces on May 10, 1865. The eleventh volume of The Papers of Jefferson Davis follows the last tumultuous months of the Confederacy and illuminates Davis's policies, feelings, ideas, and relationships, as well as the viewpoints of hundreds of southerners -- critics and supporters -- who asked for favors, pointed out abuses, and offered advice on myriad topics. Printed here for the first time are many speeches and a number of new letters and telegrams. In the course of the volume, Robert E. Lee officially becomes general in chief, Joseph E. Johnston is given a final command, legislation is enacted to place slaves in the army as soldiers, and peace negotiations are opened at the highest levels. The closing pages chronicle Davis's dramatic flight from Richmond, including emotional correspondence with his wife as the two endeavor to find each other en route and make plans for the future in the wreckage of their lives. The holdings of seventy different manuscript repositories and private collections in addition to numerous published sources contribute to Volume 11, the fifth in the Civil War period.
Through the life of Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina's self-styled agrarian rebel, this book traces the history of white male supremacy and its discontents from the era of plantation slavery to the age of Jim Crow. As an anti-Reconstruction guerrilla, Democratic activist, South Carolina governor, and U.S. senator, Tillman offered a vision of reform that was proudly white supremacist. In the name of white male militance, productivity, and solidarity, he justified lynching and disfranchised most of his state's black voters. His arguments and accomplishments rested on the premise that only productive and virtuous white men should govern and that federal power could never be trusted. Over the course of his career, Tillman faced down opponents ranging from agrarian radicals to aristocratic conservatives, from woman suffragists to black Republicans. His vision and his voice shaped the understandings of millions and helped create the violent, repressive world of the Jim Crow South. Friend and foe alike--and generations of historians--interpreted Tillman's physical and rhetorical violence in defense of white supremacy as a matter of racial and gender instinct. This book instead reveals that Tillman's white supremacy was a political program and social argument whose legacies continue to shape American life.
This is a compilation of the medical histories of 425 Confederate generals. It does not analyze the effects of an individual's medical problems on a battle or the war, but provides information about factors that may have contributed to the wound, injury, or illness, and the outcome.
In 1861, James B. Griffin left Edgefield, South Carolina and rode off to Virginia to take up duty with the Confederate Army in a style that befitted a Southern gentleman: on a fine-blooded horse, with two slaves to wait on him, two trunks, and his favorite hunting dog. He was thirty-five years old, a wealthy planter, and the owner of sixty-one slaves when he joined Wade Hampton's elite Legion as a major of cavalry. He left behind seven children, the eldest only twelve, and a wife who was eight and a half months pregnant. As a field officer in a prestigious unit, the opportunities for fame and glory seemed limitless. Griffin, however, performed no daring acts, nor did he inspire great loyalty in his men. Instead, he unknowingly provided a unique and invaluable portrait of the Confederate officers who formed the core of Southern political, military, and business leadership. In A Gentleman and an Officer, Judith N. McArthur and Orville Vernon Burton have collected eighty of Griffin's letters written at the Virginia front, and during later postings on the South Carolina coast, to his wife Leila Burt Griffin. Extraordinary in their breadth and volume, the letters encompass Griffin's entire Civil War service, detailing living conditions and military maneuvers, the jockeying for position among officers, and the different ways officers and enlisted men interacted during the Civil War. Unlike the reminiscences and biographies of high-ranking, well-known Confederate officers or studies and edited collections of letters of members of the rank and file, this collection sheds light on the life of a middle officer--a life turned upside down by extreme military hardship and complicated further by the continuing need for reassurance about personal valor and status common to men of the southern gentry. In these letters, Griffin describes secret troop movements in various military actions such as the Hampton Legion's role in the Peninsula Campaign (details that would certainly have been censored in more recent wars). Here he relates the march from Manassas to Fredricksburg, the siege of Yorktown and the retreat to Richmond, and the fighting at Eltham's landing and Seven Pines, where Griffin commanded the legion after Hampton was wounded. Throughout, as Griffin recounts these most extraordinary of times, he illuminates the most ordinary of day-to-day issues. One might expect to find a Confederate officer meditating on slavery, emancipation, or Lincoln. Instead, we are confronted by simple humanity and simple concerns, from the weather to gossip. Monumental historical events intruded on Griffin's life and sent him off to war, but his heartfelt considerations were about his family, his community, and his own personal pride. Ultimately, Griffin's letters present the Civil War as the refinery, the ordeal by fire, that tested and verified--or modified--Southern upperclass values. With a fascinating combination of military and social history, A Gentleman and an Officer moves from the beginning of the Civil War at Fort Sumter through the end of the war and Reconstruction, vividly illustrating how the issues of the Civil War were at once devastatingly national and revealingly local.