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In the spring of 1861, Richmond, Virginia, suddenly became the capital city, military headquarters, and industrial engine of a new nation fighting for its existence. A remarkable drama unfolded in the months that followed. The city's population exploded, its economy was deranged, and its government and citizenry clashed desperately over resources to meet daily needs while a mighty enemy army laid siege. Journalists, officials, and everyday residents recorded these events in great detail, and the Confederacy's foes and friends watched closely from across the continent and around the world. In Rebel Richmond, Stephen V. Ash vividly evokes life in Richmond as war consumed the Confederate capital. He guides readers from the city's alleys, homes, and shops to its churches, factories, and halls of power, uncovering the intimate daily drama of a city transformed and ultimately destroyed by war. Drawing on the stories and experiences of civilians and soldiers, slaves and masters, refugees and prisoners, merchants and laborers, preachers and prostitutes, the sick and the wounded, Ash delivers a captivating new narrative of the Civil War's impact on a city and its people.
Rebel Bulldog tells the story of Preston Davidson, a Northerner who fought for the Confederacy, and his family who lived in Indiana and Virginia. It examines antebellum religion, education, reform, and politics, and how they affected the identity of not just one young man, but of a nation caught up in a civil war. Furthermore, it discusses how a native- born Hoosier reached the decision to fight for the South, while detailing a unique war experience and the postwar life of a proud Rebel who returned to the North after the guns fell silent and tried to remake his life in a very different state and nation than the ones he had left in 1860. The book uses not just Preston's story, but that of his family as a lens to help us glimpse the past. Preston's paternal family had strong ties to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and Washington College (now Washington and Lee University). The maternal side of Preston's family tree included his grandfather, Governor Noah Noble.
“A fascinating book, and the most detailed account you will find about intelligence operations during the Gettysburg campaign.” —Dr. Vince Houghton, Historian/Curator, International Spy Museum, Washington, DC As intelligence experts have long asserted, “Information in regard to the enemy is the indispensable basis of all military plans.” Despite the thousands of books and articles written about Gettysburg, Tom Ryan’s groundbreaking Spies, Scouts, and Secrets in the Gettysburg Campaign is the first to offer a unique and incisive comparative study of intelligence operations during what many consider the war’s decisive campaign. Based upon years of indefatigable research, the author evaluates how Gen. Robert E. Lee used intelligence resources, including cavalry, civilians, newspapers, and spies to gather information about Union activities during his invasion of the North in June and July 1863, and how this information guided Lee’s decision-making. Simultaneously, Ryan explores the effectiveness of the Union Army of the Potomac’s intelligence and counterintelligence operations. Both Maj. Gens. Joe Hooker and George G. Meade relied upon cavalry, the Signal Corps, and an intelligence staff known as the Bureau of Military Information that employed innovative concepts to gather, collate, and report vital information from a variety of sources.
Never before or since in American history have the needs and influence of the military weighed so heavily on society. Escott analyzes the militarization of life in the Confederacy and probes the relationships between military commanders, legislators, and Jefferson Davis and his administration. As the South struggled to wage an exhausting war against the North, military necessity increasingly determined policy and shaped all aspects of life. The military had an increasingly large impact not only on policy but also on events inside civil society. Military men played important roles in bringing about extensive social change, enforcing law and order, and placing significant restrictions on individual freedoms. Ultimately the crisis of the Confederacy threatened both the constitutionalism that southern politicians long had cherished and a core principle of the tradition of civil control over the military. Key figures in the army also took the lead in urging the use of slaves as soldiers and promoting the idea of emancipation. With many portraits of high-ranking generals and civil officials and telling anecdotes that reveal the nature of their relationships, this book reveals the depth of the Confederacy's social, political, and military crisis and highlights what this crisis revealed about the foundations of Confederate society.
A senior military historian presents an unflinching account of the human costs of the Civil War. Many Americans, argues Michael C. C. Adams, tend to think of the Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. Millions of tourists flock to battlefields each year as vacation destinations, their perceptions of the war often shaped by reenactors who work hard for verisimilitude but who cannot ultimately simulate mutilation, madness, chronic disease, advanced physical decay. In Living Hell, Adams tries a different tack, clustering the voices of myriad actual participants on the firing line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical reenactment. Perhaps because the United States has not seen conventional war on its own soil since 1865, the collective memory of its horror has faded, so that we have sanitized and romanticized even the experience of the Civil War. Neither film nor reenactment can fully capture the hard truth of the four-year conflict. Living Hell presents a stark portrait of the human costs of the Civil War and gives readers a more accurate appreciation of its profound and lasting consequences. Adams examines the sharp contrast between the expectations of recruits versus the realities of communal living, the enormous problems of dirt and exposure, poor diet, malnutrition, and disease. He describes the slaughter produced by close-order combat, the difficulties of cleaning up the battlefields—where tens of thousands of dead and wounded often lay in an area of only a few square miles—and the resulting psychological damage survivors experienced. Drawing extensively on letters and memoirs of individual soldiers, Adams assembles vivid accounts of the distress Confederate and Union soldiers faced daily: sickness, exhaustion, hunger, devastating injuries, and makeshift hospitals where saws were often the medical instrument of choice. Inverting Robert E. Lee’s famous line about war, Adams suggests that too many Americans become fond of war out of ignorance of its terrors. Providing a powerful counterpoint to Civil War glorification, Living Hell echoes William Tecumseh Sherman’s comment that war is cruelty and cannot be refined. Praise for Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861–1865 "This excellent and provocative work concludes with a chapter suggesting how the image of Southern military superiority endured in spite of defeat."—Civil War History "Adams's imaginative connections between culture and combat provide a forceful reminder that Civil War military history belongs not in an encapsulated realm, with its own categories and arcane language, but at the center of the study of the intellectual, social, and psychological currents that prevailed in the mid-nineteenth century."—Journal of American History Praise for The Best War Ever: America and World War II "Adams has a real gift for efficiently explaining complex historical problems."—Reviews in American History "Not only is this mythologizing bad history, says Adams, it is dangerous as well. Surrounding the war with an aura of nostalgia both fosters the delusion that war can cure our social ills and makes us strong again, and weakens confidence in our ability to act effectively in our own time."—Journal of Military History
How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life during the conflict? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael's sweeping new study of men at war. Based on close examination of the letters and records left behind by individual soldiers from both the North and the South, Carmichael explores the totality of the Civil War experience--the marching, the fighting, the boredom, the idealism, the exhaustion, the punishments, and the frustrations of being away from families who often faced their own dire circumstances. Carmichael focuses not on what soldiers thought but rather how they thought. In doing so, he reveals how, to the shock of most men, well-established notions of duty or disobedience, morality or immorality, loyalty or disloyalty, and bravery or cowardice were blurred by war. Digging deeply into his soldiers' writing, Carmichael resists the idea that there was "a common soldier" but looks into their own words to find common threads in soldiers' experiences and ways of understanding what was happening around them. In the end, he argues that a pragmatic philosophy of soldiering emerged, guiding members of the rank and file as they struggled to live with the contradictory elements of their violent and volatile world. Soldiering in the Civil War, as Carmichael argues, was never a state of being but a process of becoming.
In Confederate Political Economy, Michael Bonner suggests that the Confederate nation was an expedient corporatist state -- a society that required all sectors of the economy to work for the national interest, as defined by a partnership of industrial leaders and a dominant government. As Bonner shows, the characteristics of the Confederate States' political economy included modern organizational methods that mirrored the economic landscape of other late nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century corporatist governments. Southern leaders, Bonner argues, were slave-owning agricultural capitalists who sought a counterrevolution against northern liberal capitalism. During secession and as the war progressed, they built and reinforced Confederate nationalism through specific centralized government policies. Bolstered by the Confederate constitution, these policies evolved into a political culture that allowed for immense executive powers, facilitated an anti-party ideology, and subordinated individual rights. In addition, the South's lack of industrial capacity forced the Confederacy to pursue a curious manufacturing policy that used both private companies and national ownership to produce munitions. This symbiotic relationship was just one component of the Confederacy's expedient corporatist state: other wartime policies like conscription, the domestic passport system, and management of southern railroads also exhibited unmistakable corporatist characteristics. Bonner's probing research and new comparative analysis expand our understanding of the complex organization and relationships in Confederate political and economic culture during the Civil War.
J. Patton Anderson was from Florida, the seceding state that was referred to as the "tadpole" of the Confederate states, but nevertheless he was one of the Confederacy's great military leaders. Anderson oversaw a large plantation, Casa Bianca, and his views meshed with secessionist views sufficiently for him to be elected as a delegate to the Secession Conference held in Montgomery, Alabama. After Florida seceded, President Davis appointed Anderson as a Brigadier General. Anderson engaged the enemy in the Western theater for four years under his mentor, General Braxton Bragg, who advanced him to Major General in command of the District of Florida. This is a complete biography of Anderson's life, including his service in the Mexican War, his appointment as United States Marshal to the distant Washington Territory, his adventure (with his wife, Etta Adair) of taking the 1853 Washington Territory census by canoe, his election as territorial delegate to Washington City, and his entire Civil War service. J. Patton and Etta Anderson's affectionate correspondence is an important aspect of this biography, revealing what it was like to be alive at this time and what it took to keep their family intact.
To see the introduction, the table of contents, a generous selection of sample pages, and more, visit the website The Army of Northern Virginia website. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia was one of the greatest fighting formations in history: a combination of an outstanding commander and an excellent fighting force. This book offers an in-depth study of why this formation was so successful against Northern armies, which often had a greater wealth of resources and manpower and some very able leaders. Almost always outnumbered, Lee's forces were able to record a number of notable victories by giving free rein to subordinates and utilizing the fighting qualities of the army's units to the full. Also includes color and black and white maps.