Download Free The Rebel Scout A Thrilling History Of Scouting Life In The Southern Army Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Rebel Scout A Thrilling History Of Scouting Life In The Southern Army and write the review.

In the aftermath of the September 1862 Battle of Antietam, President Abraham Lincoln issued the most significant presidential decree in American history, the Emancipation Proclamation, which would forever free all slaves in territory not under Union control. Nevertheless, his chief military commander in the field, Major General George B. McClellan, was outraged. Within days, two former Union officers nefariously crossed the lines into rebeldom, an initiative resulting in an elaborate subterfuge to scam Lincoln into withdrawing the Proclamation in return for nebulous promises of peace. This book tells the story, obscured in a veil of secrecy for 150 years, of the cloak and dagger chess match between Union detectives and Southern operatives in the months before emancipation become effective. Despite an ominous warning by author Herman Melville five years before, the scheme to perpetuate slavery almost succeeded, for it was engineered by a man the National Police Gazette once declared the "King of the Confidence Men."
In this luminous portrait of wartime Washington, Ernest B. Furgurson–author of the widely acclaimed Chancellorsville 1863, Ashes of Glory, and Not War but Murder--brings to vivid life the personalities and events that animated the Capital during its most tumultuous time. Here among the sharpsters and prostitutes, slaves and statesmen are detective Allan Pinkerton, tracking down Southern sympathizers; poet Walt Whitman, nursing the wounded; and accused Confederate spy Antonia Ford, romancing her captor, Union Major Joseph Willard. Here are generals George McClellan and Ulysses S. Grant, railroad crew boss Andrew Carnegie, and architect Thomas Walter, striving to finish the Capitol dome. And here is Abraham Lincoln, wrangling with officers, pardoning deserters, and inspiring the nation. Freedom Rising is a gripping account of the era that transformed Washington into the world’s most influential city.
Amidst the vast literature of the Civil War, one of the most significant and enlightening documents remains largely unknown. A day-by-day, uninterrupted, four-year chronicle by a mature, keenly observant clerk in the War Department of the Confederacy, the wartime diary of John Beauchamp Jones was first published in two volumes of small type in 1866. Over the years, the diary was republished three more times—but never with an index or an editorial apparatus to guide a reader through the extraordinary mass of information it contained. Published here with an authoritative editorial framework, including an extensive introduction and endnotes, this unique record of the Civil War takes its rightful place as one of the best basic reference tools in Civil War history, absolutely critical to study the Confederacy. A Maryland journalist/novelist who went south at the outbreak of the war, Jones took a job as a senior clerk in the Confederate War Department, where he remained to the end, a constant observer of men and events in Richmond, the heart of the Confederacy and the principal target of Union military might. As a high-level clerk at the center of military planning, Jones had an extraordinary perspective on the Southern nation in action—and nothing escaped his attention. Confidential files, command-level conversations, official correspondence, revelations, rumors, statistics, weather reports, and personal opinions: all manner of material, found nowhere else in Civil War literature, made its meticulous way into the diary. Jones quotes scores of dispatches and reports by both military and civilian authorities, including letters from Robert E. Lee never printed elsewhere, providing an invaluable record of documents that would later find their way into print only in edited form. His notes on such ephemera as weather and prices create a backdrop for the military movements and political maneuverings he describes, all with the judicious eye of a seasoned writer and observer of southern life. James I. Robertson Jr., provides introductions to each volume, over 2,700 endnotes that identify, clarify, and expand on Jones’s material, and a first ever index which makes Jones's unique insights and observations accessible to interested readers, who will find in the pages of A Rebel War Clerk's Diary one of the most complete and richly textured accounts of the Civil War ever to be composed at the very heart of the Confederacy.
Horses and mules served during the Civil War in greater number and suffered more casualties than the men of the Union and Confederate armies combined. Using firsthand accounts, this history addresses the many uses of equines during the war, the methods by which they were obtained, their costs, their suffering on the battlefields and roads, their consumption by soldiers, and such topics as racing and mounted music. The book is supplemented by accounts of the "Lightning Mule Brigade," the "Charge of the Mule Brigade," five appendices and 37 illustrations. More than 700 Civil War equines are identified and described with incidental information and identification of their masters.
Provides insight into the real personality of the famous warrior
This vividly rendered Civil War history presents “a lively guided tour of Washington during the 24 hours or so around Lincoln’s swearing-in” (Adam Goodheart, Washington Post). By March 4, 1865, the Civil War had left intractable wounds on the nation. Tens of thousands crowded Washington’s Capitol grounds that day to see Abraham Lincoln take the oath for a second term—and witness what was perhaps the greatest inaugural address in American history. Lincoln stunned the nation by arguing that both sides had been wrong, and that the war’s unimaginable horrors might have been God’s just verdict on the national sin of slavery. In Every Drop of Blood, Edward Achorn reveals the nation’s capital on that momentous day—with its mud, sewage, and saloons, its prostitutes, spies, reporters, social-climbing spouses and power-hungry politicians. Swirling around the complex figure of Lincoln, a host of characters are brought to life, from grievously wounded Union colonel Selden Connor to the embarrassingly drunk new vice president, Andrew Johnson, to poet-journalist Walt Whitman; from soldiers’ advocate Clara Barton and African American leader Frederick Douglass to conflicted actor John Wilkes Booth. In indelible scenes, Achorn captures the frenzy and division in the nation’s capital at this crucial moment in America’s history. His story offers new understanding of our great national crisis, and echoes down the decades to resonate in our own time.
“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.
Cavalryman of the Lost Cause is the first major biography in decades of the famous Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart. Based on research in manuscript collections, personal memoirs and reminiscences, and regimental histories, this comprehensive volume reflects outstanding Civil War scholarship. James Ewell Brown Stuart was the premier cavalry commander of the Confederacy. He gained a reputation for daring early in the war when he rode around the Union army in the Peninsula Campaign, providing valuable intelligence to General Robert E. Lee at the expense of Union commander George B. McClellan. Stuart has long been controversial because of his performance in the critical Gettysburg Campaign, where he was out of touch with Lee for several days; this left Lee uncertain about the size and movement of the Union army, information that would prove decisive when the battle began. In an engagement with the cavalry of Union general Philip Sheridan in spring 1864, Stuart was killed. He was only thirty-one. Jeffry D. Wert provides new details about Stuart's childhood and youth, and he draws on letters between Stuart and his wife, Flora, to show us the man as he was: eager for glory, daring sometimes to the point of recklessness, but a devoted and loving husband and father. Stuart has long been regarded as the finest Confederate cavalryman and one of the best this country has ever produced. Wert shows how Stuart's friendship with Stonewall Jackson and his relationship with Lee were crucial; at the same time Stuart's relationships with his subordinates were complicated and sometimes troubled. Cavalryman of the Lost Cause is a riveting biography of a towering figure of the Civil War, a fascinating and colorful work by one of our finest Civil War historians.
Avenging Lincoln’s Death: The Trial of John Wilkes Booth’s Accomplices is an examination of the 1865 military commission trial of eight alleged accomplices of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin who murdered President Abraham Lincoln. The book analyzes the trial transcript and other relevant evidence relating to the guilt of Booth’s alleged accomplices, as well as a careful application of basic constitutional law principles to the jurisdiction of the military commission and the fundamental fairness of the trial. The author found that the military commission trial was unconstitutional and unfair because Congress never authorized trial by military commission for these eight civilians. President Johnson exceeded the scope of his authority as commander in chief by ordering the accomplices to be tried by military commission. He failed to follow the Habeas Corpus Act of 1863 that required him to turn over the alleged accomplices to civilian authorities for prosecution. The accomplices were convicted on perjured testimony and the Government was allowed to drag in unrelated evidence of Confederate atrocities to poison the minds of the panel of officers.