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Books : History : United States : Civil War : Confederacy
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"You would be surprised to see what men we have in the ranks," Virginia cavalryman Thomas Rowland informed his mother in May 1861, just after joining the Army of Northern Virginia. His army -- General Robert E. Lee's army -- was a surprise to almost everyone: With daring early victories and an invasion into the North, they nearly managed to convince the North to give up the fight. Even in 1865, facing certain defeat after the loss of 30,000 men, a Louisiana private fighting in Lee's army still had hope. "I must not despair," he scribbled in his diary. "Lee will bring order out of chaos, and with the help of our Heavenly Father, all will be well."
Astonishingly, after 150 years of scholarship, there are still some major surprises about the Army of Northern Virginia. In General Lee's Army, renowned historian Joseph T. Glatthaar draws on an impressive range of sources assembled over two decades -- from letters and diaries, to official war records, to a new, definitive database of statistics -- to rewrite the history of the Civil War's most important army and, indeed, of the war itself. Glatthaar takes readers from the home front to the heart of the most famous battles of the war: Manassas, the Peninsula campaign, Antietam, Gettysburg, all the way to the final surrender at Appomattox. General Lee's Army penetrates headquarters tents and winter shanties, eliciting the officers' plans, wishes, and prayers; it portrays a world of life, death, healing, and hardship; it investigates the South's commitment to the war and its gradual erosion; and it depicts and analyzes Lee's men in triumph and defeat.
The history of Lee's army is a powerful lens on the entire war. The fate of Lee's army explains why the South almost won -- and why it lost. The story of his men -- their reasons for fighting, their cohesion, mounting casualties, diseases, supply problems, and discipline problems -- tells it all.
Glatthaar's definitive account settles many historical arguments. The Rebels were fighting above all to defend slavery. More than half of Lee's men were killed, wounded, or captured -- a staggering statistic. Their leader, Robert E. Lee, though far from perfect, held an exalted place in his men's eyes despite a number of mistakes and despite a range of problems among some of his key lieutenants.
General Lee's Army is a masterpiece of scholarship and vivid storytelling, narrated as much as possible in the words of the enlisted men and their officers.
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For the 200th anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s birth, a new portrait drawing on previously unpublished correspondence
Robert E. Lee’s war correspondence is well known, and here and there personal letters have found their way into print, but the great majority of his most intimate messages have never been made public. These letters reveal a far more complex and contradictory man than the one who comes most readily to the imagination, for it is with his family and his friends that Lee is at his most candid, most engaging, and most vulnerable. Over the past several years historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor has uncovered a rich trove of unpublished Lee materials that had been held in both private and public collections.Her new book, a unique blend of analysis, narrative, and historiography, presents dozens of these letters in their entirety, most by Lee but a few by family members. Each letter becomes a departure point for an essay that shows what the letter uniquely reveals about Lee’s time or character. The material covers all aspects of Lee’s life—his early years, West Point, his work as an engineer, his relationships with his children and his slaves, his decision to join the South, his thoughts on military strategy, and his disappointments after defeat in the Civil War. The result is perhaps the most intimate picture to date of Lee, one that deftly analyzes the meaning of his actions within the context of his personality, his relationships, and the social tenor of his times.
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The common image of the Confederate Army during the Civil War is dominated by a limited number of early photographs of officers and men wearing the gray and butternut associated with the CS regulations and quartermaster issues. This sequence of books examines a much wider field: the original uniforms of the state and volunteer companies which were brought together to form the Confederate field armies, and the continuing efforts to clothe troops as wear-and-tear gradually reduced the originally wide range of uniforms. A mass of information from contemporary documents is illustrated with rare photographs and meticulous color reconstructions.
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When Confederate men marched off to battle, southern women struggled with the new responsibilities of directing farms and plantations, providing for families, and supervising increasingly restive slaves. Drew Faust offers a compelling picture of the more than half-million women who belonged to the slaveholding families of the Confederacy during this period of acute crisis, when every part of these women's lives became vexed and uncertain. Faust chronicles the clash of the old and the new within a group that was at once the beneficiary and the victim of the social order of the Old South.
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As a boy growing up in rural Arkansas, Bob Brewer often heard from his uncle and his great-uncle about a particular tree in the woods, the "Bible Tree," filled with strange carvings. Years later he would learn that this tree was carved with symbols associated with the Knights of the Golden Circle, a Civil WarÂera secret society that had buried gold coins and other treasure in various remote locations across the South and Southwest in hopes of someday funding a second War Between the States. These secret caches were guarded by sentinels, men whose responsibility it was to watch and protect these sites. To his astonishment, Bob discovered that both his uncle and his great-uncle had been twentieth-century sentinels, and that he had grown up near an important KGC treasure site.
In Shadow of the Sentinel, Bob Brewer and investigative journalist Warren Getler tell the fascinating story of the Knights of the Golden Circle and the hidden caches the KGC established across the country. Brewer reveals how, with agonizing effort, he eventually deciphered the fiendishly complicated KGC codes and ciphers, which drew heavily on images associated with Freemasonry. (Many of the key KGC postÂCivil War leaders were Scottish Rite Masons, who used the cover of that secret fraternity to conduct their activities.) Using his knowledge of KGC symbolism to crack coded maps, Brewer has located several KGC caches and has recovered gold coins, guns, and other treasure from some of them.
Shadow of the Sentinel is the most comprehensive account yet of the activities of the KGC after the Civil War and, indeed, into the 1900s. Getler and Brewer suggest that the clandestine network of KGC operatives was far wider than previously thought, and that it included Jesse James, the former Confederate guerrilla whose stage and bank robberies helped to fill KGC treasure chests.
This is a rousing and provocative adventure that weaves together one man's personal quest with an intriguing, little-known chapter in America's hidden history.
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A vivid, unprecedented account of why Union and Confederate soldiers identified slavery as the root of the war, how the conflict changed troops’ ideas about slavery, and what those changing ideas meant for the war and the nation.
Using soldiers’ letters, diaries, and regimental newspapers, Chandra Manning allows us to accompany soldiers—black and white, northern and southern—into camps and hospitals and on marches and battlefields to better understand their thoughts about what they were doing and why. Manning’s work reveals that Union soldiers, though evincing little sympathy for abolitionism before the war, were calling for emancipation by the second half of 1861, ahead of civilians, political leaders, and officers, and a full year before the Emancipation Proclamation. She recognizes Confederate soldiers’ primary focus on their own families, and explores how their beliefs about abolition—that it would endanger their loved ones, erase the privileges of white manhood, and destroy the very fabric of southern society—motivated even non-slaveholding Confederates to fight and compelled them to persevere through military catastrophes like Gettysburg and Atlanta, long after they grew to despise the Confederate government and disdain the southern citizenry. She makes clear that while white Union troops viewed preservation of the Union as essential to the legacy of the Revolution, over the course of the war many also came to think that in order to gain God’s favor, they and other white northerners must confront the racial prejudices that made them complicit in the sin of slavery. We see how the eventual consideration of the enlistment of black soldiers by the Confederacy eliminated any reason for many Confederate soldiers to fight; how, by 1865, black Union soldiers believed the forward racial strides made during the war would continue; and how white Union troops’ commitment to racial change, fluctuating with the progress of the war, created undreamt-of potential for change but failed to fulfill it.
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Among the plethora of books about the Civil War Company Aytch stands out for its uniquely personal view of the events as related by a most engaging writer -- a man with Twain-like talents who served as a foot soldier for four long years in the Confederate army. Originally published in 1881 as a series of articles in the Columbia, Tennessee, Herald, Sam Watkins's account has long been recognized by historians as one of the most lively and witty accounts of the war. Parallels between this text and The Red Badge of Courage suggest that Stephen Crane was also among Private Watkins's readers.
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A distinguished historian's vision of how the Civil War could have turned out differently, and with what consequences.
What if Lee had avoided defeat at Gettysburg? What if a military stalemate had developed, coupled with growing antiwar sentiment? What if Lincoln had been defeated in the 1864 election and Great Britain had recognized the Confederacy? What would have been the careers of an independent Confederate States of America and a defeated United States?
In the right hands the "what if" question can give us unusual access to the fascinations of history. It can transform the inevitable back into the possible, restoring the contingency and the drama of events. Roger L. Ransom, a master of historical analysis, follows the consequences of the "what if" scenario over an extended period of time, showing us the logical and historically valid outcomes of his counterfactuals. The result is a historical vision that is fascinating, convincing, and a source of insight into the critical events of the Civil War as they actually happened. 24 maps.
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In the world of historical painting, Don Troiani stands alone, universally acclaimed for the accuracy, drama, and detail of his depictions of America's past. In Don Troiani's Regiments and Uniforms of the Civil War, first released in 2002, the artist turned his brush to the units and uniforms of the War between the States. Through Troiani's careful reconstructions and the accompanying text, the book offers one of the most comprehensive looks at Civil War uniforms ever undertaken. In addition to the full volume in hard cover, Stackpole Books now presents four handsome, individually bound paperbacks, each covering different branches of service and types of soldier. Both the cavalry and the artillery played critical roles in the Civil War. The uniforms of horsemen and cannoneers resembled those of the infantry but differed in key respects, such as the bright yellow trim that distinguished the cavalry and the crossed-cannon insignia of the artillery. The artwork in this volume gives a flavor of how these specialized troops were outfitted.
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Few men have ever started from humbler beginnings and risen to greater heights. Thomas J. Jackson never sought fame, but he could not escape its light when opportunity came. At the same time, the louder people cheered, the more embarrassed he became. Fatally wounded by friendly fire on May 2, 1863, Jackson has continued to live in the American memory. His sobriquet "Stonewall" remains the most famous nickname in American military history. The manner in which Jackson lived his life was heavily influenced by the writings of Lord Chesterfield, whose published letters to his son on self-improvement were popular in polite society. No single work—save the Bible—more influenced Jackson in his evolution as a polished gentleman. As a cadet at West Point, he felt compelled to compose his own book of maxims. Jackson’s maxims are reproduced here as he wrote them. Accompanying each are insights into the man by today’s foremost authority on the general, James I. Robertson Jr.!
This information includes the origin of the adage, one or more quotations paralleling the maxim, how Jackson may have applied the idea in his own life, and how certain maxims offer insights into the mind of the man. Following Jackson’s death in 1863, this book of maxims disappeared. Subsequent generations could only assume that it was a casualty of time. When Robertson began to research his landmark biography of Jackson in the late 1980s, he came across the original notebook of maxims in a collection of papers that had been given to Tulane University at the turn of the twentieth century. The contents are reproduced here in full.





















