A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern American historians, it remains the only full-scale evaluation of the ideas of the early Republican party. Now with a new introduction, Eric Foner puts his argument into the context of contemporary scholarship, reassessing the concept of free labor in the light of the last twenty-five years of writing on such issues as work, gender, economic change, and political thought. A significant reevaluation of the causes of the Civil War, Foner's study looks beyond the North's opposition to slavery and its emphasis upon preserving the Union to determine the broader grounds of its willingness to undertake a war against the South in 1861. Its search is for those social concepts the North accepted as vital to its way of life, finding these concepts most clearly expressed in the ideology of the growing Republican party in the decade before the war's start. Through a careful analysis of the attitudes of leading factions in the party's formation (northern Whigs, former Democrats, and political abolitionists) Foner is able to show what each contributed to Republican ideology. He also shows how northern ideas of human rights--in particular a man's right to work where and how he wanted, and to accumulate property in his own name--and the goals of American society were implicit in that ideology. This was the ideology that permeated the North in the period directly before the Civil War, led to the election of Abraham Lincoln, and led, almost immediately, to the Civil War itself. At the heart of the controversy over the extension of slavery, he argues, is the issue of whether the northern or southern form of society would take root in the West, whose development would determine the nation's destiny. In his new introductory essay, Foner presents a greatly altered view of the subject. Only entrepreneurs and farmers were actually "free men" in the sense used in the ideology of the period. Actually, by the time the Civil War was initiated, half the workers in the North were wage-earners, not independent workers. And this did not account for women and blacks, who had little freedom in choosing what work they did. He goes onto show that even after the Civil War these guarantees for "free soil, free labor, free men" did not really apply for most Americans, and especially not for blacks. Demonstrating the profoundly successful fusion of value and interest within Republican ideology prior to the Civil War, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men remains a classic of modern American historical writing. Eloquent and influential, it shows how this ideology provided the moral consensus which allowed the North, for the first time in history, to mobilize an entire society in modern warfare.

    It has been needed for a long time, both by the student and by the man who simply likes to read about the Civil War, but until now no one had the dedication or the encyclopedic knowledge to produce it. Here it is, at last—an almanac, or day-by-day recital down to the close conflict, written by Professor E. B. Long of the University of Wyoming. If there was a battlefield in the Civil War that this man has not visited personally, I do not know where it is; if there is an important collection of papers shedding light on the war that he has not examined, it would be hard to name it. It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that this man knows more facts about the Civil War than any other man who ever lived. To know a subject thoroughly, of course, is one thing; to put the results of that knowledge into lucid prose of manageable compass is something else again. One does not need to examine many pages of this almanac to realize that Professor Long has succeeded admirably in the second task. Crammed into the margins of each page with facts, this book is never soporific. It is for the casual reader as well as for the specialist; it can even, as a matter of fact, be read straight through as a narrative, in which the dramatic and heart-stirring events of America’s greatest time of trial pass before the eye on a day-to-day basis. A book like this has been needed for a long time, but up to now no one was able to write it. It should have a long life, and no one will ever need to do it again. It belongs on the somewhat restricted shelf of Civil War books that will be of permanent value.”Bruce Catton, from his foreword

    This overview of our national history from Fort Sumter through Appomattox and the death of Abraham Lincoln takes a rightful place among the classics accounts of the war that tore America apart.The present volume, complete in itself, opens with a survey of the condition of the nation midway through the warÐa balance-sheet of the strengths of the opposing armiesÐbut soon we stand outside Vicksburg as, after several false starts, Grant closes in around that city and prepares to seize control of the Mississippi River and cut the Confederacy in two. Coincident with these mighty operations, we are shown the fumbling and uncertainty that followed the Union defeat at Chancellorsville and the eventual conflict at Gettysburg, the high tide of the Confederacy in one sense and its doom in another. Allan Nevins won the National Book Award for The Organized War: 1863-1864 and The Organized War to Victory: 1864-1865, the succeeding volume in The War for the Union.All four volumes of the War for the Union are currently available from Konecky & Konecky.

    

    But how many people know the story behind the Confederacy's attempt to build a fleet of armorclad vessels of war?When the Civil War began, the South had virtually no navy, few seamen, and limited shipbuilding facilities. In order to defend its ports against a well-established Northern navy, the South had to resort to innovation, and the Confederate ironclad navy was born.The Confederate government commissioned and put into operation twenty-two armorclad vessels of war. This is their story. From the inception of the program, through the problems of building the vessels, through the careers of the vessels themselves (including gripping battle descriptions), to their eventual destruction or surrender, it is all here. Iron Afloat is history that reads like a novel and will appeal to readers interested in the Civil War and Confederacy as well as to military and naval historians.