But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again this time from a war close to home, and to his own heart.Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance.In Virginia, Horwitz joins a band of 'hardcore' reenactors who crash-diet to achieve the hollow-eyed look of starved Confederates; in Kentucky, he witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war sparked by the killing of a white man who brandishes a rebel flag; at Andersonville, he finds that the prison's commander, executed as a war criminal, is now exalted as a martyr and hero; and in the book's climax, Horwitz takes a marathon trek from Antietam to Gettysburg to Appomattox in the company of Robert Lee Hodge, an eccentric pilgrim who dubs their odyssey the 'Civil Wargasm.'Written with Horwitz's signature blend of humor, history, and hard-nosed journalism, Confederates in the Attic brings alive old battlefields and new ones 'classrooms, courts, country bars' where the past and the present collide, often in explosive ways. Poignant and picaresque, haunting and hilarious, it speaks to anyone who has ever felt drawn to the mythic South and to the dark romance of the Civil War.

    The first-ever biography of the perpetrator of the Centralia and Baxter Springs Massacres, as well as innumerable atrocities during the Civil War in the West.

    Her detailed journal, first published in 1866, provides a riveting look behind the lines of Civil War action in depicting civilian attitudes, army medical practices, and the administrative workings of the Confederate hospital system.

    A powerful work of historical fiction that dramatizes the romantic, brutal, and glorious life of Stonewall Jackson, one of the Civil War's greatest heroes.

    Lavishly illustrated with period photographs and drawi

    Based on research in more than 1,200 wartime letters and diaries by more than 400 Confederate officers and enlisted men, this book offers a compelling social history of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia during its final year, from May 1864 to April 1865. Organized in a chronological framework, the book uses the words of the soldiers themselves to provide a view of the army's experiences in camp, on the march, in combat, and under siege--from the battles in the Wilderness to the final retreat to Appomattox. It sheds new light on such questions as the state of morale in the army, the causes of desertion, ties between the army and the home front, the debate over arming black men in the Confederacy, and the causes of Confederate defeat. Remarkablyrich and detailed, Lee's Miserables offers a fresh look at one of the most-studied Civil War armies. A landmark book. . . . When the end came, the men of the Army of Northern Virginia passed into legend. Power's important study brings a large measure of reality back to their story.--Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr., American HistoryPower's research is voluminous and his conclusions sensible and thought-provoking. The result is a major and welcome addition to the literature of how armies are made and how they die.--Steven E. Woodworth, Blue & Gray Education Society NewsletterA classic Civil War study--immensely useful to the historian, vigorous and enlightening to the common reader. It is a glimpse into the American soul: what is best and worst about us, our riches and griefs, discontents, yearnings, murderous urges, and abiding faith.--Donald McCaig, Washington Post Book WorldOne of the finest works ever written on the Army of Northern Virginia.--Keith Bohannon, Civil War HistoryBased on research in more than 1,200 wartime letters and diaries by more than 400 Confederate officers and enlisted men, Lee's Miserables offers a compelling social history of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia during its final year, from May 1864 to April 1865. The book uses the words of the soldiers themselves to provide a richly detailed view of the army's experiences in camp, on the march, in combat, and under siege--from the battles in the Wilderness to the final retreat to Appomattox.

    It contributes critically to our understanding of the war, and it will influence the course of Civil War scholarship for decades to comes. I cannot overemphasize the importance of this book."--Richard J. Sommers, U.S. Army Military History InstituteIn this reexamination of Confederate war aims, Joseph L. Harsh analyzes the military policy and grand strategy adopted by Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis in the first two years of the Civil War.Recent critics of Lee have depicted him as a general of tactical brilliance, but one who lacked strategic vision. He has been accused of squandering meager military resources in vain pursuit of decisive victories during his first year in field command. Critics of Davis claim he went too far in adopting a "perimeter" policy which attempted to defend every square mile of Southern territory, scattering Confederate resources too thinly.Harsh argues, to the contrary, that Davis and Lee's policies allowed the Confederacy to survive longer than it otherwise could have and were the policies best designed to win Southern independence.

    For four months Ewell was Stonewall Jackson's most trusted subordinate; when Jackson died, Ewell took command of the Second Corps, leading it at Gettysburg, the Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Court House. In this biography, Donald Pfanz presents the most detailed portrait yet of the man sometimes referred to as Stonewall Jackson's right arm. Drawing on a rich array of previously untapped original source materials, Pfanz concludes that Ewell was a highly competent general, whose successes on the battlefield far outweighed his failures. But Pfanz's book is more than a military biography. It also examines Ewell's life before and after the Civil War, including his years at West Point, his service in the Mexican War, his experiences as a dragoon officer in Arizona and New Mexico, and his postwar career as a planter in Mississippi and Tennessee. In all, Pfanz offers an exceptionally detailed portrait of one of the South's most important leaders.General Richard Stoddert Ewell holds a unique place in the history of the Army of Northern Virginia. For four months Ewell was Stonewall Jackson's most trusted subordinate; when Jackson died, Ewell took command of the Second Corps, leading it at Gettysburg, the Wilderness Campaign, and Spotsylvania Court House. By the end of the war he was in charge of the defense of Richmond. With this book, Donald Pfanz provides more than just a military biography. He also examines Ewell's life before and after the Civil War, offering an exceptionally detailed portrait of one of the South's most important leaders.

    Despite its distinguished record and key role in the war, no detailed history of the brigade has been written in 130 years. Made up largely of New York Irishmen, the Brigade made a decisive contribution to the Union victory at Antietam, suffered fearfully in a gallant charge at Fredericksburg, and made a famous stand in the Wheatfield on the second day at Gettysburg, as depicted in the recent film. The full co-operation of the present-day 69th New York National Guard helped make possible the compilation of this detailed account, which includes 13 period maps and 270 illustrations, many of them rare photos from private collections. The original hardcover limited edition of Bilby's book quickly sold out to re-enactors, veteran and active members of the 69th Regiment, and hard-core Civil War collectors; the Combined Publishing trade paperback is the first edition made available directly to the general public. Joseph G. Bilby is a popular columnist for the Civil War News and a veteran of the current 69th Regiment. He is also the author of Civil War Firearms.

    Now, in Like Men of War, he focuses on African-American soldiers in the Union army. In all, more than 175,000 black soldiers fought in more than 400 battles. But once the war was won, their efforts were largely ignored or forgotten. Drawing from the diaries and letters of these veterans, Trudeau vividly re-creates their experiences. At the outset, the white military believed that blacks were simply incapable of combat duty. But, as in the courageous assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina, African Americans more than proved their mettle. Thoroughly researched and copiously illustrated, Like Men of War illuminates the struggles of these courageous men and brings a fresh perspective to our understanding of the Civil War

    Wittenberg's Gettysburg's Forgotten Cavalry Actions won the Bachelder-Coddington Award for the year's best new work interpreting the Battle of Gettysburg. This fully revised edition adds extensive new research, interpretations, and conclusions that substantially add to our understanding of these important mounted actions.Gettysburg's Forgotten Cavalry Actions examines in great detail three of the campaign's central cavalry episodes. The first is the heroic but doomed legendary charge of Brig. Gen. Elon J. Farnsworth's cavalry brigade against Confederate infantry and artillery. The attack was launched on July 3 after the repulse of Pickett's Charge, and the high cost included the life of General Farnsworth. The second examines Brig. Gen. Wesley Merritt's tenacious fight on South Cavalry Field, including a fresh look at the opportunity to roll up the Army of Northern Virginia's flank on the afternoon of July 3. Finally, Wittenberg studies the short but especially brutal cavalry fight at Fairfield, Pennsylvania. The strategic Confederate victory kept the Hagerstown Road open for Lee's retreat back to Virginia, nearly destroyed the 6th U. S. Cavalry, and resulted in the award of two Medals of Honor.Gettysburg's Forgotten Cavalry Actions: Farnsworth's Charge, South Cavalry Field, and the Battle of Fairfield, July 3, 1863 boasts several worthy additions: nearly 15,000 words of new material based upon recently uncovered archival sources, including a new appendix (co-authored with J. David Petruzzi) that resolves the dispute about where Farnsworth's Charge and Merritt's fight occurred; a walking and driving tour complete with GPS coordinates; and updated photographs to reflect the modern appearance of the Gettysburg battlefield, which now better reflects its 1863 appearance.About the Author: Eric J. Wittenberg is an accomplished American Civil War cavalry historian and author. An attorney in Ohio, Wittenberg is the author of many articles and the author or co-author of more than a dozen books on Civil War cavalry subjects, including The Battle of Monroe's Crossroads and the Civil War's Final Campaign; Plenty of Blame to Go Around: Jeb Stuart's Controversial Ride to Gettysburg; and One Continuous Fight: The Retreat from Gettysburg and the Pursuit of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, July 4-14, 1863. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife Susan.

    A renowned cavalryman, Nathan Bedford Forrest perfected a ruthless hit-and-run guerrilla warfare that terrified Union soldiers and garnered the respect of warriors like William Sherman, who described his adversary as that Devil, Forrest . . . the most remarkable man our Civil War produced on either side.Historian Bruce Catton rated Forrest one of the authentic military geniuses of the whole war, but Brian Steel Wills covers much more than the cavalryman's incredible feats on the field of battle. He also provides the most thoughtful and complete analysis of Forrest's hardscrabble childhood in backwater Mississippi; his rise to wealth in the Memphis slave trade; his role in the infamous Fort Pillow massacre of black Union soldiers; his role as early leader and Grand Wizard of the first Ku Klux Klan; and his declining health and premature death in a reconstructing America.

    In this masterful book, Larry Daniel re-creates the drama and the

    Introduction by James McPherson.

    

    An engaging roster of curmudgeons, drunkards, and fools in the early days of the Civil War.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    Turning to her mother's journals she catches a glimpse of the God her mother loved and trusted. When her father, New York State's Assemblyman Samuel Pownell, gives Serenity her mother's Bible she finds strength in God's promise to never leave nor forsake her.

    In this way, he aims to show that McClellan's career, both his shortcomings and accomplishments, can be viewed with clearer perspective.

    Examines the important contributions of various women, Northern, Southern, and slave, to the American Civil War, on the battlefield, in print, on the home front, and in other areas where they challenged traditional female roles.

    

    Diaries, letters, journals, media reports and more. Beautifully and dramatically illustrated.

    When nearly 200,000 black men, most of them former slaves, entered the Union army and navy, they transformed the Civil War into a struggle for liberty and changed the course of American history.

    Diaries, letters, journals, media reports and more. Beautifully and dramatically illustrated.

    The first book-length treatment of an important Confederate regiment composed mostly of Irish immigrants who were involved in most of the important Civil War battles in the East.

    Although much less memorialized than Gettysburg, the fall of Vicksburg was every bit as crucial to the Union cause.Pitting Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman against John Pemberton and Joseph Johnston, the victorious Vicksburg Campaign helped revive a war-weary North, gave it absolute control of the Mississippi River, severed the western Confederacy from the East, and further constricted the South's ability to wage war as the Union drove ever deeper into its heartland. It also gave Grant-the campaign's chief architect-a dramatic venue for demonstrating his maturing skills and intelligence as a strategist and field commander.Unlike other volumes in the U.S. Army War College Guides to Civil War Battles series, this one examines an entire campaign, looking at many interlinked battles and joint Army-Navy operations as they played out over seven months and thousands of square miles of rivers, streams, swamps, lakes, forests, hills, and plains surrounding Vicksburg. In addition to detailed coverage of the actual Siege of Vicksburg, the book also chronicles the battles at Jackson, Port Gibson, Raymond, Champions Hill, and Big Black Ridge.Like the other volumes in the series, this one combines eyewitness accounts with maps, illustrations, and tour directions to illuminate the events for both tourists and arm-chair travellers. For anyone interested in learning more about this relatively neglected but pivotal Civil War campaign, the Guide to the Vicksburg Campaign is must reading.

    Cowboys represent the spirit of adventure and determination that marked the settlers as they explored the vast frontier.

    Lee, his principal subordinates, the treatment they received in the literature of the Confederate military history, and the continuing influence of Lost Cause arguments into the late-20th century United States.

    In the South, near the end of the third year, Marines joined in the ill-fated attempts of September 1863 to recapture Fort Sumter, and in May 1864 the Red River expedition on the other side of the Confederacy.But the Corps' work in the ongoing coastal war yielded success, as that duty continued.

    As a member of one of the most prominent and powerful political families in America during the nineteenth century, possibly the equivalent of the twentieth-century Kennedys, Frank was steeped in politics at an early age. The youngest son of Francis Preston Blair, editor of Andrew Jackson's Washington Globe and adviser to Presidents Andrew Jackson through Andrew Johnson, Frank Blair was greatly influenced by his father, who had high political expectations of him.Volatile and combative, Blair was either strongly admired or hated by the public figures of his day. He held adamantly to his opinions and fought hard for his political causes. He was an ardent supporter of Abraham Lincoln and championed the president's program in Congress and in Missouri against the frequent assaults of the Radicals. Credited with being the principal leader in saving Missouri for the Union in 1861, Blair later served with great distinction at Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and in the Sherman campaigns throughout Georgia and the Carolinas. He is one of only two Missourians ever honored by his state in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol.Frank Blair: Lincoln's Conservative reveals the full extent of Blair's importance as a national political figure. Specialists in nineteenth-century America, students of Missouri history, and Civil War buffs will welcome this study, which will long stand as the definitive work on this influential and colorful character.

    

    Written in 1902, Beecham recounts his war experiences with a keen eye toward the daily life of the soldier, the suffering and brutality of war, and the remarkable acts of valor, by soldiers both black and white, that punctuated the grind of long campaigns. As If It Were Glory is an unforgettable account of the Civil War, unclouded by sentimentality and insistent that the nation remain true to the cause for which it fought. Beecham's war was a long one-he served from May 1861 through the completion of the war in the spring of 1865. With the Iron Brigade he saw action at such momentous battles as Chancellorsville and then at Gettysburg, where he was taken prisoner. Returned to service in a prison exchange, Beecham was promoted to first lieutenant of the 23rd United States Colored Troops whom he lead in fierce fighting at the Battle of the Crater. At the Crater, Beecham was wounded, again captured, and, after eight months in a Confederate prison, escaped to find his way to Annapolis just before the conclusion of the war. In his narrative, Beecham celebrates the ingenuity of the enlisted man at the expense of officers who are often arrogant or incompetent. He also chides the altered recollections of fellow veterans who remember only triumphs and forgot defeats. In one of the most powerful parts of his memoir, Beecham pays tribute to the valor of the African Americans who fought under his command and insists that they were "the bravest and best soldiers that ever lived."

    Dunn Browne's Experiences in the Army, edited by noted Civil War writer Stephen Sears, provides a candid, often witty, behind-the-scenes look at the Civil War. A collection of battlefront letters composed by Browne (pseudonym of Captain Samuel Wheelock Fiske of the 14th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry), this book is unique in the literature of the Civil War. Fiske was at once a fighting infantryman and an experienced newspaper correspondent, and no one in this war, on either side, wrote better accounts of a soldier's experiences in battle and in camp. From Antietam to the Wilderness, readers of the Springfield Republican had Dunn Browne to explain to them just how it was in the Army of the Potomac. In addition, he was an investigative reporter (before that term was invented) who delved into the follies of the army bureaucracy, the sophistries of the Copperheads, and the abuses of conscription. He delved, too, into the complexities of why men fight.

    Following the third day of the Battle of Glorieta Pass, the Texans realized their predicament: Here we are between two armies, one double ours and the other four times our number, 1,000 miles from home, not a wagon, not a dust of flour, not a pound of meat. While the Confederates had forced a Union retreat on the rocky, forested battlefield around Pigeon's Ranch, they could not press their advantage. The most crippling blow had come in the surprise destruction of all seventy supply wagons at Johnson's Ranch by Colorado Volunteers. So complete was their devastation that during a truce in the early evening, the Texans even had to borrow Union shovels to bury their dead.A superbly researched and well-written study of the Battle of Glorieta Pass that is likely to be definitive.--Jerry Thompson, author of Confederate General of the West: Henry Hopkins Sibley

    From Brawner Farm and Second Bull Run to Chancellorsville and Gettysburg--the Western soldiers earned and justified the proud name Iron Brigade. And when the war was over, the records showed that it led all federal brigades in percentage of deaths in battle. These essays, by some of the best known historians of the brigade, spotlight significant moments in the history of the Civil War's most celebrated unit.

    Diaries, letters, journals, media reports and more. Beautifully and dramatically illustrated.