Rhea continues his spectacular narrative of the initial campaign between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee in the spring of 1864. May 13 through 25, a phase oddly ignored by historians, was critical in the clash between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia. During those thirteen days -- an interlude bracketed by horrific battles that riveted the public's attention -- a game of guile and endurance between Grant and Lee escalated to a suspenseful draw on Virginia's North Anna River.From the bloodstained fields of the Mule Shoe to the North Anna River, with Meadow Bridge, Myers Hill, Harris Farm, Jericho Mills, Ox Ford, and Doswell Farm in between, grueling night marches, desperate attacks, and thundering cavalry charges became the norm for both Grant's and Lee's men. But the real story of May 13--25 lay in the two generals' efforts to outfox each other, and Rhea charts their every step and misstep. Realizing that his bludgeoning tactics at the Bloody Angle were ineffective, Grant resorted to a fast-paced assault on Lee's vulnerable points. Lee, outnumbered two to one, abandoned the offensive and concentrated on anticipating Grant's maneuvers and shifting quickly enough to repel them. It was an amazingly equal match of wits that produced a gripping, high-stakes bout of warfare -- a test, ultimately, of improvisation for Lee and of perseverance for Grant.

    Jaffa. This long-awaited sequel to Crisis of the House Divided, first published in 1959, continues Jaffa's piercing examination of the political thought of Abraham Lincoln and the themes of self-government, equality, and statesmanship. Whereas Crisis of the House Divided focused on the famous senate campaign debates between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, this volume expands and deepens Jaffa's analysis of American political thought, and gives special attention to Lincoln's refutation of the arguments of John C. Calhoun the intellectual champion of the Confederacy. According to Jaffa, the Civil War is the characteristic event in American history not because it represents a statistical frequency, but rather because through the conflict of that war we are able to understand what is fundamentally at stake in the American experiment in self-government.

    Her husband was a wealthy rice planter who owned four plantations and 337 slaves. Her thirteen children included two Harvard scholars, seven world travelers, a U.S. Navy war hero, six Confederate soldiers, one possible Union collaborator, a Confederate firebrand trapped in the North, an expatriate bon vivant in France, and two California pioneers. “Mary's World” illuminates in lavish detail the world and psyche of this wealthy, well-educated, well-intentioned woman, her family, and their slaves in the antebellum South.During the Civil War, Mary and her husband, William, stood helpless as two sons were killed, another was driven insane, their slaves were freed, and the world as they knew it was swept away by a hurricane of social change. In her own words, Mary tells us about the joys, sorrows, frustrations, and terrors she and her family faced in nineteenth-century Charleston. This intimate, visceral biography was drawn directly from over 2,500 pages of Mary's handwritten letters, journals and diaries, none of which, she could have imagined, would ever be read by strangers. Therein lies their power.Readers also learn about the vastly different lifestyles, food, clothing, and experiences of their slaves. “Mary's World” also pays special attention to Cretia Stewart, Mary's favorite servant, Cretia’s husband, Scipio, and their free descendants, some of whom worked for Mary’s grandchildren well into the twentieth century. How Mary, William, their children, and slaves lived before the Civil War, clung desperately to life in the eye of the maelstrom, and coped – or failed to cope -- with its bewildering aftermath is the story of this book. The letters and images they left behind offer priceless insights into the anguished roots of Southern social history.

    An autobiography written by a Union mapmaker who witnessed the worst of the Civil War firsthand, including an account of his experiences during a two-year stay at the notorious Andersonville prison.

    In July 1863 the regiment's eight-hundred-plus troops--young men from North Carolina's mountains, farmlands, and hamlets--were thrust into the firestorm of Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in North America. By the time the fighting ended, the 26th North Carolina had suffered what some authorities would calculate to be the highest casualties of any regiment in the Civil War.Following a bone-wearying march into Pennsylvania with the rest of General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, the soldiers of the 26th found themselves in ferocious, almost face-to-face combat with some of the hardest-fighting troops in the Federal army--the heralded Iron Brigade. The bloody contest on McPherson's Ridge produced some of Gettysburg's fiercest fighting, and the troops involved--men from North Carolina, Michigan, and Indiana--established an enduring legacy of American fortitude and will.On Gettysburg's third day of battle, the 26th North Carolina was placed in the front ranks of Pickett's Charge. Following a massive artillery barrage, the tattered regiment was commanded to go the distance in what would prove to be the most famous assault of the war. At one point, as he watched the men of the 26th in battle, Brigadier General James J. Pettigrew dispatched a message to the regiment's commander: "Tell him his regiment haas covered itself with glory today."The story of the 26th North Carolina at Gettysburg is an American saga of duty performed in the worst of warfare. It unfolds through the lives of key characters--the regiment'stwenty-one year old commander, Colonel Henry K. Burgwyn, Jr.; its second-in-command, twenty-six-year-old farmer-turned-lieutenant colonel John R. Lane; twenty-two-year-old Major John Jones, who had abandoned his college studies to join the army; and common soldiers like Private Jimmie Moore, a North Carolina mountain boy who had gone to war at the age of fifteen."Covered In Glory is an intensely personal narrative based on exhaustive research into the diaries, letters, memoirs, and official records of the men who struggled on the bloody field at Gettysburg. It is a powerful, moving account of American courage and sacrifice.

    The most notable of these occurred at Bennett Place, near Durham, North Carolina, when Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered the Army of Tennessee to Union General William T. Sherman. In this first full-length examination of the end of the war in North Carolina, Mark Bradley traces the campaign leading up to Bennett Place.Alternating between Union and Confederate points of view and drawing on his readings of primary sources, including numerous eyewitness accounts and the final muster rolls of the Army of Tennessee, Bradley depicts the action as it was experienced by the troops and the civilians in their path. He offers new information about the morale of the Army of Tennessee during its final confrontation with Sherman's much larger Union army. And he advances a fresh interpretation of Sherman's and Johnston's roles in the final negotiations for the surrender.Even after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, the Civil War continued to be fought, and surrenders negotiated, on different fronts. The most notable of these occurred at Bennett Place, near Durham, North Carolina, when Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered the Army of Tennessee to Union General William T. Sherman. In this first full-length examination of the end of the war in North Carolina, Mark L. Bradley depicts the action as it was experienced by the troops and the civilians in their path.

    This question was most fractious in the border states of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. In Missouri, it was largely settled at Wilson's Creek on August 10, 1861, in a contest that is rightly considered the second major battle of the Civil War.In providing the first in-depth narrative and analysis of this important but largely overlooked battle, William Piston and Richard Hatcher combine a traditional military study of the fighting at Wilson's Creek with an innovative social analysis of the soldiers who participated and the communities that supported them. In particular, they highlight the importance of the soldiers' sense of corporate honor--the desire to uphold the reputation of their hometowns--as a powerful motivator for enlistment, a source of sustenance during the campaign, and a lens through which soldiers evaluated their performance in battle.In the summer of 1861, Americans were preoccupied by the question of which states would join the secession movement and which would remain loyal to the Union. This question was most fractious in the border states of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. In Missouri, it was largely settled at Wilson's Creek on August 10, 1861, in a contest that is rightly considered the second major battle of the Civil War. In an in-depth narrative and analysis of this important but largely overlooked battle, William Piston and Richard Hatcher combine a traditional military study of the fighting with an innovative social analysis of the soldiers who participated and the communities that supported them.

    Lyde Sizer shows that from the 1850 publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin through Reconstruction, these women, as well as a larger mosaic of lesser-known writers, used their mainstream writings publicly to make sense of war, womanhood, Union, slavery, republicanism, heroism, and death. Among the authors discussed are Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sara Willis Parton (Fanny Fern), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Mary Abigail Dodge (Gail Hamilton), Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Although direct political or partisan power was denied to women, these writers actively participated in discussions of national issues through their sentimental novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and letters to the editor.Sizer pays close attention to how these mostly middle-class women attempted to create a rhetoric of unity, giving common purpose to women despite differences in class, race, and politics. This theme of unity was ultimately deployed to establish a white middle-class standard of womanhood, meant to exclude as well as include.

    But, like his tomb on the Hudson, Grant's reputation has fallen into disrepair. The image many Americans hold of him is a caricature: someone "uniquely stupid," an insensitive butcher as a general, an incompetent mediocrity as president, and a drunk. Several efforts to counter this stereotype have often gone too far in the other direction, resulting in an equally distorted laudatory portrait of near-perfection. In reading the original sources, Brooks D. Simpson became convinced that Grant was neither a bumbling idiot who was the darling of fortune nor a flawless general who could do no wrong. Rather, he was a tangle of opposing qualities--a relentless warrior but a generous victor, a commander who drew upon uncommon common sense in drafting campaign plans and in winning battles, a soldier so sensitive to suffering that he could not stand to see the bloody hides at his father's tannery, a man who made mistakes and sometimes learned from them. Even as he waged war, he realized the broader political implications of the struggle; he came to believe that the preservation of the Union depended upon the destruction of slavery. Equally compelling is Grant's personal story--one of a man who struggled against great odds, bad luck, and personal humiliation, who sought joy and love in the arms of his wife and his children, and who was determined to overcome adversity and prevail over his detractors. "None of our public men have a story so strange as this," Owen Wister once observed; agreeing, William T. Sherman remarked that Grant remained a mystery even to himself. In the first of two volumes, Brooks Simpson brings Grant's story to life in an account that is readable, balanced, compelling, and definitive.

    Moving beyond Mary Ellison's 1972 landmark regional study of Lancashire cotton workers' reactions, R. J. M. Blackett opens the subject to a new, wider transatlantic context of influence and undertakes a deftly researched and written sociological, intellectual, and political examination of who in Britain supported the Union, who the Confederacy, and why. The American Civil War had a profound effect on Britain's political culture; no other event during that period -- not in Poland, Hungary, Italy, or British colonies -- compared. Blackett argues that the traditional historiographical assessments of British partisanship along class and economic lines must be reevaluated in light of the nature and changing contours of transatlantic abolitionist connections, the ways in which nationalism framed the debate, and the effect that race -- among other issues -- exerted over the British public's perception of conditions in America. Divided Hearts presents a compelling and innovative thesis, one sure to engage scholars in many fields of history.

    Sudlow spent most of the decade gathering the names of virtually every Maine woman involved in the war. The description of women-run organizations for relief is a revealing model for how women from all states endeavored to support the war effort.