Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War
Series · 42
books · 2000-2023
Books in series
#1
Counterfeit Justice
The Judicial Odyssey of Texas Freedwoman Azeline Hearne
2009
For many of the forty years of her life as a slave, Azeline Hearne cohabitated with her wealthy, unmarried master, Samuel R. Hearne. She bore him four children, only one of whom survived past early childhood. When Sam died shortly after the Civil War ended, he publicly acknowledged his relationship with Azeline and bequeathed his entire estate to their twenty-year-old mulatto son, with the provision that he take care of his mother. When their son died early in 1868, Azeline inherited one of the most profitable cotton plantations in Texas and became one of the wealthiest ex-slaves in the former Confederacy. In Counterfeit Justice, Dale Baum traces Azeline's remarkable story, detailing her ongoing legal battles to claim and maintain her legacy.
As Baum shows, Azeline's inheritance quickly made her a target for predatory whites determined to strip her of her land. A familiar figure at the Robertson County District Court from the late 1860s to the early 1880s, Azeline faced numerous lawsuits—including one filed against her by her own lawyer. Samuel Hearne's family took steps to dispossess her, and other unscrupulous white men challenged the title to her plantation, using claims based on old Spanish land grants. Azeline's prolonged and courageous defense of her rightful title brought her a certain the first freedwoman to be a party to three separate civil lawsuits appealed all the way to the Texas Supreme Court and the first former slave in Robertson County indicted on criminal charges of perjury. Although repeatedly blocked and frustrated by the convolutions of the legal system, she evolved from a bewildered defendant to a determined plaintiff who, in one extraordinary lawsuit, came tantalizingly close to achieving revenge against those who defrauded her for over a decade.
Due to gaps in the available historical record and the unreliability of secondary accounts based on local Reconstruction folklore, many of the details of Azeline's story are lost to history. But Baum grounds his speculation about her life in recent scholarship on the Reconstruction era, and he puts his findings in context in the history of Robertson County. Although history has not credited Azeline Hearne with influencing the course of the law, the story of her uniquely difficult position after the Civil War gives an unprecedented view of the era and of one solitary woman's attempt to negotiate its social and legal complexities in her struggle to find justice.
Baum's meticulously researched narrative will be of keen interest to legal scholars and to all those interested in the plight of freed slaves during this era.
#3
Legacy of Disunion
The Enduring Significance of the American Civil War
2003
The conviction that the American Civil War left a massive legacy to the country has generally been much clearer than the definition of what that legacy is. Did the war, as Ulysses S. Grant believed, bequeath power, intelligence, and sectional harmony to America, or did it, as many have argued since, sow racial and regional bitterness that has blighted the nation since 1865? What, exactly, was the legacy of disunion?
This collection explores that question from a variety of angles, showcasing the work of twelve scholars from the United States and the United Kingdom. The essays ponder the role of history, myth, and media in sustaining the memory of the war and its racial implications in the South; Abraham Lincoln’s legacy; and the war’s consequences in less studied areas, such as civil-military relations, constitutional and legal history, and America’s ascent on the international stage. By juxtaposing American and non-American interpretations, this stimulating volume sheds light on aspects of the war’s legacy that from a purely American viewpoint are sometimes too close for comfort. Perhaps the greatest legacy of the Civil War is its ongoing debate and continuing fascination worldwide.
#8
While in the Hands of the Enemy
Military Prisons of the Civil War
2005
During the four years of the American Civil War, over 400,000 soldiers—one in every seven who served in the Union and Confederate armies—became prisoners of war. In northern and southern prisons alike, inmates suffered horrific treatment. Even healthy young soldiers often sickened and died within weeks of entering the stockades. In all, nearly 56,000 prisoners succumbed to overcrowding, exposure, poor sanitation, inadequate medical care, and starvation. Historians have generally blamed prison conditions and mortality rates on factors beyond the control of Union and Confederate command, but Charles W. Sanders, Jr., boldly challenges the conventional view and demonstrates that leaders on both sides deliberately and systematically ordered the mistreatment of captives.
Sanders shows how policies developed during the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War shaped the management of Civil War prisons. He examines the establishment of the major camps as well as the political motivations and rationale behind the operation of the prisons, focusing especially on Camp Douglas, Elmira, Camp Chase, and Rock Island in the North and Andersonville, Cahaba, Florence, and Danville in the South. Beyond a doubt, he proves that the administrations of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis purposely formulated and carried out retaliatory practices designed to harm prisoners of war, with each assuming harsher attitudes as the conflict wore on.
Sanders cites official and personal correspondence from high-level civilian and military leaders who knew about the intolerable conditions but often refused to respond or even issued orders that made matters far worse. From such documents emerges a chilling chronicle of how prisoners came to be regarded not as men but as pawns to be used and then callously discarded in pursuit of national objectives. Yet even before the guns fell silent, Sanders reveals, both North and South were hard at work constructing elaborate justifications for their actions.
While in the Hands of the Enemy offers a groundbreaking revisionist interpretation of the Civil War military prison system, challenging historians to rethink their understanding of nineteenth-century warfare.
#9
Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory
2005
At the now-peaceful spot of Tennessee's Fort Pillow State Historic Area, a horrific incident in the nation's bloodiest war occurred on April 12, 1864. Just as a high bluff in the park offers visitors a panoramic view of the Mississippi River, John Cimprich's absorbing book affords readers a new vantage on the American Civil War as viewed through the lens of the Confederate massacre of unionist and black Federal soldiers at Fort Pillow.
Cimprich covers the entire history of Fort Pillow, including its construction by Confederates, its capture and occupation by federals, the massacre, and ongoing debates surrounding that affair. He sets the scene for the carnage by describing the social conflicts in federally occupied areas between secessionists and unionists as well as between blacks and whites. In a careful reconstruction of the assault itself, Cimprich balances vivid firsthand reports with a judicious narrative and analysis of events. He shows how Major General Nathan B. Forrest attacked the garrison with a force outnumbering the Federals roughly 1,500 to 600, and a breakdown of Confederate discipline resulted. The 65 percent death toll for black unionists was approximately twice that for white unionists, and Cimprich concludes that racism was at the heart of the Fort Pillow massacre.
Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory serves as a case study for several major themes of the Civil the great impact of military experience on campaigns, the hardships of military life, and the trend toward a more ruthless conduct of war. The first book to treat the fort's history in full, it provides a valuable perspective on the massacre and, through it, on the war and the world in which it occurred.
#12
A Black Patriot and a White Priest
André Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans
2000
Stephen J. Ochs chronicles the intersecting lives of the first black military Civil War hero, Captain André Cailloux of the 1st Louisiana Native Guards, and the lone Catholic clerical voice of abolition in New Orleans, the Reverend Claude Paschal Maistre. Their paths converged in July 1863, when Maistre, in defiancé of his archbishop, officiated at a large public military funeral for Cailloux, who had perished while courageously leading a doomed charge against the Confederate bastion of Port Hudson. The story of how Cailloux and Maistre arrived at that day and what happened as a consequence provides a prism through which to view the black military experience and the complex interplay of slavery, race, radicalism, and religion during American democracy's most violent upheaval.
#15
Brothers One And All
Esprit De Corps in a Civil War Regiment
2004
During the Civil War, the regiment was the fundamental component of armies both North and South, its reliability and effectiveness crucial to military success. Soldiers' devotion to their regiment—their esprit de corps—encouraged unit cohesion and motivated the individual soldier to march into battle and endure the hardships of military life. In Brothers One and All, Mark H. Dunkelman identifies the characteristics of Civil War esprit de corps and charts its development from recruitment and combat to the end of the war and beyond through the experiences of a single regiment, the 154th New York Volunteer Infantry. Dunkelman offers a unique psychological portrait of a front-line unit that fought with distinction at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Lookout Valley, Rocky Face Ridge, and other engagements. He traces the evolution of natural camaraderie among friends and neighbors into a more profound sense of pride, enthusiasm, and loyalty forged as much in the shared unpleasantness of day-to-day army life as in the terrifying ordeal of battle.
#17
Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites
Race and Nationality in the Era of Reconstruction
2007
After the American Civil War, several movements for ethnic separatism and political self-determination significantly shaped the course of Reconstruction. The Union Leagues, which began during the war to support the northern effort, spread to the South after the war and mobilized African Americans to fight for their political rights and economic security. Opposing the Leagues was the Ku Klux Klan, which used intimidation and violence to maintain the political and economic hegemony of southern whites. Founded in 1858 as the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, the Irish-American Fenians sought to liberate Ireland from English rule. Mitchell Snay provides a compelling comparison of these seemingly disparate groups in Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites, illuminating the contours of nationalism during Reconstruction. Despite their separate and often opposing goals, the Fenians, Union Leagues, and the Klan, Snay reveals, shared many characteristics. To various extents, they were secret societies that sought to advance their mission through both political and extra-political means. Both the League and the Klan employed elaborate rites of initiation and secret passwords common to nineteenth-century fraternal organizations. They also shared a similar political culture of secrecy, conspiracy, and countersubversion. All three groups were quasi-military in structure and activities and shared a desire for the control of land. Among the three organizations, Snay shows, the Fenians provide the clearest case of nationalist aspirations along the lines of ethnicity, though the rise of racial consciousness among both southern whites and blacks also might be seen as expressions of ethnic nationalism. According to Snay, the political culture of Reconstruction encouraged the nationalist ambitions of these groups, but channeled their separatist impulses along civil rather than ethnic lines by focusing on questions of freedom, citizenship, and suffrage. In addition, the Republican emphasis on color-blind equality limited overt expressions of national identities based solely on ethnicity or race. Unlike southern whites and blacks, Irish Americans are seldom mentioned in Reconstruction histories. By joining the Fenians with freedpeople and southern whites, Snay seeks to assert their central relevance to the dynamics of nationalism during Reconstruction and offers a highly original analysis of Reconstruction as an Age of Capital and an Age of Emancipation where categories of race, class, and gender—as well as nationalism—were fluid and contested. 200 pages, 8 Halftones, 5.5 x 8.5
#18
Texas Terror
The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South
2007
On July 8, 1860, fire destroyed the entire business section of Dallas, Texas. At about the same time, two other fires damaged towns near Dallas. Early reports indicated that spontaneous combustion was the cause of the blazes, but four days later, Charles Pryor, editor of the Dallas Herald, wrote letters to editors of pro-Democratic newspapers, alleging that the fires were the result of a vast abolitionist conspiracy, the purpose of which was to devastate northern Texas and free the region's slaves. White preachers from the North, he asserted, had recruited local slaves to set the fires, murder the white men of their region, and rape their wives and daughters. These sensational allegations set off an unprecedented panic that extended throughout the Lone Star State and beyond. In Texas Terror, Donald E. Reynolds offers a deft analysis of these events and illuminates the ways in which this fictionalized conspiracy determined the course of southern secession immediately before the Civil War. As Reynolds explains, all three fires probably resulted from a combination of extreme heat and the presence of new, and highly volatile, phosphorous matches in local stores. But from July until mid-September, vigilantes from the Red River to the Gulf of Mexico charged numerous whites and blacks with involvement in the alleged conspiracy and summarily hanged many of them. Southern newspapers reprinted lurid stories of the alleged abolitionist plot in Texas, and a spate of similar panics occurred in other states. States-rights Democrats asserted that the Republican Party had given tacit approval, if not active support, to the abolitionist scheme, and they repeatedly cited the "Texas Troubles" as an example of what would happen throughout the South if Lincoln were elected president. After Lincoln's election, secessionists charged that all who opposed immediate secession were inviting abolitionists to commit unspeakable depredations. Secessionists used this argument, as Reynolds clearly shows, with great effectiveness, particularly where there was significant opposition to immediate secession.Mining a rich vein of primary sources, Reynolds demonstrates that secessionists throughout the Lower South created public panic for a preparing a traditionally nationalistic region for withdrawal from the Union. Their exploitation of the "Texas Troubles," Reynolds asserts, was a critical and possibly decisive factor in the Lower South's decision to leave the Union of their fathers and form the Confederacy.
#22
Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War
The Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers
2010
During the Civil War, private printers in both the North and South produced a vast array of envelopes featuring iconography designed to promote each side's war effort. Many of these "covers" featured depictions of soldiers, prominent political leaders, Union or Confederate flags, Miss Liberty, Martha Washington, or even runaway slavesùat least fifteen thousand pro-Union and two hundred fifty pro-Confederate designs appeared between 1861 and 1865. In Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War, the first book-length analysis of these covers, Steven R. Boyd explores their imagery to understand what motivated soldiers and civilians to support a war far more protracted and destructive than anyone anticipated in 1861.
Northern envelopes, Boyd shows, typically document the centrality of the preservation of the Union as the key issue that, if unsuccessful, would lead to the destruction of the United States, its Constitution, and its way of life. Con federate covers, by contrast, usually illustrate a competing vision of an independent republic free of the "tyranny" of the United States. Each side's flags and presidents symbolize these two rival viewpoints. Images of presidents Davis and Lincoln, often portrayed as contestants in a boxing match, personalized the contest and served to rally citizens to the cause of southern independence or national preservation.
In the course of depicting the events of the period, printers also revealed the impact of the war on females and African Americans. Some envelopes, for example, featured women on the home front engaging in a variety of patriotic tasks that would have been almost unthinkable before the war. African Americans, on the other hand, became far more visible in American popular culture, especially in the North, where Union printers showed them pursuing their own liberation from southern slavery.
#24
Lincoln and Citizens' Rights in Civil War Missouri
Balancing Freedom and Security
2011
During the Civil War, the state of Missouri presented President Abraham Lincoln, United States military commanders, and state officials with an array of complex and difficult problems. Although Missouri did not secede, a large minority of residents owned slaves, sympathized with secession, or favored the Confederacy. Many residents joined a Confederate state militia, became pro-Confederate guerrillas, or helped the cause of the South in some subversive manner. In order to subdue such disloyalty, Lincoln supported Missouri's provisional Unionist government by ordering troops into the state and approving an array of measures that ultimately infringed on the civil liberties of residents. In this thorough investigation of these policies, Dennis K. Boman reveals the difficulties that the president, military officials, and state authorities faced in trying to curb traitorous activity while upholding the spirit of the United States Constitution. Boman explains that despite Lincoln's desire to disentangle himself from Missouri policy matters, he was never able to do so.
Lincoln's challenge in Missouri continued even after the United States Army defeated the state's Confederate militia. Attention quickly turned to preventing Confederate guerrillas from attacking Missouri's railway system and from ruthlessly murdering, pillaging, and terrorizing loyal inhabitants. Eventually military officials established tribunals to prosecute captured insurgents. In his role as commander-in-chief, Lincoln oversaw these tribunals and worked with Missouri governor Hamilton R. Gamble in establishing additional policies to repress acts of subversion while simultaneously protecting constitutional rights—an incredibly difficult balancing act.
For example, while supporting the suppression of disloyal newspapers and the arrest of persons suspected of aiding the enemy, Lincoln repealed orders violating property rights when they conflicted with federal law. While mitigating the severity of sentences handed down by military courts, Boman shows, Lincoln advocated requiring voters and officeholders to take loyalty oaths and countenanced the summary execution of guerrillas captured with weapons in the field.
One of the first books to explore Lincoln's role in dealing with an extensive guerrilla insurgency, Lincoln and Citizens' Rights in Civil War Missouri illustrates the difficulty of suppressing dissent while upholding the Constitution, a feat as complicated during the Civil War as it is for the War on Terror.
#25
The Reconstruction of Mark Twain
How a Confederate Bushwhacker Became the Lincoln of Our Literature
2011
When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, thousands of patriotic southerners rushed to enlist for the Confederate cause. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who grew up in the border state of Missouri in a slave-holding family, was among them. Clemens, who later achieved fame as the writer Mark Twain, served as second lieutenant in a Confederate militia, but only for two weeks, leading many to describe his loyalty to the Confederate cause as halfhearted at best. After all, Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and his numerous speeches celebrating Abraham Lincoln, with their trenchant call for racial justice, inspired his crowning as "the Lincoln of our Literature."
In The Reconstruction of Mark Twain, Joe B. Fulton challenges these long-held assumptions about Twain's advocacy of the Union cause, arguing that Clemens traveled a long and arduous path, moving from pro-slavery, secession, and the Confederacy to pro-union, and racially enlightened. Scattered and long-neglected texts written by Clemens before, during, and immediately after the Civil War, Fulton shows, tout pro-southern sentiments critical of abolitionists, free blacks, and the North for failing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. These obscure works reveal the dynamic process that reconstructed Twain in parallel with and response to events on American battlefields and in American politics.
Beginning with Clemens' youth in Missouri, Fulton tracks the writer's transformation through the turbulent Civil War years as a southern-leaning reporter in Nevada and San Francisco to his raucous burlesques written while he worked as a Washington correspondent during the impeachment crises of 1867—1868. Fulton concludes with the writer's emergence as the country's satirist-in-chief in the postwar era. By explaining the relationship between the author's early pro-southern writings and his later stance as a champion for racial justice throughout the world, Fulton provides a new perspective on Twain's views and on his deep involvement with Civil War politics.
A deft blend of biography, history, and literary studies, The Reconstruction of Mark Twain offers a bold new assessment of the work of one of America's most celebrated writers.
#26
Civil War Senator
William Pitt Fessenden and the Fight to Save the American Republic
2011
One of the most talented and influential American politicians of the nineteenth century, William Pitt Fessenden (1806—1869) helped devise Union grand strategy during the Civil War. A native of Maine and son of a fiery New England abolitionist, he served in the United States Senate as a member of the Whig Party during the Kansas-Nebraska crisis and played a formative role in the development of the Republican Party. In this richly textured and fast-paced biography, Robert J. Cook charts Fessenden's rise to power and probes the potent mix of political ambition and republican ideology which impelled him to seek a place in the U.S. Senate at a time of rising tension between North and South.
A determined and self-disciplined man who fought, not always successfully, to keep his passions in check, Fessenden helped to spearhead Republican Party opposition to proslavery expansion during the strife-torn 1850s and led others to resist the cotton states' efforts to secede peaceably after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. During the Civil War, he chaired the Senate Finance Committee and served as President Lincoln's second head of the Treasury Department. In both positions, he fashioned and implemented wartime financial policy for the United States.
In addition, Fessenden's multifaceted relationship with Lincoln helped to foster effective working relations between the president and congressional Republicans. Cook outlines Fessenden's many contributions to critical aspects of northern grand strategy and to the gradual shift to an effective total war policy against the Confederacy. Most notably, Cook shows, Fessenden helped craft congressional policy regarding the confiscation and emancipation of slaves. Cook also details Fessenden's tenure as chairman of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction after the war, during which he authored that committee's report. Although he sanctioned his party's break with Andrew Johnson less than a year after the war's end, Cook explains how Fessenden worked decisively to thwart attempts by Radical Republicans to revolutionize post-emancipation society in the defeated Confederacy.
The first biography of Fessenden in over forty years, Civil War Senator reveals a significant but often sidelined historical figure and explains the central role played by party politics and partisanship in the coming of the Civil War, northern military victory, and the ultimate failure of postwar Reconstruction. Cook restores Fessenden to his place as one of the most important politicians of a troubled generation.
#29
Confederate Invention
The Story of the Confederate States Patent Office and Its Inventors
2011
The formation of the Confederate States of America involved more than an attempt to create a new, sovereign nation—it inspired a flurry of creativity and entrepreneurialism in the South that fiercely matched Union ingenuity. H. Jackson Knight's Confederate Invention brings to light the forgotten history of the Confederacy's industrious inventors and its active patent office.
Despite the destruction wrought by the Civil War, evidence of Confederate inventions exists in the registry of the Confederate States Patent Office. Hundreds of southerners submitted applications to the agency to secure patents on their intellectual property, which ranged from a "machine for operating submarine batteries," to a "steam plough," to a "combined knapsack and tent," to an "instrument for sighting cannon." The Confederacy's most successful inventors included entrepreneurs, educators, and military men who sought to develop new weapons, weapon improvements, or other inventions that could benefit the Confederate cause as well as their own lives. Each creation belied the conception of a technologically backward South, incapable of matching the creativity and output of northern counterparts.
Knight's work provides a groundbreaking study that includes neglected and largely forgotten patents as well as an array of other primary sources. Details on the patent office's origins, inner workings, and demise, and accounts of southern inventors who obtained patents before, during, and after the war reveal a captivating history recovered from obscurity.
A novel creation in its own right, Confederate Invention presents the remarkable story behind the South's long-forgotten Civil War inventors and offers a comprehensive account of Confederate patents.
#32
Views from the Dark Side of American History
2011
Throughout his long and influential career, Michael Fellman has explored the tragic side of American history. Incorporating essays written over the past thirty years—two of them previously unpublished, and the others not widely available—Views from the Dark Side of American History reveals some of the major personal and scholarly concerns of his career and illuminates his approach to history, research, applied theory, and analysis.
#33
The Confederate Heartland
Military and Civilian Morale in the Western Confederacy
2011
Bradley R. Clampitt’s The Confederate Heartland examines morale in the Civil War’s western theater—the region that witnessed the most consistent Union success and Confederate failure, and the battleground where many historians contend that the war was won and lost. Clampitt’s western focus provides a glimpse into the hearts and minds of Confederates who routinely witnessed the defeat of their primary defenders, the Army of Tennessee.
This book tracks morale through highs and lows related to events on and off the battlefield, and addresses the lingering questions of when and why western Confederates recognized and admitted defeat. Clampitt digs beneath the surface to illustrate the intimate connections between battlefield and home front, and demonstrates a persistent dedication to southern independence among residents of the Confederate heartland until that spirit was broken on the battlefields of Middle Tennessee in late 1864.
The western Confederates examined in this study possessed a strong sense of collective identity that endured long past the point when defeat on the battlefield was all but certain. Ultimately, by authoring a sweeping vision of the Confederate heartland and by addressing questions related to morale, nationalism, and Confederate identity within a western context, Clampitt helps to fashion a more balanced historical landscape for Civil War studies.
#37
The Battlefield and Beyond
Essays on the American Civil War
2012
In The Battlefield and Beyond leading Civil War historians explore a tragic part of our nation's history though the lenses of race, gender, leadership, politics, and memory. The essays in this strong collection shed new light on the defining issues of the Civil War era.
Orville Vernon Burton, Leonne M. Hudson, and Daniel E. Sutherland delve into the master-slave relationship, the role of blacks in the army, and the nature of southern violence. Herman Hattaway, Paul D. Escott, and Judith F. Gentry offer innovative perspectives on the influential leadership of President Jefferson Davis, Lieutenant-General Stephen D. Lee, and General Edmund Kirby Smith.
Other contributors consider politicians and the public: Michael J. Connolly and Clayton E. Jewett investigate how despotism contributed to Confederate defeat; David E. Kyvig and Alan M. Kraut examine the war's impact on the Constitution and racial relationships with Jews; and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Kenneth Nivison, and Emory M. Thomas discuss the critical function of memory in our understanding of Lincoln's assassination.
The essays in The Battlefield and Beyond consider the fundamental issue of the Confederacy's failure and military defeat but also expose our nation's continuing struggles with race, individual rights, terrorism, and the economy. Collectively, this distinguished group of historians reveals that 150 years after the nation's most defining conflict its consequences still resonate.
#39
Apocalypse and the Millennium in the American Civil War Era
2013
In the Civil War era, Americans nearly unanimously accepted that humans battled in a cosmic contest between good and evil and that God was directing history toward its end. The concept of God’s Providence and of millennialism―Christian anticipations of the end of the world―dominated religious thought in the nineteenth century. During the tumultuous years immediately prior to, during, and after the war, these ideas took on a greater importance as Americans struggled with the unprecedented destruction and promise of the period.
Scholars of religion, literary critics, and especially historians have acknowledged the presence of apocalyptic thought in the era, but until now, few studies have taken the topic as their central focus or examined it from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. By doing so, the essays in Apocalypse and the Millennium in the American Civil War Era highlight the diverse ways in which beliefs about the end times influenced nineteenth-century American lives, including reform culture, the search for meaning amid the trials of war, and the social transformation wrought by emancipation. Millennial zeal infused the labor of reformers and explained their successes and failures as progress toward an imminent Kingdom of God. Men and women in the North and South looked to Providence to explain the causes and consequences of both victory and defeat, and Americans, black and white, experienced the shock waves of emancipation as either a long-prophesied jubilee or a vengeful punishment. Religion fostered division as well as union, the essays suggest, but while the nation tore itself apart and tentatively stitched itself back together, Americans continued looking to divine intervention to make meaning of the national apocalypse.
Edward J. Blum, Ryan Cordell, Zachary W. Dresser, Jennifer Graber, Matthew Harper, Charles F. Irons, Joseph Moore, Robert K. Nelson, Scott Nesbit, Jason Phillips, Nina Reid-Maroney, Ben Wright
#40
William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini
Abolition, Democracy, and Radical Reform
2013
William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini, two of the foremost radicals of the nineteenth century, lived during a time of profound economic, social, and political transformation in America and Europe. Both born in 1805, but into dissimilar family backgrounds, the American Garrison and Italian Mazzini led entirely different lives—one as a citizen of a democratic republic, the other as an exile proscribed by most European monarchies. Using a comparative analysis, Enrico Dal Lago suggests that Garrison and Mazzini nonetheless represent a connection between the egalitarian ideologies of American abolitionism and Italian democratic nationalism.
Focusing on Garrison's and Mazzini's activities and transnational links within their own milieus and in the wider international arena, Dal Lago shows why two nineteenth-century progressives and revolutionaries considered liberation from enslavement and liberation from national oppression as two sides of the same coin. At different points in their lives, both Garrison and Mazzini demonstrated this belief by concurrently supporting the abolition of slavery in the United States and the national revolutions in Italy. The two meetings Garrison and Mazzini had, in 1846 and in 1867, served to reinforce their sense that they somehow worked together toward the achievement of liberty not just in the United States and Italy, but also in the Atlantic and Euro-American world as a whole. In the end, the abolition of American slavery led to Garrison's consecration, while the new Italian kingdom forced Mazzini into exile. Despite these different outcomes, Garrison and Mazzini both attracted legions of devoted followers who believed these men personified the radical causes of the nations to which they belonged.
#41
Confederate General William Dorsey Pender
The Hope of Glory
2013
During the Civil War, North Carolinian William Dorsey Pender established himself as one of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia's best young generals. He served in most of the significant engagements of the war in the eastern theater while under the command of Joseph E. Johnston at Seven Pines and Robert E. Lee from the Seven Days to Gettysburg. His most crucial contributions to Confederate success came at the battles of Second Manassas, Shepherdstown, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. After an effective first day at Gettysburg, Pender was struck by a shell and disabled, necessitating his return to Virginia for what he hoped would be only an extended convalescence. Although Pender initially survived the wound, he died soon thereafter due to complications from his injury.
In this thorough biography of Pender, noted Civil War historian Brian Steel Wills examines both the young general's military career and his domestic life. While Pender devoted himself to military service, he also embraced the Episcopal Church and was baptized before his command in the field. According to Wills, Pender had an insatiable quest for "glory" in both earthly and heavenly realms, and he delighted in his role as a husband and father. In Pender's voluminous correspondence with his wife, Fanny, he shared his beliefs and offered views and opinions on a vast array of subjects. In the end, Wills suggests that Pender's story captures both the idealistic promise and the despair of a war that cost the lives of many Americans and changed the nation forever.
#46
Across the Bloody Chasm
The Culture of Commemoration among Civil War Veterans
2014
Long after the Civil War ended, one conflict raged on: the battle to define and shape the war's legacy. Across the Bloody Chasm deftly examines Civil War veterans' commemorative efforts and the concomitant—and sometimes conflicting—movement for reconciliation.
Though former soldiers from both sides of the war celebrated the history and values of the newly reunited America, a deep divide remained between people in the North and South as to how the country's past should be remembered and the nation's ideals honored. Union soldiers could not forget that their southern counterparts had taken up arms against them, while Confederates maintained that the principles of states' rights and freedom from tyranny aligned with the beliefs and intentions of the founding fathers. Confederate soldiers also challenged northern claims of a moral victory, insisting that slavery had not been the cause of the war, and ferociously resisting the imposition of postwar racial policies. M. Keith Har-ris argues that although veterans remained committed to reconciliation, the sectional sensibilities that influenced the memory of the war left the North and South far from a meaningful accord.
Harris' masterful analysis of veteran memory assesses the ideological commitments of a generation of former soldiers, weaving their stories into the larger narrative of the process of national reunification. Through regimental histories, speeches at veterans' gatherings, monument dedications, and war narratives, Harris uncovers how veterans from both sides kept the deadliest war in American history alive in memory at a time when the nation seemed determined to move beyond conflict.
#48
Patrick Henry Jones
Irish American, Civil War General, and Gilded Age Politician
2015
Patrick Henry Jones' obituary vowed that "his memory shall not fade among men." Yet in little more than a century, history has largely forgotten Jones' considerable accomplishments in the Civil War and the Gilded Age that followed. In this masterful biography, Mark H. Dunkelman resurrects Jones' story and restores him to his rightful standing as an exceptional military officer and influential politician of nineteenth-century America.
Patrick Henry Jones (1830-1900), a poor Irish immigrant, began his career in journalism before gaining admittance to the New York bar. When the Civil War erupted in 1861, Jones volunteered for service in the Union Army. He rose steadily through the ranks of the 37th New York, became general of the 154th New York, and eventually attained the rank of brigadier general. Jones was one of only twelve native Irishmen ever to attain that rank in the federal forces.
When the war ended, Jones' reputation as a military hero gave him an entry into politics under the mentorship of editor Horace Greeley and politician Reuben E. Fenton. He served in both elective and appointed offices in the state of New York, navigating the corruptions, scandals, and political upheavals of the Golden Age. Ultimately, his entanglement with one of the most sensational crimes of his era-a high-profile grave-robbing from the cemetery of St. Mark's Church-tainted his name and ruined his once-respectable career.
In the first full-length biographical account of this important figure, Patrick Henry Jones tells the quintessentially American story of an immigrant who overcame both his humble origins and the rampant xenophobia of mid-nineteenth-century America to achieve a level of prominence equaled by few of his peers.
#51
Confederate Political Economy
Creating and Managing a Southern Corporatist Nation
2016
In Confederate Political Economy, Michael Bonner suggests that the Confederate nation was an expedient corporatist state—a society that required all sectors of the economy to work for the national interest, as defined by a partnership of industrial leaders and a dominant government. As Bonner shows, the characteristics of the Confederate States' political economy included modern organizational methods that mirrored the economic landscape of other late nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century corporatist governments.
Southern leaders, Bonner argues, were slave-owning agricultural capitalists who sought a counterrevolution against northern liberal capitalism. During secession and as the war progressed, they built and reinforced Confederate nationalism through specific centralized government policies. Bolstered by the Confederate constitution, these policies evolved into a political culture that allowed for immense executive powers, facilitated an anti-party ideology, and subordinated individual rights. In addition, the South's lack of industrial capacity forced the Confederacy to pursue a curious manufacturing policy that used both private companies and national ownership to produce munitions. This symbiotic relationship was just one component of the Confederacy's expedient corporatist other wartime policies like conscription, the domestic passport system, and management of southern railroads also exhibited unmistakable corporatist characteristics. Bonner's probing research and new comparative analysis expand our understanding of the complex organization and relationships in Confederate political and economic culture during the Civil War.
#54
Designing Gotham
West Point Engineers and the Rise of Modern New York, 1817-1898
2016
Between 1817 and 1898, New York City evolved from a vital Atlantic port of trade to the center of American commerce and culture. With this rapid commercial growth and cultural development, New York came to epitomize a nineteenth-century metropolis. Although this important urban transformation is well documented, the critical role of select Union soldiers turned New York engineers has, until now, remained largely unexplored. In Designing Gotham, Jon Scott Logel examines the fascinating careers of George S. Greene, Egbert L. Viele, John Newton, Henry Warner Slocum, and Fitz John Porter, all of whom studied engineering at West Point, served in the United States Army during the Civil War, and later advanced their civilian careers and status through the creation of Victorian New York.
These influential cadets trained at West Point in the nation’s first engineering school, a program designed by Sylvanus Thayer and Dennis Hart Mahan that would shape civil engineering in New York and beyond. After the war, these industrious professionals leveraged their education and military experience to wield significant influence during New York’s social, economic, and political transformation. Logel examines how each engineer’s Civil War service shaped his contributions to postwar activities in the city, including the construction of the Croton Aqueduct, the creation of Central Park, and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. Logel also delves into the administration of New York’s municipal departments, in which Military Academy alumni interacted with New York elites, politicians, and civilian-trained engineers. Examining the West Pointers’ experiences―as cadets, military officers during the war, and New Yorkers―Logel assesses how these men impacted the growing metropolis, the rise of professionalization, and the advent of Progressivism at the end of the century.
#56
The Slaveholding Crisis
Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War
2017
In December 1860, South Carolinians voted to abandon the Union, sparking the deadliest war in American history. Led by a proslavery movement that viewed Abraham Lincoln s place at the helm of the federal government as a real and present danger to the security of the South, southerners both slaveholders and non-slaveholders willingly risked civil war by seceding from the United States. Radical proslavery activists contended that without defending slavery s westward expansion American planters would, like their former counterparts in the West Indies, become greatly outnumbered by those they enslaved. The result would transform the South into a mere colony within the federal government and make white southerners reliant on antislavery outsiders for protection of their personal safety and wealth. Faith in American exceptionalism played an important role in the reasoning of the antebellum American public, shaping how those in both the free and slave states viewed the world. Questions about who might share the bounty of the exceptional nature of the country became the battleground over which Americans fought, first with words, then with guns.
Carl Paulus s The Slaveholding Crisis examines how, due to the fear of insurrection by the enslaved, southerners created their own version of American exceptionalism one that placed the perpetuation of slavery at its forefront. Feeling a loss of power in the years before the Civil War, the planter elite no longer saw the Union, as whole, fulfilling that vision of exceptionalism and as a result, Paulus contends, slaveholders and non-slaveholding southerners believed that the white South could anticipate racial conflict and brutal warfare. This narrative postulated that limiting slavery s expansion within the Union was a riskier proposition than fighting a war of secession. In the end, Paulus argues, by insisting that the new party in control of the federal government promoted this very insurrection, the planter elite gained enough popular support to create the Confederate States of America. In doing so, they established a thoroughly proslavery, modern state with the military capability to quell massive resistance by the enslaved, expand its territorial borders, and war against the forces of the Atlantic antislavery movement."
#57
The Guerrilla Hunters
Irregular Conflicts during the Civil War
2017
Throughout the Civil War, irregular warfare including the use of hit-and-run assaults, ambushes, and raiding tactics thrived in localized guerrilla fights within the Border States and the Confederate South. The Guerrilla Hunters offers a comprehensive overview of the tactics, motives, and actors in these conflicts, from the Confederate-authorized Partisan Rangers, a military force directed to spy on, harass, and steal from Union forces, to men like John Gatewood, who deserted the Confederate army in favor of targeting Tennessee civilians believed to be in sympathy with the Union.
With a foreword by Kenneth W. Noe and an afterword by Daniel E. Sutherland, this collection represents an impressive array of the foremost experts on guerrilla fighting in the Civil War. Providing new interpretations of this long-misconstrued aspect of warfare, these scholars go beyond the conventional battlefield to examine the stories of irregular combatants across all theaters of the Civil War, bringing geographic breadth to what is often treated as local and regional history. The Guerrilla Hunters shows that instances of unorthodox combat, once thought isolated and infrequent, were numerous, and many clashes defy easy categorization. Novel methodological approaches and a staggering diversity of research and topics allow this volume to support multiple areas for debate and discovery within this growing field of Civil War scholarship.
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#59
A Kingdom Divided
Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era
2010
A Kingdom Divided uncovers how evangelical Christians in the border states influenced debates about slavery, morality, and politics from the 1830s to the 1890s. Using little-studied events and surprising incidents from the region, April E. Holm argues that evangelicals on the border powerfully shaped the regional structure of American religion in the Civil War era.
In the decades before the Civil War, the three largest evangelical denominations diverged sharply over the sinfulness of slavery. This division generated tremendous local conflict in the border region, where individual churches had to define themselves as being either northern or southern. In response, many border evangelicals drew upon the "doctrine of spirituality," which dictated that churches should abstain from all political debate. Proponents of this doctrine defined slavery as a purely political issue, rather than a moral one, and the wartime arrival of secular authorities who demanded loyalty to the Union only intensified this commitment to "spirituality." Holm contends that these churches' insistence that politics and religion were separate spheres was instrumental in the development of the ideal of the nonpolitical southern church. After the Civil War, southern churches adopted both the disaffected churches from border states and their doctrine of spirituality, claiming it as their own and using it to supply a theological basis for remaining divided after the abolition of slavery. By the late nineteenth century, evangelicals were more sectionally divided than they had been at war's end.
In A Kingdom Divided, Holm provides the first analysis of the crucial role of churches in border states in shaping antebellum divisions in the major evangelical denominations, in navigating the relationship between church and the federal government, and in rewriting denominational histories to forestall reunion in the churches. Offering a new perspective on nineteenth-century sectionalism, it highlights how religion, morality, and politics interacted—often in unexpected ways—in a time of political crisis and war.
#60
In the Wake of War
Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America
2017
The Civil War era marked the dawn of American wars of military occupation, inaugurating a tradition that persisted through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that continues to the present. In the Wake of War traces how volunteer and even professional soldiers found themselves tasked with the unprecedented project of wartime and peacetime military occupation, initiating a national debate about the changing nature of American military practice that continued into Reconstruction.
In the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, citizen-soldiers confronted the complicated challenges of invading, occupying, and subduing hostile peoples and nations. Drawing on firsthand accounts from soldiers in United States occupation forces, Andrew F. Lang shows that many white volunteers equated their martial responsibilities with those of standing armies, which were viewed as corrupting institutions hostile to the republican military ethos. With the advent of emancipation came the enlistment of African American troops into Union armies, facilitating an extraordinary change in how provisional soldiers interpreted military occupation. Black soldiers, many of whom had been formerly enslaved, garrisoned regions defeated by Union armies and embraced occupation as a tool for destabilizing the South's long-standing racial hierarchy. Ultimately, Lang argues, traditional fears about the army's role in peacetime society, grounded in suspicions of standing military forces and heated by a growing ambivalence about racial equality, governed the trials of Reconstruction.
Focusing on how U.S. soldiers—white and black, volunteer and regular—enacted and critiqued their unprecedented duties behind the lines during the Civil War era, In the Wake of War reveals the dynamic, often problematic conditions of military occupation.
#61
The Civil War and the Transformation of American Citizenship
2018
The meanings and practices of American citizenship were as contested during the Civil War era as they are today. By examining a variety of perspectives―from prominent lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to enslaved women, from black firemen in southern cities to Confederate émigrés in Latin America― The Civil War and the Transformation of American Citizenship offers a wide-ranging exploration of citizenship’s metamorphoses amid the extended crises of war and emancipation.
Americans in the antebellum era considered citizenship, at its most basic level, as a legal status acquired through birth or naturalization, and one that offered certain rights in exchange for specific obligations. Yet throughout the Civil War period, the boundaries and consequences of what it meant to be a citizen remained in flux. At the beginning of the war, Confederates relinquished their status as U.S. citizens, only to be mostly reabsorbed as full American citizens in its aftermath. The Reconstruction years also saw African American men acquire―at least in theory―the core rights of citizenship. As these changes swept across the nation, Americans debated the parameters of citizenship, the possibility of adopting or rejecting citizenship at will, and the relative importance of political privileges, economic opportunity, and cultural belonging. Ongoing inequities between races and genders, over the course of the Civil War and in the years that followed, further shaped these contentious debates.
The Civil War and the Transformation of American Citizenship reveals how war, Emancipation, and Reconstruction forced the country to rethink the concept of citizenship not only in legal and constitutional terms but also within the context of the lives of everyday Americans, from imprisoned Confederates to former slaves.
#62
Ambivalent Nation
How Britain Imagined the American Civil War
2018
In Ambivalent Nation, Hugh Dubrulle explores how Britons envisioned the American Civil War and how these conceptions influenced their discussions about race, politics, society, military affairs, and nationalism. Contributing new research that expands upon previous scholarship focused on establishing British public opinion toward the war, Dubrulle offers a methodical dissection of the ideological forces that shaped that opinion, many of which arose from the complex Anglo-American postcolonial relationship.
Britain’s lingering feeling of ownership over its former colony contributed heavily to its discussions of the American Civil War. Because Britain continued to have a substantial material interest in the United States, its writers maintained a position of superiority and authority in respect to American affairs. British commentators tended to see the United States as divided by two distinct civilizations, even before the onset of a Yankee bourgeois democracy and a southern oligarchy supported by slavery. They invariably articulated mixed feelings toward both sections, and shortly before the Civil War, the expression of these feelings was magnified by the sudden emergence of inexpensive newspapers, periodicals, and books. The conflicted nature of British attitudes toward the United States during the antebellum years anticipates the ambivalence with which the British reacted to the American crisis in 1861. Britons used prewar stereotypes of northerners and southerners to help explain the course and significance of the conflict. Seen in this fashion, the war seemed particularly relevant to a number of questions that occupied British conversations during this the characteristics and capacities of people of African descent, the proper role of democracy in society and politics, the future of armed conflict, and the composition of a durable nation. These questions helped shape Britain’s stance toward the war and, in turn, the war informed British attitudes on these subjects.
Dubrulle draws from numerous primary sources to explore the rhetoric and beliefs of British public figures during these years, including government papers, manuscripts from press archives, private correspondence, and samplings from a variety of dailies, weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies. The first book to examine closely the forces that shaped British public opinion about the Civil War, Ambivalent Nation contextualizes and expands our understanding of British attitudes during this tumultuous period.
#63
Lincoln's Mercenaries
Economic Motivation among Union Soldiers during the Civil War
2018
Lincoln's Mercenaries considers the question of whether the burden of military service in the Union army was borne mainly by the poor during the American Civil War. From a survey of the entire 1860 United States Census, renowned Civil War historian William Marvel constructs a clearer picture of economic conditions for the war's earliest recruits.
Marvel finds disproportionate participation by men from chronically impoverished occupations, and documents the largely forgotten recession of 1860 and 1861. That fiscal downturn put hundreds of thousands of men out of work or blighted their businesses, leaving them susceptible to the modest emoluments of military pay and community support for soldiers' families. Individual contemporary testimony, including direct or indirect personal admissions and personal observations, shows that the fervent recruiting of 1861 and 1862 was heavily driven not by patriotism, but rather economic distress, and confirms that the Union armies were composed mostly of poor men.
Notably, Marvel reveals that those who enlisted in during those two years—generally regarded as the most patriotic of Lincoln's soldiers—appear to have been motivated by money as were those at least as much who enlisted in 1863 and 1864 for exorbitant bounties. A fascinating study of intersection of war and economic conditions, Lincoln's Mercenaries shows how economic pressures played a role during the Civil war and continued to play one even after the conclusion of the war when relative poverty among Union recruits helped fuel the demand for veterans' pensions.
#67
The Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens
Place, Personality, and Politics in the Civil War Era
2019
The Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens examines the political interests, relationships, and practices of two of the era’s most prominent politicians as well as the political landscapes they inhabited and informed. Both men called Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, their home, and both were bachelors. During the 1850s, James Buchanan tried to keep the Democratic Party alive as the slavery debate divided his peers and the political system. Thaddeus Stevens, meanwhile, as Whig turned Republican, invested in the federal government to encourage economic development and social reform, especially antislavery and Republican Reconstruction.
Considering Buchanan and Stevens’s divergent lives alongside their political and social worlds reveals the dynamics and directions of American politics, especially northern interests and identities. While focusing on these individuals, the contributors also explore the roles of parties and patronage in informing political loyalties and behavior. They further track personal connections across lines of gender and geography and underline the importance of details like who regularly dined and conversed with whom, the complex social milieu of Washington, the role of rumor in determining political allegiances, and the ways personality and failing relationships mattered in a hothouse of national politics fueled by slavery and expansion.
The essays in The Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens collectively invite further consideration of how parties, personality, place, and private lives influenced the political interests and actions of an age affected by race, religion, region, civil war, and reconstruction.
#69
Liberty and Slavery
European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War
2019
In Liberty and Slavery, Niels Eichhorn examines the language of slavery, which he considers central to revolutionary struggles, especially those waged in Europe in the nineteenth century. Eichhorn begins in 1830 with separatist movements in Greece, Belgium, and Poland, which laid the foundation for rebellions undertaken later in the century, and then shifts focus to the 1848 uprisings in Ireland, Hungary, and Schleswig-Holstein. He argues that revolutionaries embraced or rejected the language of slavery as they saw fit, using it to justify their rebellions and larger goals. The failure of these insurgencies propelled a wave of revolutionary migrants across the Atlantic world. Those who journeyed to the United States felt the need to adjust to the political and sectional divisions in their new home. Eichhorn shows that separatism was widespread during this period; the secessionist aims of the American Confederacy were by no means unique. Additionally, Eichhorn explores these migrants’ motivations for shunning the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Having been steeped in the language of slavery and separatism, they naturally sided with the Union when the sectional crisis culminated in civil war in 1861.
#70
Between Freedom and Progress
The Lost World of Reconstruction Politics
2019
Between Freedom and Progress recovers and analyzes the global imaginings of Reconstruction’s partisans―those who struggled over and with Reconstruction―as they vied with one another to define the nature of their country after the Civil War. The remarkable technological and commercial transformations of the mid-nineteenth century―in particular, steam engines, telegraphs, and an expanded commercial printing capacity―created a constant stream of news, description, and storytelling from across and beyond the nation. Reconstruction’s partisans contended with each other to make sense of this information, motivated by intense political antagonism combined with a shared but contested set of ideas about freedom and progress. As writers, lecturers, editors, travelers, moral reformers, racists, abolitionists, politicians, suffragists, soldiers, and diplomats, Reconstruction’s partisans made competing claims about their place in the world. Understanding how, why, and when they did so helps ground our understanding of Reconstruction―itself a mysterious, transatlantic term―in its own intellectual context.
Three factors proved pivotal to the making of Reconstruction’s world. First, from 1865 to the early 1870s, the interconnected issues of how to remake the Union and how to remake the South exerted a powerful hold on federal politics, defining the partisan landscape and inspiring rival arguments about what was possible and what was good. The daunting nature of these issues created a sense of crisis across the political spectrum, with political discourse ranging in tone from combative to euphoric to apocalyptic. Second, though domestic in nature, these issues were refracted through two broadly held that the causes of freedom and progress defined history and that distinctive peoples with their own characters composed the world’s population. These beliefs produced a disposition to think of developments from across and beyond the United States as essentially relatable to each other, encouraging an intellectual style that favored wide-ranging comparisons.
Third, far from being confined to the elite, this mode of thinking and arguing about the world lived and breathed in public texts that were produced and consumed on a weekly and daily basis. This commercialized and politicized world of mass publishing was highly unequal in structure and content, but it was also impressively vibrant and popular. Together, these three factors made the world of Reconstruction a global landscape of information, argumentation, and imagination that derived much of its vigor from domestic political battles.
#71
Jefferson Davis, Napoleonic France, and the Nature of Confederate Ideology, 1815–1870
2020
In this highly original study of Confederate ideology and politics, Jeffrey Zvengrowski suggests that Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his supporters saw Bonapartist France as a model for the Confederate States of America. They viewed themselves as struggling not so much for the preservation of slavery but for antebellum Democratic ideals of equality and white supremacy. The faction dominated the Confederate government and deemed Republicans a coalition controlled by pro-British abolitionists championing inequality among whites.
Like Napoleon I and Napoleon III, pro-Davis Confederates desired to build an industrial nation-state capable of waging Napoleonic-style warfare with large conscripted armies. States’ rights, they believed, should not preclude the national government from exercising power. Anglophile anti-Davis Confederates, in contrast, advocated inequality among whites, favored radical states’ rights, and supported slavery-in-the-abstract theories that were dismissive of white supremacy. Having opposed pro-Davis Democrats before the war, they preferred decentralized guerrilla warfare to Napoleonic campaigns and hoped for support from Britain. The Confederacy, they avowed, would willingly become a de facto British agricultural colony upon achieving independence. Pro-Davis Confederates, wanted the Confederacy to become an ally of France and protector of sympathetic northern states.
Zvengrowski traces the origins of the pro-Davis Confederate ideology to Jeffersonian Democrats and their faction of War Hawks, who lost power on the national level in the 1820s but regained it during Davis' term as secretary of war. Davis used this position to cultivate friendly relations with France and later warned northerners that the South would secede if Republicans captured the White House. When Lincoln won the 1860 election, Davis endorsed secession. The ideological heirs of the pro-British faction soon came to loathe Davis for antagonizing Britain and for offering to accept gradual emancipation in exchange for direct assistance from French soldiers in Mexico.
Zvengrowski’s important new interpretation of Confederate ideology situates the Civil War in a global context of imperial competition. It also shows how anti-Davis ex-Confederates came to dominate the postwar South and obscure the true nature of Confederate ideology. Furthermore, it updates the biographies of familiar John C. Calhoun, who befriended Bonapartist officers; Davis, who was as much a Francophile as his namesake, Thomas Jefferson; and Robert E. Lee, who as West Point’s superintendent mentored a grand-nephew of Napoleon I.
#73
American Discord
The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era
2020
A panoramic collection of essays written by both established and emerging scholars, American Discord examines critical aspects of the Civil War era, including rhetoric and nationalism, politics and violence, gender, race, and religion. Beginning with an overview of the political culture of the 1860s, the collection reveals that most Americans entered the decade opposed to political compromise. Essays from Megan L. Bever, Glenn David Brasher, Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr., and Christian McWhirter discuss the rancorous political climate of the day and the sense of racial superiority woven into the political fabric of the era.
Shifting focus to the actual war, Rachel K. Deale, Lindsay Rae Privette, Adam H. Petty, and A. Wilson Greene contribute essays on internal conflict, lack of compromise, and commitment to white supremacy. Here, contributors adopt a broad understanding of "battle," considering environmental effects and the impact of the war after the battles were over. Essays by Laura Mammina and Charity Rakestraw and Kristopher A. Teters reveal that while the war blurred the boundaries, it ultimately prompted Americans to grasp for the familiar established hierarchies of gender and race.
Examinations of chaos and internal division suggest that the political culture of Reconstruction was every bit as contentious as the war itself. Former Confederates decried the barbarity of their Yankee conquerors, while Republicans portrayed Democrats as backward rubes in need of civilizing. Essays by Kevin L. Hughes, Daniel J. Burge, T. Robert Hart, John F. Marszalek, and T. Michael Parrish highlight Americans' continued reliance on hyperbolic rhetoric.
American Discord embraces a multifaceted view of the Civil War and its aftermath, attempting to capture the complicated human experiences of the men and women caught in the conflict. These essays acknowledge that ordinary people and their experiences matter, and the dynamics among family members, friends, and enemies have far-reaching consequences.
#76
Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares
The American Civil War as an Apocalyptic Conflict
2021
In Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares, John H. Matsui argues that the political ideology and racial views of American Protestants during the Civil War mirrored their religious optimism or pessimism regarding human nature, perfectibility, and the millennium. While previous historians have commented on the role of antebellum eschatology in political alignment, none have delved deeply into how religious views complicate the standard narrative of the North versus the South.
Moving beyond the traditional optimism/pessimism dichotomy, Matsui divides American Protestants of the Civil War era into “premillenarian” and “postmillenarian” camps. Both postmillenarian and premillenarian Christians held that the return of Christ would inaugurate the arrival of heaven on earth, but they disagreed over its timing. This disagreement was key to their disparate political stances. Postmillenarians argued that God expected good Christians to actively perfect the world via moral reform―of self and society―and free-labor ideology, whereas premillenarians defended hierarchy or racial mastery (or both). Northern Democrats were generally comfortable with antebellum racial norms and were cynical regarding human nature; they therefore opposed Republicans’ utopian plans to reform the South. Southern Democrats, who held premillenarian views like their northern counterparts, pressed for or at least acquiesced in the secession of slaveholding states to preserve white supremacy. Most crucially, enslaved African American Protestants sought freedom, a postmillenarian societal change requiring nothing less than a major revolution and the reconstruction of southern society.
Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares adds a new dimension to our understanding of the Civil War as it reveals the wartime marriage of political and racial ideology to religious speculation. As Matsui argues, the postmillenarian ideology came to dominate the northern states during the war years and the nation as a whole following the Union victory in 1865.
#79
Contesting Commemoration
The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South
2021
In Contesting The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South, Jack Noe examines identity and nationalism in the post–Civil War South through the lens of commemorative activity, namely Independence Day celebrations and the Centennial of 1876. Both events presented opportunities for whites, Blacks, northerners, and southerners to reflect on their identity as Americans. The often colorful and engaging discourse surrounding these observances provides a fascinating portrait of this fractured moment in the development of American nationalism.
#81
Invisible Wounds
Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers
2021
Dillon J. Carroll’s Invisible Wounds examines the effects of military service, particularly combat, on the psyches and emotional well-being of Civil War soldiers—Black and white, North and South. Soldiers faced harsh military discipline, arduous marches, poor rations, debilitating diseases, and the terror of battle, all of which took a severe psychological toll. While mental collapses sometimes occurred during the war, the emotional damage soldiers incurred more often became apparent in the postwar years, when it manifested itself in disturbing and self-destructive behavior. Carroll explores the dynamic between the families of mentally ill veterans and the superintendents of insane asylums, as well as between those superintendents and doctors in the nascent field of neurology, who increasingly believed the central nervous system or cultural and social factors caused mental illness. Invisible Wounds is a sweeping reevaluation of the mental damage inflicted by the nation’s most tragic conflict.
#85
Lincoln’s Unfinished Work
The New Birth of Freedom from Generation to Generation
2022
In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln promised that the nation’s sacrifices during the Civil War would lead to a “new birth of freedom.” Lincoln’s Unfinished Work analyzes how the United States has attempted to realize―or subvert―that promise over the past century and a half. The volume is not solely about Lincoln, or the immediate unfinished work of Reconstruction, or the broader unfinished work of America coming to terms with its tangled history of race; it investigates all three topics.
The book opens with an essay by Richard Carwardine, who explores Lincoln’s distinctive sense of humor. Later in the volume, Stephen Kantrowitz examines the limitations of Lincoln’s Native American policy, while James W. Loewen discusses how textbooks regularly downplay the sixteenth president’s antislavery convictions. Lawrence T. McDonnell looks at the role of poor Blacks and whites in the disintegration of the Confederacy. Eric Foner provides an overview of the Constitution-shattering impact of the Civil War amendments. Essays by J. William Harris and Jerald Podair examine the fate of Lincoln’s ideas about land distribution to freedpeople. Gregory P. Downs focuses on the structural limitations that Republicans faced in their efforts to control racist violence during Reconstruction. Adrienne Petty and Mark Schultz argue that Black land ownership in the post-Reconstruction South persisted at surprisingly high rates. Rhondda Robinson Thomas examines the role of convict labor in the construction of Clemson University, the site of the conference from which this book evolved. Other essays look at events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Randall J. Stephens analyzes the political conservatism of white evangelical Christianity. Peter Eisenstadt uses the career of Jackie Robinson to explore the meanings of integration. Joshua Casmir Catalano and Briana Pocratsky examine the debased state of public history on the airwaves, particularly as purveyed by the History Channel. Gavin Wright rounds out the volume with a striking political and economic analysis of the collapse of the Democratic Party in the South.
Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a far-reaching, thought-provoking exploration of the unfinished work of democracy, particularly as it pertains to the legacy of slavery and white supremacy in America.
#90
Navigating Liberty
Black Refugees and Antislavery Reformers in the Civil War South
2022
When thousands of African Americans freed themselves from slavery during the American Civil War and launched the larger process of emancipation, hundreds of northern antislavery reformers traveled to the federally occupied South to assist them. The two groups brought views and practices from their backgrounds that both helped and hampered the transition out of slavery. While enslaved, many Blacks assumed a certain guarded demeanor when dealing with whites. In freedom, they resented northerners’ paternalistic attitudes and preconceptions about race, leading some to oppose aid programs―included those related to education, vocational training, and religious and social activities―initiated by whites. Some interactions resulted in constructive cooperation and adjustments to curriculum, but the frequent disputes more often compelled Blacks to seek additional autonomy.
In an exhaustive analysis of the relationship between the formerly enslaved and northern reformers, John Cimprich shows how the unusual circumstances of emancipation in wartime presented new opportunities and spawned social movements for change yet produced intractable challenges and limited results. Navigating Liberty serves as the first comprehensive study of the two groups’ collaboration and conflict, adding an essential chapter to the history of slavery’s end in the United States.
#91
Conflict of Command
George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War
2023
The fraught relationship between Abraham Lincoln and George McClellan is well known, so much so that many scholars rarely question the standard narrative casting the two as foils, with the Great Emancipator inevitably coming out on top over his supposedly feckless commander. In Conflict of Command, acclaimed Civil War historian George C. Rable rethinks that stance, providing a new understanding of the interaction between the president and his leading wartime general by reinterpreting the political aspects of their partnership.
Rable pays considerable attention to Lincoln’s cabinet, Congress, and newspaper editorials, revealing the role each played in shaping the dealings between the two men. While he surveys McClellan’s military campaigns as commander of the Army of the Potomac, Rable focuses on the political fallout of the fighting rather than the tactical details. This broadly conceived approach highlights the army officers and enlisted men who emerged as citizen-soldiers and political actors.
Most accounts of the Lincoln-McClellan feud solely examine one of the two individuals, and the vast majority adopt a steadfast pro-Lincoln position. Taking a more neutral view, Rable deftly shows how the relationship between the two developed in a political context and ultimately failed spectacularly, profoundly altering the course of the Civil War itself.
#92
From Property to Person
Slavery and the Confiscation Acts, 1861–1862
2005
Most historians accept the proposition that in the first two years of the Civil War the North's primary aim was to reestablish the Union and the Constitution, not to emancipate slaves. But when northerners began clamoring for the confiscation of southern land and slaves as a punitive, military, and revenue-raising tactic, the constitutional right to personal property, particularly human property, came into question. In From Property to Person, Silvana R. Siddali traces the resulting discourse among northern voters, politicians, military leaders, and President Lincoln, elucidating how emancipation ultimately became an essential political cause in the North. After the outbreak of civil war, many northern citizens demanded that slaves be seized as contraband without necessarily endorsing their emancipation. Siddali examines the public and political debates in the North over southerners' private property rights and explains how these deliberations set in motion the first major reconsideration of the Constitution since the Bill of Rights. Fundamental questions Who had the right to control the war effort? What were the rights of rebellious citizens in a democratic Republic? How did one define human bondage that is implicitly protected in the nation's founding documents? Would the destruction of slavery irreparably damage the Constitution? Through the two Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862, the author argues, Americans worked out a conundrum between property rights and constitutionally protected civil liberties. The right of all human beings to freedom now trumped white southerners' right to human property.
In a rich analysis of editorials, pamphlets, letters, and congressional speeches, From Property to Person reveals the swift transformation in rhetoric concerning the Constitution and its protection of private property rights. The Confiscation Acts paved the way for the Reconstruction Amendments by fostering support for a broader reach by the federal government into private property rights and envisioning a new interpretation of an individual citizen's rights and obligations.
Authors
Dale Baum
Author · 1 books
A native of New Jersey and a Vietnam era veteran, Dale Baum is professor emeritus at Texas A&M University. His research focuses on nineteenth-century American political, social, and legal history.
William Marvel
Author · 10 books
William Marvel grew up on Davis Hill in South Conway, New Hampshire where he still lives. He has been writing about nineteenth-century American history for more than three decades.
George C. Rable
Author · 7 books
George C. Rable is the Charles Summersell Professor of Southern History at the University of Alabama.
