Showing titles in American Civil War

The South’s James Bulloch, charming and devious, was to acquire a cutting-edge clandestine fleet intended to break President Lincoln’s blockade of Confederate ports, sink Northern merchant vessels, and drown the U.S. Navy’s mightiest ships at sea. The profits from gunrunning and smuggling cotton—Dixie’s notorious “white gold”—would finance the scheme. Opposing him was Thomas Dudley, a resolute Quaker lawyer and abolitionist. He was determined to stop Bulloch by any means necessary in a spy-versus-spy game of move and countermove, gambit and sacrifice, intrigue and betrayal.

John Roebling was one of the 19th century's most brilliant engineers, ingenious inventors, successful manufacturers, and fascinating personalities. Raised in a German backwater amid the war-torn chaos of the Napoleonic Wars, he immigrated to the US in 1831, where he became wealthy and acclaimed, eventually receiving a carte-blanche contract to build one of the 19th century's most stupendous and daring works of engineering: a gigantic suspension bridge to span the East River between New York and Brooklyn.

Fifty years of service at the White House in various capacities, including bodyguard to Abraham Lincoln, William H. Crook's memoir brings an astonishing array of personal details of life in the executive mansion. His sensitive observations of Lincoln are especially moving.

By the end of the Civil War, nearly half a million slaves had taken refuge behind Union lines in what became known as "contraband camps". These were crowded, dangerous places, yet some 12 to 15 percent of the Confederacy's slave population took almost unimaginable risks to reach them, and they became the first places Northerners came to know former slaves en masse.

Slave narratives are extremely rare. Of the 100 or so of these testimonies that survive, a mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and freed themselves. Now two newly uncovered narratives, and the biographies of the men who wrote them, join that exclusive group.

Tony Silber's account starts on April 14, 1861, with President Lincoln's call for seventy-five thousand militia troops. Washington, a Southern slaveholding city, was the focal point. The capital was barely defended, by about two thousand local militia troops of dubious training and loyalty. In Charleston, the Confederates had an organized army that was larger and ready to fight.

Love and the Working Class is a unique look at the emotions of hard-living, nineteenth-century Americans who were often on the cusp of literacy. These laboring folk highly valued letters and, however difficult it was, wrote to stay connected to those they loved. This book displays the personal expression of factory hands, manual laborers, peddlers, coopers, carpenters, lumbermen, miners, tanners, haulers, tailors, seamstresses, laundresses, domestics, sharecroppers, independent farmers, and common soldiers and their wives.

In Little Women, Mr. March went off to war. But in real life it was Jo (Louisa May Alcott herself, an avowed abolitionist) who traveled to Washington to nurse Northern soldiers. Despite the subject matter, her account is full of amusing anecdotes as she makes her way alone from Concord to DC, trying to finagle a free ticket and convinced she will drown during the journey.

The Battle of Antietam, (also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg), was fought on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Antietam Creek. The battle was the culmination of Robert E. Lee's Maryland campaign in which Lee attempted to take the war to the North. The first major battle in the American Civil War to take place on Union soil, it was and remains, the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, claiming a staggering 23,000 casualties. The savage battle was not a clear victory for either side, though turning back the Confederate invasion gave Abraham Lincoln the "victory" he wanted.

“May God forgive me for the order”, Confederate Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge remarked as he ordered young cadets from Virginia military institute into the battle lines at New Market, just days after calling them from their academic studies to assist in a crucial defense. Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley had seen years of fighting. In the spring of 1864, Union Maj. Gen. Franz Sigel prepared to lead a new invasion force into the Valley, operating on the far right flank of Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign. Breckinridge scrambled to organize the confederate defense.

Gen. Robert E. Lee began moving part of his Army of Northern Virginia from the Old Dominion toward Pennsylvania on June 3, 1863. Lee believed his army needed to win a major victory on Northern soil if the South was to have a chance at winning the war. Transferring the fighting out of war-torn Virginia would allow the state time to heal while he supplied his army from untapped farms and stores in Maryland and the Keystone State. Lee had also convinced Pres. Jefferson Davis that his offensive would interfere with the Union effort to take Vicksburg in Mississippi.

Amid all the printer's ink and historical speculation, the antebellum period (approx. 1820-1860) has largely been ignored until recently. The antebellum period often gets lost between the better-documented Federalist and Victorian eras.

With a bit of insight into the Native American culture, paired with a larger understanding of how the settlers of the west actually lived, you'll be able to decipher what happened to the Oatman family of your own accord, empowering an honest understanding of this history. In The Captivity of the Oatman Girls, you’ll discover powerful insight into the truth of the relations between the settlers and the Plains Indians of North America, why the actions of the colonists in the late 18th century bordered genocide - and how this shifted the landscape forever, and more.

This book is considered to be the best account of the Civil War ever written from the Confederate point of view. It is also the one most frequently cited by historians of the Western campaigns. Sam Watkins, a high private in the Army of Tennessee, brings a vividness and detail to his story unmatched in the genre.

Author John F. Wasik tracks Lincoln from his time in the 1830s as a young Illinois state legislator pushing for internal improvements; through his work as a lawyer representing the Illinois Central Railroad in the 1840s; to his presidential fight for the Transcontinental Railroad; and his support of land-grant colleges that educated a nation. These brick-and-mortar developments were essential to how the nation could lift citizens above poverty and its isolating origins.

Historian Jonathan W. White tells the riveting story of Appleton Oaksmith, a swashbuckling sea captain whose life intersected with some of the most important moments, movements, and individuals of the mid-nineteenth century, from the California Gold Rush, filibustering schemes in Nicaragua, Cuban liberation, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. Most importantly, the book depicts the extraordinary lengths the Lincoln Administration went to destroy the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade.

“In this brief sketch of our great Southern hero, I have endeavored to portray, amid the blaze of his matchless military genius, the unchanging rectitude of his conduct, the stern will-power by which he conquered all difficulties, his firm belief in an overruling Providence, and his entire submission to the Divine Will. These traits of character were the cornerstones upon which he reared the edifice of his greatness, and upon which the young people of our day will do well to build."

Widely known as the "poor man's lawyer" in antebellum Boston, John Albion Andrew (1818-1867) was involved in nearly every cause and case that advanced social and racial justice in Boston in the years preceding the Civil War. Inspired by the legacies of John Quincy Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and mentored by Charles Sumner, Andrew devoted himself to the battle for equality. In this revealing and accessible biography, Stephen D. Engle traces Andrew's life and legacy, giving this important, but largely forgotten, figure his due.

His man for the job: Maj. Gen. “Little Phil” Sheridan, the bandy-legged Irishman who’d proven himself just the kind of scrapper Grant loved. Grant turned Sheridan loose across Virginia’s most vital landscape, the breadbasket of the Confederacy. In the spring of 1862, a string of Confederate victories in the Valley had foiled Union plans in the state and kept Confederate armies fed and supplied. In 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia used the Valley as its avenue of invasion, culminating in the battle of Gettysburg.

"Hassler's history will survive as our most detailed narrative of the first day's battle, examining the day's action so minutely that no succeeding historian of Gettysburg will be able to ignore it. Hassler's book has solid virtues in addition to its thoroughness of detail: it offers a persuasive argument that the first day's events largely determined the eventual outcome of the battle...." ( American Historical Review)