Civil War Memoirs

“It is glorious to see such courage in one so young!” So declared Confederate General Robert E. Lee on December 13, 1862, during the battle of Fredericksburg as he watched Major John Pelham fight at least five Union batteries with just one lone gun. The dashing and handsome 24-year-old Alabama officer earned the compliments and admiration of his men, the war gods of Virginia (Lee, Jackson, and Stuart), and Southern society—all while helping transform the concept of horse artillery on Civil War battlefields across Virginia and Maryland.

As fresh and poignant today as when they were written, these touching letters capture the heart of everyday life during the Civil War. Set both at home in Florida and on the front, the letters were written by two generations of families whose members included radical secessionists, moderates, and even a few Unionists.

In May 1861, Virginian Thomas Henry Carter raised an artillery battery and joined the Confederate Army. Over the next four years, he rose steadily in rank from captain to colonel, placing him among the senior artillerists in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. During the war, Carter wrote more than 100 revealing letters to his wife, Susan, about his service. His interactions with prominent officers - including Lee, Jubal A.Early, John B. Gordon, Robert E. Rodes, and others - come to life in Carter's astute comments about their conduct and personalities.

When the Civil War broke out, Clara Barton wanted more than anything to be a Union soldier, an impossible dream for a 39-year-old woman who stood a slender five feet tall. Determined to serve, she became a veritable soldier, a nurse, and a one-woman relief agency operating in the heart of the conflict. Now, award-winning author Stephen B. Oates, drawing on archival materials not used by her previous biographers, has written the first complete account of Clara Barton's active engagement in the Civil War.

Lincoln at Cooper Union explores Lincoln’s most influential and widely reported pre-presidential address—an extraordinary appeal by the western politician to the eastern elite that propelled him toward the Republican nomination for president. Delivered in New York in February 1860, the Cooper Union speech dispelled doubts about Lincoln’s suitability for the presidency and reassured conservatives of his moderation while reaffirming his opposition to slavery to Republican progressives.

As the brigade he commanded attacked a Confederate battery on a hill outside Petersburg in July 1864, a bursting shell blew Col. Joshua L. Chamberlain from the saddle and wounded his horse. After the enemy battery skedaddled, the brigade took the hill and dug in, and up came supporting Union guns. Chamberlain figured the day’s fighting ended. Then an unidentified senior officer ordered his brigade to charge and capture the heavily defended main Confederate line.

Should we still read William Faulkner in this new century? What can his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War, that central quarrel in our nation's history? These are the provocative questions that Michael Gorra asks in this historic portrait of the novelist and his world.

In July 1883, just a few days after the 20th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, a group of editors at the Century magazine engaged in a lively argument: Which Civil War battle was the bloodiest battle of them all? One claimed it was Chickamauga, another Cold Harbor. The argument inspired a brainstorm: Why not let the magazine’s 125,000 readers in on the conversation by offering “a series of papers on some of the great battles of the war, to be written by officers in command on both sides.”

Nelson Appleton Miles (1839 - 1925) was an American military general. From 1895 to 1903, he served as the last commanding general of the United States Army before the office was abolished. The 1911 autobiography of General Miles is titled Serving the Republic, and chronicles his career as a soldier. He participated in many of the battles of the Civil War as a volunteer and afterwards took part as a commander in most of the Indian campaigns on the Western plains. His final service was in the Spanish-American War.

No person excited greater emotion in Kansas than James Henry Lane, the US senator who led a volunteer brigade in 1861-1862. In fighting numerous skirmishes and liberating hundreds of slaves, Lane and his brigade garnered national attention. Bryce Benedict draws on a wealth of previously unexploited sources, including letters by brigade members, to dramatically re-create the violence along the Kansas-Missouri border and challenge some of the time-honored depictions of Lane’s unit as bloodthirsty and indiscriminately violent.

An Ohio family with roots in the South, the Ewings influenced the course of the Midwest for more than 50 years. Patriarch Thomas Ewing, a former Whig senator and cabinet member who made his fortune as a real estate lawyer, raised four major players in the nation’s history - including William Tecumseh “Cump” Sherman, taken into the family as a nine-year-old, who went on to marry his foster sister Ellen. Ronald D. Smith now tells of this extraordinary clan that played a role on the national stage through the illustrious career of one of its sons.

December 1862 drove the United States toward a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln's government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country's law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American.

Though generally remembered by history as two very different personalities, the soft-spoken Lincoln and often-crude Grant in fact shared similar drive and determination, as this in-depth character study illustrates.

On March 29, 1863, 12-year-old Frederick Grant, the eldest son of Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, arrived at his father’s headquarters at Young’s Point, Louisiana. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee was preparing to move against Vicksburg, Mississippi, and young Fred had no intention of missing out on the adventure. His incredible journey would consume more than three months and would not end until shortly after the surrender of the Confederate bastion on the Fourth of July. Posterity is the beneficiary of the younger Grant’s brief memoir on the subject, which Albert A.

By the acclaimed author of the classic Patriots and Union 1812, this major work of narrative history portrays four of the most turbulent decades in the growth of the American nation. After the War of 1812, Presidents Monroe, Jackson, Van Buren, and Polk led the country to its Manifest Destiny across the continent, but the forces and hostility unleashed by that expansion led inexorably to Civil War.

Lincoln, who in afterlife became mythologized as the Great Emancipator, was shaped by the values of the White America into which he was born. While he viewed slavery as a moral crime abhorrent to American principles, he disapproved of antislavery activists. Until the last year of his life, he advocated "voluntary deportation", concerned that free Blacks in a White society would result in centuries of conflict.

In his own captivating words, General Ulysses S. Grant describes the Wilderness Campaign, the almost anti-climactic surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. His depiction of the most crucial and hardest-fought battles of the Civil War, the near-disasters, and the bloody triumphs reveals a highly intelligent, profound, thinking man. Grant wrote his memoirs as he lay dying of cancer and completed the manuscript only a week before his death.

The author of the classic best seller Lincoln on Leadership answers the question: How would President Lincoln handle the pressing crises of our modern world? Abraham Lincoln is recognized as one of history's finest leaders, a great president when the United States was under tremendous strain. But suppose he were alive today. How would Lincoln deal with today's high-pressure issues, from politics to business?

Dan Butterfield played a pivotal role during the Civil War. He led troops in the field at the brigade, division, and corps level, wrote the 1862 Army field manual, composed “Taps,” and served as the chief of staff for Joe Hooker in the Army of the Potomac.

John Potts Slough, the Union commander at the Battle of Glorieta Pass, lived a life of relentless pursuit for success that entangled him in the turbulent events of mid-nineteenth-century America. As a politician, Slough fought abolitionists in the Ohio legislature and during Kansas Territory's fourth and final constitutional convention. He organized the 1st Colorado Volunteer Infantry after the Civil War broke out, eventually leading his men against Confederate forces at the pivotal engagement at Glorieta Pass.