Civil War Military History

The history of the United States was shaped by a series of sectional compromises—the Constitutional Convention, the Missouri Compromise in 1820, and the Compromise of 1850. While these accords formed an imperfect republic, or “a house divided,” as Abraham Lincoln put it, the country nevertheless remained united. But then in 1854, this three-generations system suddenly blew up with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, leading to a nearly fatal rupture in the union, described here by David S. Brown in riveting detail.

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.

The long view of the path to the Civil War, as charted through the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian eras in this book, reveals the critical fault in the nation’s foundation, exacerbated by slaveholding expansionists like Jefferson, Jackson, Polk, and Douglas, until the house they built upon it could no longer stand for two opposite ideas at once.

Many Americans, argues Michael C. C. Adams, tend to think of the Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. In Living Hell, Adams tries a different tack, clustering the voices of myriad actual participants on the firing line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical reenactment. Neither film nor reenactment can fully capture the hard truth of the four-year conflict. Living Hell presents a stark portrait of the human costs of the Civil War and gives listeners a more accurate appreciation of its lasting consequences.

Noted historian William J. Cooper has forged a reputation as one of today' s foremost Civil War experts. In We Have the War upon Us, Cooper takes a fresh look at the months between Lincoln's election and the attack on Fort Sumter that sparked the war. For years, compromise had kept the North and South from conflict but in these crucial months, the actions of major players on both sides pushed the country to the brink of destruction.

In every war, there are those battles that mark a turning point, after which everything is different. These are the battles that help determine how the war will proceed. The Battle of Bunker Hill was one of those battles in the American Revolutionary War. While it was a battle that the American rebels lost, it was significant because it showed that a rag-tag band of civilian soldiers could in fact stand up to the best trained and most experienced military in the world at that time.

They met in person only four times, yet these two men determined the outcome of the Civil War and cast competing styles for the reunited nation. Each the subject of innumerable biographies, Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee have never before been paired as they are here. Exploring their personalities, their character, and their ethical, moral, political, and military worlds, William C. Davis finds surprising similarities between the two men.

Impassioned antislavery rhetoric made antebellum Boston famous as the nation’s hub of radical abolitionism. In fact, the city was far from a beacon of equality. In No Right to an Honest Living, historian Jacqueline Jones reveals how Boston was the United States writ small—a place where the soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism was easy, but justice in the workplace was elusive. Highlighting the everyday struggles of ordinary Black workers, this book shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston—and the United States—from securing true equality for all.

On the last, cold Sunday of February 1859, Daniel Sickles shot his wife's lover in Washington's Lafayette Square, just across from the White House. This is the story of that killing and its repercussions. Thomas Keneally brilliantly recreates an extraordinary period, when women were punished for violating codes of society that did not bind men. And the caddish, good-looking Dan Sickles personifies the extremes of the era.

Americans have long been fascinated by the Civil War, marveling at the size of the battles, the leadership of the generals, and the courage of the soldiers. Given the extent of Irish immigration in the 19th century, it should come as no surprise that the Irish played important roles in the Civil War. The Irish joined for many reasons, including wanting regular wages and enlistment bonus money, defending the Union, and even hoping that veteran Irish soldiers could help free Ireland from British rule.

July 1, 1863, had gone poorly for the Union army’s XI Corps. Shattered in battle north of the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg, the battered and embarrassed unit ended the day hunkered at the crest of a cemetery-topped hill south of the village. Reinforcements fortified the position, which extended eastward to include another key piece of high ground, Culp’s Hill. The Federal line also extended southward down Cemetery Ridge, forming what eventually became a long fishhook.

Americans have long been fascinated by the Civil War, marveling at the size of the battles, the leadership of the generals, and the courage of the soldiers. The Civil War was the deadliest conflict in American history, and had the two sides realized it would take four years and inflict over a million casualties, it might not have been fought. Since it did, however, historians and history buffs alike have been studying and analyzing the military and political history of the conflict ever since.

In the two decades before the Civil War, free Americans engaged in history wars every bit as ferocious as those waged today over the proposed National History Standards or the commemoration at the Smithsonian Institution of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In One Nation Divided by Slavery, author Michael F. Conlin investigates the different ways antebellum Americans celebrated civic holidays, read the Declaration of Independence, and commemorated Revolutionary War battles.

Abraham Lincoln is the central axis of this story about America's seemingly unstoppable march toward war, the shattering of its political landscape, and its grappling with the moral underpinnings of a republic of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The northwestern third of the Commonwealth of Virginia finally broke away in 1863 to form the Union's 35th state. In Seceding from Secession: The Civil War, Politics, and the Creation of West Virginia, authors Eric J. Wittenberg, Edmund A. Sargus, and Penny L. Barrick chronicle those events in an unprecedented study of the social, legal, military, and political factors that converged to bring about the birth of the West Virginia.

Historian Wiley Sword offers a richly detailed account that captures the vivid personalities behind the battle for Chattanooga. Grant, Thomas, Bragg, William Tecumseh Sherman, Phil Sheridan, William Rosecrans, Pat Cleburne, Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln—all come alive in a narrative that combines furious battle action with behind-the-scenes political maneuvering and astute analysis.

This volume does not claim to be a tactical, or strategic history of the campaigns of which it treats; it aims rather to be a narrative of the every day life and experience of the private soldier in camp and field how he lived, how he marched, how he fought and how he suffered. No sooner had some of the volunteers reached the front, and been subjected to the hardships and exposures of army life, than they fell sick, were sent to the hospital and were discharged without passing through any serious campaigns.

Andersonvilles of the North, by James M. Gillispie, represents the first broad study to argue that the image of Union prison officials as negligent and cruel to Confederate prisoners is severely flawed. This study is not an attempt to "whitewash" Union prison policies or make light of Confederate prisoner mortality.

Frazier has made use of previously untapped primary sources, allowing him to present new interpretations of the famous Civil War battles in the Southwest. Using narratives of veterans of the campaign and official Confederate and Union documents, the author explains how this seemingly far-fetched fantasy of building a Confederate empire was an essential part of the Confederate strategy.

In early March 1861, civil war loomed. By late April, Americans had begun to kill their fellow citizens. Cry Havoc! recounts the events that divided the states and reveals how quirks of timing, character, and place all conspired to transform the nation into a battlefield. Nelson Lankford chronicles the eight critical weeks that began with Lincoln's inauguration through the explosion at Fort Sumpter and the president's fateful response to it.