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To the Bitter End
Across the Confederacy, determination remained high through the winter of 1864 into the new year. Yet ominous signs were everywhere. The peace conference had failed. Large areas were overrun, the armies could not stop Union advances, the economy was in shambles, and industry and infrastructure were crumblingÑthe Confederacy could not make, move, or maintain anything. No one knew what the future held, but uncertainty. Civilians and soldiers, generals and governors, resolved to fight to the bitter end. Myths and misconceptions abound about those last days of the Confederacy. There would be no single surrender or treaty that brought the war to an end. Rather, the Confederacy collapsed, its gov...
More Great What Ifs of the American Civil War
To ask "What If" about great moments of history is to simultaneously unleash imagined possibilities and embrace the rigorous confines of fact.Every armchair general asks "What If," but serious students of the war avoid making assumptions when they ask it. They go beyond wishful thinking and use "What If" as a springboard to explore not only what happened but also their own assumptions about what happened. A serious inquiry sparks rigorous exploration, demands critical thinking, and unlocks important insights.More Great "What Ifs" of the American Civil War: Historians Tackle More of the Conflict's Most Intriguing Possibilities picks up where volume one left off: with historians at Emerging Ci...
No Turning Back
“[T]here will be no turning back,” said Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. It was May, 1864. The Civil War had dragged into its fourth spring. It was time to end things, Grant resolved, once and for all. With the Union Army of the Potomac as his sledge, Grant crossed the Rapidan River, intending to draw the Army of Northern Virginia into one final battle. Short of that, he planned “to hammer continuously against the armed forces of the enemy and his resources, until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left to him . . . .” Almost immediately, though, Robert E. Lee’s Confederates brought Grant to bay in the thick tangle of the Wilderness. Rather than retreat, as ot...
The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson
An exhaustive look at the final hours of the Confederacy’s most audacious general. May 1863. The Civil War was in its third spring, and Confederate Lt. Gen. Thomas Jonathan Jackson stood at the peak of his fame. He had risen from obscurity to become “Old Stonewall,” adored across the South and feared and respected throughout the North. On the night of May 2, however, just hours after Jackson executed the most audacious maneuver of his career and delivered a crushing blow against an unsuspecting Union army at Chancellorsville, disaster struck. The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson recounts the events of that fateful night—considered one of the most pivotal moments of the war—and the te...
A Want of Vigilance
"The months after Gettysburg had hardly been quietfilled with skirmishes, cavalry clashes, and plenty of marching. Nonetheless, Union commander Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade had yet to come to serious blows with his Confederate counterpart, Gen. Robert E. Lee. ñLee is undoubtedly bullying you,î one of MeadeÍs superiors goaded. LeeÍs armyseverely bloodied at Gettysburgdid not have quite the offensive capability it once possessed, yet LeeÍs aggressive nature could not be quelled. He looked for the chance to strike out at Meade. In mid-October, 1863, both men shifted their armies into motion. Each surprised the other. Quickly, Meade found himself racing northward for safety along the...
Dawn of Victory
After the unprecedented violence of the 1864 Overland Campaign, Union Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant turned his gaze south of Richmond to Petersburg, and the key railroad junction that supplied the Confederate capital and its defenders. Nine grueling months of constant maneuver and combat around the Cockade City followed. As massive fortifications soon dominated the landscape, both armies frequently pushed each other to the brink of disaster. As March 1865 drew to a close, Grant planned one more charge against Confederate lines. Despite recent successes, many viewed this latest task as an impossibilityand their trepidation had merit. These lines might well have been looked upon by the ene...
A Fine Opportunity Lost
For James Longstreet, the transfer to the Western Theater in 1863 offered opportunity. For his opponent Ambrose Burnside, the hope of redemption. Longstreet, who Robert E. Lee called his “Old Warhorse,” had long labored in the shadow of both his army commander and the late Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. When Confederate fortunes took a turn for the worse in Tennessee, both Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee dispatched Longstreet and most of his First Corps to reinforce Braxton Bragg’s ill-starred Army of Tennessee. Within hours of his arrival Longstreet helped win the decisive victory at Chickamauga and drove the Union Army of the Cumberland back into Chattanooga. For a host of reas...
A Handsome Flogging
Place yourself in the boots of the Continental Army and the British forces as they march towards a pivotal Revolutionary War battle. June 1778 was a tumultuous month in the annals of American military history. Somehow, General George Washington and the Continental Army were able to survive a string of defeats around Philadelphia in 1777 and a desperate winter at Valley Forge. As winter turned to spring, and spring turned to summer, the army—newly trained by Baron von Steuben and in high spirits thanks to France’s intervention into the conflict—marched out of Valley Forge in pursuit of Henry Clinton’s British Army making its way across New Jersey for New York City. What would happen n...
Lincoln Comes to Gettysburg
New York Times–Bestselling Author:The story of the battle’s aftermath—the burial of the dead, and Lincoln’s appearance to make “a few appropriate remarks.” Almost 8,000 dead dotted the fields of Gettysburg after the guns went silent. The Confederate dead were hastily buried, but what of the Union dead? Several men hatched the idea of a new cemetery to bury and honor the Union soldiers just south of town. Their task was difficult to say the least. After the State of Pennsylvania purchased seventeen acres, a renowned landscape architect designed the cemetery’s layout. All was now ready for the bodies to be taken from their uneasy resting places around the battlefield, placed in c...
Dreams of Victory
“Chick does a good job of portraying [General Beauregard] as the first real hero of the Confederacy, who at times proved his own worst enemy.” —The NYMAS Review Few Civil War generals attracted as much debate and controversy as Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard. He combined brilliance and charisma with arrogance and histrionics. He was a Catholic Creole in a society dominated by white Protestants, which made him appear exotic next to the likes of Albert Sidney Johnston and Robert E. Lee. He was reviled by Jefferson Davis and mocked by Mary Chesnut in her diary. Yet he was popular with his soldiers and subordinates. Outside of Lee, he was the South’s most consistently successful comman...
