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This manuscript is the first biography of Joseph Holt, the U.S. Army's Judge Advocate General during the Civil War. Leonard argues that Holt has been portrayed as more or less a caricature of himself, flatly represented as the brutal prosecutor of Lincoln's assassins and the judge who allowed Mary Surratt to be hanged despite knowing her sentence had been reduced. Leonard contends that the southern view of Holt became the predominant way we see him, in large part because the memory perpetrated by the Lost Cause defined Holt as ruthless toward Southerners and the South. But Leonard argues that there is much more to Holt than what sympathizers with the Lost Cause came to think of him, and she tells his story here, from his early life in Kentucky to his wartime life as a member of Lincoln's administration to his postwar life as the prosecutor of Lincoln's assassins. Perhaps most important, Leonard will look at the erasure of Holt from American memory and investigate how such a significant figure has come to be so widely misunderstood.
Abandoned at the age of four, Susan Swingler had no contact with her father Leonard or with her stepmother, the revered Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley, until the age of 21. In this startling part memoir, part mystery, Susan explains why she and her father were kept apart while telling the story of her quest to find him. As she painstakingly traces and documents clues to a better understanding of Leonard, she inadvertently unravels an intricate fiction created by Elizabeth Jolley to protect those she loves.
Benjamin Franklin Butler was one of the most important and controversial military and political leaders of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Remembered most often for his uncompromising administration of the Federal occupation of New Orleans during the war, Butler reemerges in this lively narrative as a man whose journey took him from childhood destitution to wealth and profound influence in state and national halls of power. Prize-winning biographer Elizabeth D. Leonard chronicles Butler’s successful career in the law defending the rights of the Lowell Mill girls and other workers, his achievements as one of Abraham Lincoln’s premier civilian generals, and his role in developing wa...
Tells the stories of three Northern women who radically changed America's central notions about gender during the Civil War.
Offers advice on buying, arranging, and caring for flowers, discusses mood, color, shape, and composition, and shows examples of still lifes and garden scenes
On April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was murdered by John Wilkes Booth, and Secretary of State William H. Seward was brutally stabbed. Clearly a conspiracy was afoot. Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt was put in charge of the investigation and trial. He first set out to punish all of Booth's accomplices and then wanted to go after Jefferson Davis, whom he felt had instigated the assassination—despite stern opposition, not least of all from Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson. Elizabeth D. Leonard tells for the first time the full story of the two assassination trials. She explores the questions that made these trials pivotal in American history: Were they to be used to make the South pay for secession? Were they to be fair trials based on the evidence? Or were they to be points of reconciliation, with the South forgiven at all costs to create a solid union?
Reexamines the lives and legacies of the twenty thousand women who worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during the Civil War, using government records and private manuscripts to discover who they were and to explore their postwar lives.