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Focuses on Union's internal conflict at building a successful military leadership team. This book shows us Lincoln's administration in disarray, with relations between the president and field commander McClellan strained to the breaking point. It gives details about the critical moment in the unfolding of the Civil War.
The first in his authoritative two-volume study of the Battle of Antietam, Unfurl Those Colors! traces the engrossing story of the Union Army's strategies, stratagems, and movements on the bloodiest day in American military history.
"In this book, the author provides an hour-by-hour tactical history of the battle, beginning before dawn on September 17 and concluding with the immediate aftermath of the battle, including General McClellan's fateful decision to not pursue Lee's retreating forces back across the Potomac to Virginia. But this is not only an operational history of Antietam: the author also offers the reader insight into the experiences of enlisted soldiers, the terror of the fighting itself, and the emotional aftermath for those who survived"--
“An important book that rescues George B. McClellan’s military reputation.” —Chronicles Bold, brash, and full of ambition, George Brinton McClellan seemed destined for greatness when he assumed command of all the Union armies before he was 35. It was not to be. Ultimately deemed a failure on the battlefield by Abraham Lincoln, he was finally dismissed from command following the bloody battle of Antietam. To better understand this fascinating, however flawed, character, Ethan S. Rafuse considers the broad and complicated political climate of the earlier 19th Century. Rather than blaming McClellan for the Union’s military losses, Rafuse attempts to understand his political thinking a...
“War means fighting, and fighting means killing,” Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest famously declared. The Civil War was fundamentally a matter of Americans killing Americans. This undeniable reality is what Jonathan Steplyk explores in Fighting Means Killing, the first book-length study of Union and Confederate soldiers’ attitudes toward, and experiences of, killing in the Civil War. Drawing upon letters, diaries, and postwar reminiscences, Steplyk examines what soldiers and veterans thought about killing before, during, and after the war. How did these soldiers view sharpshooters? How about hand-to-hand combat? What language did they use to describe killing in combat? What cultural and societal factors influenced their attitudes? And what was the impact of race in battlefield atrocities and bitter clashes between white Confederates and black Federals? These are the questions that Steplyk seeks to answer in Fighting Means Killing, a work that bridges the gap between military and social history—and that shifts the focus on the tragedy of the Civil War from fighting and dying for cause and country to fighting and killing.
“Fascinating . . . [a] 300-plus year history of North America” from the award-winning historian and author of The Holocaust: History & Memory (Military Heritage). Prize-winning author Jeremy Black traces the competition for control of North America from the landing of Spanish troops under Hernán Cortés in modern Mexico in 1519 to 1871 when, with the Treaty of Washington and the withdrawal of most British garrisons, Britain accepted American mastery in North America. In this wide-ranging narrative, Black makes clear that the process by which America gained supremacy was far from inevitable. The story Black tells is one of conflict, diplomacy, geopolitics, and politics. The eventual resu...
“Thought-provoking and entertaining . . . What if Lincoln had dodged the assassin’s bullet? What if Lee had waged guerrilla warfare in April 1865?” —Gordon C. Rhea, author of the Overland Campaign series “What if. . . ?” Every Civil War armchair general asks the question. Possibilities unfold. Disappointments vanish. Imaginations soar. More questions arise. “What if . . .” can be more than an exercise in wistful fantasy. A serious inquiry sparks rigorous exploration, demands critical thinking, and unlocks important insights. The Great “What Ifs” of the American Civil War: Historians Tackle the Conflict’s Most Intriguing Possibilities is a collection of fourteen essays b...
When Gen. Robert E. Lee fled from Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia, in April 1865, many observers did not realize that the Civil War had reached its nadir. A large number of Confederates, from Jefferson Davis down to the rank-and-file, were determined to continue fighting. Though Union successes had nearly extinguished the Confederacy’s hope for an outright victory, the South still believed it could force the Union to grant a negotiated peace that would salvage some of its war aims. As evidence of the Confederacy’s determination, two major Union campaigns, along with a number of smaller engagements, were required to quell the continued organized Confederate military resistance. In Sprin...
On September 17, 1862, the "United States" was on the brink, facing a permanent split into two separate nations. America's very future hung on the outcome of a single battle--and the result reverberates to this day. Given the deep divisions that still rive the nation, given what unites the country, too, Antietam is more relevant now than ever. The epic battle, fought near Sharpsburg, Maryland, was a Civil War turning point. The South had just launched its first invasion of the North; victory for Robert E. Lee would almost certainly have ended the war on Confederate terms. If the Union prevailed, Lincoln stood ready to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He knew that freeing the slaves would...
A Companion to the U.S. Civil War presents a comprehensive historiographical collection of essays covering all major military, political, social, and economic aspects of the American Civil War (1861-1865). Represents the most comprehensive coverage available relating to all aspects of the U.S. Civil War Features contributions from dozens of experts in Civil War scholarship Covers major campaigns and battles, and military and political figures, as well as non-military aspects of the conflict such as gender, emancipation, literature, ethnicity, slavery, and memory