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“A carefully crafted microhistory of a riverboat and life on the Western rivers that reveals the tensions and realities of America on the eve of civil war.” —America’s Civil War Review In March 1856, a dead body washed onto the shore of the Mississippi River. Nothing out of the ordinary. In those days, people fished corpses from the river with alarming frequency. But this body, with its arms and legs tied to a chair, struck an especially eerie chord. The body belonged to a man who had been a passenger on the luxurious steamboat known as the Ohio Belle, and he was the son of a southern planter. Who had bound and pitched this wealthy man into the river? Why? As reports of the killing s...
"In March 1856, the drowned body of J.B. Jones, the son of a prominent Southern planter, was found floating near a sandbar in the Mississippi River. Normally, Jones's demise would not have garnered much attention, for dead men were fished from the water with alarming frequency. This case, however, was different. Jones's waterlogged corpse was tied to a chair. He had been a passenger on the Ohio Belle, a luxurious steamboat that ferried people and goods between Cincinnati and New Orleans. The Belle had an interesting history in its own right, having plied the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers at the height of the steamboat era. The tale of the drowned man lashed to a chair and pitched from the Bell...
On January 19, 1862, Confederate and Union forces clashed in the now-forgotten Battle of Mill Springs. Armies of inexperienced soldiers chaotically fought in the wooded terrain of south-central Kentucky as rain turned bloodied ground to mud. Mill Springs was the first major Union victory since the Federal disaster of Bull Run. This Union triumph secured the Bluegrass State in Union hands, opening the large expanses of Tennessee for Federal invasion. From General Felix Zollicoffer meeting his death by wandering into Union lines to the heroics of General George Thomas, Civil War historian Stuart Sanders chronicles this important battle and its essential role in the war.
Perhaps more than any other citizens of the nation, Kentuckians held conflicted loyalties during the American Civil War. As a border state, Kentucky was largely pro-slavery but had an economy tied as much to the North as to the South. State government officials tried to keep Kentucky neutral, hoping to play a lead role in compromise efforts between the Union and the Confederacy, but that stance failed to satisfy supporters of both sides, all of whom considered the state's backing crucial to victory. President Abraham Lincoln is reported to have once remarked, "I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky." Kentucky did side with Lincoln, officially aligning itself with the Union i...
Native Tennessee generals, about forty Confederate and six Union, are profiled here with brief biographies. Forrest, Polk, Stewart, and many more are discussed with regard to their childhoods, prewar vocations, participation in battles around the country, and life after the war if they survived.
Far removed from the main centers of commerce and population, and thus remote from the priorities of Confederate political leaders in the East, the Trans-Mississippi Theater experienced a different sort of war during America’s great fratricidal conflict of 1861–1865. Not only was its distance from Richmond a distinguishing factor, but it was also a theater where the Union army and navy gained a foothold far sooner than elsewhere in the South, first in Missouri and then in Louisiana and the Mississippi River Valley. Confederate generals were tasked with ousting, not merely halting, an enemy closing from two directions; guerrilla warfare was more often the norm than the exception; and the ...
The largest battle fought in Kentucky during the American Civil War occurred at a small, crossroads town named Perryville. As Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Confederate Heartland Offensive sputtered through Kentucky, Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s reformed Army of the Ohio pursued the Army of the Mississippi and clashed with its rearguard just outside Perryville. Believing that he faced only a part of Buell’s army, Bragg ordered an assault on the Union left flank which resulted in Confederate victory. However, that evening Bragg determined the Army of the Ohio outnumbered him three to one and quickly decided to retreat. Outmanned, outmaneuvered, and lacking supplies and reinforcements, Bragg retre...