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Based on research from over 1200 wartime letters and diaries written by more than 400 Confederate officers and enlisted men, this text offers a social history of Robert E Lee's Army of Northern Virginia during its final year, from May 1864 to April 1865.

In 1861, as part of a last-ditch effort to preserve the Union and prevent war, Abraham Lincoln offered to accept a constitutional amendment that barred Congress from interfering with slavery in the slave states. Daniel Crofts unearths the hidden history and political manoeuvring behind the stillborn attempt to enact this amendment.

This vivid history of the Civil War era reveals how unexpected bonds of union forged among diverse peoples in the Ohio-Kentucky borderlands furthered emancipation through a period of spiraling chaos between 1830 and 1865. Moving beyond familiar arguments about Lincoln's deft politics or regional commercial ties, Bridget Ford recovers the potent religious, racial, and political attachments holding the country together at one of its most likely breaking points, the Ohio River.Living in a bitterly contested region, the Americans examined here--Protestant and Catholic, black and white, northerner and southerner--made zealous efforts to understand the daily lives and struggles of those on the opposite side of vexing human and ideological divides. In their common pursuits of religious devotionalism, universal public education regardless of race, and relief from suffering during wartime, Ford discovers a surprisingly capacious and inclusive sense of political union in the Civil War era. While accounting for the era's many disintegrative forces, Ford reveals the imaginative work that went into bridging stark differences in lived experience, and she posits that work as a precondition for slavery's end and the Union's persistence.

Offering new and definitive interpretations of the battle of Peach Tree Creek's place within the Atlanta campaign, Earl J. Hess describes how several Confederate regiments and brigades made a pretense of advancing but then stopped partway to the objective and then took cover. Hess shows that morale played an unusually important role in determining the outcome at Peach Tree Creek.

Shows that in the process of winning the US Civil War, Northerners were forced to grapple with the frauds of free labor. Labor brokers did indispensable work that helped the Northern state and Northern employers emerge victorious. They also gave rise to an economic and political system that enriched the managerial class.

In Fighting for Citizenship, Brian Taylor complicates existing interpretations of why black men fought in the Civil War. Civil War-era African Americans recognized the urgency of a core political concern: how best to use the opportunity presented by this conflict over slavery to win abolition and secure enduring black rights.

Combines military and environmental history to forge a comprehensive new narrative of the American Civil War's significance and impact. As the authors reveal, the conflict created a new disease environment; led to large-scale modifications of the landscape; and sparked new thinking about the human relationship to the natural world.

Military historian Earl Hess reveals how a combination of rugged terrain, poor coordination, and low battlefield morale among Union troops influenced the result of the largest attack mounted by Grant's Army of the Tennessee.

Examines the Freedmen's Bureau 's attempt to document and deploy hard information about the reality of the violence that Black communities endured in the wake of Emancipation. William Blair uses the accounts of far-flung Freedmen's Bureau agents to ask questions about the early days of Reconstruction.

Known today as "the other speaker at Gettysburg", Edward Everett had a distinguished and illustrative career at every level of American politics from the 1820s through the Civil War. In this new biography, Matthew Mason argues that Everett's extraordinarily well-documented career reveals a complex man whose shifting political opinions illuminate the nuances of Northern Unionism.

Many accounts of the secession crisis overlook the sharp political conflict that took place in the Border South states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. Michael D. Robinson expands the scope of this crisis to show how the fate of the Border South, and with it the Union, desperately hung in the balance during the fateful months surrounding the clash at Fort Sumter.

In this insightful book, Stephen Cushman considers Civil War generals' memoirs as both historical and literary works, revealing how they remain vital to understanding the interaction of memory, imagination, and the writing of American history.

In this fascinating work, Jill Ogline Titus uses centennial events in Gettysburg to examine the history of political, social, and community change in 1960s America. She shows how the era's deep divisions thrust Gettysburg into the national spotlight and ensured that white and Black Americans would define its meaning in dramatically different ways.

The Army of the Potomac was a hotbed of political activity during the Civil War. In this comprehensive reassessment of the army's politics, Zachery Fry argues that the war was an intense political education for its common soldiers.

Weaving together biography and political history, Michael Woods restores Jefferson Davis and Stephen Douglas's fatefully entwined lives and careers to the centre of the Civil War era. Operating on personal, partisan, and national levels, Woods traces the deep roots of Democrats' internal strife.

By 1863 and the final Emancipation Proclamation, the Union army had transformed into the key force for instituting emancipation in the American West. However, Kristopher Teters argues that the guiding principles behind this development in attitudes and policy were a result of military necessity and pragmatic strategies, rather than an effort to enact racial equality.

Renowned military historian Jeffry Wert draws on the personal narratives of Union and Confederate troops to offer a gripping story of Civil War combat at its most difficult. Wert's harrowing tale reminds us that the war's story, often told through its commanders and campaigns, truly belonged to the common soldier.

Between 1861 and 1865, approximately 200,000 women were widowed by the deaths of Civil War soldiers. They recorded their experiences in diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and pension applications. In Love and Duty, Angela Esco Elder draws on these materials to explore white Confederate widows' stories.

More than 150 years after the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organisations repeat claims that anywhere up to 100,000 African Americans fought in the Confederate army. Kevin Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts and poorly understood primary-source material have helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth.

Offers a study of the battle of Bentonville, the only major Civil War battle fought in North Carolina and the Confederacy's last attempt to stop the devastating march of Sherman's army north through the Carolinas. This work analyzes the reasons for the initial success and eventual failure of General Joseph E Johnston's offensive.

The battle of Belmont was the first battle in the western theater of the Civil War and, more important, the first battle of the war fought by Ulysses S Grant. This book provides a study of the battle that catapulted Grant into prominence.

Delving into wartime diaries kept by women of the southern slave-owning class, Steven Stowe recaptures their motivations to keep the days close even as war tore apart the brutal system of slavery that had benefited them. In studying the inner lives of these unsympathetic characters, Stowe also explores the importance - and the limits - of historical empathy as a condition for knowing the past.

One of the most controversial figures in nineteenth-century American history, Thaddeus Stevens is best remembered for his role as congressional leader of the radical Republicans and as a chief architect of Reconstruction. Long painted by historians as a vindictive 'dictator of Congress,' out to punish the South at the behest of big business and his own ego, Stevens receives a more balanced treatment in Hans L. Trefousse's biography, which portrays him as an impassioned orator and a leader in the struggle against slavery. Trefousse traces Stevens's career through its major phases: from his days in the Pennsylvania state legislature, when he antagonized Freemasons, slaveholders, and Jacksonian Democrats, to his political involvement during Reconstruction, when he helped author the Fourteenth Amendment and spurred on the passage of the Reconstruction Acts and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Throughout, Trefousse explores the motivations for Stevens's lifelong commitment to racial equality, thus furnishing a fuller portrait of the man whose fervent opposition to slavery helped move his more moderate congressional colleagues toward the implementation of egalitarian policies.

Ambrose Burnside, the Union general, was a major player on the Civil War stage from the first clash at Bull Run until the final summer of the war. He led a corps or army during most of this time and played important roles in various theaters of the war. But until now, he has been remembered mostly for his distinctive side-whiskers that gave us the term "e;sideburns"e; and as an incompetent leader who threw away thousands of lives in the bloody battle of Fredericksburg.In a biography focusing on the Civil War years, William Marvel reveals a more capable Burnside who managed to acquit himself creditably as a man and a soldier. Along the Carolina coast in 1862, Burnside won victories that catapulted him to fame. In that same year, he commanded a corps at Antietam and the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg. In East Tennessee in the summer and fall of 1863, he captured Knoxville, thereby fulfilling one of Lincoln's fondest dreams. Back in Virginia during the spring and summer of 1864, he once again led a corps at the battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg. But after the fiasco of the Crater he was denied another assignment, and he resigned from the army the day that Lincoln was assassinated.Marvel challenges the traditional evaluation of Burnside as a nice man who failed badly as a general. Marvel's extensive research indicates that Burnside was often the scapegoat of his superiors and his junior officers and that William B. Franklin deserves a large share of the blame for the Federal defeat at Fredericksburg. He suggests that Burnside's Tennessee campaign of 1863 contained much praiseworthy effort and shows during the Overland campaign from the Wilderness to Petersburg, and at the battle of the Crater, Burnside consistently suffered slights from junior officers who were confident that they could get away with almost any slur against "e;Old Burn."e; Although Burnside's performance included an occasional lapse, Marvel argues that he deserved far better treatment than he has received from his peers and subsequently from historians.

Was Robert E. Lee a gifted soldier whose only weaknesses lay in the depth of his loyalty to his troops, affection for his lieutenants, and dedication to the cause of the Confederacy? Or was he an ineffective leader and poor tactician whose reputation was drastically inflated by early biographers and Lost Cause apologists? These divergent characterizations represent the poles between which scholarly and popular opinion on Lee has swung over time. Now, in eight essays, Gary Gallagher offers his own refined thinking on Lee, exploring the relationship between Lee's operations and Confederate morale, the quality of his generalship, and the question of how best to handle his legacy in light of the many distortions that grew out of Lost Cause historiography.Using a host of contemporary sources, Gallagher demonstrates the remarkable faith that soldiers and citizens maintained in Lee's leadership even after his army's fortunes had begun to erode. Gallagher also engages aspects of the Lee myth with an eye toward how admirers have insisted that their hero's faults as a general represented exaggerations of his personal virtues. Finally, Gallagher considers whether it is useful--or desirable--to separate legitimate Lost Cause arguments from the transparently false ones relating to slavery and secession.

Historians have traditionally drawn distinctions between Ulysses S. Grant's military and political careers. In Let Us Have Peace, Brooks Simpson questions such distinctions and offers a new understanding of this often enigmatic leader. He argues that during the 1860s Grant was both soldier and politician, for military and civil policy were inevitably intertwined during the Civil War and Reconstruction era. According to Simpson, Grant instinctively understood that war was 'politics by other means.' Moreover, he realized that civil wars presented special challenges: reconciliation, not conquest, was the Union's ultimate goal. And in peace, Grant sought to secure what had been won in war, stepping in to assume a more active role in policymaking when the intransigence of white Southerners and the obstructionist behavior of President Andrew Johnson threatened to spoil the fruits of Northern victory.