Books in the Civil War America series

In this innovative new study, Jonathan W. White explores what dreams meant to Civil War-era Americans and what their dreams reveal about their experiences during the war. He shows how Americans grappled with their fears, desires, and struggles while they slept, and how their dreams helped them make sense of the confusion, despair, and loneliness that engulfed them.

Between February 1864 and April 1865, 41,000 Union prisoners of war were taken to the stockade at Anderson Station, Georgia, where nearly 13,000 of them died. The author contends that virulent disease and severe shortages of vegetables, medical supplies, and other necessities combined to create a crisis beyond the captors' control.

New Orleans was the largest city in the Confederacy, protected in part by Fort Jackson, which was just 65 miles down the Mississippi River. On April 27, 1862, Confederate soldiers at Fort Jackson rose up in mutiny against their commanding officers. This book examines various sources to determine why the soldiers rebelled at such a decisive moment.

During the secession crisis of the winter of 1860-61, Southerners spoke out and wrote prolifically on the subject, publishing their views in pamphlets that circulated widely. In this valuable reference work, Jon Wakelyn has collected twenty representative examples of this long-overlooked literature.

In the spring of 1861, Richmond, Virginia, suddenly became the capital city, military headquarters, and industrial engine of a new nation fighting for its existence. In Rebel Richmond, Stephen Ash vividly evokes life in Richmond as war consumed the Confederate capital.

Operating in the vast and varied trans-Appalachian west, the Army of Tennessee was crucially important to the military fate of the Confederacy. But it won few major battles and many regard its inability to halt steady Union advances as a matter of failed leadership. Military historian Larry Daniel here offers a far richer interpretation.

Tells the story of how Americans attempted to define what it meant to be a citizen of the United States, at a moment of fracture in the republic's history. As Erik Mathisen demonstrates, prior to the Civil War, American national citizenship amounted to little more than a vague bundle of rights. But during the conflict, citizenship was transformed.

In this engaging and nuanced political history of Northern communities in the Civil War era, Adam I.P. Smith offers a new interpretation of the familiar story of the path to war and ultimate victory. Smith looks beyond the political divisions between abolitionist Republicans and Copperhead Democrats to consider the everyday conservatism that characterized the majority of Northern voters.

This personal account of the American Civil War by General Edward Porter Alexander, provides an assessment of people and events. Alexander was involved in nearly all of the great battles of the East and had frequent contact with the high command of the Army of Northern Virginia.

During the winter of 1864, more than 3,000 Federal prisoners of war escaped from prison camps into South and North Carolina. In this look at Union soldiers' flight for freedom in the last months of the Civil War, Lorien Foote reveals connections between the collapse of the Confederate prison system, the large-scale escape of Union soldiers, and the unravelling of the Confederate States of America.

American Civil Wars takes readers beyond the battlefields and sectional divides of the U.S. Civil War to view the conflict from outside the national arena of the United States. Contributors position the American conflict squarely in the context of a wider transnational crisis across the Atlantic world, marked by a multitude of civil wars, European invasions and occupations, revolutionary independence movements, and slave uprisings?all taking place in the tumultuous decade of the 1860s. The multiple conflicts described in these essays illustrate how the United States' sectional strife was caught up in a larger, complex struggle in which nations and empires on both sides of the Atlantic vied for the control of the future. These struggles were all part of a vast web, connecting not just Washington and Richmond but also Mexico City, Havana, Santo Domingo, and Rio de Janeiro and--on the other side of the Atlantic--London, Paris, Madrid, and Rome. This volume breaks new ground by charting a hemispheric upheaval and expanding Civil War scholarship into the realms of transnational and imperial history. American Civil Wars creates new connections between the uprisings and civil wars in and outside of American borders and places the United States within a global context of other nations.Contributors:Matt D. Childs, University of South CarolinaAnne Eller, Yale UniversityRichard Huzzey, University of LiverpoolHoward Jones, University of AlabamaPatrick J. Kelly, University of Texas at San AntonioRafael de Bivar Marquese, University of Sao PauloErika Pani, College of MexicoHilda Sabato, University of Buenos AiresSteve Sainlaude, University of Paris IV SorbonneChristopher Schmidt-Nowara, Tufts UniversityJay Sexton, University of Oxford

Examining the breadth of Northern popular culture, J. Matthew Gallman offers a dramatic reconsideration of how the Union's civilians understood the meaning of duty and citizenship in wartime. Gallman shows how thousands of authors, artists, and readers together created a new set of rules for navigating life in a nation at war.

During the US Civil War, Americans confronted profound moral problems about how to fight in the conflict. In this innovative book, D.H. Dilbeck reveals how the Union sought to wage a just war against the Confederacy. He shows that northerners fought according to a distinct "moral vision of war", an array of ideas about the nature of a truly just and humane military effort.

In this rich study of Union governors and their role in the US Civil War, Stephen D. Engle examines how these politicians were pivotal in securing victory. While providing detailed and engaging portraits of these men, their state-level actions, and their collective cooperation, Engle brings into new focus the era's complex political history.

In this illuminating study, Steven E. Nash chronicles the history of Reconstruction as it unfolded in the mountains of western North Carolina. Nash presents a complex story of the region's grappling with the war's aftermath, examining the persistent wartime loyalties that informed bitter power struggles between factions of white mountaineers determined to rule.

Draws on original documents, diaries, and letters composed as the US Civil War unfolded to produce a clear and credible portrait of everyday life in Appomattox, as well as examining the galvanizing events of April 1865. The also scrutinizes Appomattox the national symbol, exposing and explaining some of the cherished myths surrounding the surrender there.

Why did many Irish Americans, who did not have a direct connection to slavery, choose to fight for the Confederacy? This perplexing question is at the heart of Gleeson's comprehensive analysis of the Irish in the Confederate States of America.