I couldn’t stop reading it! Bravo!” —Ken Burns, Emmy Award-winning producer and director of The Civil War

In These Rugged Days: Alabama in the Civil War, John S. Sledge offers a riveting and readable account of Alabama’s Civil War saga. Focused on the conflict’s turning points within the state’s borders, Sledge recounts residents’ experiences from secession’s early days to its tumultuous collapse, when 75,000 blue-coated soldiers were on the move statewide. Sledge brings these tumultuous years to life in an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, including official records, diaries, newspapers, memoirs, correspondence, sketches, and photographs. He also highlights such colorful personalities as John Pelham, the youthful Jacksonville artillerist who was shipped home in an iron casket with a glass faceplate; Gus Askew, a nine-year-old Barbour County slave who vividly recalled the day the Yankees marched in; Augusta Jane Evans, the Mobile novelist who was given a gold pen by a daring blockade runner; and Emma Sansom, a plucky Gadsden teenager who acted as a scout and guide to Nathan Bedford Forrest.

These Rugged Days is an enthralling tale of action, courage, pride, and tragedy. The Civil War has left indelible marks on Alabama’s land, culture, economy, and people, and Sledge offers a refreshing take on the state's role in the conflict. His narrative is a dramatic account that will be enjoyed by lay readers as well as students and scholars of Alabama and the Civil War. 

John S. Sledge is a senior architectural historian for the Mobile Historic Development Commission and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He is the author of Cities of Silence: A Guide to Mobile’s Historic Cemeteries and The Mobile River. He and his wife, Lynn, live in Fairhope, Alabama.

“A fresh look at the Civil War in Alabama that thoroughly covers the topic in a way that only John Sledge can. Anyone who grew up in the South, who has an interest in the Civil War, will immediately relate.”
—Robert Bradley, former chief curator at the Alabama Department of Archives and History

“If all politics is local then history is more so, and that holds true for the story John Sledge has told here. It is personal and intimate (and unusually moving), as well as enormously edifying, well written, and revealing; I couldn’t stop reading it! Bravo!” —Ken Burns, Emmy Award-winning producer and director of The Civil War

"The audience for which Sledge is writing—Southern-born general readers, buffs, and hobbyists, among others—in search of a good yarn or two will enjoy These Rugged Days immensely. It is truly the work of one of Alabama's master writers and will be savored." —Alabama Review

"Sledge has effectively balanced the uniqueness of the conflict in Alabama with the broader context of the rest of the war . . .  it consolidates one state’s wartime experience into a single, accessible volume, and is thus a useful contribution to the Civil War literature." —Journal of Military History

"These Rugged Days is eloquent. This is narrative history at its best. One normally ignores blurbs, but on the back cover, filmmaker Ken Burns says of These Rugged Days, 'I couldn’t stop reading it.'I couldn’t either." —Don Noble, The Tuscaloosa News

“As a writer, Sledge possesses an appealing gift for evocative prose, his picturesque writing style well suited to drawing in both casual readers and more serious students of Civil War Alabama. His narrative generally follows the top commanders, but it also generously incorporates pithy excerpts from the diaries and letters of common soldiers and civilians from all parts of the state." —Civil War Books and Authors

"Through [Sledge's] appreciation of the past of his home state and his smooth, engrossing prose, we finally have a riveting account of Alabama's Civil War that enlivens obscure figures we should better know, animates forgotten landscapes where war was waged with which we should be more familiar, and brings home the visceral emotion and profound spectacle of combat on Alabama soil and waters through which we should have understood these events all along." —The Historians Manifesto