Emily's moving letters to her husband, startling in their immediacy and detail, chronicle such difficulties as a desperate lack of food and clothing for her family, the frustration of depending on others in the community, and her growing terror at facing childbirth without her husband, at the mercy of a doctor with questionable skills. Major Moxley's letters to his wife reveal a decidedly unromantic side of the war, describing his frequent encounters with starvation, disease, and bloody slaughter.
When his captain was killed during the Battle of Perryville, John Calvin Hartzell was made commander of Company H, 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He led his men during the Battle of Chickamauga, the siege of Chattanooga, and the Battle of Missionary Ridge. Edited and introduced by Charles Switzer, Ohio Volunteer: The Childhood and Civil War Memoirs of Captain John Calvin Hartzell, OVI documents military strategy, the life of the common soldier, the intense excitement and terror of battle, and the wretchedness of the wounded.
Hartzell’s family implored him to set down his life story, including his experiences in the Civil War from 1862 to 1866. Hartzell did so diligently, taking more than two years to complete his manuscript. The memoir reveals a remarkable memory for vivid details, the ability to see larger and more philosophical perspectives, and a humorous outlook that helped him bear the unbearable.
He also depicted the changing rural economy, the assimilation of the Pennsylvania Dutch, and the transformations wrought by coal mining and the iron industry. Hartzell felt individualism was threatened by the Industrial Revolution and the cruelties of the war. He found his faith in humanity affirmed—and the dramatic tension in his memoir resolved—when 136,000 Union soldiers reenlisted and assured victory for the North. The common soldier, he wrote, was “loyal to the core.”
In 1860, Ohio was among the most influential states in the nation. As the third-most-populous state and the largest in the middle west, it embraced those elements that were in concert-but also at odds-in American society during the Civil War era. Ohio’s War uses documents from that vibrant and tumultuous time to reveal how Ohio’s soldiers and civilians experienced the Civil War. It examines Ohio’s role in the sectional crises of the 1850s, its contribution to the Union war effort, and the war’s impact on the state itself. In doing so, it provides insights into the war’s meaning for northern society.
Ohio’s War introduces some of those soldiers who left their farms, shops, and forges to fight for the Union. It documents the stories of Ohio’s women, who sustained households, organized relief efforts, and supported political candidates. It conveys the struggles and successes of free blacks and former slaves who claimed freedom in Ohio and the distinct wartime experiences of its immigrants. It also includes the voices of Ohioans who differed over emancipation, freedom of speech, the writ of habeas corpus, the draft, and the war’s legacy for American society.
From Ohio’s large cities to its farms and hamlets, as the documents in this volume show, the war changed minds and altered lives but left some beliefs and values untouched. Ohio’s War is a documentary history not only of the people of one state, but also of a region and a nation during the pivotal epoch of American history.
The story of Old Abe, the bald eagle that became the mascot of the Eighth Regiment of Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. It is also the story of the men among whom Old Abe lived: the farmers, loggers, clerks, and immigrants who flocked to the colors in 1861.
Reissued in 2012 with a new cover.
A new scholarly edition of an Ohio boy soldier’s revealing post-Civil War memoir.
This annotated edition of Holliday’s recollections—known primarily among historians of the American West—re-contextualizes his memoir to include his boyhood in southern Ohio and the largely untold story of the hundreds of Buckeyes who crossed the Ohio River to serve their country in Virginia (later West Virginia) regiments, ultimately traveling across Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming to safeguard mail and stage routes along the celebrated Oregon Trail during a pivotal time in American history.
Glenn Longacre’s extensive research in federal, state, and local archives, manuscript collections, and period newspapers complements his correspondence with the living descendants of Holliday and other soldiers. His research integrates this story deservedly as part of Appalachian history before, during, and after the Civil War. From this perspective it addresses an entirely new audience of Appalachian studies scholars, Civil War and frontier history enthusiasts, students, and general readers.
From the ratification of the Constitution to the outbreak of the Civil War, few persons played a greater role in American history than Daniel Webster. He was a spokesman of New England commercial interests in the War of 1812, approving the threat of state interposition by the Hartford Convention; later an apostle of the industrial system and advocate of protective tariffs; a brilliant expositor of the Constitution as an instrument for national economic growth and strong central government; the architect of a foreign policy that brought permanent peace between the United States and England; the Great Compromiser who, as much as any other public man, tried to reconcile the clashing interests of North and South.
Despite his importance Webster has never been the subject of a full-scale, scholarly biography. Maurice G. Baxter’s One and Inseparable traces the interrelated evolution of the public career and the private life of this imposing and controversial Yankee. He portrays Webster as an unswerving patriot, an advocate of nationality, and a champion of peace and the Union—but also reveals him as a self-promoting politician who varied his positions to suit the interests of his constituents and was sometimes insensitive to the great moral issues of his day. This devoted family man, enterprising if not altogether successful farmer, and genial companion could he egotistical, immoderate in his drinking habits, and careless about personal finances. Reading Baxter’s lucid, moving biography it is possible to understand why Ralph Waldo Emerson so detested Daniel Webster but also called him “the completest man” produced by America, adding: “Nature had not in our days, or not since Napoleon, cut out such a masterpiece.”
In 1997, John Stanchak, an editor at Cowles Enthusiast Media (now part of Primedia), realized his vision of “a publication that contained the best, most up-to-date scholarship on the [Civil] war, but was edited with the amateur historian in mind,” with the publication of Columbiad: A Quarterly Review of the War between the States. In the four years the journal was published, it strived to lessen the rift between the scholarly world of professional historians and the “popular” history with which the general reader is more familiar. Now, a selection of the essays that best represent the successful balance between “serious scholarship” and a narrative reading style preferred by the educated layman has been collected in The Ongoing Civil War.
John C. Nicolay, who had known Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois, served as chief White House secretary from 1861 to 1865. Trained as a journalist, Nicolay had hoped to write a campaign biography of Lincoln in 1860, a desire that was thwarted when an obscure young writer named William Dean Howells got the job. Years later, however, Nicolay fulfilled his ambition; with John Hay, he spent the years from 1872 to 1890 writing a monumental ten-volume biography of Lincoln.
In preparation for this task, Nicolay interviewed men who had known Lincoln both during his years in Springfield and later when he became the president of the United States. "When it came time to write their massive biography, however," Burlingame notes, "he and Hay made sparing use of the interviews" because they had become "skeptical about human memory." Nicolay and Hay also feared that Robert Todd Lincoln might censor material that reflected "poorly on Lincoln or his wife."
Nicolay had interviewed such Springfield friends as Lincoln’s first two law partners, John Todd Stuart and Stephen T. Logan. At the Illinois capital in June and July 1875, he talked to a number of others including Orville H. Browning, U.S. senator and Lincoln’s close friend and adviser for over thirty-five years, and Ozias M. Hatch, Lincoln’s political ally and Springfield neighbor. Four years later he returned briefly and spoke with John W. Bunn, a young political "insider" from Springfield at the time Lincoln was elected president, and once again with Hatch.
Browning shed new light on Lincoln’s courtship and marriage, telling Nicolay that Lincoln often told him "that he was constantly under great apprehension lest his wife should do something which would bring him into disgrace" while in the White House. During their research, Nicolay and Hay also learned of Lincoln’s despondency and erratic behavior following his rejection by Matilda Edwards, and they were subsequently criticized by friends for suppressing the information. Burlingame argues that this open discussion of Lincoln’s depression of January 1841 is "perhaps the most startling new information in the Springfield interviews."
Briefer and more narrowly focused than the Springfield interviews, the Washington interviews deal with the formation of Lincoln’s cabinet, his relations with Congress, his behavior during the war, his humor, and his grief. In a reminiscence by Robert Todd Lincoln, for example, we learn of Lincoln’s despair at General Lee's escape after the Battle of Gettysburg: "I went into my father’s office ... and found him in [much] distress, his head leaning upon the desk in front of him, and when he raised his head there were evidences of tears upon his face. Upon my asking the cause of his distress he told me that he had just received the information that Gen. Lee had succeeded in escaping across the Potomac river. . ."
To supplement these interviews, Burlingame has included Nicolay’s unpublished essays on Lincoln during the 1860 campaign and on Lincoln’s journey from Springfield to Washington in 1861, essay’s based on firsthand testimony.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press