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Walt Whitman's Reconstruction
Poetry and Publishing between Memory and History
Martin T. Buinicki
University of Iowa Press, 2012

 For Walt Whitman, living and working in Washington, D.C., after the Civil War, Reconstruction meant not only navigating these tumultuous years alongside his fellow citizens but also coming to terms with his own memories of the war. Just as the work of national reconstruction would continue long past its official end in 1877, Whitman’s own reconstruction would continue throughout the remainder of his life as he worked to revise his poetic project—and his public image—to incorporate the disasters that had befallen the Union. In this innovative and insightful analysis of the considerable poetic and personal reimagining that is the hallmark of these postwar years, Martin Buinicki reveals the ways that Whitman reconstructed and read the war.

 
The Reconstruction years would see Whitman transformed from newspaper editor and staff journalist to celebrity contributor and nationally recognized public lecturer, a transformation driven as much by material developments in the nation as by his own professional and poetic ambitions while he expanded and cemented his place in the American literary landscape. Buinicki places Whitman’s postwar periodical publications and business interests in context, closely examining his “By the Roadside” cluster as well as MemorandaDuring the War and Specimen Days as part of his larger project of personal and artistic reintegration. He traces Whitman’s shifting views of Ulysses S. Grant as yet another way to understand the poet’s postwar life and profession and reveals the emergence of Whitman the public historian at the end of Reconstruction.
 
Whitman’s personal reconstruction was political, poetic, and public, and his prose writings, like his poetry, formed a major part of the postwar figure that he presented to the nation. Looking at the poet’s efforts to absorb the war into his own reconstruction narrative, Martin Buinicki provides striking new insights into the evolution of Whitman’s views and writings.
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Wanted—Correspondence
Women’s Letters to a Union Soldier
Nancy L. Rhoades
Ohio University Press, 2009

A unique collection of more than 150 letters written to an Ohio serviceman during the American Civil War that offers glimpses of women’s lives as they waited, worked, and wrote from the Ohio home front. The letters reveal fascinating details of the lives of mostly young, single women—friends, acquaintances, love interests, and strangers who responded to one Union soldier’s advertisement for correspondents. Almost all of the women who responded to Lieutenant Edwin Lewis Lybarger’s lonely-hearts newspaper advertisement lived in Ohio and supported the Union. Lybarger carried the collection of letters throughout three years of military service, preserved them through his life, and left them to be discovered in an attic trunk more than a century after Lee’s surrender.

Women’s letter writing functioned as a form of “war work” that bolstered the spirits of enlisted men and “kinship work” that helped forge romantic relationships and sustain community bonds across the miles. While men’s letters and diaries abound in Civil War history, less readily available are comprehensive collections of letters from middle-class and rural women that survived the weathering of marches, camp life, and battles to emerge unscathed from men’s knapsacks at war’s end.

The collection is accompanied by a detailed editorial introduction that highlights significant themes in the letters. Together, they contribute to the still-unfolding historical knowledge concerning Northern women’s lives and experiences during this significant period in American history.

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War In Kentucky
Shiloh Perryville
James Lee Mcdonough
University of Tennessee Press, 1996
War in Kentucky
From Shiloh to Perryville
James Lee McDonough

A compelling new volume from the author of Shiloh—In Hell before Night and Chattanooga—A Death Grip on the Confederacy, this book explores the strategic importance of Kentucky for both sides in the Civil War and recounts the Confederacy's bold attempt to capture the Bluegrass State.  In a narrative rich with quotations from the diaries, letters, and reminiscences of participants, James Lee McDonough brings to vigorous life an episode whose full significance has previously eluded students of the war.
In February of 1862, the fall of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson near the Tennessee-Kentucky border forced a Confederate retreat into northern Alabama. After the Southern forces failed that spring at Shiloh to throw back the Federal advance, the controversial General Braxton Bragg, newly promoted by Jefferson Davis, launched a countermovement that would sweep eastward to Chattanooga and then northwest through Middle Tennessee. Capturing Kentucky became the ultimate goal, which, if achieved, would lend the war a different complexion indeed.
Giving equal attention to the strategies of both sides, McDonough describes the ill-fated Union effort to capture Chattanooga with an advance through Alabama, the Confederate march across Tennessee, and the subsequent two-pronged invasion of Kentucky.  He vividly recounts the fighting at Richmond, Munfordville, and Perryville, where the Confederate dream of controlling Kentucky finally ended.
The first book-length study of this key campaign in the Western Theater, War in Kentucky not only demonstrates the extent of its importance but supports the case that 1862 should be considered the decisive year of the war.
The author: James Lee McDonough, a native of Tennessee, is professor of history at Auburn University. Among his other books are Stones River—Bloody Winter in Tennessee and Five Tragic Hours: The Battle of Franklin, which he co-wrote with Thomas L. Connelly.

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War Like the Thunderbolt
The Battle and Burning of Atlanta
Russell S. Bonds
Westholme Publishing, 2009

A masterpiece of prose and research, the definitive history of the struggle for Atlanta during the Civil War, an episode immortalized by the novel Gone with the Wind
Called “the greatest event of the Civil War” by New York diarist George Templeton Strong, the epic struggle for the city of Atlanta in the bloody summer of 1864 was a pivotal moment in American history. Union commander William Tecumseh Sherman’s relentless fight for the city secured the reelection of Abraham Lincoln, sealed the fate of the Southern Confederacy, and set a precedent for military campaigns that endures today. Its depiction in the novel and motion picture Gone with the Wind established the fight for Atlanta as an iconic episode in our nation’s most terrible war. In War Like the Thunderbolt: The Battle and Burning of Atlanta, award-winning author Russell S. Bonds takes the reader behind the lines and across the smoky battlefields of Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Ezra Church, and Jonesboro, and into the lives of fascinating characters, both the famous and the forgotten, including the fiery and brilliant Sherman; General John Bell Hood, the Confederacy’s last hope to defend Atlanta; Benjamin Harrison, the diminutive young Indiana colonel who would rise to become President of the United States; Patrick Cleburne, the Irishmanturned- Southern officer; and ten-year-old diarist Carrie Berry, who bravely withstood and bore witness to the fall of the city. Here also is the dramatic story of the ordeal of Atlanta itself—the five-week artillery bombardment, the expulsion of its civilian population, and the infamous fire that followed. Based on new research in diaries, newspapers, previously unpublished letters, and other archival sources, War Like the Thunderbolt is a combination of captivating narrative and insightful military analysis—a stirring account of the battle and burning of the “Gate City of the South.”

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A War of Words
The Rhetorical Leadership of Jefferson Davis
R. Jarrod Atchison
University of Alabama Press, 2017
A rhetorical analysis of Jefferson Davis’s public discourse

Numerous biographies of Jefferson Davis have been penned; however, until now, there had been no substantive analysis of his public discourse as president of the Confederacy. R. Jarrod Atchison’s A War of Words uses concepts from rhetorical theory and public address to help answer a question that has intrigued scholars from a variety of disciplines since the collapse of the Confederacy: what role, if any, did Davis play in the collapse of Confederate nationalism?
 
Most discussions of Davis and nationalism focus on the military outcomes of his controversial wartime decisions. A War of Words focuses less on military outcomes and argues instead that, in the context of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis’s rhetorical leadership should have been responsible for articulating a vision for the nation—including the core tenets of its identity, the values the nation should hold dear, the principles it should never compromise, and the goals it should set for its future. Undoubtedly, Davis possessed the skills necessary to make a persuasive public argument. It is precisely because Davis’s oratory skills were so powerful that there is room to judge how he used them. In short, being a great orator is not synonymous with successful rhetorical leadership.
 
Atchison posits that Davis’s initial successes constrained his rhetorical options later in the war. A War of Words concludes that, in the end, Davis’s rhetorical leadership was a failure because he was unable to articulate a coherent Confederate identity in light of the sacrifices endured by the populace in order to sustain the war effort.
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A War State All Over
Alabama Politics and the Confederate Cause
Ben H. Severance
University of Alabama Press, 2020
An in-depth political study of Alabama’s government during the Civil War
 
Alabama’s military forces were fierce and dedicated combatants for the Confederate cause.In his study of Alabama during the Civil War, Ben H. Severance argues that Alabama’s electoral and political attitudes were, in their own way, just as unified in their support for the cause of southern independence. To be sure, the civilian populace often expressed unease about the conflict, as did a good many of Alabama’s legislators, but the majority of government officials and military personnel displayed pronounced Confederate loyalty and a consistent willingness to accept a total war approach in pursuit of their new nation’s aims. As Severance puts it, Alabama was a “war state all over.”
 
In A War State All Over: Alabama Politics and the Confederate Cause, Severance examines the state’s political leadership at multiple levels of governance—congressional, gubernatorial, and legislative—and orients much of his analysis around the state elections of 1863. Coming at the war’s midpoint, these elections provide an invaluable gauge of popular support for Alabama’s role in the Civil War, particularly at a time when the military situation for Confederate forces was looking bleak. The results do not necessarily reflect a society that was unreservedly prowar, but they clearly establish a polity that was committed to an unconditional Confederate victory, in spite of the probable costs.
 
Severance’s innovative work focuses on the martial character of Alabama’s polity while simultaneously acknowledging the widespread angst of Alabama’s larger culture and society. In doing so, it puts a human face on the election returns by providing detailed character sketches of the principal candidates that illuminate both their outlook on the war and their role in shaping policy.
 
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War Stories
Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North
Frances M. Clarke
University of Chicago Press, 2011

The American Civil War is often seen as the first modern war, not least because of its immense suffering. Yet unlike later conflicts, it did not produce an outpouring of disillusionment or cynicism, as most people continued to portray the war in highly sentimental and patriotic terms. While scholars typically dismiss this everyday writing as simplistic or naïve, Frances M. Clarke argues that we need to reconsider the letters, diaries, songs, and journalism penned by Union soldiers and their caregivers to fully understand the war’s impact and meaning.

In War Stories, Clarke revisits the most common stories that average Northerners told in hopes of redeeming their suffering and loss—stories that enabled people to make sense of their hardship, and to express their beliefs about religion, community, and personal character. From tales of Union soldiers who died heroically to stories of tireless volunteers who exemplified the Republic’s virtues, War Stories sheds new light on this transitional moment in the history of war, emotional culture, and American civic life.

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Wartime Washington
The Civil War Letters of Elizabeth Blair Lee
Edited by Virginia Jeans Laas
University of Illinois Press, 1991
Elizabeth Blair Lee was raised in Washington's political circles, and her husband, Samuel Phillips Lee, third cousin to Robert E. Lee, commanded the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron during the Civil War. When they married, Elizabeth promised to write every day they were apart. Of the hundreds of letters with which she kept her promise, Virginia Jeans Laas has edited a choice selection that illuminates the functioning of a nineteenth-century family and the Mrs. Lee's unique perspective on the political and military affairs of the nation's beleaguered capital.
 
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We Are in His Hands Whether We Live or Die
The Letters of Brevet Brigadier General Charles Henry Howard
David K. Thomson
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
     Many soldiers who served in the American Civil War found solace in their faith during the most trying times of the war. But few soldiers took such a providential view of life and the Civil War as Charles Henry Howard. Born in a small town in Maine, Howard came from a family with a distinguished history of soldiering: his grandfather was a Revolutionary War veteran and his brother, the older and more well-known Oliver Otis Howard, attended West Point and rose to command an army in the Civil War. Following in his brother’s footsteps, Charles Henry Howard graduated from Bowdoin College in 1859. Following graduation, Charles visited his older brother at West Point during the tumultuous election of 1860. While at West Point, Howard saw the tensions between Northern and Southern cadets escalate as he weighed his options for a military or theological career. The choice was made for him on April 12, 1861, with the firing on Fort Sumter.
     Responding to his brother’s plea for the sons of Maine to join the Union cause, Charles found himself a noncommissioned officer fighting in the disastrous Battle of First Bull Run. All told, Howard fought in several major battles of the Eastern Theater, including Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, and went on to participate in various military actions in the Western Theater including Sherman’s bloody Atlanta Campaign. He was wounded twice, first at the Battle of Fair Oaks and again at Fredericksburg. Yet, despite facing the worst horrors of war, Howard rarely wavered in his faith and rose steadily in rank throughout the conflict. By war’s end, he was a brevet brigadier general in command of the 128th U.S. Colored Troop Regiment.
     Howard’s letters cover a wide-ranging period, from 1852 to 1908. His concern for his family is typical of a Civil War soldier, but his exceptionally firm reliance on divine providence is what makes these letters an extraordinary window into the mind of a Civil War officer. Howard’s grounded faith was often tested by the viciousness of war, and as a result his letters are rife with stirring confessions and his emotional grappling with the harsh realities he faced. Howard’s letters expose the greater theological and metaphysical dilemmas of the war faced by so many on both sides.
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We Called Him Rabbi Abraham
Lincoln and American Jewry, a Documentary History
Gary Phillip Zola
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

Over the course of American history, Jews have held many American leaders in high esteem, but they maintain a unique emotional bond with Abraham Lincoln. From the time of his presidency to the present day, American Jews have persistently viewed Lincoln as one of their own, casting him as a Jewish sojourner and, in certain respects, a Jewish role model. This pioneering compendium— The first volume of annotated documents to focus on the history of Lincoln’s image, influence, and reputation among American Jews— considers how Lincoln acquired his exceptional status and how, over the past century and a half, this fascinating relationship has evolved.

Organized into twelve chronological and thematic chapters, these little-known primary source documents—many never before published and some translated into English for the first time—consist of newspaper clippings, journal articles, letters, poems, and sermons, and provide insight into a wide variety of issues relating to Lincoln’s Jewish connection. Topics include Lincoln’s early encounters with Central European Jewish immigrants living in the Old Northwest; Lincoln’s Jewish political allies; his encounters with Jews and the Jewish community as President; Lincoln’s response to the Jewish chaplain controversy; General U. S. Grant’s General Orders No. 11 expelling “Jews, as a class” from the Military Department of Tennessee; the question of amending the U.S. Constitution to legislate the country’s so-called Christian national character; and Jewish eulogies after Lincoln’s assassination. Other chapters consider the crisis of conscience that arose when President Andrew Johnson proclaimed a national day of mourning for Lincoln on the festival of Shavuot (the Feast of Weeks), a day when Jewish law enjoins Jews to rejoice and not to mourn; Lincoln’s Jewish detractors contrasted to his boosters; how American Jews have intentionally “Judaized” Lincoln ever since his death; the leading role that American Jews have played in in crafting Lincoln’s image and in preserving his memory for the American nation; American Jewish reflections on the question “What Would Lincoln Do?”; and how Lincoln, for America’s Jewish citizenry, became the avatar of America’s highest moral aspirations.

With thoughtful chapter introductions that provide readers with a context for the annotated documents that follow, this volume provides a fascinating chronicle of American Jewry’s unfolding historical encounter with the life and symbolic image of Abraham Lincoln, shedding light on how the cultural interchange between American ideals and Jewish traditions influences the dynamics of the American Jewish experience.

Finalist, 2014 National Jewish Book Award
Finalist, 2015 Ohioana Book Award


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Welcome the Hour of Conflict
William Cowan McClellan and the 9th Alabama
William Cowan McClellan, edited by John C. Carter
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Vivid and lively letters from a young Confederate in Lee’s Army

In the Spring of 1861, a 22-year-old Alabamian did what many of his friends and colleagues were doing—he joined the Confederate Army as a volunteer. The first of his family to enlist, William Cowan McClellan, who served as a private in the 9th Alabama Infantry regiment, wrote hundreds of letters throughout the war, often penning for friends who could not write home for themselves. In the letters collected in John C. Carter’s volume, this young soldier comments on his feelings toward his commanding officers, his attitude toward military discipline and camp life, his disdain for the western Confederate armies, and his hopes and fears for the future of the Confederacy.
 
McClellan’s letters also contain vivid descriptions of camp life, battles, marches, picket duty, and sickness and disease in the army. The correspondence between McClellan and his family dealt with separation due to war as well as with other wartime difficulties such as food shortages, invasion, and occupation. The letters also show the rise and fall of morale on both the home front and on the battlefield, and how they were closely intertwined.
 
Remarkable for their humor, literacy, and matter-of-fact banter, the letters reveal the attitude a common soldier in the Army of Northern Virginia had toward the day-to-day activity and progression of the war. John C. Carter includes helpful appendixes that list the letters chronologically and offer the regimental roster, casualty/enlistment totals, assignments, and McClellan’s personal military record.
 

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Well Satisfied with My Position
The Civil War Journal of Spencer Bonsall
Edited by Michael A. Flannery and Katherine H. Oomens
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
Well Satisfied with My Position offers a first-person account of army life during the Civil War’ s Peninsula Campaign and Battle of Fredericksburg. Spencer Bonsall, who joined the 81st Pennsylvania Infantry as a hospital steward, kept a journal from March 1862 until March 1863, when he abruptly ceased writing. Editors Michael A. Flannery and Katherine H. Oomens place his experiences in the context of the field of Civil War medicine and continue his story in an epilogue.

             Trained as a druggist when he was in his early twenties, Bonsall traveled the world, spent eight years on a tea plantation in India, and settled in Philadelphia, where he worked in the city surveyor’ s office. But in March 1862, when he was in his mid-forties, the lure of serving his country on the battlefield led Bonsall to join the 81st Pennsylvania Infantry as a hospital steward.

             Bonsall enjoyed his life with the Union army at first, comparing bivouacking in the woods to merely picnicking on a grand scale. “ We are about as jolly a set of old bachelors as can be found in Virginia,” Bonsall wrote. But his first taste of the aftermath of battle at Fair Oaks and the Seven Days’ Battles in Virginia changed his mind about the joys of soldiering— though he never lost his zeal for the Union cause.

             Bonsall details the camp life of a soldier from firsthand experience, outlines the engagements of the 81st, and traces the Battle of Fredericksburg and the Peninsula Campaign. He records facts not available elsewhere about camp conditions, attitudes toward Union generals and Confederate soldiers, and troop movements.

             From the end of June to late October 1862, Bonsall’ s illness kept him from writing in his journal. He picked up the record again in December 1862, just before the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in which the Union suffered a staggering 10,200 casualties and the 81st Pennsylvania lost more than half its men. He vividly describes the bloody aftermath. Bonsall’ s horse was shot out from underneath him at the battle of Gettysburg, injuring him seriously and ending his military career. Although he was listed as “ sick in hospital” on the regiment’ s muster rolls, he was labeled a deserter in the U.S. Army records. Indeed, after recovery from his injuries, Bonsall walked away from the army to resume life in Philadelphia with his wife and child.

Published for the first time, Bonsall’ s journal offers an unusually personal glimpse into the circumstances and motives of a man physically ruined by the war. Seventeen illustrations, including some drawn by Bonsall himself, help bring this narrative to life.

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When the Wolf Came
The Civil War and the Indian Territory
Mary Jane Warde
University of Arkansas Press, 2013
Winner of the 2014 Oklahoma Book Award for nonfiction

Winner of the 2014 Pate Award from the Fort Worth Civil War Round Table.



When the peoples of the Indian Territory found themselves in the midst of the American Civil War, squeezed between Union Kansas and Confederate Texas and Arkansas, they had no way to escape a conflict not of their choosing--and no alternative but to suffer its consequences. When the Wolf Came explores how the war in the Indian Territory involved almost every resident, killed many civilians as well as soldiers, left the country stripped and devastated, and cost Indian nations millions of acres of land. Using a solid foundation of both published and unpublished sources, including the records of Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek nations, Mary Jane Warde details how the coming of the war set off a wave of migration into neighboring Kansas, the Red River Valley, and Texas. She describes how Indian Territory troops in Unionist regiments or as Confederate allies battled enemies--some from their own nations--in the territory and in neighboring Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. And she shows how post-war land cessions forced by the federal government on Indian nations formerly allied with the Confederacy allowed the removal of still more tribes to the Indian Territory, leaving millions of acres open for homesteads, railroads, and development in at least ten states. Enhanced by maps and photographs from the Oklahoma Historical Society's photographic archives, When the Wolf Came will be welcomed by both general readers and scholars interested in the signal public events that marked that tumultuous era and the consequences for the territory's tens of thousands of native peoples.
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When This Evil War is Over
The Correspondence of the Francis Family
James P. Pate
University of Alabama Press, 2006
A collection of Civil War correspondence exchanged between members of the James Carrington Francis family of Jacksonville, Calhoun County, Alabama

Six of the seven Francis brothers served in the Confederate army, as did their uncle, four servants, and other kinsmen, and all twelve members of the immediate family of Dr. James Carrington Francis and Amy Ingram Francis—as well as several members of their extended family—are represented in this volume. While the letters refer to the war and the brothers’ military service, they also shed light on this family’s struggle to survive the profound cultural, economic, and political upheaval that ensued.
 
In addition to the correspondence itself, the editor includes a thoroughly researched  introduction that provides an overview of the Francis family history before, during, and after the war, which sheds light on the historical context in which the letters were written. Also included are endnotes that document and elucidate figures and events that receive passing reference in the letters, a genealogical chart of the Francis family, and photographs of each family member.  The editor includes maps of the Virginia, Georgia, and Carolinas settings, which allow the reader to follow the progress of Francis family members during the Civil War campaigns in which they participated.
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Widows by the Thousand
The Civil War Correspondence of Theophilus and Harriet Perry, 1862–1864
M. Jane Johansson
University of Arkansas Press, 2000
This collection of letters written between Theophilus and Harriet Perry during the Civil War provides an intimate, firsthand account of the effect of the war on one young couple. Perry was an officer with the 28th Texas Cavalry, a unit that campaigned in Arkansas and Louisiana as part of the division known as “Walker’s Greyhounds.” His letters describe his service in a highly literate style that is unusual for Confederate accounts. He documents a number of important events, including his experiences as a detached officer in Arkansas in the winter of 1862–63, the attempt to relieve the siege of Vicksburg, mutiny in his regiment, and the Red River campaign, just before he was killed in the battle of Pleasant Hill. Harriet’s writings allow the reader to witness the everyday life of an upper-class woman enduring home front deprivations, facing the hardships and fears of childbearing and childrearing alone, and coping with other challenges resulting from her husband’s absence.
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Wilderness
A Tale Of The Civil War
Robert Penn Warren
University of Tennessee Press, 2001
“A moving and disturbing work—one which goes beyond events, to brood upon their meanings.”—Samuel Hynes, New York Times Book Review

In the summer of 1863, Adam Rosenzweig leaves a Bavarian ghetto and sails for the United States to fight for the North in the Civil War. Fired by a revolutionary idealism inherited from his father, he hopes to aid a cause that he believes to be as simple as he knows it to be just.

Over the course of his journey, Adam becomes witness to a world whose complexity does not readily conform to his ideals of liberty. When his twisted foot attracts unwanted attention on his voyage to America, he is threatened with return to Europe. He jumps ship in New York, only to be caught up in the violence and horror of the anti-draft riots. Eventually he reaches the Union Army, serving not as a soldier but as a civilian provisioner’s assistant. Adam’s encounters with others—among them a wealthy benefactor, a former slave, an exiled Southerner, a bushwacker and his wife—further challenge the absolutism that informs his view of the world and of his place in it.

First published in 1961, Wilderness remains a profoundly provocative meditation on the significance of the Civil War and the varieties of human experience. This new edition of the novel includes an insightful introductory essay by James H. Justus, Distringuished Professor Emeritus at Indiana University and author of The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren.

The Author: Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989)was born in Kentucky and studied at Vanderbilt and Oxford Universities. As a novelist, teacher, poet, and critic, he became one of America’s most celebrated men of letters and the only writer to receive Pulitzer Prizes for both poetry and fiction. In addition to Wilderness, his novels included All the King’s Men, World Enough and Time, and Band of Angels.
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A Wisconsin Boy in Dixie
Civil War Letters of James K. Newton
Selected and Edited by Stephen E. Ambrose
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995
“Unlike many of his fellows, [James Newton] was knowledgeable, intuitive, and literate; like many of his fellows he was cast into the role of soldier at only eighteen years of age. He was polished enough to write drumhead and firelight letters of fine literary style. It did not take long for this farm boy turned private to discover the grand design of the conflict in which he was engaged, something which many of the officers leading the armies never did discover.”—Victor Hicken, Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society
    “When I wrote to you last I was at Madison with no prospect of leaving very soon, but I got away sooner than I expected to.” So wrote James Newton upon leaving Camp Randall for Vicksburg in 1863 with the Fourteenth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. Newton, who had been a rural schoolteacher before he joined the Union army in 1861, wrote to his parents of his experiences at Shiloh, Corinth, Vicksburg, on the Red River, in Missouri, at Nashville, at Mobile, and as a prisoner of war. His letters, selected and edited by noted historian Stephen E. Ambrose, reveal Newton as a young man who matured in the war, rising in rank from private to lieutenant.
                A Wisconsin Boy in Dixie reveals Newton as a young man who grew to maturity through his Civil War experience, rising in rank from private to lieutenant. Writing soberly about the less attractive aspects of army life, Newton's comments on fraternizing with the Rebs, on officers, and on discipline are touched with a sense of humor—"a soldier's best friend," he claimed. He also became sensitive to the importance of political choices. After giving Lincoln the first vote he had ever cast, Newton wrote: "In doing so I felt that I was doing my country as much service as I have ever done on the field of battle."
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Wisconsin in the Civil War
The Home Front and the Battle Front, 1861-1865
Frank Klement
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1997
The final book by Marquette University historian Frank L. Klement (1905-1994), this is a vivid chronological narrative of Wisconsin's role in the pivotal event in American history. In this volume, Klement greatly expanded his 1962 booklet on this topic, adding new material on each of Wisconsin's fifty-three infantry regiments, political and constitutional issues, soldiers voting, women and the war, and Wisconsin's black soldiers.
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Wisconsin Women in the War between the States
Ethel Hurn
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2013

“There was too much to be done by the most of us, to keep the wolf from the door, to give way to our feelings, and it was better so. It gave us the feeling that we, too, although not enlisted in the ranks South, had a battle to fight at home on more than one line, and the worst of all was to keep up hope against hope, that our loved ones would be spared to come back to us…”

As the fiftieth anniversary of the American Civil War neared, the Wisconsin History Commission was established to develop and publish a series of “original papers” on Wisconsin’s role in what was officially called the War of Rebellion. Picked as the sixth selection and published in May 1911 was Wisconsin Women in the War between the States by Ethel Alice Hurn. In many ways it was a landmark effort. It was one of the first formal recognitions—not only in Wisconsin but nationally—of the overlooked and almost forgotten role Northern women played in 1861–1865.

The author of the study was Ethel Hurn of Oshkosh, then a student at the University of Wisconsin. Gathering the material for the book proved a daunting task. During the Civil War era women could not vote, hold bank accounts, or take a direct role in business. Nevertheless, in the time of national crisis, women took over farms and shops and other endeavors, and some left quiet family hearths to move onto the public stage. They prepared food, sewed and laundered, knitted socks and gloves, and organized campaigns and fairs as relief efforts that raised millions of dollars to aid wounded soldiers and assist war widows and orphans. However, these women’s work was generally undertaken without thought of keeping a formal record. It could be found only in scattered collections of letters, newspaper files, several interviews, and the brief reports and pamphlets of soldier fairs and soldiers’ aid societies.

Wisconsin Women in the War between the States is just as significant today as it was a century ago because it documented an important turning point in the changing role of women in American society. Other scholars have added to the record in the passing years, but Hurn’s groundbreaking book is welcomed back in print during this 150th anniversary of the American Civil War to be discovered and enjoyed as well as to enlighten a new generation of readers.

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With Fire and Sword
Arkansas, 1861-1874
Thomas A. Deblack
University of Arkansas Press, 2003

When Arkansas seceded from the Union in 1861, it was a thriving state. But the Civil War and Reconstruction left it reeling, impoverished, and so deeply divided that it never regained the level of prosperity it had previously enjoyed. Although most of the major battles of the war occurred elsewhere, Arkansas was critical to the Confederate war effort in the vast Trans-Mississippi region, and Arkansas soldiers served—some for the Union and more for the Confederacy—in every major theater of the war. And the war within the state was devastating. Union troops occupied various areas, citizens suffered greatly from the war’s economic disruption, and guerilla conflict and factional tensions left a bitter legacy. Reconstruction was in many ways a continuation of the war as the prewar elite fought to regain economic and political power.

In this, the fourth volume in the Histories of Arkansas series, Thomas DeBlack not only describes the major players and events in this dramatic and painful story, but also explores the experiences of ordinary people. Although the historical evidence is complex—and much of the secondary literature is extraordinarily partisan—DeBlack offers a balanced, vivid overview of the state’s most tumultuous period.

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With Lincoln in the White House
Letters, Memoranda, and other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860-1865
Edited by Michael Burlingame
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

From the time of Lincoln’s nomination for the presidency until his assassination, John G. Nicolay served as the Civil War president’s chief personal secretary. Nicolay became an intimate of Lincoln and probably knew him as well as anyone outside his own family. Unlike John Hay, his subordinate, Nicolay kept no diary, but he did write several memoranda recording his chief’s conversation that shed direct light on Lincoln. In his many letters to Hay, to his fiancée, Therena Bates, and to others, Nicolay often describes the mood at the White House as well as events there. He also expresses opinions that were almost certainly shaped by the president

For this volume, Michael Burlingame includes all of Nicolay’s memoranda of conversations, all of the journal entries describing Lincoln’s activities, and excerpts from most of the nearly three hundred letters Nicolay wrote to Therena Bates between 1860 and 1865. He includes letters and portions of letters that describe Lincoln or the mood at the White House or that give Nicolay’s personal opinions. He also includes letters written by Nicolay while on troubleshooting missions for the president.

An impoverished youth, Nicolay was an unlikely candidate for the important position he held during the Civil War. It was only over the strong objections of some powerful people that he became Lincoln’s private secretary after Lincoln’s nomination for the presidency in 1860. Prominent Chicago Republican Herman Kreismann found the appointment of a man so lacking in savoir faire

“ridiculous.” Henry Martin Smith, city editor of the Chicago Tribune, called Nicolay’s appointment a national loss. Henry C.Whitney was surprised that the president would appoint a “nobody.”

Lacking charm, Nicolay became known at the White House as the “bulldog in the ante-room” with a disposition “sour and crusty.” California journalist Noah Brooks deemed Nicolay a “grim Cerberus of Teutonic descent who guards the last door which opens into the awful presence.” Yet in some ways he was perfectly suited for the difficult job. William O. Stoddard, noting that Nicolay was not popular and could “say 'no'about as disagreeably as any man I ever knew,” still granted that Nicolay served Lincoln well because he was devoted and incorruptible. Stoddard concluded that Nicolay “deserves the thanks of all who loved Mr. Lincoln.”

For his part, Nicolay said he derived his greatest satisfaction “from having enjoyed the privilege and honor of being Mr. Lincoln’s intimate and official private secretary, and of earning his cordial friendship and perfect trust.”

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front cover of Without Concealment, Without Compromise
Without Concealment, Without Compromise
The Courageous Lives of Black Civil War Surgeons
Jill L. Newmark
Southern Illinois University Press, 2023
Advancing the cause of racial equality while saving lives

Of some twelve thousand Union Civil War surgeons, only fourteen were Black men. This book is the first-ever comprehensive exploration of their lives and service. Jill L. Newmark’s outstanding research uncovers stories hidden for more than 150 years, illuminating the unique experiences of proud, patriotic men who fought racism and discrimination to attend medical school and serve with the U.S. military. Their efforts and actions influenced societal change and forged new pathways for African Americans.
 
Individual biographies bring to light Alexander T. Augusta, who challenged discriminatory laws; William P. Powell Jr., who pursued a military pension for twenty-five years; Anderson R. Abbott, a friend of Elizabeth Keckley’s; John van Surly DeGrasse, the only Black surgeon to serve on the battlefield; John H. Rapier Jr., an international traveler; Richard H. Greene, the only Black surgeon known to have served in the Navy; Willis R. Revels, a preacher; Benjamin A. Boseman, a politician and postmaster; and Charles B. Purvis, who taught at Howard University. Information was limited for five other men, all of whom broke educational barriers by attending medical schools in the United States: Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed, William B. Ellis, Alpheus W. Tucker, Joseph Dennis Harris, and Charles H. Taylor.
 
Newmark presents all available information about the surgeons’ early lives, influences, education, Civil War service, and post-war experiences. Many of the stories overlap, as did the lives of the men. Each man, through his service as a surgeon during the war and his lifelong activism for freedom, justice, and equality, became a catalyst of change and a symbol of an emancipated future.
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The Woman in Battle
The Civil War Narrative of Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Cuban Woman and Confederate Soldier
Loreta Janeta Velazquez
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003
A Cuban woman who moved to New Orleans in the 1850s and eloped with her American lover, Loreta Janeta Velazquez fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy as the cross-dressing Harry T. Buford. As Buford, she single-handedly organized an Arkansas regiment; participated in the historic battles of Bull Run, Balls Bluff, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh; romanced men and women; and eventually decided that spying as a woman better suited her Confederate cause than fighting as a man. In the North, she posed as a double agent and worked to traffic information, drugs, and counterfeit bills to support the Confederate cause. She was even hired by the Yankee secret service to find "the woman . . . traveling and figuring as a Confederate agent"—Velazquez herself.

Originally published in 1876 as The Woman in Battle, this Civil War narrative offers Velazquez’s seemingly impossible autobiographical account, as well as a new critical introduction and glossary by Jesse Alemán. Scholars are divided between those who read the book as a generally honest autobiography and those who read it as mostly fiction. According to Alemán’s critical introduction, the book also reads as pulp fiction, spy memoir, seduction narrative, travel literature, and historical account, while it mirrors the literary conventions of other first-person female accounts of cross-dressing published in the United States during wartime, dating back to the Revolutionary War. Whatever the facts are, this is an authentic Civil War narrative, Alemán concludes, that recounts how war disrupts normal gender roles, redefines national borders, and challenges the definition of identity.
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A Woman's Civil War
A Diary with Reminiscences of the War, from March 1862
Cornelia Peake McDonald; Edited, with an Introduction by Minrose C. Gwin
University of Wisconsin Press, 1992
     On the night of March 11, 1862, as the heavy tramp of Confederate marching troops died away in the distance—her husband’s regiment among them—Cornelia Peake McDonald began her diary of events in war-torn Winchester, Virginia.
     McDonald’s story of the Civil War records a personal and distinctly female battle of her own—a southern woman’s lonely struggle in the midst of chaos to provide safety and shelter for herself and her children. For McDonald, history is what happens “inside the house.” She relates the trauma that occurs when the safety of the home is disrupted and destroyed by the forces of war—when women and children are put out of their houses and have nowhere to go.
     Whether she is describing a Union soldier’s theft of her Christmas cakes, the discovery of a human foot in her garden, or the death of her baby daughter, McDonald’s story of the Civil War at home is compelling and disturbing. Her tremendous determination and unyielding spirit in the face of the final collapse of her world is testimony to a woman’s will to preserve her family and her own sense of purpose as a “rebel” against all that she regarded as tyrannical and brutal in war itself.
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Women in Civil War Texas
Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi
Deborah M. Liles
University of North Texas Press, 2016

front cover of Women Making War
Women Making War
Female Confederate Prisoners and Union Military Justice
Thomas F. Curran
Southern Illinois University Press, 2020
Partisan activities of disloyal women and the Union army’s reaction
 
During the American Civil War, more than four hundred women were arrested and imprisoned by the Union Army in the St. Louis area. The majority of these women were fully aware of the political nature of their actions and had made conscious decisions to assist Confederate soldiers in armed rebellion against the U.S. government. Their crimes included offering aid to Confederate soldiers, smuggling, spying, sabotaging, and, rarely, serving in the Confederate army. Historian Thomas F. Curran’s extensive research highlights for the first time the female Confederate prisoners in the St. Louis area, and his thoughtful analysis shows how their activities affected Federal military policy.
 
Early in the war, Union officials felt reluctant to arrest women and waited to do so until their conduct could no longer be tolerated. The war progressed, the women’s disloyal activities escalated, and Federal response grew stronger. Some Confederate partisan women were banished to the South, while others were held at Alton Military Prison and other sites. The guerilla war in Missouri resulted in more arrests of women, and the task of incarcerating them became more complicated.
 
The women’s offenses were seen as treasonous by the Federal government. By determining that women—who were excluded from the politics of the male public sphere—were capable of treason, Federal authorities implicitly acknowledged that women acted in ways that had serious political meaning. Nearly six decades before U.S. women had the right to vote, Federal officials who dealt with Confederate partisan women routinely referred to them as citizens. Federal officials created a policy that conferred on female citizens the same obligations male citizens had during time of war and rebellion, and they prosecuted disloyal women in the same way they did disloyal men.
 
The women arrested in the St. Louis area are only a fraction of the total number of female southern partisans who found ways to advance the Confederate military cause. More significant than their numbers, however, is what the fragmentary records of these women reveal about the activities that led to their arrests, the reactions women partisans evoked from the Federal authorities who confronted them, the impact that women’s partisan activities had on Federal military policy and military prisons, and how these women’s experiences were subsumed to comport with a Lost Cause myth—the need for valorous men to safeguard the homes of defenseless women.
 
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Women, Work, and Worship in Lincoln's Country
The Dumville Family Letters
Edited by Anne M. Heinz and John P. Heinz
University of Illinois Press, 2016
The Dumville family settled in central Illinois during an era of division and dramatic change. Arguments over slavery raged. Railroads and circuit-riding preachers brought the wider world to the prairie. Irish and German immigrants flooded towns and churches. Anne M. Heinz and John P. Heinz draw from an extraordinary archive at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum to reveal how Ann Dumville and her daughters Jemima, Hephzibah, and Elizabeth lived these times. The letters tell the story of Ann, expelled from her Methodist church for her unshakable abolitionist beliefs; the serious and religious Jemima, a schoolteacher who started each school day with prayer; Elizabeth, enduring hard work as a farmer's wife, far away from the others; and Hephzibah, observing human folly and her own marriage prospects with the same wicked wit. Though separated by circumstances, the Dumvilles deeply engaged one another with their differing views on Methodism, politics, education, technological innovation, and relationships with employers. At the same time, the letters offer a rarely seen look at antebellum working women confronting privation, scarce opportunities, and the horrors of civil war with unwavering courage and faith.
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Women's Diaries from the Civil War South
A Literary-Historical Reading
Sharon Talley
University of Tennessee Press, 2020

“Traditionally, narratives of war have been male,” Sharon Talley writes. In the pages that follow, she goes on to disrupt this tradition, offering close readings and comparative studies of fourteen women’s diaries from the Civil War era that illuminate women’s experiences in the Confederacy during the war.

While other works highlighting individual diaries exist—and Talley notes that there has been a virtual explosion of published primary sources by women in recent years—this is the first effort of comprehensive synthesis of women’s Civil War diaries to attempt to characterize them as a distinct genre. Deeply informed by autobiographical theory, as well as literary and social history, Talley’s presentation of multiple diaries from women of differing backgrounds illuminates complexities and disparities across female wartime experiences rather than perpetuating overgeneralizations gleaned from a single diary or
preconceived ideas about what these diaries contain.

To facilitate this comparative approach, Talley divides her study into six sections that are organized by location, vocation, and purpose: diaries of elite planter women; diaries of women on the Texas frontier; diaries of women on the Confederate border; diaries of espionage by women in the South; diaries of women nurses near the battlefront; and diaries of women missionaries in the Port Royal Experiment. When read together, these writings illustrate that the female experience in the Civil War South was not one but many.

Women’s Diaries from the Civil War South: A Literary-Historical Reading is an essential text for scholars in women’s studies, autobiography studies, and Civil War studies alike, presenting an in-depth and multifaceted look at how the Civil War reshaped women’s lives in the South—and how their diverse responses shaped the course of the war in return.

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Women’s War
Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War
Stephanie McCurry
Harvard University Press, 2019

Winner of the PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Award

“A stunning portrayal of a tragedy endured and survived by women.”
—David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass

“Readers expecting hoop-skirted ladies soothing fevered soldiers’ brows will not find them here…Explodes the fiction that men fight wars while women idle on the sidelines.”
Washington Post

The idea that women are outside of war is a powerful myth, one that shaped the Civil War and still determines how we write about it today. Through three dramatic stories that span the war, Stephanie McCurry invites us to see America’s bloodiest conflict for what it was: not just a brothers’ war but a women’s war.

When Union soldiers faced the unexpected threat of female partisans, saboteurs, and spies, long held assumptions about the innocence of enemy women were suddenly thrown into question. McCurry shows how the case of Clara Judd, imprisoned for treason, transformed the writing of Lieber’s Code, leading to lasting changes in the laws of war. Black women’s fight for freedom had no place in the Union military’s emancipation plans. Facing a massive problem of governance as former slaves fled to their ranks, officers reclassified black women as “soldiers’ wives”—placing new obstacles on their path to freedom. Finally, McCurry offers a new perspective on the epic human drama of Reconstruction through the story of one slaveholding woman, whose losses went well beyond the material to intimate matters of family, love, and belonging, mixing grief with rage and recasting white supremacy in new, still relevant terms.

“As McCurry points out in this gem of a book, many historians who view the American Civil War as a ‘people’s war’ nevertheless neglect the actions of half the people.”
—James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom

“In this brilliant exposition of the politics of the seemingly personal, McCurry illuminates previously unrecognized dimensions of the war’s elemental impact.”
—Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering

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"Words for the Hour"
A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry
Faith Barrett
University of Massachusetts Press, 2005
"Words for the Hour" presents a readable and illuminating account of the Civil War, told through the words of poets North and South. From bathos to profound philosophical meditation and sorrow, the range of these poems illuminates the complexity of their era while also revealing the continuing power of this turning point in American history to speak to readers in the present day.

The volume is divided into three parts, each offering a different perspective on the poetry generated by the war. Part I samples the extraordinary range of poems written immediately preceding and during the war and published in popular periodicals, providing a kind of poetic newspaper account as one might have read it then—from the early days of optimistically heralded victory on both sides, through the mounting casualties and brutal deaths of the long middle years, to the war's conclusion and President Lincoln's assassination. Viewing the struggle from many different vantage points gives the reader access to the ways that people from various backgrounds experienced the trajectory of the war. Civilians and soldiers, free blacks and proponents of slavery, women and men from Massachusetts and Virginia and from recently admitted states and barely developed territories, writers with their eyes on the national political stage and those focused on personal domestic issues: these are the multiple voices of America responding to the war.

Part II includes substantial selections of poems by writers who published extensively in response to the conflict, providing more complex and comprehensive perceptions of the war. These poets include not just well-known figures such as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and John Greenleaf Whittier, but also African American poets George Moses Horton and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Southern poets Henry Timrod and Sarah Piatt.

Part III offers poems by two poets who did not publish during their lifetimes, but had strong imaginative responses to the conflict, thus giving a sense of the long reach of the war as a defining national experience. One of these two poets (Emily Dickinson) is now renowned while the other (Obadiah Ethelbert Baker) is first published in this volume.

"Words for the Hour" is indeed "new" among anthologies of Civil War poetry not only in its wide range of poems by popular, anonymous, and now canonical poets but also in its informational apparatus. A historical timeline listing major battles and events of the war begins the volume, and historical photographs or lithographs introduce each section of poems. The book also includes a substantial introduction, a glossary of important names and terminology relevant to understanding the poems, and biographical sketches for all the poets whose work is included.
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Worthy of the Cause for Which They Fight
The Civil War Diary of Brigadier General Harris Reynolds, 1861-1865
Robert Patrick Bender
University of Arkansas Press, 2011
Worthy of the Cause for Which They Fight chronicles the experiences of a well-educated and articulate Confederate officer from Arkansas who witnessed the full evolution of the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi Department and western theater. Daniel Harris Reynolds, a community leader with a thriving law practice in Chicot County, entered service in 1861 as a captain in command of Company A of the First Arkansas Mounted Rifles. Reynolds saw action at Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge before the regiment was dismounted and transferred to the Army of Tennessee, the primary Confederate force in the western theater. As Reynolds fought through the battles of Chickamauga, Atlanta, Nashville, and Bentonville, he consistently kept a diary in which he described the harsh realities of battle, the shifting fortunes of war, and the personal and political conflicts that characterized and sometimes divided the soldiers. The result is a significant testimonial offering valuable insights into the nature of command from the company to brigade levels, expressed by a committed Southerner coming to grips with the realities of defeat and the ultimate demoralization of surrender.
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The Wounded River
The Civil War Letters of John Vance Lauderdale, M.D.
Peter Josyph
Michigan State University Press, 1993

The Wounded River takes the reader back more than 130 years to reveal a marvelous, first-hand account of nineteenth-century warfare. In the process, the work cuts the legends and mythology that have come to frame and define accounts of America's bloodiest war. Of equal significance, Peter Josyph's editorial work on this superb collection of letters from the Western Americana Division of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library enhances and clarifies Lauderdale's experinces as a surgeon aboard the U.S. Army hospital ship D. A. January.  
      The reader looks on while Lauderdale, a New York civilian contract surgeon, operates on hundreds of Confederate and Union wounded. The young doctor's clear writing style and his great compassion for these unfortunate men whose bodies were ripped apart by bullets, shell fragments, and bayonets permits us to catch a disturbiing glimpse of what modern warfare does to humanity. Finally, we learn of Lauderdale's motives for volunteering, his impressions of the "hospital ship" D. A. January, Confederate morale, the Abolitionist cause, and black slavery. The Wounded River is a must read for anyone interested in the real American Civil War.

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