front cover of Key Command
Key Command
Ulysses S. Grant's District of Cairo
T. K. Kionka
University of Missouri Press, 2006
During the Civil War, Cairo, Illinois, held a uniquely strategic position: it was not only the southernmost northern city, but it was also located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Union strategists believed that the importance of securing it could not be overestimated, and Cairo was occupied by the first volunteer regiments organized in the western theater of the war. Arriving six months later, an underappreciated general named Ulysses S. Grant decided that the Union could do more with Cairo than simply guard it, and using the town as his headquarters, he set about reclaiming the Mississippi valley from Rebel forces. This book reveals the story of how Grant honed his strategic skills in those campaigns while also telling of the changes that came to Cairo.
Key Command examines Grant’s tenure at his first district command from both military and administrative perspectives. T. K. Kionka has written the first book-length study of the district, exploring the town’s Civil War legacy while shedding new light on Grant, the war in the West, and other important Union generals such as Logan and McClernand. From this command post, Grant led troops to the first great Union victories at Belmont, Fort Henry, and Fort Donelson, and Kionka explores their role in Grant’s military evolution while highlighting the contributions of civilian volunteers through first-person accounts.
Nineteenth-century Cairo was home to an unruly, ethnically diverse population, and Kionka interweaves the story of Grant’s military campaign with a social history of the town, describing the men and women associated with the Cairo camps who played significant roles in Grant’s command. Grant’s victories not only sealed his own reputation, but they also brought unprecedented wealth to a town that before the war had failed to develop under two different land companies. Kionka’s work tells how local entrepreneurs made money supplying Grant’s troops and how unscrupulous speculators poured into Cairo as Grant coped with dissension, supply shortages, and refugees. It also examines the prewar movement to create a new state out of southern Illinois and its implications both for Cairo and for Union strategy.
More than a military history, Key Command gives readers a glimpse of the social and cultural atmosphere of an important military base that proved to be the decisive training ground for the most successful general in the war. With its insight into a polarized society and wartime corruption, Kionka’s readable account sheds new light on our own times as it tells the story of a town struggling to survive and a man fighting to succeed.
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front cover of The Kimberlins Go to War
The Kimberlins Go to War
A Union Family in Copperhead Country
Michael B. Murphy
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2016
As July 7, 1861, dawned, war was in the air in Lexington, Indiana. The county seat of Scott County was abuzz with the latest news of the southern rebellion. The _Madison Daily and Evening Courier_ told of skirmishes between Federal troops and “secesh” forces at Harpers Ferry and Falling Waters, Virginia. Closer to home, word had come that William A. Sanderson had organized a new outfit, the Twenty-Third Indiana, and was recruiting throughout the Second Congressional District for men to join the regiment. Although Scott County had been rife with sympathy and support for the South, answering the call to serve the Union cause from the county were Jacob T. Kimberlin, a twenty-one-year-old farmhand; his older brother, John J.; and his cousins, William H. H. Kimberlin, Benjamin F. Kimberlin, and James Stark. These five young men could not have known at the time that none of them would ever again see their homes. They only knew that the Kimberlins were going to war. This is the story of the Kimberlin family that sent thirty-three fathers and sons, brothers and cousins, to fight for the Union during the Civil War. Ten family members were killed, wounded, or died of battlefield disease, a 30 percent casualty rate that is unmatched in recorded Scott County history. Of the 134 known deaths of Scott County soldiers, ten were members of the Kimberlin clan. Their feelings about the war come from forty letters to and from the battlefield that have survived to this day. The book examines such questions as: Were they fighting to save the Union or to free the slaves? How did they express grief over the loss of a brother? Did they keep up with their business and the women at home? And what did they think about “secesh” neighbors in southern Indiana who tried to undermine the Union?
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front cover of The King’s Peace
The King’s Peace
Law and Order in the British Empire
Lisa Ford
Harvard University Press, 2021

How the imposition of Crown rule across the British Empire during the Age of Revolution corroded the rights of British subjects and laid the foundations of the modern police state.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British Empire responded to numerous crises in its colonies, from North America to Jamaica, Bengal to New South Wales. This was the Age of Revolution, and the Crown, through colonial governors, tested an array of coercive peacekeeping methods in a desperate effort to maintain control. In the process these leaders transformed what it meant to be a British subject.

In the decades after the American Revolution, colonial legal regimes were transformed as the king’s representatives ruled new colonies with an increasingly heavy hand. These new autocratic regimes blurred the lines between the rule of law and the rule of the sword. Safeguards of liberty and justice, developed in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, were eroded while exacting obedience and imposing order became the focus of colonial governance. In the process, many constitutional principles of empire were subordinated to a single, overarching rule: where necessary, colonial law could diverge from metropolitan law. Within decades of the American Revolution, Lisa Ford shows, the rights claimed by American rebels became unthinkable in the British Empire. Some colonial subjects fought back but, in the empire, the real winner of the American Revolution was the king.

In tracing the dramatic growth of colonial executive power and the increasing deployment of arbitrary policing and military violence to maintain order, The King’s Peace provides important lessons on the relationship between peacekeeping, sovereignty, and political subjectivity—lessons that illuminate contemporary debates over the imbalance between liberty and security.

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front cover of Kiska
Kiska
The Japanese Occupation of an Alaska Island
Brendan Coyle
University of Alaska Press, 2014
Alaska’s windswept Aleutian Island chain arcs for over a thousand miles toward Asia from the Alaska Peninsula. In this remote and hostile archipelago is Kiska Island, an uninhabited sub-arctic speck in the tempestuous Bering Sea. Few have the opportunity even to visit this island, but in June of 1942 Japanese troops seized Kiska and neighboring Attu in the only occupation of North American territory since the War of 1812.

The bastion of Japan’s possessions in Alaska, Kiska was soon fortified with 7,500 enemy troops, their equipment, and a labyrinth of tunnels. For thirteen months Japanese troops withstood constant bombardment from American forces while retaining a tenuous hold on the island. Finally forced to abandon their position, the Japanese occupiers evacuated without their equipment and personal effects, leaving behind a trail of artifacts.

Brendan Coyle spent fifty-one days on the island searching out the tunnels, the equipment, and the objects, all frozen in time. Kiska brings together the images Coyle amassed during his exploration and his archival research. Accompanying explanations put the images in historical perspective, opening a window on a little-known battlefield and shining a rare light on a shadowy occupation.
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