front cover of Portraits of Conflict
Portraits of Conflict
A Photographic History of Alabama in the Civil War
Ben H. Severance
University of Arkansas Press, 2012
Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Alabama in the Civil War is the tenth volume in this acclaimed series showing the human side of the country's great national conflict. Over 230 photographs of soldiers and civilians from Alabama, many never seen before, are accompanied by their personal stories and woven into the larger narrative of the war both on the battlefield and the home front. Alabama is unusual among the Rebel states in that, while its people saw little fighting inside its boundaries, nearly one hundred thousand Alabamians served with Confederate units throughout the South. This volume chronicles their experiences in almost every battle east of the Mississippi River--especially at Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg under the legendary Robert E. Lee; at Murfreesboro and Chickamauga as part of the ill-fated Army of Tennessee; and at the famous siege of Vicksburg. Ultimately Union soldiers did invade the state, and Alabamians defended their homeland against enemy cavalry raiders at Selma and against Federal warships in the fight for Mobile Bay. The volume also includes accounts of some of Alabama's leading politicians as well as several of its more ordinary citizens. This new volume contains the same quality of photography and storytelling that has attracted Civil War enthusiasts since the first volume was published in 1987, making it another welcome addition to the series Civil War History called "a sensibly priced, beautifully produced photographic history."
[more]

front cover of A War State All Over
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.
 
[more]

front cover of The Yellowhammer War
The Yellowhammer War
The Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama
Edited by Kenneth W. Noe
University of Alabama Press, 2014
Published to mark the Civil War sesquicentennial, The Yellowhammer War collects new essays on Alabama’s role in, and experience of, the bloody national conflict and its aftermath.

During the first winter of the war, Confederate soldiers derided the men of an Alabama Confederate unit for their yellow-trimmed uniforms that allegedly resembled the plumage of the yellow-shafted flicker or “yellowhammer” (now the Northern Flicker, Colaptes auratus, and the state bird of Alabama). The soldiers’ nickname, “Yellowhammers,” came from this epithet. After the war, Alabama veterans proudly wore yellowhammer feathers in their hats or lapels when attending reunions. Celebrations throughout the state have often expanded on that pageantry and glorified the figures, events, and battles of the Civil War with sometimes dubious attention to historical fact and little awareness of those who supported, resisted, or tolerated the war off the battlefield.

Many books about Alabama’s role in the Civil War have focused serious attention on the military and political history of the war. The Yellowhammer War likewise examines the military and political history of Alabama’s Civil War contributions, but it also covers areas of study usually neglected by centennial scholars, such as race, women, the home front, and Reconstruction. From Patricia A. Hoskins’s look at Jews in Alabama during the Civil War and Jennifer Ann Newman Treviño’s examination of white women’s attitudes during secession to Harriet E. Amos Doss’s study of the reaction of Alabamians to Lincoln’s Assassination and Jason J. Battles’s essay on the Freedman’s Bureau, readers are treated to a broader canvas of topics on the Civil War and the state.

CONTRIBUTORS
Jason J. Battles / Lonnie A. Burnett / Harriet E. Amos Doss / Bertis English / Michael W. Fitzgerald / Jennifer Lynn Gross / Patricia A. Hoskins / Kenneth W. Noe / Victoria E. Ott  / Terry L. Seip / Ben H. Severance / Kristopher A. Teters / Jennifer Ann Newman Treviño / Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins / Brian Steel Wills

Published in Cooperation with the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter