"Focuses on the struggles of Civil War veteran Thomas L. Wragg, Confederate officer, prisoner of war, and successful doctor. Documents General Joseph E. Johnston's army at Harpers Ferry and the Battle of Bull Run, Wragg's training on the CSS Georgia, his imprisonment, his courtship, and the effects of posttraumatic stress"--Provided by publisher.
In this moving day-by-day chronicle, we hear the real voices of the soldiers, nurses, farmers, laborers, slaves, and freed people who lived through America's most tragic conflict. This much-needed collection of the letters, diaries, speeches, telegrams, newspaper accounts, and official battlefield reports penned by those people presents an astonishing array of perspectives and conflicting accounts of this very personal war. Hundreds of period black and white images enhance the first-person accounts and help recapture the texture of life at all levels and on both sides of the Civil War.
The Confederate States of America (also called the Confederacy, the Confederate States, the CSA, and the South) was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by eleven Southern slave states that had declared their secession from the United States. Secessionists argued that the United States Constitution was a compact among states, an agreement which each state could abandon without consultation. The U.S. government (the Union) rejected secession as illegal. Following a Confederate attack upon Fort Sumter, a federal fort in the Confederate state of South Carolina, the U.S. used military action to defeat the Confederacy. No foreign nation officially recognized the Confederate States of America as an independent country,[1] but several did grant belligerent status.The Confederate Constitution of seven state signatories — South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas — formed a "permanent federal government" in Montgomery, Alabama. In response to a call by Lincoln for troops from each state to recapture Sumter and other lost federal properties in the South, four additional slave-holding states — Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina — declared their secession and joined the Confederacy. Missouri and Kentucky were represented by partisan factions from those states. Also aligned with the Confederacy were the Five Civilized Tribes and a new Confederate Territory of Arizona. Efforts to secede in Maryland were halted by martial law, while Delaware, though of divided loyalty, did not attempt it. West Virginia separated from the Confederate state of Virginia in 1863 and aligned with the Union. The Confederate government in Richmond, Virginia had an uneasy relationship with its member states because of issues related to control of manpower, although the South mobilized nearly its entire white male population for war.
This is a concise but comprehensive history of the secession of the Confederate States of America. On December 20, a little more than a month after Republican Abraham Lincoln had been elected the 16th president, a convention met in Charleston and passed the first ordinance of secession by one of the United States, declaring, "We, the people of the State of South Carolina in convention assembled, do declare and ordain... that the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of 'the United States of America,' is hereby dissolved." That came two days after the failure of the Crittenden Compromise, a proposed Constitutional Amendment to reinstate the Missouri Compromise line and extend it to the Pacific failed. President Buchanan supported the measure, but President-Elect Lincoln said he refused to allow the further expansion of slavery under any conditions. In January 1861, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Kansas followed South Carolina's lead, and the Confederate States of America was formed on February 4 in Montgomery, Alabama, with former Secretary of War Jefferson Davis inaugurated as its President. A few weeks later Texas joined, and after Fort Sumter several more states would secede and join the Confederacy, most notably Virginia. The election of Abraham Lincoln was the impetus for the secession of the South, but that was merely one of many events that led up to the formation of the Confederacy and the start of the Civil War. Sectional hostility over the issue of slavery had been bubbling for most of the 19th century, and violence had already broken out in places like Bleeding Kansas. Political issues like the Missouri Compromise, popular sovereignty, and the Fugitive Slave Act all added to the arguments. The secession of the South was one of the seminal events in American history, but it also remains one of the most controversial. Over the last 150 years, the greatest debate over the Civil War has remained just what caused it, and as recently as April 2010, Virginia's governor declared April “Confederate History Month in Virginia,” issuing a proclamation that made no mention of slavery. Facing an intense backlash, Virginia's governor first defended his proclamation by noting "there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states.” Days later, the governor apologized for the omission of slavery. In turn, the governor's backtracking was criticized by many Southerners, most prominently the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a large organization dedicated to commemorating the Confederates. The governor later declared that there would be no Confederate History Month in 2011.Secession:
