This regional history examines the process of mourning and reconciliation for the people of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in the aftermath of the Civil War. After four bloody years of Civil War battles, the inhabitants of the Shenandoah Valley needed to muster the strength to recover, rebuild and reconcile. Most residents had supported the Confederate cause, and in order to heal the deep wounds of war, they would need to resolve differences with Union veterans. Union veterans memorialized their service. Confederate veterans agreed to forgive but not forget. And each side was key to the rebuilding effort. The battlefields of the Shenandoah, where men sacrificed their lives, became places for veterans to find common ground and healing through remembrance. In Civil War Legacy in Shenandoah, historian and professor Jonathan A. Noyalas examines the evolution of attitudes among former soldiers as the Shenandoah Valley sought to find its place in the aftermath of national tragedy.
The African American experience in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley from the antebellum period through Reconstruction This book examines the complexities of life for African Americans in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. Although the Valley was a site of fierce conflicts during the Civil War and its military activity has been extensively studied, scholars have largely ignored the Black experience in the region until now. Correcting previous assumptions that slavery was not important to the Valley, and that enslaved people were treated better there than in other parts of the South, Jonathan Noyalas demonstrates the strong hold of slavery in the region. He explains that during the war, enslaved and free African Americans navigated a borderland that changed hands frequently—where it was possible to be in Union territory one day, Confederate territory the next, and no-man’s land another. He shows that the region’s enslaved population resisted slavery and supported the Union war effort by serving as scouts, spies, and laborers, or by fleeing to enlist in regiments of the United States Colored Troops. Noyalas draws on untapped primary resources, including thousands of records from the Freedmen’s Bureau and contemporary newspapers, to continue the story and reveal the challenges African Americans faced from former Confederates after the war. He traces their actions, which were shaped uniquely by the volatility of the struggle in this region, to ensure that the war’s emancipationist legacy would survive. A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller
After four bloody years of Civil War battles in the Shenandoah Valley, the region's inhabitants needed to muster the strength to recover, rebuild and reconcile. Most residents had supported the Confederate cause, and in order to heal the deep wounds of war, they would need to resolve differences with Union veterans. Union veterans memorialized their service. Confederate veterans agreed to forgive but not forget. And each side was key to the rebuilding effort. The battlefields of the Shenandoah, where men sacrificed their lives, became places for veterans to find common ground and healing through remembrance. Civil War historian and professor Jonathan A. Noyalas examines the evolution of attitudes among former soldiers as the Shenandoah Valley sought to find its place in the aftermath of national tragedy.
"The Battle of New Market, though a smaller conflict, represented a crucial moment in the Union's offensive movements in the spring of 1864 and became the last major Confederate victory in the Shenandoah Valley. The results of the battle between Franz Sigel and John C. Breckinridge - with the Virginia Military Institute Cadets pushing the conflict in the Confederates' favor - altered the campaigns of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee and the course of the American Civil War in Virginia."--Provided by publisher.
In many ways, John H. Black typified the thousands of volunteers who fought for the Union during the Civil War. Born in 1834 and raised on his family’s farm near Allegheny Township, Pennsylvania, Black taught school until he, like many Pennsylvanians, rushed to defend the Union after the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861. He served with the Twelfth Pennsylvania Cavalry, one of the Union’s most unruly, maligned, and criticized units.Consistently outperformed early in the conflict, the Twelfth finally managed to salvage much of its reputation by the end of the war. Throughout his service, Black penned frequent and descriptive letters to his fiancée and later wife, Jennie Leighty Black. This welcome volume presents this complete correspondence for the first time, offering a surprisingly full record of the cavalryman’s service from 1862 to 1865 and an intimate portrait of a wartime romance. In his letters, Black reveals his impassioned devotion to the cause, frequently expressing his disgust toward those who would not enlist and his frustration with friends who were not appropriately patriotic. Despite the Twelfth Pennsylvania’s somewhat checkered history, Black consistently praises both the regiment’s men and their service and demonstrates a strong camaraderie with his fellow soldiers. He offers detailed descriptions of the regiment’s vital operations in protecting Unionists and tracking down and combating guerrillas, in particular John Singleton Mosby and his partisan rangers, providing a rare first-person account of Union counterinsurgency tactics in the Lower Shenandoah Valley. In the midst of portraying heated and chaotic military operations, Black makes Jennie a prominent character in his war, illustrating the various ways in which the conflict altered or nurtured romantic relationships. One of the few compilations of letters by a long-term Yankee cavalry member and the only such collection by a member of the Twelfth Pennsylvania, A Yankee Horseman in the Shenandoah Valley provides new insights into the brutal, confused guerrilla fighting that occurred in northwestern Virginia. Moreover, these letters make a significant contribution toward an emerging consensus that Yankee cavalry—often maligned and contrasted with their celebrated Confederate foes—became a superior fighting force as the war progressed. David J. Coles, professor of history at Longwood University, is the associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Civil War, coauthor of Sons of Garibaldi in Blue and Gray, and coeditor of the Encyclopedia of the American Civil War. Stephen D. Engle, professor of history at Florida Atlantic University, is the author of Yankee Dutchman: The Life of Franz Sigel, Don Carlos Buell: Most Promising of All, and Struggle for the Heartland: The Campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth.
The last shot of the Civil War was fired, not on an obscure battlefield, but in the ice-locked Sea of Okhotsk off Siberia seven months after Lee’s surrender. The last armed Confederate cruiser was the C.S.S. Shenandoah, a beautiful but dangerous vessel which scattered and burned the New Bedford whaling fleet in Arctic waters. She was the last cruiser sent to sea by James Dunwoody Bulloch, the captain who built the Confederacy’s navy in the shipyards of Europe. Constructed at a cost of £53,715, the Shenandoah captured thirty-eight ships and burned thirty-two. She inflicted damage to Union commerce which was officially judged at $1,361,983. She took 1,053 prisoners. In fact, she took so many her skipper, Lieutenant-Commanding James Waddell, had to rig a chain of whaleboats that could be towed along by his vessel, to accommodate captured Union seamen and the crews of the whalers he had burned. A few years after the war, Waddell wrote his account of the Shenandoah’s great cruise, and it is published here complete for the first time. He tells of his own career in the United States Navy and in the Confederate Navy, and also of the events leading up to his taking command of the Shenandoah.
Historian Ben Cleary takes readers beyond the legend of Stonewall Jackson and directly onto the Civil War battlefields on which he fought, and where a country once again finds itself at a crossroads. Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson was the embodiment of Southern contradictions. He was a slave owner who fought and died, at least in part, to perpetuate slavery, yet he founded an African-American Sunday School and personally taught classes for almost a decade. For all his sternness and rigidity, Jackson was a deeply thoughtful and incredibly intelligent man. But his reputation and mythic status, then and now, was due to more than combat success. In a deeply religious age, he was revered for a piety that was far beyond the norm. How did one man meld his religion with the institution of slavery? How did he reconcile it with the business of killing, at which he so excelled? In SEARCHING FOR STONEWALL JACKSON, historian Ben Cleary examines not only Jackson's life, but his own, contemplating what it means to be a white Southerner in the 21st century. Now, as statues commemorating the Civil War are toppled and Confederate flags come down, Cleary walks the famous battlefields, following in the footsteps of his subject as he questions the legacy of Stonewall Jackson and the South's Lost Cause at a time when the contentions of politics, civil rights, and social justice are at a fever pitch. Combining nuanced, authoritative research with deeply personal stories of life in the modern American South, SEARCHING FOR STONEWALL JACKSON is a thrilling, vivid portrait of a soldier, a war, and a country still contending with its past.
Was Robert E. Lee a gifted soldier whose only weaknesses lay in the depth of his loyalty to his troops, affection for his lieutenants, and dedication to the cause of the Confederacy? Or was he an ineffective leader and poor tactician whose reputation was
Nestled between the Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia's Shenandoah Valley enjoyed tremendous prosperity before the Civil War. This valuable stretch of land--called "the Breadbasket of the Confederacy" due to its rich soil and ample harvests--became the source of many conflicts between the Confederate and Union armies. Of the thirteen major battles fought here, none was more influential than the Battle of Cedar Creek. On October 19, 1864, General Philip Sheridan's Union troops finally gained control of the valley, which eliminated the Shenandoah as a supply source for Confederate forces in Virginia, ended the valley's role as a diversionary theater of war and stopped its use as an avenue of invasion into the North. Civil War historian Jonathan A. Noyalas explains the battle and how it aided Abraham Lincoln's reelection campaign and defined Sheridan's enduring legacy.
