From well-known battlefields, such as Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Appomattox, to lesser-known sites, such as Sinking Spring Cemetery and Rude’s Hill, Sedore leads readers on a vivid journey through Virginia’s Confederate history. Tablets, monoliths, courthouses, cemeteries, town squares, battlefields, and more are cataloged in detail and accompanied by photographs and meticulous commentary. Each entry contains descriptions, fascinating historical information, and location, providing a complete portrait of each site. Much more than a visual tapestry or a tourist’s handbook, An Illustrated Guide to Virginia’s Confederate Monuments draws on scholarly and field research to reveal these sites as public efforts to reconcile mourning with Southern postwar ideologies. Sedore analyzes in depth the nature of these attempts to publicly explain Virginia’s sense of grief after the war, delving deep into the psychology of a traumatized area. From commemorations of famous generals to memories of unknown soldiers, the dead speak from the pages of this sweeping companion to history.
“This book triumphs on several levels . . . This is going to be my answer to the question ‘Where should I start looking at the Civil War?’ from now on.” —TOCWOC–A Civil War Blog The New Civil War Handbook is a complete up-to-date guide for American Civil War enthusiasts of all ages. Author Mark Hughes uses clear and concise writing, tables, charts, and more than 100 photographs to trace the history of the war from the beginning of the conflict through Reconstruction. Coverage includes battles and campaigns, the common soldier, technology, weapons, women and minorities at war, hospitals, prisons, generals, the naval war, artillery, and much more. In addition to these important areas, Hughes includes a fascinating section about the Civil War online, including popular blog sites and other Internet resources. Reference material in The New Civil War Handbook includes losses in battles, alternate names for battles, major causes of death of Union soldiers (no data exists for Confederates), deaths in POW camps, and other valuable but hard to locate information. Readers will find The New Civil War Handbook to be an invaluable quick reference guide, and one that makes an excellent gift for both the Civil War novice and the Civil War buff. “Updated and more comprehensive than ever, Mark Hughes’ timely release of The New Civil War Handbook will introduce yet another generation to the defining event in American history.” —Terrence J. Winschel, retired Chief Historian, Vicksburg National Military Park and author of Triumph and Defeat
The author of this book, a recognized expert on the subject of Confederate weapons, provides a comprehensive catalogue and description of most of the known swords manufactured in the Confederate States and used by Southern soldiers and officers during the War Between the States. Copiously illustrated with sketches of each weapon.
A combination of Arthur Martine's Handbook of etiquette first published by Dick & Fitzgerald, New York in 1866 and Vulgarisms in Conversation which is a part of the Art of conversation by Charles Godfrey Leland published by Carleton, New York in 1864.
When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.
Confederate scout and sharpshooter Berry Greenwood Benson witnessed the first shot fired on Fort Sumter, retreated with Lee's Army to its surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, and missed little of the action in between. This memoir of his service is a remarkable narrative, filled with the minutiae of the soldier's life and paced by a continual succession of battlefield anecdotes. Three main stories emerge from Benson's account: his reconnaissance exploits, his experiences in battle, and his escape from prison. Though not yet eighteen years old when he left his home in Augusta, Georgia, to join the army, Benson was soon singled out for the abilities that would serve him well as a scout. Not only was he a crack shot, a natural leader, and a fierce Southern partisan, but he had a kind of restless energy and curiosity, loved to take risks, and was an instant and infallible judge of human nature. His recollections of scouting take readers within arm's reach of Union trenches and encampments. Benson recalls that while eavesdropping he never failed to be shocked by the Yankees' foul language; he had never heard that kind of talk in a Confederate camp! Benson's descriptions of the many battles in which he fought--including Cold Harbor, The Seven Days, Manassas, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania, and Petersburg--convey the desperation of a full frontal charge and the blind panic of a disorganized retreat. Yet in these accounts, Benson's own demeanor under fire is manifest in the coolly measured tone he employs. A natural writer, Benson captures the dark absurdities of war in such descriptions as those of hardened veterans delighting in the new shoes and other equipment they found on corpse-littered battlefields. His clothing often torn by bullets, Benson was also badly bruised a number of times by spent rounds. At one point, in May 1863, he was wounded seriously enough in the leg to be hospitalized, but he returned to the field before full recuperation. Benson was captured behind enemy lines in May 1864 while on a scouting mission for General Lee. Confined to Point Lookout Prison in Maryland, he escaped after only two days and swam the Potomac to get back into Virginia. Recaptured near Washington, D.C., he was briefly held in Old Capitol Prison, then sent to Elmira Prison in New York. There he joined a group of ten men who made the only successful tunnel escape in Elmira's history. After nearly six months in captivity or on the run, he rejoined his unit in Virginia. Even at Appomattox, Benson refused to surrender but stole off with his brother to North Carolina, where they planned to join General Johnston. Finding the roads choked with Union forces and surrendered Confederates, the brothers ultimately bore their unsurrendered rifles home to Augusta. Berry Benson first wrote his memoirs for his family and friends. Completed in 1878, they drew on his--and partially on his brother's--wartime diaries, as well as on letters that both brothers had written to family members during the war. The memoirs were first published in book form in 1962 but have long been unavailable. This edition, with a new foreword by the noted Civil War historian Herman Hattaway, will introduce this compelling story to a new generation of readers.
“An extremely detailed history of 160 hospital sites that formed to care for soldiers who were wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg.” —Civil War Cycling Nearly 26,000 men were wounded in the three-day battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863). It didn’t matter if the soldier wore blue or gray or was an officer or enlisted man, for bullets, shell fragments, bayonets, and swords made no class or sectional distinction. Almost 21,000 of the wounded were left behind by the two armies in and around the small town of 2,400 civilians. Most ended up being treated in makeshift medical facilities overwhelmed by the flood of injured. Many of these and their valiant efforts are covered in Greg Coco’s A Vast Sea of Misery. The battle to save the wounded was nearly as terrible as the battle that placed them in such a perilous position. Once the fighting ended, the maimed and suffering warriors could be found in churches, public buildings, private homes, farmhouses, barns, and outbuildings. Thousands more, unreachable or unable to be moved remained in the open, subject to the uncertain whims of the July elements. As one surgeon unhappily recalled, “No written nor expressed language could ever picture the field of Gettysburg! Blood! blood! And tattered flesh! Shattered bones and mangled forms almost without the semblance of human beings!” Based upon years of firsthand research, Coco’s A Vast Sea of Misery introduces readers to 160 of those frightful places called field hospitals. It is a sad journey you will never forget, and you won’t feel quite the same about Gettysburg once you finish reading.
What would separate Union and Confederate countries look like if the South had won the Civil War? In fact, this was something that southern secessionists actively debated. Imagining themselves as nation builders, they understood the importance of a plan for the economic structure of the Confederacy. The traditional view assumes that Confederate slave-based agrarianism went hand in hand with a natural hostility toward industry and commerce. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, John Majewski's analysis finds that secessionists strongly believed in industrial development and state-led modernization. They blamed the South's lack of development on Union policies of discriminatory taxes on southern commerce and unfair subsidies for northern industry. Majewski argues that Confederates' opposition to a strong central government was politically tied to their struggle against northern legislative dominance. Once the Confederacy was formed, those who had advocated states' rights in the national legislature in order to defend against northern political dominance quickly came to support centralized power and a strong executive for war making and nation building.
