Harriet Ryegate, the proper daughter of Massachusetts Puritans, is the first white woman to go far into the wilderness beyond the upper Missouri. With her husband, a Baptist minister, she seeks to convert the Blackfoot Indians to Christianity. But it is the Ryegates who are changed by their "journey into strangeness." Marcus Ryegate returns to Massachusetts obsessed by a beautiful Indian woman. For sermonizing about her, he pays a heavy price. ø Harriet, one of Mildred Walker?s most fully realized characters, writes in her journal about "the effect of the Wilderness on civilized persons who are accustomed to live in the world of words." If a Lion Could Talk reveals the tragic lack of communication that stretches from Massachusetts to Missouri and beyond in the years before the Civil War?and the appalling heart of darkness that is close to home.
A gripping and original account of how the Civil War began and a second American revolution unfolded, setting Abraham Lincoln on the path to greatness and millions of slaves on the road to freedom. An epic of courage and heroism beyond the battlefields, 1861 introduces us to a heretofore little-known cast of Civil War heroes—among them an acrobatic militia colonel, an explorer’s wife, an idealistic band of German immigrants, a regiment of New York City firemen, a community of Virginia slaves, and a young college professor who would one day become president. Their stories take us from the corridors of the White House to the slums of Manhattan, from the waters of the Chesapeake to the deserts of Nevada, from Boston Common to Alcatraz Island, vividly evoking the Union at its moment of ultimate crisis and decision. Hailed as “exhilarating….Inspiring…Irresistible…” by The New York Times Book Review, Adam Goodheart’s bestseller 1861 is an important addition to the Civil War canon. Includes black-and-white photos and illustrations.
Having won renown in the 1850s for his vivid warfront dispatches from the Crimea, William Howard Russell was the most celebrated foreign journalist in America during the first year of the Civil War. As a special correspondent for The Times of London, Russell was charged with explaining the American crisis to a British audience, but his reports also had great impact in America. They so alienated both sides, North and South, that Russell was forced to return to England prematurely in April 1862. My Diary North and South (1863), Russell's published account of his visit remains a classic of Civil War literature. It was not in fact a diary but a narrative reconstruction of the author's journeys and observations based on his private notebooks and published dispatches. Despite his severe criticisms of American society and conduct, Russell offered in that work generally sympathetic characterizations of the Northern and Southern leadership during the war. In this new volume, Martin Crawford brings together the journalist's original diary and a selection of his private correspondence to resurrect the fully uninhibited Russell and to provide, accordingly, a true documentary record of this important visitor's first impressions of America during the early months of its greatest crisis. Over the course of his visit, Russell traveled widely throughout the Union and the new Confederacy, meeting political and social leaders on both sides. Included here are spontaneous - and often unflattering - comments on such prominent figures as William H. Seward, Jefferson Davis, Mary Todd Lincoln, and George B. McClellan, as well as quick sketches of New York, Washington, New Orleans, and other cities. Alsorevealed for the first time are the anxiety and despair that Russell experienced during his visit - a state induced by his own self-doubt, by concern over the health and situation of his wife in England, and, finally, by the bitter criticism he received in America over his reports, especially his famous description of the Union retreat from Bull Run in July 1861. A sometimes vain and pompous figure, Russell also emerges here as an individual of exceptional tenacity - a man who abhorred slavery and remained convinced of the essential rectitude of the Northern cause even as he criticized Northern leaders, their lack of preparedness for war, and the apparent disunity of the Northern population. In calmer times, Crawford notes, Russell's independent qualities might have brought him admiration, but in the turbulent climate of Civil War America they succeeded only in arousing deep suspicion.
Grace Brown Elmore recorded her experiences and observations as the Confederate Army retreated from Columbia, South Carolina, and as she was "forced to reassess all that she had taken for granted before poverty, uncertainty, and loneliness became her daily companions."--Jacket.
A well-educated, outspoken member of a politically prominent family in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Josie Underwood (1840–1923) left behind one of the few intimate accounts of the Civil War written by a southern woman sympathetic to the Union. This vivid portrayal of the early years of the war begins several months before the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861. “The Philistines are upon us,” twenty-year-old Josie writes in her diary, leaving no question about the alarm she feels when Confederate soldiers occupy her once-peaceful town. Offering a unique perspective on the tensions between the Union and the Confederacy, Josie reveals that Kentucky was a hotbed of political and military action, particularly in her hometown of Bowling Green, known as the Gibraltar of the Confederacy. Located along important rail and water routes that were vital for shipping supplies in and out of the Confederacy, the city linked the upper South’s trade and population centers and was strategically critical to both armies. Capturing the fright and frustration she and her family experienced when Bowling Green served as the Confederate army’s headquarters in the fall of 1861, Josie tells of soldiers who trampled fields, pilfered crops, burned fences, cut down trees, stole food, and invaded homes and businesses. In early 1862, Josie’s outspoken Unionist father, Warner Underwood, was ordered to evacuate the family’s Mount Air estate, which was later destroyed by occupying forces. Wartime hardships also strained relationships among Josie’s family, neighbors, and friends, whose passionate beliefs about Lincoln, slavery, and Kentucky’s secession divided them. Published for the first time, Josie Underwood’s Civil War Diary interweaves firsthand descriptions of the political unrest of the day with detailed accounts of an active social life filled with travel, parties, and suitors. Bringing to life a Unionist, slave-owning young woman who opposed both Lincoln’s policies and Kentucky’s secession, the diary dramatically chronicles the physical and emotional traumas visited on Josie’s family, community, and state during wartime.
Two months before the Civil War broke out, Emma Holmes made the first entry in a diary that would eventually hold vivid firsthand accounts of several major historical events. Born into an elite South Carolina family, Holmes was in her twenties during the war years. She lived in Charleston during April, 1861, bombardment of Fort Sumter and was visiting there during the 1863 Union shelling of the city. Her description of the Charleston fire of December, 1861, which destroyed her family home and leveled much of the city, is one of the most powerful passages in the diary. Holmes also spent extended periods of time on plantations and visited army camps, which she described in detail. Because of the Charleston fire, her family was uprooted to Camden, South Carolina, where she came face-to-face with Union forces: first Sherman's army, then black troops, and finally the small Reconstruction garrison. In presenting her picture of the wartime South, Holmes discussed numerous northern and southern military figures, the role of women in the war effort, the religious and social life of the day, and the heavy toll that fighting and disease took on the military and civilian population. John F. Marszalek has eliminated extraneous details in order to highlight Holmes's individual insight, the vital heart of the volumn. His new Forward considers this valuable contribution to social history in the context of the current growing popularity of the Civil War and the relatively recent interest in that conflict among women's studies scholars.
Excerpt from Diary: From March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 In this Diary I recorded what I heard and saw myself, and what I heard from others, on whose veracity I can implicitly rely. I recorded impressions as immediately as I felt them. A life almost wholly spent in the tempest and among the breakers of our times has taught me that the first impressions are the purest and the best. If they ever peruse these pages, my friends and acquaintances will find therein what, during these horrible national trials, was a subject of our confidential conversations and discussions, what in letters and by mouth was a subject of repeated forebodings and warnings. Perhaps these pages may in some way explain a phenomenon almost unexplained in history, - that twenty millions of people, brave, highly intelligent, and mastering all the wealth of modern civilization, were, if not virtually overpowered, at least so long kept at bay by about five millions of rebels. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
