Iron Confederacies
Iron Confederacies

Author: Scott Reynolds Nelson

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2005-10-12

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0807876100

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During Reconstruction, an alliance of southern planters and northern capitalists rebuilt the southern railway system using remnants of the Confederate railroads that had been built and destroyed during the Civil War. In the process of linking Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia by rail, this alliance created one of the largest corporations in the world, engendered bitter political struggles, and transformed the South in lasting ways, says Scott Nelson. Iron Confederacies uses the history of southern railways to explore linkages among the themes of states' rights, racial violence, labor strife, and big business in the nineteenth-century South. By 1868, Ku Klux Klan leaders had begun mobilizing white resentment against rapid economic change by asserting that railroad consolidation led to political corruption and black economic success. As Nelson notes, some of the Klan's most violent activity was concentrated along the Richmond-Atlanta rail corridor. But conflicts over railroads were eventually resolved, he argues, in agreements between northern railroad barons and Klan leaders that allowed white terrorism against black voters while surrendering states' control over the southern economy.

Ironmaker to the Confederacy
Ironmaker to the Confederacy

Author: Charles B. Dew

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780884901907

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Charles Dew's unsurpassed Ironmaker to the Confederacy tells the story of the South's premier ironworks & its intrepid owner, Joseph Reid Anderson. Dew's detailed & rich account masterfully describes Tredegar's struggle to supply the Confederate nation with the weapons of war & is a seminal study of southern manufacturing & industrial slavery. The revised edition includes a new preface by Dr. Dew, additional illustrations, and redesigned maps of the ironworks based on new site research and archaelogy.

The Railroads of the Confederacy
The Railroads of the Confederacy

Author: Robert C. Black III

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-08-25

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 1469650304

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Originally published by UNC Press in 1952, The Railroads of the Confederacy tells the story of the first use of railroads on a major scale in a major war. Robert Black presents a complex and fascinating tale, with the railroads of the American South playing the part of tragic hero in the Civil War: at first vigorous though immature; then overloaded, driven unmercifully, starved for iron; and eventually worn out--struggling on to inevitable destruction in the wake of Sherman's army, carrying the Confederacy down with them. With maps of all the Confederate railroads and contemporary photographs and facsimiles of such documents as railroad tickets, timetables, and soldiers' passes, the book will captivate railroad enthusiasts as well as readers interested in the Civil War.

Clad in Iron
Clad in Iron

Author: Howard J. Fuller

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2007-12-30

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 0313345910

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This work addresses many persistent misconceptions of what the monitors were for, and why they failed in other roles associated with naval operations of the Civil War (such as the repulse at Charleston, April 7, 1863). Monitors were 'ironclads'- not fort-killers. Their ultimate success is to be measured not in terms of spearheading attacks on fortified Southern ports but in the quieter, much more profound, strategic deterrence of Lord Palmerston's ministry in London, and the British Royal Navy's potential intervention. The relatively unknown 'Cold War' of the American Civil War was a nevertheless crucial aspect of the survival, or not, of the United States in the mid 19th-century. Foreign intervention—explicitly in the form of British naval power—represented a far more serious threat to the success of the Union blockade, the safety of Yankee merchant shipping worldwide, and Union combined operations against the South than the Confederate States Navy. Whether or not the North or South would be 'clad in iron' thus depended on the ability of superior Union ironclads to deter the majority of mid-Victorian British leaders, otherwise tempted by their desire to see the American 'experiment' in democratic class-structures and popular government finally fail. Discussions of open European involvement in the Civil War were pointless as long as the coastline of the United States was virtually impregnable. Combining extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, this work offers an in-depth look at how the Union Navy achieved its greatest grand-strategic victory in the American Civil War. Through a combination of high-tech 'machines' armed with 'monster' guns, intensive coastal fortifications and a new fleet of high-speed Union commerce raiders, the North was able to turn the humiliation of the Trent Affair of late 1861 into a sobering challenge to British naval power and imperial defense worldwide.

Ironmaker to the Confederacy
Ironmaker to the Confederacy

Author: Charles B. Dew

Publisher: New Haven, Yale U. P

Published: 1966

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13:

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Under the guidance of Joseph Reid Anderson, the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond - the largest iron manufacturer in the Confederacy - reflected, and to an important degree shaped, the fortunes of the South. Mr. Dew traces in detail the history of the company from 1859-67. Dependence on the North for raw materials and skilled labor, increasing competition from Yankee manufacturers in the Southern iron market, and the Tredegar owners' growing antagonism toward the North are the dominant themes of the prewar chapters. Secession , which the Richmond industrialists desired and encouraged, made Tredegar production crucial to the South but also brought crippling shortages of strategic materials. The book outlines the dramatic expansion of the company's activities as it attempted, with government aid, to overcome these deficiencies. Production successes and failures and their influence on Confederate military fortunes, efforts to correct labor shortages, the condition of slave and free industrial workers during the war, and the owners' attempts to maximize profits in the face of galloping inflation are all examined. The final chapter on the war years traces the decline in military production as the Tredegar management funneled increasing amounts of iron to private consumers and the Southern industrial economy disintegrated. Of both human and historical interest is Mr. Dew's account of successful efforts by Anderson and his associates to secure pardons, from the President and capital from Northern industrialists in order to reclaim and rebuild the Tredegar. -- Publisher.

Reconstruction's Ragged Edge
Reconstruction's Ragged Edge

Author: Steven E. Nash

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2016-01-13

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 146962625X

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In this illuminating study, Steven E. Nash chronicles the history of Reconstruction as it unfolded in the mountains of western North Carolina. Nash presents a complex story of the region's grappling with the war's aftermath, examining the persistent wartime loyalties that informed bitter power struggles between factions of white mountaineers determined to rule. For a brief period, an influx of federal governmental power enabled white anti-Confederates to ally with former slaves in order to lift the Republican Party to power locally and in the state as a whole. Republican success led to a violent response from a transformed class of elites, however, who claimed legitimacy from the antebellum period while pushing for greater integration into the market-oriented New South. Focusing on a region that is still underrepresented in the Reconstruction historiography, Nash illuminates the diversity and complexity of Appalachian political and economic machinations, while bringing to light the broad and complicated issues the era posed to the South and the nation as a whole.

Private Confederacies
Private Confederacies

Author: James J. Broomall

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2019-01-10

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1469649764

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How did the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction shape the masculinity of white Confederate veterans? As James J. Broomall shows, the crisis of the war forced a reconfiguration of the emotional worlds of the men who took up arms for the South. Raised in an antebellum culture that demanded restraint and shaped white men to embrace self-reliant masculinity, Confederate soldiers lived and fought within military units where they experienced the traumatic strain of combat and its privations together--all the while being separated from suffering families. Military service provoked changes that escalated with the end of slavery and the Confederacy's military defeat. Returning to civilian life, Southern veterans questioned themselves as never before, sometimes suffering from terrible self-doubt. Drawing on personal letters and diaries, Broomall argues that the crisis of defeat ultimately necessitated new forms of expression between veterans and among men and women. On the one hand, war led men to express levels of emotionality and vulnerability previously assumed the domain of women. On the other hand, these men also embraced a virulent, martial masculinity that they wielded during Reconstruction and beyond to suppress freed peoples and restore white rule through paramilitary organizations and the Ku Klux Klan.

Tredegar Iron Works: Richmond’s Foundry on the James
Tredegar Iron Works: Richmond’s Foundry on the James

Author: Nathan Vernon Madison

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 1

ISBN-13: 146711894X

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One of the most important industrial landmarks in the nation lies in the heart of historic Richmond. The Tredegar Iron Works was the most prodigious ordnance supplier to the Confederacy during the Civil War, as well as an industrial behemoth in its own right. Named for the hometown of the Welsh engineers who built it, Tredegar remained one of Richmond's chief industrial entities for over a century. It produced ordnance during five wars and helped build the railroads that rapidly spread across the nation during the Gilded Age. Author Nathan Vernon Madison, utilizing a wealth of primary sources and firsthand accounts, chronicles the full history of a Richmond industrial icon.

Confederate Ironclad Vs Union Ironclad
Confederate Ironclad Vs Union Ironclad

Author: Ron Field

Publisher: Osprey Publishing

Published: 2008-11-18

Total Pages: 84

ISBN-13:

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The Ironclad was a revolutionary weapon of war. Although iron was used for protection in the Far East during the 16th century, it was the 19th century and the American Civil War that heralded the first modern armored self-propelled warships. With the parallel pressures of civil war and the industrial revolution, technology advanced at a breakneck speed. It was the South who first utilized ironclads as they attempted to protect their ports from the Northern blockade. Impressed with their superior resistance to fire and their ability to ram vulnerable wooden ships, the North began to develop its own rival fleet of ironclads. Eventually these two products of this first modern arms race dueled at the battle of Hampton Roads in a clash that would change the face of naval warfare. Fully illustrated with cutting-edge digital artwork, rare photographs and first-person perspective gun sight views, this book allows the reader to discover the revolutionary and radically different designs of the two rival Ironclads - the CSS Virginia and USS Monitor - through an analysis of each ship's weaponry, ammunition and steerage. Compare the contrasting training of the crews and re-live the horrors of the battle at sea in a war which split a nation, communities and even families.