Searching for Irvin McDowell
Searching for Irvin McDowell

Author: Frank P. Simione

Publisher: Savas Beatie

Published: 2023-03-15

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1954547420

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Irvin McDowell was a prominent figure during the early months of the Civil War. With so much at stake, he was called upon to lead the Union’s largest Eastern Theater army. Pressed by the media and President Abraham Lincoln to move into Virginia and defeat the Confederates gathering there, McDowell led his neophyte army out to the plains of Manassas and was soundly defeated. McDowell went on to hold an independent command in northern Virginia during the Peninsula Campaign and serve in the Army of Virginia under Maj. Gen. John Pope during the disastrous Second Bull Run Campaign. Despite his significant contributions, a lack of personal papers left him in obscurity. Authors Frank Simione Jr. and Gene Schmiel used available sources to create a reliable and readable synthesis of the man and his career to fill a sizable gap in the historiography. Unless or until his private papers surface, Searching for Irvin McDowell will stand as the best treatment available.

Searching for Irvin McDowell, Forgotten Civil War General
Searching for Irvin McDowell, Forgotten Civil War General

Author: Gene Schmiel

Publisher:

Published: 2021-08-05

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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Irvin McDowell was a major actor in the Civil War for a short, but critical time, and his life history deserves to be told and remembered. Like so many others, he was caught up in that national calamity. He was a dutiful, dependable, and diligent military officer. But perhaps unlike some others, early in the Civil War he was called upon to perform duties which, in retrospect, may have been beyond his capacity and only served both to enhance his peculiarities and shine light on his shortcomings. This book is the first attempt to make the journey of searching for Irvin McDowell and trying to understand him and his role in the Civil War era via a full-length biography.

Radical Sacrifice
Radical Sacrifice

Author: William Marvel

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2021-02-10

Total Pages: 491

ISBN-13: 1469661861

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Born into a distinguished military family, Fitz John Porter (1822-1901) was educated at West Point and breveted for bravery in the war with Mexico. Already a well-respected officer at the outset of the Civil War, as a general in the Union army he became a favorite of George B. McClellan, who chose him to command the Fifth Corps of the Army of the Potomac. Porter and his troops fought heroically and well at Gaines's Mill and Malvern Hill. His devotion to the Union cause seemed unquestionable until fellow Union generals John Pope and Irvin McDowell blamed him for their own battlefield failures at Second Bull Run. As a confidant of the Democrat and limited-war proponent McClellan, Porter found himself targeted by Radical Republicans intent on turning the conflict to the cause of emancipation. He made the perfect scapegoat, and a court-martial packed with compliant officers dismissed him for disobedience of orders and misconduct before the enemy. Porter tenaciously pursued vindication after the war, and in 1879 an army commission finally reviewed his case, completely exonerating him. Obstinately partisan resistance from old Republican enemies still denied him even nominal reinstatement for six more years. This revealing new biography by William Marvel cuts through received wisdom to show Fitz John Porter as he was: a respected commander whose distinguished career was ruined by political machinations within Lincoln's administration. Marvel lifts the cloud that shadowed Porter over the last four decades of his life, exposing the spiteful Radical Republicans who refused to restore his rank long after his exoneration and never restored his benefits. Reexamining the relevant primary evidence from the full arc of Porter's life and career, Marvel offers significant insights into the intersections of politics, war, and memory.

Battle at Bull Run
Battle at Bull Run

Author: William C. Davis

Publisher: Doubleday

Published: 2012-06-06

Total Pages: 431

ISBN-13: 0307817512

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Two great, untested armies were readying for the first—and what many believed would be the last—major conflict between North and South. On the eve of July 21, 1861, one Northerner wrote: “The sky is perfectly clear, the moon is full and bright, and the air was still as if it were not within a few hours to be disturbed by the roar of cannon and the shouts of contending men.” So optimistic were the people in Washington that a crowd of civilians came from the city with picnic hampers to witness the crushing defeat of the upstart “rebels.” It was, says William C. Davis, “the twilight of America’s innocence,” and the following day the mood would shatter in a battle that confounded the expectations of both sides—the first Battle at Bull Run. William C. Davis has written a compelling and complete account of this landmark conflict. The Battle at Bull Run (or Manassas) is notable for many reasons. It was a surprise victory for the Confederacy, a humiliating defeat for the Union, and the first ominous indication that a long and bloody war was inevitable. It marked the first strategic use of railroads in history, and the first time the horrors of the battle were photographed for the folks back home. It was also a training ground for some of America’s most colorful military figures: P.G.T. Beauregard, Joe Johnston, Irvin McDowell and “Stonewall” Jackson. Drawing from a wealth of material—old letters, journals, memoirs and military records—Davis brings to life a vivid and vital chapter in American history.

Civil War High Commands
Civil War High Commands

Author: John Eicher

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2002-06-01

Total Pages: 1062

ISBN-13: 9780804780353

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Based on nearly five decades of research, this magisterial work is a biographical register and analysis of the people who most directly influenced the course of the Civil War, its high commanders. Numbering 3,396, they include the presidents and their cabinet members, state governors, general officers of the Union and Confederate armies (regular, provisional, volunteers, and militia), and admirals and commodores of the two navies. Civil War High Commands will become a cornerstone reference work on these personalities and the meaning of their commands, and on the Civil War itself. Errors of fact and interpretation concerning the high commanders are legion in the Civil War literature, in reference works as well as in narrative accounts. The present work brings together for the first time in one volume the most reliable facts available, drawn from more than 1,000 sources and including the most recent research. The biographical entries include complete names, birthplaces, important relatives, education, vocations, publications, military grades, wartime assignments, wounds, captures, exchanges, paroles, honors, and place of death and interment. In addition to its main component, the biographies, the volume also includes a number of essays, tables, and synopses designed to clarify previously obscure matters such as the definition of grades and ranks; the difference between commissions in regular, provisional, volunteer, and militia services; the chronology of military laws and executive decisions before, during, and after the war; and the geographical breakdown of command structures. The book is illustrated with 84 new diagrams of all the insignias used throughout the war and with 129 portraits of the most important high commanders.

Citizen-General
Citizen-General

Author: Eugene D. Schmiel

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2014-04-01

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 0821444808

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The wrenching events of the Civil War transformed not only the United States but also the men unexpectedly called on to lead their fellow citizens in this first modern example of total war. Jacob Dolson Cox, a former divinity student with no formal military training, was among those who rose to the challenge. In a conflict in which “political generals” often proved less than competent, Cox, the consummate citizen general, emerged as one of the best commanders in the Union army. During his school days at Oberlin College, no one could have predicted that the intellectual, reserved, and bookish Cox possessed what he called in his writings the “military aptitude” to lead men effectively in war. His military career included helping secure West Virginia for the Union; jointly commanding the left wing of the Union army at the critical Battle of Antietam; breaking the Confederate supply line and thereby helping to precipitate the fall of Atlanta; and holding the defensive line at the Battle of Franklin, a Union victory that effectively ended the Confederate threat in the West. At a time when there were few professional schools other than West Point, the self-made man was the standard for success; true to that mode, Cox fashioned himself into a Renaissance man. In each of his vocations and avocations—general, governor, cabinet secretary, university president, law school dean, railroad president, historian, and scientist—he was recognized as a leader. Cox’s greatest fame, however, came to him as the foremost participant historian of the Civil War. His accounts of the conflict are to this day cited by serious scholars and serve as a foundation for the interpretation of many aspects of the war.

Return to Bull Run
Return to Bull Run

Author: John J. Hennessy

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 1999-09-01

Total Pages: 628

ISBN-13: 9780806131870

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"This comprehensively researched, well-written book represents the definitive account of Robert E. Lee's triumph over Union leader John Pope in the summer of 1862. . . . Lee's strategic skills, and the capabilities of his principal subordinates James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson, brought the Confederates onto the field of Second Manassas at the right places and times against a Union army that knew how to fight, but not yet how to win."?Publishers Weekly "The deepest, most comprehensive, and most definitive work on this Civil War campaign, by the unchallenged authority."?James I. Robertson Jr., author of Stonewall Jackson

Dreams of Victory
Dreams of Victory

Author: Sean Michael Chick

Publisher:

Published: 2022-04-15

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 9781611215212

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Few Civil War generals attracted as much debate and controversy as Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard. He combined brilliance and charisma with arrogance and histrionics. Sean Michael Chick explores a life of contradictions and dreams unrealized--the first real hero of the Confederacy who sometimes proved to be his own worst enemy.

Our Latest Longest War
Our Latest Longest War

Author: Aaron B. O'Connell

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-04-03

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 022626579X

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American and Afghan veterans contribute to this anthology of critical perspectives—“a vital contribution toward understanding the Afghanistan War” (Library Journal). When America went to war with Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, it did so with the lofty goals of dismantling al Qaeda, removing the Taliban from power, remaking the country into a democracy. But as the mission came unmoored from reality, the United States wasted billions of dollars, and thousands of lives were lost. Our Latest Longest War is a chronicle of how, why, and in what ways the war in Afghanistan failed. Edited by prize-winning historian and Marine lieutenant colonel Aaron B. O’Connell, the essays collected here represent nine different perspectives on the war—all from veterans of the conflict, both American and Afghan. Together, they paint a picture of a war in which problems of culture, including an unbridgeable rural-urban divide, derailed nearly every field of endeavor. The authors also draw troubling parallels to the Vietnam War, arguing that ideological currents in American life explain why the US government has repeatedly used military force in pursuit of democratic nation-building. In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, this created a dramatic mismatch of means and ends that neither money, technology, nor weapons could overcome.

The Grand Design
The Grand Design

Author: Donald Stoker

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-07-20

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13: 0199752567

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Despite the abundance of books on the Civil War, not one has focused exclusively on what was in fact the determining factor in the outcome of the conflict: differences in Union and Southern strategy. In The Grand Design, Donald Stoker provides for the first time a comprehensive and often surprising account of strategy as it evolved between Fort Sumter and Appomattox. Reminding us that strategy is different from tactics (battlefield deployments) and operations (campaigns conducted in pursuit of a strategy), Stoker examines how Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis identified their political goals and worked with their generals to craft the military means to achieve them--or how they often failed to do so. Stoker shows that Davis, despite a West Point education and experience as Secretary of War, ultimately failed as a strategist by losing control of the political side of the war. Lincoln, in contrast, evolved a clear strategic vision, but he failed for years to make his generals implement it. And while Robert E. Lee was unerring in his ability to determine the Union's strategic heart--its center of gravity--he proved mistaken in his assessment of how to destroy it. Historians have often argued that the North's advantages in population and industry ensured certain victory. In The Grand Design, Stoker reasserts the centrality of the overarching plan on each side, arguing convincingly that it was strategy that determined the result of America's great national conflict.