This book is the trade edition of Volume VII of A History of the South, a ten-volume series designed to present a thoroughly balanced history of all the complex aspects of the South's culture from 1607 to the present. Like its companion volumes, The Confederate States of America is written by an outstanding student of Southern history, E. Merton Coulter, who is also one of the editors of the series and the author of Volume VIII.The drama of war has led most historians to deal with the years 1861 to 1865 in terms of campaigns and generals. In this volume, however, Mr. Coulter treats the war in its perspective as an aspect of the life of a people.The attempt to build a nation strong enough to win independence naturally drew Southerners' attention to such problems as morale, money, bonds, taxes, diplomacy, manufacturing, transportation, communication, publishing, armaments, religion, labor, prices, profits, race problems, and political policy. Mr. Coulter balances these phases of the struggle in their relation to war itself, and the whole is dealt with as a period in the history of a people.And finally, Mr. Coulter deals with the ever-recurring questions: Did secession necessarily mean war? Was the South from the very beginning engaged in a hopeless struggle? And, if not, why did it lose?
This book is Volume VIII of A History of the South, a ten-volume series designed to present a thoroughly balanced history of all the complex aspects of the South's culture from 1607 to the present. Like its companion volumes, The South During Reconstruction is written by an outstanding student of Southern history, E. Merton Coulter, who is also one of the editors of the series.The tragic Reconstruction period still casts its long shadow over the South. In his study, Mr. Coulter looks beyond the familiar political and economic patterns into the more fundamental attitudes and activities of the people. In this dismal period of racial and political bitterness, little notice has been taken of the strivings for reorganization of agriculture under free labor, for industrial and transportation development, for a free-school system and higher education, and for the advance of religious, literary, and other cultural interests. Mr. Coulter's book shows these things to be very real, and they are related to the Radical program, which, conceived both in good and evil, ran its course and finally collapsed.This period forms an important chapter in American history. It is an account of a region, defeated in one of the world's great wars, struggling to rebuild its social and economic structure and to win back for itself a place in the reunited nation.
Of all the states in the Confederacy, Tennessee was the most sectionally divided. East Tennesseans opposed secession at the ballot box in 1861, petitioned unsuccessfully for separate statehood, resisted the Confederate government, enlisted in Union militias, elected U.S. congressmen, and fled as refugees into Kentucky. These refugees formed Tennessee's first Union cavalry regiments during early 1862, followed shortly thereafter by others organized in Union-occupied Middle and West Tennessee. In Homegrown Yankees, the first book-length study of Union cavalry from a Confederate state, James Alex Baggett tells the remarkable story of Tennessee's loyal mounted regiments. Fourteen mounted regiments that fought primarily within the boundaries of the state and eight local units made up Tennessee's Union cavalry. Young, nonslaveholding farmers who opposed secession, the Confederacy, and the war -- from isolated villages east of Knoxville, the Cumberland Mountains, or the Tennessee River counties in the west -- filled the ranks. Most Tennesseans denounced these local bluecoats as renegades, turncoats, and Tories; accused them of betraying their people, their section, and their race; and held them in greater contempt than soldiers from the North. Though these homegrown Yankees participated in many battles -- including those in the Stones River, Tullahoma, Chickamauga, East Tennessee, Nashville, and Atlanta campaigns -- their story provides rare insights into what occurred between the battles. For them, military action primarily meant almost endless skirmishing with partisans, guerrillas, and bushwackers, as well as with the Rebel raiders of John Hunt Morgan, Joseph Wheeler, and Nathan Bedford Forrest, who frequently recruited and supplied themselves from behind enemy lines. Tennessee's Union cavalry scouted and foraged the countryside, guarded outposts and railroads, acted as couriers, supported the flanks of infantry, and raided the enemy. On occasion, especially during the Nashville campaign, they provided rapid pursuit of Confederate forces. They also helped protect fellow unionists from an aggressive pro-Confederate insurgency after 1862. Baggett vividly describes the deprivation, sickness, and loneliness of cavalrymen living on the war's periphery and traces how circumstances beyond their control -- such as terrain, transport, equipage, weaponry, public sentiment, and military policy -- affected their lives. He also explores their well-earned reputation for plundering -- misdeeds motivated by revenge, resentment, a lack of discipline, and the hard-war policy of the Union army. In the never-before-told story of these cavalrymen, Homegrown Yankees offers new insights into an unexplored facet of southern Unionism and provides an exciting new perspective on the Civil War in Tennessee.
In Creating a Confederate Kentucky, Anne E. Marshall traces the development of a Confederate identity in Kentucky between 1865 and 1925, belying the fact that Kentucky never left the Union. After the Civil War, the people of Kentucky appeared to forget their Union loyalties and embraced the Democratic politics, racial violence, and Jim Crow laws associated with former Confederate states. Marshall looks beyond postwar political and economic factors to the longer-term commemorations of the Civil War by which Kentuckians fixed the state's remembrance of the conflict for the following sixty years.
This book is Volume I of A HISTORY OF THE SOUTH, a ten-volume series designed to present a balanced history of all the complex aspects of the South’s culture from 1607 to the present. Like its companion volumes, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century was written by an outstanding student of Southern history. In the America of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, just what was Southern? The first colonists looked upon themselves as British, and only gradually did those attitudes and traditions develop which were distinctively American. To determine what was Southern in the early colonies, Professor Craven has searched for those features of early American society which distinguished the South in later years and those features of early American history which help the Southerner to understand himself. The Chesapeake colonies—Virginia and Maryland—formed the first Southern community. These colonies grew out of the same interest which directed European imperialism toward Africa and the West Indies—notably the production of sugar, silk, wine, and tobacco. Craven studies the social, economic, and political development of the Southern colonies as the product of continuing European rivalries that resulted in the colonization of Carolina and Florida. Major emphasis, however, is placed upon British expansion, since Anglo-Saxon influence was dominant in the formation of the South as a region. Craven sees as crucial the middle period of the seventeenth century. Out of the political and social unrest which characterized these years emerged the points of view which gave shape to the American and the Southern tradition.
The slave market in Seville, while still relatively small, became one of the most active in Europe. Many called the city the 'New Babylon.' Northern and sub-Saharan Africans comprised more than 50 percent of the inhabitants of several of Seville's neighborhoods. The African populations became so socially and politically important that in 1475 the Crown appointed Juan de Valladolid, its royal servant and mayoral, to represent Seville's Afro-Iberian community. Churches and charities catered to its spiritual and material needs.
Allen C. Guelzo's Reconstruction: A Concise History is a gracefully written interpretation of Reconstruction as a spirited struggle to reintegrate the defeated Southern Confederacy into the American Union after the Civil War, to bring African Americans into the political mainstream of American life, and to recreate the Southern economy after a Northern free-labor model.
