John Bell Hood, a native of Kentucky bred on romantic notions of the Old South and determined to model himself on Robert E. Lee, had a tragic military career, no less interesting for being calamitous. After conspicuous bravery in leading a Texas brigade, he rose in the ranks to become the youngest of the full generals of the Confederacy. The misfortune in store for Hood, a far better fighter than a strategist, illustrates the strain and risks of high command. One of the lasting images to come out of the Civil War is that of the one-legged General Hood strapped in his saddle, leading his men in a hopeless counter-offensive against Sherman's march on Atlanta. In this prize-winning book Richard M. McMurry spares no details of Hood's ultimate "complete and disastrous failure," but he is concerned to do justice to one of the most maligned and misunderstood figures in Civil War history.
Just a touch here and a tweak there . . . . MacKinlay Kantor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, master storyteller, shows us how the South could have won the Civil War, how two small shifts in history (as we know it) in the summer of 1863 could have turned the tide for the Confederacy. What would have happened: to the Union, to Abraham Lincoln, to the people of the North and South, to the world? If the South Had Won the Civil War originally appeared in Look Magazine nearly half a century ago. It immediately inspired a deluge of letters and telegrams from astonished readers and became an American classic overnight. Published in book form soon after, Kantor's masterpiece has been unavailable for a decade. Now, this much requested classic is once again available for a new generation of readers and features a stunning cover by acclaimed Civil War artist Don Troiani, a new introduction by award-winning alternate history author Harry Turtledove, and fifteen superb illustrations by the incomparable Dan Nance. It all begins on that fateful afternoon of Tuesday, May 12, 1863, when a deplorable equestrian accident claims the life of General Ulysses S. Grant . . . . At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
In this hard-hitting collection of 4 essays, Dr Wilson cuts straight to the chase: YOU WERE LIED TO! You were lied to about the nature, character, and cause of the American "Civil War," but that is just the start. The entire South-its people, culture, history, customs, both past and present-has been and continues to be lied about and demonized by the unholy trinity of the American establishment: Academia, Hollywood, and the Media. In the midst of the anti-South hysteria currently infecting the American psyche-the banning of flags, charges of hate and "racism," the removal and attempted removal of Confederate monuments, the renaming of schools, vandalism of monuments and property displaying the Confederate Battle Flag, and even physical assaults, albeit rarely at present, on people who display the symbols of the South-Shotwell Publishing offers this unapologetic, unreconstructed, pro-South book with the hope that it will reach those who are left that are not afraid to question the sanity of this cultural purge and the veracity of its narrative concerning the South. This title is enrolled in Kindle MatchBook. FREE if print edition is purchased on Amazon.
Including a new afterword by the author, this bold and controversial book will not only change how historians think about the causes of the Civil War but will place its powerful legacy into proper perspective.
Originally there was no connection between the settlements along the coast. In 1776 they held a meeting and declared their separation from England and asserted that each State was a free, independent and sovereign State; and by a treaty of peace, that was admitted by England. In 1781 the States entered into a confederacy and again declared the independence and sovereignty of each State. In 1788 a union was proposed to go into effect between any nine States that ratified the Constitution. Eleven States ratified the Constitution and it went into operation between them. George Washington was elected President of the eleven States. In ratifying that Constitution Virginia and New York particularly affirmed that the people of any State had a right to withdraw from the Union, and there was general assent to that claim, and it was taught in the text book at West Point. There arose at various times differences between the Southern States and the Northern States but all these were peaceably settled except as to African slavery. For some cause South Carolina seceded in December, 1860, and presently was joined by six other Southern States. Neither Congress nor the President took any action against these States. But at length Congress passed a measure proposing that the States should amend the Constitution and prohibit Congress from interfering with Negro slavery in any State, with the expectation that such an amendment would lead the seceded States to return. Presently the new President was led to deny the right of a State to withdraw from the Union, and he started a war against the seceded States and called on the other States to furnish troops for his war. When North Carolina and Virginia and other Southern States were called on to furnish troops to fight the seceded States, North Carolina said, “You can get no soldiers from this State to fight your unholy war,” and North Carolina withdrew from the Union and so did Virginia and two other States. Then the Supreme Court in a case before it declared that under the Constitution the President had no right to make war and the Constitution did not give Congress the right to make war on any State. So it mentioned the war as one between the Northern and Southern States and said the right of the matter in dispute was to be determined by the “wager of battle,” thus ignoring the light and justice of the claim in dispute. And so the Northern States conquered those that had seceded. This book contains the following chapters: 1. The Slave Trade 2. Steps Leading to War 3. Nullification, North and South 4. The States Made the Union 5. Nullification, North and South 6. Ratification of the Constitution by Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island 7. Secession, Insurrection of the Negroes, and Northern Incendiarism 8. The Modern Case of John Brown 9. Why South Carolina Seceded 10. Secession of the Cotton States 11. President Lincoln’s Inaugural 12. Lincoln and the Constitution 13. Lincoln the Lawyer 14. Lincoln’s Inhumanity 15. Lincoln the Usurper 16. Abraham Lincoln, the Citizen 17. Lincoln the Strategist 18. Conditions Just After the War 19. The War Between the Northern States and the Southern States 20. Speech of Jefferson Davis at Mississippi City, Mississippi in 1881
The little-known history of anti-secession Southerners: “Absolutely essential Civil War reading.” —Booklist, starred review Bitterly Divided reveals that the South was in fact fighting two civil wars—the external one that we know so much about, and an internal one about which there is scant literature and virtually no public awareness. In this fascinating look at a hidden side of the South’s history, David Williams shows the powerful and little-understood impact of the thousands of draft resisters, Southern Unionists, fugitive slaves, and other Southerners who opposed the Confederate cause. “This fast-paced book will be a revelation even to professional historians. . . . His astonishing story details the deep, often murderous divisions in Southern society. Southerners took up arms against each other, engaged in massacres, guerrilla warfare, vigilante justice and lynchings, and deserted in droves from the Confederate army . . . Some counties and regions even seceded from the secessionists . . . With this book, the history of the Civil War will never be the same again.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Most Southerners looked on the conflict with the North as ‘a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,’ especially because owners of 20 or more slaves and all planters and public officials were exempt from military service . . . The Confederacy lost, it seems, because it was precisely the kind of house divided against itself that Lincoln famously said could not stand.” —Booklist, starred review
Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore, is a 1953 novel of alternate history. The point of divergence occurs when the Confederate States of America wins the Battle of Gettysburg and subsequently declares victory in the American Civil War. Includes an introduction by John Betancourt. "An important original work... richly and realistically imagined." —Galaxy Science Fiction.
Pulitzer Prize Finalist Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winner of the Merle Curti Award “McCurry strips the Confederacy of myth and romance to reveal its doomed essence. Dedicated to the proposition that men were not created equal, the Confederacy had to fight a two-front war. Not only against Union armies, but also slaves and poor white women who rose in revolt across the South. Richly detailed and lucidly told, Confederate Reckoning is a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read.” —Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic “McCurry challenges us to expand our definition of politics to encompass not simply government but the entire public sphere. The struggle for Southern independence, she shows, opened the door for the mobilization of two groups previously outside the political nation—white women of the nonslaveholding class and slaves...Confederate Reckoning offers a powerful new paradigm for understanding events on the Confederate home front.” —Eric Foner, The Nation “Perhaps the highest praise one can offer McCurry’s work is to say that once we look through her eyes, it will become almost impossible to believe that we ever saw or thought otherwise...At the outset of the book, McCurry insists that she is not going to ask or answer the timeworn question of why the South lost the Civil War. Yet in her vivid and richly textured portrait of what she calls the Confederacy’s ‘undoing,’ she has in fact accomplished exactly that.” —Drew Gilpin Faust, New Republic “A brilliant, eye-opening account of how Southern white women and black slaves fatally undermined the Confederacy from within.” —Edward Bonekemper, Civil War News The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. When the grandiosity of Southerners’ national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people—white women and slaves—and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise. Wartime scarcity of food, labor, and soldiers tested the Confederate vision at every point and created domestic crises to match those found on the battlefields. Women and slaves became critical political actors as they contested government enlistment and tax and welfare policies, and struggled for their freedom. The attempt to repress a majority of its own population backfired on the Confederate States of America as the disenfranchised demanded to be counted and considered in the great struggle over slavery, emancipation, democracy, and nationhood. That Confederate struggle played out in a highly charged international arena. The political project of the Confederacy was tried by its own people and failed. The government was forced to become accountable to women and slaves, provoking an astounding transformation of the slaveholders’ state. Confederate Reckoning is the startling story of this epic political battle in which women and slaves helped to decide the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.
In this highly original study, Gregory Downs argues that the most American of wars, the Civil War, created a seemingly un-American popular politics, rooted not in independence but in voluntary claims of dependence. Through an examination of the pleas and
