The Diary of Edmund Ruffin
The Diary of Edmund Ruffin

Author: Edmund Ruffin

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 1977-03-01

Total Pages: 752

ISBN-13: 9780807101834

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In this second of a projected three-volume edition of The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, the fiery southern nationalist records the events of the first two years of the Civil War -- from the aftermath of Fort Sumter (where Ruffin fired the first shot) to the simultaneous disasters at Gettysburg and Vicksburg that spelled doom for the Confederacy.From his advantageous position as the resident and former owner of two Virginia plantations, Ruffin was able to write a vivid eyewitness account of the early Federal campaigns against Richmond. Both of the Ruffin homesteads, Marlbourne and Beechwood, were overrun during McClellan's Peninsular Campaign of 1862, and the journal contains interesting observations about the conduct of Virginia slaves during this campaign, as well as the change it engendered in master-slave relations. Also included is a remarkable recollection of the Nat Turner revolt.The day-to-day descriptions of the Civil War in Virginia are laced with illumination comments about civil and military leaders on both sides, the prospect of foreign intervention, the increasing strain upon the southern economy, the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the possibility of detaching the northwestern states from the East.Written by a man totally committed to the southern cause, The Diary of Edmund Ruffin is a literate, dependable source of information about the Civil War and its effects, as well as the political and social conditions in the South during the most critical period in its history. Meticulously edited by William Kauffman Scarborough, it will be of lasting value to anyone who wishes to study the Civil War from the insider's point of view.

Food and Agriculture during the Civil War
Food and Agriculture during the Civil War

Author: R. Douglas Hurt

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2016-01-11

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1440803269

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This book provides a perspective into the past that few students and historians of the Civil War have considered: agriculture during the Civil War as a key element of power. The Civil War revolutionized the agricultural labor system in the South, and it had dramatic effects on farm labor in the North relating to technology. Agriculture also was an element of power for both sides during the Civil War—one that is often overlooked in traditional studies of the conflict. R. Douglas Hurt argues that Southerners viewed the agricultural productivity of their region as an element of power that would enable them to win the war, while Northern farmers considered their productivity not only an economic benefit to the Union and enhancement of their personal fortunes but also an advantage that would help bring the South back into the Union. This study examines the effects of the Civil War on agriculture for both the Union and the Confederacy from 1860 to 1865, emphasizing how agriculture directly related to the war effort in each region—for example, the efforts made to produce more food for military and civilian populations; attempts to limit cotton production; cotton as a diplomatic tool; the work of women in the fields; slavery as a key agricultural resource; livestock production; experiments to produce cotton, tobacco, and sugar in the North; and the adoption of new implements.

Looming Civil War
Looming Civil War

Author: Jason Phillips

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-09-20

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0190868171

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How did Americans imagine the Civil War before it happened? The most anticipated event of the nineteenth century appeared in novels, prophecies, dreams, diaries, speeches, and newspapers decades before the first shots at Fort Sumter. People forecasted a frontier filibuster, an economic clash between free and slave labor, a race war, a revolution, a war for liberation, and Armageddon. Reading their premonitions reveals how several factors, including race, religion, age, gender, region, and class, shaped what people thought about the future and how they imagined it. Some Americans pictured the future as an open, contested era that they progressed toward and molded with their thoughts and actions. Others saw the future as a closed, predetermined world that approached them and sealed their fate. When the war began, these opposing temporalities informed how Americans grasped and waged the conflict. In this creative history, Jason Phillips explains how the expectations of a host of characters-generals, politicians, radicals, citizens, and slaves-affected how people understood the unfolding drama and acted when the future became present. He reconsiders the war's origins without looking at sources using hindsight, that is, without considering what caused the cataclysm and whether it was inevitable. As a result, Phillips dispels a popular myth that all Americans thought the Civil War would be short and glorious at the outset, a ninety-day affair full of fun and adventure. Much more than rational power games played by elites, the war was shaped by uncertainties and emotions and darkened horizons that changed over time. Looming Civil War highlights how individuals approached an ominous future with feelings, thoughts, and perspectives different from our sensibilities and unconnected to our view of their world. Civil War Americans had their own prospects to ponder and forge as they discovered who they were and where life would lead them. The Civil War changed more than America's future; it transformed how Americans imagined the future and how Americans have thought about the future ever since.

Confederate Political Economy
Confederate Political Economy

Author: Michael Brem Bonner

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2016-05-11

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0807162140

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In Confederate Political Economy, Michael Bonner suggests that the Confederate nation was an expedient corporatist state -- a society that required all sectors of the economy to work for the national interest, as defined by a partnership of industrial leaders and a dominant government. As Bonner shows, the characteristics of the Confederate States' political economy included modern organizational methods that mirrored the economic landscape of other late nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century corporatist governments. Southern leaders, Bonner argues, were slave-owning agricultural capitalists who sought a counterrevolution against northern liberal capitalism. During secession and as the war progressed, they built and reinforced Confederate nationalism through specific centralized government policies. Bolstered by the Confederate constitution, these policies evolved into a political culture that allowed for immense executive powers, facilitated an anti-party ideology, and subordinated individual rights. In addition, the South's lack of industrial capacity forced the Confederacy to pursue a curious manufacturing policy that used both private companies and national ownership to produce munitions. This symbiotic relationship was just one component of the Confederacy's expedient corporatist state: other wartime policies like conscription, the domestic passport system, and management of southern railroads also exhibited unmistakable corporatist characteristics. Bonner's probing research and new comparative analysis expand our understanding of the complex organization and relationships in Confederate political and economic culture during the Civil War.

An Unholy Traffic
An Unholy Traffic

Author: Robert K. D. Colby

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0197578268

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During the Civil War, enslavers bought and sold thousands of people, extending a traffic in humanity that had long underpinned American slavery. Despite the pressures of blockades, economic collapse, and unfolding emancipation, the slave trade survived to the war's end. This book provides a vivid look at life within the trade in slaves and tells the story of the wartime slave trade from the perspective of both participants in it and those subjected to it.

Nature's Management
Nature's Management

Author: Edmund Ruffin

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9780820321622

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History remembers Edmund Ruffin, the Virginia native believed to have fired the first shot against Fort Sumter in 1861, as one of the South's most aggressive "fire-eaters." This volume of Ruffin's work offers us his less known but equally intense passion for agricultural study. In carefully edited selections from Ruffin's writings, Jack Temple Kirby presents an innovative, progressive agronomist and pioneering conservationist. Arranged in sections discussing southern agricultural history, Ruffin's observations of nature, his ideas about land reform, and his plans for soil rejuvenation, Nature’s Management shows that Ruffin was a thinker far ahead of his time, recognizing our need to improve agriculture and to protect nature. Known as the "father of soil science" in the United States, Edmund Ruffin discovered and solved the problem of soil acidity while still in his twenties and published several papers on the subject. As the publication of his writing increased, Ruffin left his own farming business to pursue his studies. This volume contains a collection of Ruffin's essays on a variety of interrelated subjects. From the promotion of fencing and methods of malaria prevention to advocacy of a public works program and the recycling of waste, Ruffin's ideas paved the way for the early conservation movement associated with Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and others. Nature's Management presents Ruffin's activism and innovative genius at its best, replacing the image of a southern firebrand with that of an outspoken reformer deserving of recognition.

The Battlefield and Beyond
The Battlefield and Beyond

Author: Clayton E. Jewett

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2012-05-16

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0807143561

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"Leading Civil War historians explore a tragic part of our nation's history through the lenses of race, gender, leadership, politics, and memory ... the essays ... consider the fundamental issue of the Confederacy's failure and military defeat but also expose our nation's continuing struggles with race, individual rights, terrorism, and the economy"--Dust jacket.

The Early Morning of War
The Early Morning of War

Author: Edward G. Longacre

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2014-10-22

Total Pages: 885

ISBN-13: 0806147601

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When Union and Confederate forces squared off along Bull Run on July 21, 1861, the Federals expected this first major military campaign would bring an early end to the Civil War. But when Confederate troops launched a strong counterattack, both sides realized the war would be longer and costlier than anticipated. First Bull Run, or First Manassas, set the stage for four years of bloody conflict that forever changed the political, social, and economic fabric of the nation. It also introduced the commanders, tactics, and weaponry that would define the American way of war through the turn of the twentieth century. This crucial campaign receives its most complete and comprehensive treatment in Edward G. Longacre’s The Early Morning of War. A magisterial work by a veteran historian, The Early Morning of War blends narrative and analysis to convey the full scope of the campaign of First Bull Run—its drama and suspense as well as its practical and tactical underpinnings and ramifications. Also woven throughout are biographical sketches detailing the backgrounds and personalities of the leading commanders and other actors in the unfolding conflict. Longacre has combed previously unpublished primary sources, including correspondence, diaries, and memoirs of more than four hundred participants and observers, from ranking commanders to common soldiers and civilians affected by the fighting. In weighing all the evidence, Longacre finds correctives to long-held theories about campaign strategy and battle tactics and questions sacrosanct beliefs—such as whether the Manassas Gap Railroad was essential to the Confederate victory. Longacre shears away the myths and persuasively examines the long-term repercussions of the Union’s defeat at Bull Run, while analyzing whether the Confederates really had a chance of ending the war in July 1861 by seizing Washington, D.C. Brilliant moves, avoidable blunders, accidents, historical forces, personal foibles: all are within Longacre’s compass in this deftly written work that is sure to become the standard history of the first, critical campaign of the Civil War.

Civil War Eyewitnesses
Civil War Eyewitnesses

Author: Garold Cole

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9781570033278

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A bibliographical guide to recently published Civil War diaries, journals, letters, and memoirs.

The American Civil War
The American Civil War

Author: Ethan S. Rafuse

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-28

Total Pages: 653

ISBN-13: 1351147781

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The largest and most destructive military conflict between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War, the American Civil War has inspired some of the best and most intriguing scholarship in the field of United States history. This volume offers some of the most important work on the war to appear in the past few decades and offers compelling information and insights into subjects ranging from the organization of armies, historiography, the use of intelligence and the challenges faced by civil and military leaders in the course of America‘s bloodiest war.