John Fitch served as the Provost Judge of the Army of the Cumberland. His monumental work about the Army of the Cumberland, his Annals, contains detailed biographies of the commanding general, Major-General William S. Rosecrans; the army chief-of staff, Brigadier-General James A. Garfield; and all the prominent commanders in the army. Information about lesser commanders and staff officers is included, although in less depth. Four officers killed at Stones River are also noted, including Brigadier-General Joshua Sill and Colonel Julius Garesche. In addition to the biographies, Fitch also offers general information about the Army of the Cumberland and its various non-combatant departments. The official reports of the Union and Confederate commanders from the Battle of Stones River are present, as well as General Rosecrans's report of the Chickamauga fight. A section about the Army Police presents a record of the Confederacy as seen through Federal eyes. The account "Gathering in the Contrabands" details the impressments of African Americans in Nashville as forced labor who built Ft. Negley and other defenses around the city. .

Reprint of the original, first published in 1863. Also its police record of spies, smugglers, and prominent rebel emissaries. Together with anecdotes, incidents, poetry, reminiscences, etc., and official reports of the battle of Stone River.

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On the morning of August 21, 1861, John T. Wilder, a brash young colonel of a Union mounted infantry unit nicknamed the “Lightning Brigade” ordered his men to open fire on the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, damaging buildings, sinking steamboats along the riverfront, and injuring men, women, and children. In the midst of Reconstruction and an emerging new South a mere eight years later, Wilder was elected mayor of Chattanooga. While Wilder is most closely associated with the Lightning Brigade, which helped to pioneer the use of both mounted infantry and repeating firearms during the American Civil War, his military accomplishments occupied only five years of his eighty-seven year life. His immense postwar success, however, left a permanent mark on the industrial development of the war-torn South in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is the comprehensive picture of Wilder’s nearly nine decades that Maury Nicely seeks to capture in Forging a New South: The Life of General John T. Wilder. “For many war heroes, there was not much beyond the war worth telling,” Nicely writes. “Such was not the case with Wilder.” A successful entrepreneur and industrialist, after the war Wilder relocated to East Tennessee, where he created dozens of businesses, factories, mines, hotels, and towns; was elected mayor of the city he had shelled during the war; and cultivated close personal and business relationships with Federal and Confederate veterans alike, helping to create a new South in the wake of a devastating conflict. Presented in two parts and accompanied by more than sixty detailed photographs and maps, Nicely’s balanced study fills a significant void—the first complete biography of General John T. Wilder.