Richmond, Virginia: pride of the founding fathers, doomed capital of the Confederate States of America. Unlike other Southern cities, Richmond boasted a vibrant, urban industrial complex capable of producing crucial ammunition and military supplies. Despite its northern position, Richmond became the Confederacy's beating heart—its capital, second-largest city, and impenetrable citadel. As long as the city endured, the Confederacy remained a well-supplied and formidable force. But when Ulysses S. Grant broke its defenses in 1865, the Confederates fled, burned Richmond to the ground, and surrendered within the week. Confederate Citadel: Richmond and Its People at War offers a detailed portrait of life's daily hardships in the rebel capital during the Civil War. Here, barricaded against a siege, staunch Unionists became a dangerous fifth column, refugees flooded the streets, and women organized a bread riot in the city. Drawing on personal correspondence, private diaries, and newspapers, author Mary A. DeCredico spotlights the human elements of Richmond's economic rise and fall, uncovering its significance as the South's industrial powerhouse throughout the Civil War.

Few American cities have experienced the trauma of wartime destruction. As the capital of the new Confederate States of America, situated only ninety miles from the enemy capital at Washington, D.C., Richmond was under constant threat. The civilian population suffered not only shortage and hardship but also constant anxiety. During the war, the city more than doubled in population and became the industrial center of a prolonged and costly war effort. The city transformed with the creation of a massive hospital system, military training camps, new industries and shifting social roles for everyone, including women and African Americans. Local historians Jack Trammell and Guy Terrell detail the excitement, and eventually bitter disappointment, of Richmond at war.

The stirring history of a president and a capital city on the front lines of war and freedom. In the late 1840s, Representative Abraham Lincoln resided at Mrs. Sprigg’s boardinghouse on Capitol Hill. Known as Abolition House, Mrs. Sprigg’s hosted lively dinner-table debates of antislavery politics by the congressional boarders. The unusually rapid turnover in the enslaved staff suggested that there were frequent escapes north to freedom from Abolition House, likely a cog in the underground railroad. These early years in Washington proved formative for Lincoln. In 1861, now in the White House, Lincoln could gaze out his office window and see the Confederate flag flying across the Potomac. Washington, DC, sat on the front lines of the Civil War. Vulnerable and insecure, the capital was rife with Confederate sympathizers. On the crossroads of slavery and freedom, the city was a refuge for thousands of contraband and fugitive slaves. The Lincoln administration took strict measures to tighten security and established camps to provide food, shelter, and medical care for contrabands. In 1863, a Freedman’s Village rose on the grounds of the Lee estate, where the Confederate flag once flew. The president and Mrs. Lincoln personally comforted the wounded troops who flooded wartime Washington. In 1862, Lincoln spent July 4 riding in a train of ambulances carrying casualties from the Peninsula Campaign to Washington hospitals. He saluted the “One-Legged Brigade” assembled outside the White House as “orators,” their wounds eloquent expressions of sacrifice and dedication. The administration built more than one hundred military hospitals to care for Union casualties. These are among the unforgettable scenes in Lincoln’s Citadel, a fresh, absorbing narrative history of Lincoln’s leadership in Civil War Washington. Here is the vivid story of how the Lincoln administration met the immense challenges the war posed to the city, transforming a vulnerable capital into a bastion for the Union.

This is the story, told by it former President, of a remarkable institution; one of the last reaming state -assisted military colleges in America. Beginning with the account of an aborted slave insurrection in June 1822, the author tells in detail of the city of Charleston, and of a later decision by the State Legislature to use the facility, as well as an arsenal in Columbia, to educate a corps of cadets and to train them for the defense of the state. Just before Commencement in 1861, the cadet corps, stationed on Morris Island, fired the first shots of the Civil War at the "Star of the West", a supply ship sent to relieve Ft. Sumter. A member of the first class to graduate after the war (1886), the author was immediately appointed an assistant professor and was thereafter a member of the faculty for 45 years. His personal involvement in every aspect of Citadel life during that time allowed him to include personal reminiscences that are both fascinating and poignant. He was appointed Superintendent (President) in 1908.

Focusing on the South’s four major military colleges—the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), the South Carolina Military Academy (later The Citadel), the Georgia Military Institute, and the University of Alabama—The Young Lions is the story of young Confederate military cadets at war. From the opening of VMI in 1839 through the struggles of all the schools to remain open during the war, the death of Stonewall Jackson (a VMI professor), and the Pyrrhic victory of the Battle of New Market to the burning of the University of Alabama in 1865, this book reveals the everyday dramatic actions of cadets on battlefield and beyond.

The revised and updated groundbreaking study of the most extensive military operation of the Civil War—from the author of Bloody Roads South. The Petersburg campaign began on June 9, 1864, and ended on April 3, 1865, when Federal troops at last entered the city. It was the longest and most costly siege ever to take place on North American soil, yet it has been overshadowed by other actions that occurred at the same time period, most notably Sherman’s famous “March to the Sea,” and Sheridan’s celebrated Shenandoah Valley campaign. The ten-month Petersburg affair witnessed many more combat actions than the other two combined, and involved an average of 170,000 soldiers, not to mention thousands of civilians who were also caught up in the maelstrom. By its bloody end, the Petersburg campaign would add more than 70,000 casualties to the war’s total. With the same dogged determination that had seen him through the terrible Overland Campaign, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant fixed his sights on the capture of Petersburg. Grant’s opponent, General Robert E. Lee, was equally determined that the “Cockade City” would not fall. Trudeau crafts this dramatic and moving story largely through the words of the men and women who were there, including officers, common soldiers, and the residents of Petersburg. What emerges is an epic account rich in human incident and adventure. Based on exhaustive research into official records and unpublished memoirs, letters, and diaries, as well as published recollections and regimental histories, The Last Citadel also includes twenty-three maps and a choice selection of drawings by on-the-spot combat artists.

John W. Green (1841-1920), an enlisted man with Kentucky's famed Confederate Orphan Brigade throughout the Civil War, fought at Shiloh, Baton Rouge, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Atlanta and many other crucial battles. An acute observer with a flair for humanizing the impersonal horror of war, he kept a record of his experiences, and penned an exciting front-line account of America's defining trial by fire. Albert D. Kirwan provides a brief history of the Orphan Brigade and a biography of Johnny Green. Introductions to each chapter explain references in the journal and also set the context for the major campaigns.