This study investigates Major General Daniel Harvey Hill’s performance during the Chattanooga campaign, focusing specifically on the Battle of Chickamauga. Hill’s early life and performance in the Army of Northern Virginia are evaluated for character development. While Hill had proved himself a fearless division commander in the Army of Northern Virginia he nevertheless developed a reputation as an uncompromising, carping and sarcastic subordinate. When Hill arrived at Chattanooga in July 1863, relations between him and Braxton Bragg quickly began to sour. Hill’s failure to act promptly at McLemore’s Cove was a result of his distrust in Confederate cavalry and Bragg’s situational awareness. After the first day of the Battle of Chickamauga, Bragg decided to change his command structure by creating two Confederate Wing Commanders. James Longstreet would command the Left Wing and Leonidas Polk commanded the Right Wing. Bragg’s plan was for Hill’s Corps to initiate the Confederate attack at daylight on 20 September. Hill was not informed of the attack until well after daylight. The delay allowed Rosecrans’ Army to use precious daylight to fortify its positions. After the battle, Bragg relieved Hill of command. Though Hill’s performance at Chickamauga was lackluster it did not warrant his removal.

Among the high-ranking gray uniforms Daniel Harvey Hill caused a stir as a sash of red in a bullpen would. Hot-tempered, outspoken, he stormed his way through the Civil War, leading his soldiers at Malvern Hill and Antietam, and sometimes stepping on the toes of superiors. But he was much more than a seemingly impervious shield against Union bullets: a devout Christian, a family man, a gloomy fatalist, an intellectual. Lee’s Maverick General makes clear that he was often caught in the crossfire of military politics and ultimately made a scapegoat for the costly, barren victory at Chickamauga. Hal Bridges, drawing on Hill’s unpublished papers, offers an outsider’s inside views of Lee, Jefferson Davis, Braxton Bragg, James Longstreet, Stonewall Jackson, and others up and down the embattled line. In his introduction, Gary W. Gallagher rounds out the portrait of the controversial Hill, whose reading of military affairs was always perceptive.

From mid-August to mid-September 1863, Union major general William S. Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland maneuvered from Tennessee to north Georgia in a bid to rout Confederate general Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee and blaze the way for further Union advances. Meanwhile, Confederate reinforcements bolstered the numbers of the Army of Tennessee, and by the time the two armies met at the Battle of Chickamauga, in northern Georgia, the Confederates had gained numerical superiority. Although the Confederacy won its only major victory west of the Appalachians, it failed to achieve the truly decisive results many high-ranking Confederates expected. In The Chickamauga Campaign,Steven E. Woodworth assembles eight thought-provoking new essays from an impressive group of authors to offer new insight into the complex reasons for this substantial, yet ultimately barren, Confederate victory. This broad collection covers every angle of the campaign, from its prelude to its denouement, from the points of view of key players of all ranks on both sides. In addition to analyzing the actions taken by Union leaders Thomas L. Crittenden, Alexander McCook, and James S. Negley, and Confederate commanders Braxton Bragg, Patrick Cleburne, Daniel Harvey Hill, Thomas C. Hindman, James Longstreet, and Alexander P. Stewart, the book probes the campaign’s impact on morale in the North and South, and concludes with an essay on the campaign’s place in Civil War memory. The final essay pays particular attention to Union veteran Henry Van Ness Boynton, the founder and developer of Chickamauga and Chattanooga State Military Park, whose achievements helped shape how the campaign would be remembered. This second volume in the Civil War Campaigns in the Heartland seriesprovides a profound understanding of the campaign’s details as well as its significance to Civil War history. Contributors: John R. Lundberg Alexander Mendoza David Powell Ethan S. Rafuse William G. Robertson Timothy B. Smith Lee White Steven E. Woodworth

By providing detailed analyses of Civil War primary sources, this book will help readers to understand the history of the bloodiest of all American conflicts. This meticulously curated collection of primary source documents covers every aspect of the American Civil War, from its origins to its bloody engagements, all the way through the Reconstruction period. With approximately 300 primary sources, this comprehensive set includes orders and reports of significant battles, political debates and speeches, legislation, court cases, and literary works from the Civil War era. The documents provide insight into the thinking of all participants, drawing upon a vast range of sources that offer both a Northern and Southern perspective. The book gives equal treatment to the Eastern and Western Theaters and to Union and Confederate sources, and the primary sources are presented in chronological order, making it easy for readers to compare and contrast documents as the key events of the conflict unfold. Each primary source begins with an introduction that sets the document in its proper context and concludes with an analysis of the document that will help students to understand the document's significance.

A fresh and surprising look at the American Civil War through pinhole camera photographs of sesquicentennial battlefield reenactments In 2011, Michael Falco set out to document the American Civil War's 150th anniversary by photographing reenactments of more than 20 major battles—from the First Manassas, Antietam, and Chancellorsville to Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Appomattox. But rather than shooting these historic re-creations in high-definition, Falco opted for a different, older medium: a pinhole camera. This antebellum photographic technology, shot from an on-the-ground perspective, captures these battlefields in a way that feels more “real” and fully realized than even the famous daguerrotypes made during the war itself. In Falco's transporting photographs, the smoke-filled battle reenactments become blurred and dreamlike, echoing the sentiments found in the actual letters and journals of soldiers who fought and died there. Throughout, historical photographs from the period offer context to the modern-day re-creations, showing just how much—or how little—has changed on this hallowed ground. One hundred and fifty years after the last soldier fell, Echoes of the Civil War provides beautiful and compelling evidence of a Civil War landscape that is, literally and metaphorically, still with us.

Leonidas Polk was a graduate of West Point who resigned his commission to enter the Episcopal priesthood as a young man. At first combining parish ministry with cotton farming in Tennessee, Polk subsequently was elected the first bishop of the Louisiana Diocese, whereupon he bought a sugarcane plantation and worked it with several hundred slaves owned by his wife. Then, in the 1850s he was instrumental in the founding of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. When secession led to war he pulled his diocese out of the national church and with other Southern bishops established what they styled the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America. Polk then offered his military services to his friend and former West Point classmate Jefferson Davis and became a major general in the Confederate Army. Polk was one of the more notable, yet controversial, generals of the war. Recognizing his indispensable familiarity with the Mississippi Valley, Confederate president Jefferson Davis commissioned his elevation to a high military position regardless of his lack of prior combat experience. Polk commanded troops in the Battles of Belmont, Shiloh, Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, and Meridian as well as several smaller engagements in Georgia leading up to Atlanta. Polk is remembered for his bitter disagreements with his immediate superior, the likewise-controversial General Braxton Bragg of the Army of Tennessee. In 1864, while serving under the command of General Joseph E. Johnston, Polk was killed by Union cannon fire as he observed General Sherman’s emplacements on the hills outside Atlanta.

John R. Lundberg's compelling new military history chronicles the evolution of Granbury's Texas Brigade, perhaps the most distinguished combat unit in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. Named for its commanding officer, Brigadier General Hiram B. Granbury, the brigade fought tenaciously in the western theater even after Confederate defeat seemed certain. Granbury's Texas Brigade explores the motivations behind the unit's decision to continue to fight, even as it faced demoralizing defeats and Confederate collapse. Using a vast array of letters, diaries, and regimental documents, Lundberg offers provocative insight into the minds of the unit's men and commanders. The caliber of that leadership, he concludes, led to the group's overall high morale. Lundberg asserts that although mass desertion rocked Granbury's Brigade early in the war, that desertion did not necessarily indicate a lack of commitment to the Confederacy but merely a desire to fight the enemy closer to home. Those who remained in the ranks became the core of Granbury's Brigade and fought until the final surrender. Morale declined only after Union bullets cut down much of the unit's officer corps at the Battle of Franklin in 1864. After the war, Lundberg shows, men from the unit did not abandon the ideals of the Confederacy -- they simply continued their devotion in different ways. Granbury's Texas Brigade presents military history at its best, revealing a microcosm of the Confederate war effort and aiding our understanding of the reasons men felt compelled to fight in America's greatest tragedy.