The Private Civil War

The Private Civil War
Title The Private Civil War PDF eBook
Author Randall C. Jimerson
Publisher LSU Press
Pages 308
Release 1994-10-01
Genre History
ISBN 9780807119624

Download The Private Civil War Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Historians have given much attention to the Civil War’s prominent players—its generals, politicians, and other public leaders—but they have devoted less attention to the common soldiers and civilians—the “plain folk”—who actively participated in the conflict. In his study of popular thought during the Civil War era, Randall C. Jimerson offers a grass-roots perspective on the war by examining the thoughts and ideas of these ordinary men and women. The Private Civil War derives much of its power from the author’s deft use of personal letters and diaries. Separated from home and family, virtually every soldier and many civilians wrote frequent and informative letters or recorded daily experiences and thoughts in journals. Jimerson has consulted a broad cross section of these documents, culling information from letters and diaries written by people from every state and from all social classes and military ranks. These documents, remarkable in many instances for their depth of feeling and eloquence, provide rich, detailed information about sectional perceptions and ideology as well as many private reflections.

Private Confederacies

Private Confederacies
Title Private Confederacies PDF eBook
Author James J. Broomall
Publisher UNC Press Books
Pages 241
Release 2019-01-10
Genre History
ISBN 1469649764

Download Private Confederacies Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

How did the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction shape the masculinity of white Confederate veterans? As James J. Broomall shows, the crisis of the war forced a reconfiguration of the emotional worlds of the men who took up arms for the South. Raised in an antebellum culture that demanded restraint and shaped white men to embrace self-reliant masculinity, Confederate soldiers lived and fought within military units where they experienced the traumatic strain of combat and its privations together--all the while being separated from suffering families. Military service provoked changes that escalated with the end of slavery and the Confederacy's military defeat. Returning to civilian life, Southern veterans questioned themselves as never before, sometimes suffering from terrible self-doubt. Drawing on personal letters and diaries, Broomall argues that the crisis of defeat ultimately necessitated new forms of expression between veterans and among men and women. On the one hand, war led men to express levels of emotionality and vulnerability previously assumed the domain of women. On the other hand, these men also embraced a virulent, martial masculinity that they wielded during Reconstruction and beyond to suppress freed peoples and restore white rule through paramilitary organizations and the Ku Klux Klan.

The Private Mary Chesnut

The Private Mary Chesnut
Title The Private Mary Chesnut PDF eBook
Author Mary Boykin Chesnut
Publisher Oxford University Press, USA
Pages 324
Release 1984
Genre Biography & Autobiography
ISBN 9780195035131

Download The Private Mary Chesnut Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian C. Vann Woodward and Chesnut's biographer Elisabeth Muhlenfeld present here the previously unpublished Civil War diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut. The ideal diarist, Mary Chesnut was at the right place at the right time with the right connections. Daughter of one senator from South Carolina and wife of another, she had kin and friends all over the Confederacy and knew intimately its political and military leaders. At Montgomery when the new nation was founded, at Charleston when the war started, and at Richmond during many crises, she traveled extensively during the war. She watched a world "literally kicked to pieces" and left the most vivid account we have of the death throes of a society. The diaries, filled with personal revelations and indiscretions, are indispensable to an appreciation of our most famous Southern literary insight into the Civil War experience.

Private Elisha Stockwell, Jr., Sees the Civil War

Private Elisha Stockwell, Jr., Sees the Civil War
Title Private Elisha Stockwell, Jr., Sees the Civil War PDF eBook
Author Elisha Stockwell
Publisher
Pages 240
Release 1958
Genre United States
ISBN

Download Private Elisha Stockwell, Jr., Sees the Civil War Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Memoirs. Stockwell enlisted in the Union Army in 1862 as a boy of fifteen, and stayed until the end of the war.

Faces of the Civil War

Faces of the Civil War
Title Faces of the Civil War PDF eBook
Author Ronald S Coddington
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM
Pages 294
Release 2012-11-12
Genre History
ISBN 1421410397

Download Faces of the Civil War Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Archival images and biographical sketches of Union soldiers tell the stories of their lives during and after the Civil War. Before leaving to fight in the Civil War, many Union and Confederate soldiers posed for a carte de visite, or visiting card, to give to their families, friends, or sweethearts. Invented in 1854 by a French photographer, the carte de visite was a small photographic print roughly the size of a modern trading card. The format arrived in America on the eve of the Civil War, fueling intense demand for the keepsakes. Many cards of Civil War soldiers survive today, but the experiences?and often the names?of the individuals portrayed have been lost to time. A passionate collector of Civil War–era photography, Ron Coddington researched the history behind these anonymous faces in military records, pension files, and other public and personal documents. In Faces of the Civil War, Coddington presents 77 cartes de visite of Union soldiers from his collection and tells the stories of their lives during and after the war. These soldiers came from all walks of life. All were volunteers. Their personal stories reveal a tremendous diversity in their experience of war: many served with distinction, some were captured, some never saw combat while others saw little else. The lives of survivors were even more disparate. While some made successful transitions back to civilian life, others suffered permanent physical and mental disabilities, which too often wrecked their families and careers. In compelling words and haunting pictures, Faces of the Civil War offers a unique perspective on the most dramatic and wrenching period in American history.

Gone for a soldier

Gone for a soldier
Title Gone for a soldier PDF eBook
Author Alfred Bellard
Publisher
Pages 298
Release 1975
Genre
ISBN

Download Gone for a soldier Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

For Cause and Comrades

For Cause and Comrades
Title For Cause and Comrades PDF eBook
Author James M. McPherson
Publisher Oxford University Press
Pages 258
Release 1997-04-03
Genre History
ISBN 0199741050

Download For Cause and Comrades Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

General John A. Wickham, commander of the famous 101st Airborne Division in the 1970s and subsequently Army Chief of Staff, once visited Antietam battlefield. Gazing at Bloody Lane where, in 1862, several Union assaults were brutally repulsed before they finally broke through, he marveled, "You couldn't get American soldiers today to make an attack like that." Why did those men risk certain death, over and over again, through countless bloody battles and four long, awful years ? Why did the conventional wisdom -- that soldiers become increasingly cynical and disillusioned as war progresses -- not hold true in the Civil War? It is to this question--why did they fight--that James McPherson, America's preeminent Civil War historian, now turns his attention. He shows that, contrary to what many scholars believe, the soldiers of the Civil War remained powerfully convinced of the ideals for which they fought throughout the conflict. Motivated by duty and honor, and often by religious faith, these men wrote frequently of their firm belief in the cause for which they fought: the principles of liberty, freedom, justice, and patriotism. Soldiers on both sides harkened back to the Founding Fathers, and the ideals of the American Revolution. They fought to defend their country, either the Union--"the best Government ever made"--or the Confederate states, where their very homes and families were under siege. And they fought to defend their honor and manhood. "I should not lik to go home with the name of a couhard," one Massachusetts private wrote, and another private from Ohio said, "My wife would sooner hear of my death than my disgrace." Even after three years of bloody battles, more than half of the Union soldiers reenlisted voluntarily. "While duty calls me here and my country demands my services I should be willing to make the sacrifice," one man wrote to his protesting parents. And another soldier said simply, "I still love my country." McPherson draws on more than 25,000 letters and nearly 250 private diaries from men on both sides. Civil War soldiers were among the most literate soldiers in history, and most of them wrote home frequently, as it was the only way for them to keep in touch with homes that many of them had left for the first time in their lives. Significantly, their letters were also uncensored by military authorities, and are uniquely frank in their criticism and detailed in their reports of marches and battles, relations between officers and men, political debates, and morale. For Cause and Comrades lets these soldiers tell their own stories in their own words to create an account that is both deeply moving and far truer than most books on war. Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Civil War, was a national bestseller that Hugh Brogan, in The New York Times, called "history writing of the highest order." For Cause and Comrades deserves similar accolades, as McPherson's masterful prose and the soldiers' own words combine to create both an important book on an often-overlooked aspect of our bloody Civil War, and a powerfully moving account of the men who fought it.