"Thoroughly researched . . . [Hubbard's] interpretation is solid, well supported, and touches all of the major aspects of Confederate diplomacy."--American Historical Review "As the first examination of the topic since King Cotton Diplomacy (1931), this work deserves widespread attention. Hubbard offers a convincingly bleak portrayal of the limited skills and myopic vision of Rebel diplomacy at home and abroad."--Virginia Magazine of History and Biography Of the many factors that contributed to the South's loss of the Civil War, one of the most decisive was the failure of Southern diplomacy. In this penetrating work, Charles M. Hubbard reassesses the diplomatic efforts made by the Confederacy in its struggle to become an independent nation. Hubbard focuses both on the Confederacy's attempts to negotiate a peaceful separation from the Union and Southern diplomats' increasingly desperate pursuit of state recognition from the major European powers. Drawing on a large body of sources, Hubbard offers an important reinterpretation of the problems facing Confederate diplomats. He demonstrates how the strategies and objectives of the South's diplomatic program--themselves often poorly conceived--were then placed in the hands of inexperienced envoys who were ill-equipped to succeed in their roles as negotiators. The Author: Charles M. Hubbard is associate professor of history at Lincoln Memorial University and executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Museum in Harrogate, Tennessee.

This collection of thirteen essays examines the leaders of the southern states during the Civil War. Malcolm C. McMillan writes of the futile efforts of Alabama's wealthy governors to keep the trust of the poor non-slaveholding whites. Paul D. Escott shows Georgia Governor Joseph Emerson Brown's ability to please both the planter elite and the yeoman farmers. John B. Edmunds, Jr. examines the tremendous problems faced by the governors of South Carolina, the state that would suffer the highest losses. Each of the contributors describes the governor's reaction to undertaking duties never before required of men in their positions—urging men to battle, searching for means to feed and clothe the poor, boosting morale, and defending their state's territories, even against great odds.

Albert Taylor Bledsoe (1809--1877), a principal architect of the South's "Lost Cause" mythology, remains one of the Civil War generation's most controversial intellectuals. In Albert Taylor Bledsoe: Defender of the Old South and Architect of the Lost Cause, Terry A. Barnhart sheds new light on this provocative figure. Bledsoe gained a respectable reputation in the 1840s and 1850s as a metaphysician and speculative theologian. His two major works, An Examination of President Edwards' Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will (1845) and A Theodicy; Or, Vindication of the Divine Glory, As Manifested in the Constitution and Government of the Moral World (1853), grapple with perplexing problems connected with causality, Christian theology, and moral philosophy. His fervent defense of slavery and the constitutional right of secession, however, solidified Bledsoe as one of the chief proponents of the idea of the Old South. In An Essay on Liberty and Slavery (1856), he assailed egalitarianism and promoted the institution of slavery as a positive good. A decade later, he continued to devote himself to fashioning the "Lost Cause" narrative as the editor and proprietor of the Southern Review from 1867 until his death in 1877. He carried on a literary tradition aimed to reconcile white southerners to what he and they viewed as the indignity of their defeat by sanctifying their lost cause. Those who fought for the Confederacy, he argued, were not traitors but honorable men who sacrificed for noble reasons. This biography skillfully weaves Bledsoe's extraordinary life history into a narrative that illustrates the events that shaped his opinions and influenced his writings. Barnhart demonstrates how Bledsoe still speaks directly, and sometimes eloquently, to the core issues that divided the nation in the 1860s and continue to haunt it today.

E. Merton Coulter's biography of William Montague Browne portrays the life of an Irish journalist living in the north who moved south to adopt the Confederate cause. Born in County Mayo, Ireland, Browne moved to the U. S. in 1852 to be an editor at the New York Journal of Commerce. In 1859 he moved to Washington, D.C., where he edited and owned the Washington Constitution. As a journalist, Browne was an ardent champion of the southern cause and when Georgia seceded he moved south. During the Civil War he served as Director of Conscription in Georgia, aide-de-camp to President Davis, and brigadier general. Browne also took part in the defense of Savannah. After the war, Browne moved to Athens, Georgia, where he edited the Southern Banner, studied law, was admitted to the Georgia bar, and tried farming on a plantation in Oglethorpe County. Later he founded and edited the Southern Farm and Home and became secretary of the Carolina Life Insurance Co., of which Jefferson Davis was president. After the failure of this company, Browne returned to Athens and was elected the first Professor of History and Political Science at the University of Georgia.

The first volume in a four-volume series on the American Civil War—featuring first-hand writings from Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, and more This “mesmerizing and deeply troubling” glimpse into the Civil War era “will forever deepen the way you see this central chapter in our history . . . a masterpiece” (Newsweek). After 150 years the Civil War is still our greatest national drama, at once heroic, tragic, and epic-our Iliad, but also our Bible, a story of sin and judgment, suffering and despair, death and resurrection in a "new birth of freedom.” Drawn from letters, diaries, speeches, articles, poems, songs, military reports, legal opinions, and memoirs, The Civil War: The First Year gathers over 120 pieces by more than sixty participants to create a unique firsthand narrative of this great historical crisis. Beginning on the eve of Lincoln's election in November 1860 and ending in January 1862 with the appointment of Edwin M. Stanton as secretary of war, this volume presents writing by figures well-known—Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Mary Chesnut, Frederick Douglass, and Lincoln himself among them—and less familiar, like proslavery advocate J.D.B. DeBow, Lieutenants Charles B. Haydon of the 2nd Michigan Infantry and Henry Livermore Abbott of the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, and plantation mistresses Catherine Edmondston of North Carolina and Kate Stone of Mississippi. Together, the selections provide a powerful sense of the immediacy, uncertainty, and urgency of events as the nation was torn asunder. Includes headnotes, a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory endnotes, full-color hand-drawn endpaper maps, and an index. Companion volumes will gather writings from the second, third, and final years of the conflict. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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.

Illusions of Empire is the first study to treat antebellum U.S. foreign policy, Civil War campaigning, the French Intervention in Mexico, Southwestern Indian Wars, South Texas Bandit Wars, and U.S. Reconstruction in a single volume, balancing U.S. and Mexican sources to depict a borderlands conflict with lasting ramifications.