Framingham's Civil War Hero


Book Description

George Henry Gordon, who moved to Framingham, Massachusetts, at the age of five, attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where his attitudes toward the country were shaped alongside classmates George McClellan, Thomas Stonewall Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant. Gordon went on to hold political and military offices in the North, and as a general in the Union army, he led his troops against Jackson in the Valley Campaign, at Antietam and at the Siege of Charleston. Join historian Frederic A. Wallace as he recounts the largely untold story of General George H. Gordon, Framinghams favorite son, with personal diary entries and letters that reveal a man of integrity and honor whose actions displayed an outright love for his country.




The First Republican Army


Book Description

Although much is known about the political stance of the military at large during the Civil War, the political party affiliations of individual soldiers have received little attention. Drawing on archival sources from twenty-five generals and 250 volunteer officers and enlisted men, John Matsui offers the first major study to examine the ways in which individual politics were as important as military considerations to battlefield outcomes and how the experience of war could alter soldiers’ political views. The conservative war aims pursued by Abraham Lincoln’s generals (and to some extent, the president himself) in the first year of the American Civil War focused on the preservation of the Union and the restoration of the antebellum status quo. This approach was particularly evident in the prevailing policies and attitudes toward Confederacy-supporting Southern civilians and slavery. But this changed in Virginia during the summer of 1862 with the formation of the Army of Virginia. If the Army of the Potomac (the major Union force in Virginia) was dominated by generals who concurred with the ideology of the Democratic Party, the Army of Virginia (though likewise a Union force) was its political opposite, from its senior generals to the common soldiers. The majority of officers and soldiers in the Army of Virginia saw slavery and pro-Confederate civilians as crucial components of the rebel war effort and blamed them for prolonging the war. The frustrating occupation experiences of the Army of Virginia radicalized them further, making them a vanguard against Southern rebellion and slavery within the Union army as a whole and paving the way for Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.




Horses and Mules in the Civil War


Book Description

Horses and mules served during the Civil War in greater number and suffered more casualties than the men of the Union and Confederate armies combined. Using firsthand accounts, this history addresses the many uses of equines during the war, the methods by which they were obtained, their costs, their suffering on the battlefields and roads, their consumption by soldiers, and such topics as racing and mounted music. The book is supplemented by accounts of the "Lightning Mule Brigade," the "Charge of the Mule Brigade," five appendices and 37 illustrations. More than 700 Civil War equines are identified and described with incidental information and identification of their masters.




Natick's Civil War Service


Book Description

Natick acted swiftly to defend our nation in the Civil War, reacting to the calamity 29 years before the outbreak of the war. It was 1832, when the Natick Antislavery Society was created. In 1841, she formed a militia, the Natick's Mechanic Rifle Company. It is not known, but estimated that Natick's quota of men throughout the war would be under 400 men after exemptions. The Commonwealth's Adjutant General accredited Natick with the service of 496 men, well above her obligations. Natick served in about 60% of the 114 military organizations created by Massachusetts. She provided men for complete companies in two different regiments; that is about one hundred men in each company. They were the 13th Mass. Co. ?H? and the 39th Mass. Co.'I'. Unfortunately, those regiments were in many precarious situations. Natick men severely paid for Union losses with 33 killed in action, 18 died from wounds, 45 from disease, 39 were taken as prisoners of war, and 130 became disabled and were given disability discharges. Massachusetts, throughout the war, would raise three organizations to be manned by men of African descent. In those organizations, the 54th Mass Vol. Inf., 55th Mass. Vol. Inf., and the 5th Mass. Vol. Cav., Natick supplied seven officers and five enlisted men. In the United States Colored Infantries, Natick supplied fourteen officers and one enlisted man. She also supplied four enlisted men to the United States Navy. There were three officers and twenty-five enlisted men that served in these organizations, who were accredited to other municipalities, but they became citizens of Natick.On the home front, the women of Natick exceeded all expectations. They formed an Auxiliary Association of the United States Sanitary Commission. While tending the fires on the home front, they provided supplies and comfort needed for the survival of their citizen soldiers. Natick surpassed all duty required of her for the preservation of our Nation in the Great War of the Rebellion, at the seat of war, and on the home front. It is this book's intention that her resolute service is never forgotten.




The Spirit of '76


Book Description




Home Front Heroes [3 volumes]


Book Description

Brings together 1,000 focused biographies of Americans who affected how the United States made, supported, perceived, and protested its major wars from the Revolution to Gulf War II. Inventors and scientists, nurses and physicians, reformers and clerics, civil rights and labor leaders, financiers and economist, artists and musicians have all been soldiers on the home front. Home Front Heroes brings together brief and focused biographies of 1,000 Americans who affected how the United States made, supported, perceived and protested its major war efforts from the Revolution to Gulf War II. Battlefield victories and defeats are in a very real sense the reflection of the society waging war. Inventors and scientists, social reformers and clerics, civil rights and labor leaders, nurses and physicians, actors and directors, financiers and industrialists, economists and psychologists, artists and musicians, writers and journalists, have all been soldiers on the home front. The biographical entries highlighting the subjects' wartime contributions are arranged alphabetically. Many of the entries also include suggestions for further reading. Thematic indexes make it easy to look up people alphabetically by last name and by war, and other indices list entries under broad categories - Arts and Culture; Business, Industry, and Labor; Nursing and Medicine; Science, Engineering and Inventions - with more detailed occupational background. Entries include: Julia Ward Howe, composer of The Battle Hymn of the Republic; Robert Fulton, inventor of the steam engine and architect of the submarine Nautilus; Martin Brander, maker of Eliot's Saddle Ring Carbine; Robert Parker Parrott, inventor of the Parrott cannon; Novelist and War Correspondent Stephen Crane; Founder of the Army Nurse Corps Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee; Composer John Philip Sousa (Stars and Stripes Forever); Louis M. Terman, who invented the IQ test; Reginald Fessenden, developer of a sonic depth finder; machine-gun inventor Benjamin Hotchkiss; Labor leader John L. Lewis; Comedian and USO stalwart Bob Hope; Dr. Ancel Keys developer of the K-ration; napalm inventor Louis F. Fieser; and many more. The work is fully indexed, and contains an extensive bibliography.







History of the Forty-Fifth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Militia


Book Description

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.







Maine Roads to Gettysburg


Book Description

From the author of Searching for George Gordon Meade, a study of how troops from Maine aided the Union Army’s victory at the Battle of Gettysburg. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and his 20th Maine regiment made a legendary stand on Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. But Maine’s role in the battle includes much more than that. Soldiers from the Pine Tree State contributed mightily during the three days of fighting. Pious general Oliver Otis Howard secured the high ground of Cemetery Ridge for the Union on the first day. Adelbert Ames—the stern taskmaster who had transformed the 20th Maine into a fighting regiment—commanded a brigade and then a division at Gettysburg. The 17th Maine fought ably in the confused and bloody action in the Wheatfield; a sea captain turned artilleryman named Freeman McGilvery cobbled together a defensive line that proved decisive on July 2; and the 19th Maine helped stop Pickett’s Charge during the battle’s climax. Maine soldiers had fought and died for two bloody years even before they reached Gettysburg. They had fallen on battlefields in Virginia and Maryland. They had died in front of Richmond, in the Shenandoah Valley, on the bloody fields of Antietam, in the Slaughter Pen at Fredericksburg, and in the tangled Wilderness around Chancellorsville. And the survivors kept fighting, even as they followed Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania. In Maine Roads to Gettysburg, author Tom Huntington tells their stories. Praise for Searching for George Gordon Meade “An engrossing narrative that the reader can scarcely put down.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James M. McPherson “Unique and irresistible.” —Lincoln Prize-winning historian Harold Holzer