Back Door to Richmond


Book Description

Back Door to Richmond is the first book-length study of the Bermuda Hundred Campaign. It draws upon hundreds of sources, including more than sixty unpublished accounts. The standard interpretation of the campaign held that the Federal effort was an abject failure caused almost entirely by the blundering of Benjamin Butler, an incompetent who allowed his army to be bottled up by a small confederate force.




Trench Warfare under Grant and Lee


Book Description

Earl J.Hess's study of armies and fortifications turns to the 1864 Overland Campaign to cover battles from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor. Drawing on meticulous research in primary sources and careful examination of battlefields at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, North Anna, Bermuda Hundred, and Cold Harbor, , Hess analyzes Union and Confederate movements and tactics and the new way Grant and Lee employed entrenchments in an evolving style of battle. Hess argues that Grant's relentless and pressing attacks kept the armies always within striking distance, compelling soldiers to dig in for protection.




The Sharpshooters


Book Description

Recruited as sharpshooters and clothed in distinctive uniforms with green trim, the hand-picked regiment of the Ninth New Jersey Volunteer Infantry was renowned and admired far and wide. The only New Jersey regiment to reenlist for the duration of the Civil War at the close of its initial three-year term, the Ninth saw action in forty-two battles and engagements across three states. Throughout the South, the regiment broke up enemy camps and supply depots, burned bridges, and destroyed railroad tracks to thwart Confederate movements. Members of the Ninth also suffered disease and starvation as POWs at the notorious Andersonville prison camp in Georgia. Recruited largely from socially conservative cities and villages in northern and central New Jersey, the Ninth Volunteer Infantry consisted of men with widely differing opinions about the Union and their enemy. Edward G. Longacre unearths these complicated political and social views, tracing the history of this esteemed regiment before, during, and after the war—from recruitment at Camp Olden to final operations in North Carolina.




Chicago to Appomattox


Book Description

When Chicago lawyer Thomas Osborn set out to form a Union regiment in the days following the attack on Fort Sumter, he could not have known it was the beginning of a 6000-mile journey that would end at Appomattox Courthouse four years later. With assistance from Governor Richard Yates, the 39th Illinois Infantry--"The Yates Phalanx"--enlisted young men from Chicago, its (modern-day) suburbs, and small towns of northern and central Illinois. While most Illinois regiments fought in the west, the 39th marched through the Shenandoah Valley to fight Stonewall Jackson, to Charleston Harbor for the Second Battle of Fort Sumter and to Richmond for the year-long siege at Petersburg. This book chronicles day-to-day life in the regiment, the myriad factors that determined its path, and the battles fought by the Chicagoans--including two Medal of Honor recipients--who fired some of the last shots before the Confederate surrender.




Civil War Petersburg


Book Description

Few wartime cities in Virginia held more importance than Petersburg. Nonetheless, the city has, until now, lacked an adequate military history, let alone a history of the civilian home front. The noted Civil War historian A. Wilson Greene now provides an expertly researched, eloquently written study of the city that was second only to Richmond in size and strategic significance. Industrial, commercial, and extremely prosperous, Petersburg was also home to a large African American community, including the state's highest percentage of free blacks. On the eve of the Civil War, the city elected a conservative, pro-Union approach to the sectional crisis. Little more than a month before Virginia's secession did Petersburg finally express pro-Confederate sentiments, at which point the city threw itself wholeheartedly into the effort, with large numbers of both white and black men serving. Over the next four years, Petersburg's citizens watched their once-beautiful city become first a conduit for transient soldiers from the Deep South, then an armed camp, and finally the focus of one of the Civil War's most protracted and damaging campaigns. (The fall of Richmond and collapse of the Confederate war effort in Virginia followed close on Grant's ultimate success in Petersburg.) At war's end, Petersburg's antebellum prosperity evaporated under pressures from inflation, chronic shortages, and the extensive damage done by Union artillery shells. Greene's book tracks both Petersburg's civilian experience and the city's place in Confederate military strategy and administration. Employing scores of unpublished sources, the book weaves a uniquely personal story of thousands of citizens--free blacks, slaves and their holders, factory owners, merchants--all of whom shared a singular experience in Civil War Virginia.




Joseph and Harriet Hawley's Civil War


Book Description

This book explores the remarkable partnership of Joseph and Harriet Hawley, a married couple from Connecticut whose lives were transformed by overlapping experiences in the American Civil War era. When Joseph became the colonel of the 7th Connecticut Infantry Regiment in 1862, Harriet ignored family advice and social convention, and travelled to Union military headquarters at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where Joseph’s regiment was stationed. From that bold beginning, she spent the next three years as a visitor at field hospitals, a teacher at freedman’s schools, a wartime journalist, a ward nurse, and her husband’s informal advisor and publicist. Moving in and around the scenes of military action, she lived and worked in spaces usually reserved for men and took on responsibilities that implicitly challenged conventional understandings of women’s physical and emotional dependency. While Joseph struggled for recognition and promotion in the brutally competitive environment of Union military politics, Harriet shrewdly used her own personal contacts with power brokers in Hartford and Washington to protect his interests and those of his men. And as the terrible realities of the Civil War pushed them both to the brink of physical and emotional collapse, Harriet and Joseph remained committed to the cause and found ways to sustain their devotion to both Union and emancipation in the very worst moments of the conflict.




Summary of Clint Richmond's The Good Wife


Book Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The woman was a middle-aged piano player who had a ministry of her own. She was also a Sunday school teacher at an evangelical church and a mentor to young wives who wanted to create godly marriages and perfect Christian homes. #2 The killer entered the house through the kitchen, where she washed the pipe and the knife. She then walked into the living room, where she murdered the woman. She took the woman’s belongings and ransacked the house. #3 The city of Austin was built around a historic live oak tree that was cut down to make way for a new road. The tree’s ghostly spirit was said to move slowly, coming up from Town Lake through the dense cedar thickets to enter the tree casually like a neighbor might cross the road to return home after a social visit. #4 The West Side was the first area of Austin to be developed, and was developed by and for politicians, college professors, and schoolteachers. It was a minor metropolis by the early 1900s.




The Bazaar


Book Description




Freedom by the Sword


Book Description

The Civil War changed the United States in many ways—economic, political, and social. Of these changes, none was more important than Emancipation. Besides freeing nearly four million slaves, it brought agricultural wage labor to a reluctant South and gave a vote to black adult males in the former slave states. It also offered former slaves new opportunities in education, property ownership—and military service. From late 1862 to the spring of 1865, as the Civil War raged on, the federal government accepted more than 180,000 black men as soldiers, something it had never done before on such a scale. Known collectively as the United States Colored Troops and organized in segregated regiments led by white officers, some of these soldiers guarded army posts along major rivers; others fought Confederate raiders to protect Union supply trains, and still others took part in major operations like the Siege of Petersburg and the Battle of Nashville. After the war, many of the black regiments took up posts in the former Confederacy to enforce federal Reconstruction policy. Freedom by the Sword tells the story of these soldiers' recruitment, organization, and service. Thanks to its broad focus on every theater of the war and its concentration on what black soldiers actually contributed to Union victory, this volume stands alone among histories of the U.S. Colored Troops.




Marrying the Millionaire


Book Description

Fall in love with The Brides of Hilton Head Island, Sabrina Sims McAfee’s, International Bestselling contemporary romance series. MARRYING THE MILLIONAIRE is an emotional, sexy love story with light suspense. When the alpha men in this series falls in love it’s always and forever. And their dashing brides couldn’t be happier. Book Description: Kayla Crawford is having a bad night. Things are spiraling horribly out of control faster than she can blink her eyes. First her husband walks out on her, and then her grandfather gets into a terrible car accident. The good life as she once knew it now sucks. So when a gorgeous guy makes her an offer she can’t refuse, she feels the super sexy stallion must be too good to be true. Or is he? Millionaire Richmond Spaulding has never gotten over the loss of his wife. A very powerful man, he can have any woman he wants, but all he cares about is raising his precious daughter. Certain that true love can only happen once in a person’s lifetime, Richmond thinks his life is okay just as it is until he meets her—beautiful Kayla—who stokes a burning fire in Richmond he thought had long ago vanished. Soon he finds himself doing things just to make her happy and fulfilled, and by any means necessary, he protects her from the one person he knows means her no good. Kayla made a vow never to trust a man again. Knowing she has a deep rooted secret that could destroy her, she’s determined to keep Richmond at arm’s length. However, with every tender kiss from Richmond’s eyes, and every sinful touch he places upon her, sparks fly between them. Chemistry is ignited, pulling them closer and closer together. The attraction they feel for one another is too hard to resist, so they let themselves fall madly in love, hard. And fast. Just as Richmond gears up to give Kayla the very best of him by offering her his all, her secret is exposed. Now everything Richmond and Kayla worked so hard to establish with one another is threatened