Author :
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 630 pages
File Size : 19,92 MB
Release : 1991-09-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780820313962
Offers a chronological account of the Civil War, reexamines theories for the South's defeat, and analyzes Confederate and Union military strategy
Author :
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 19,40 MB
Release : 1988
Category : History
ISBN : 0820310778
In Why the South Lost the Civil War, four historians considered the dominant explanations of southern defeat. At end, the authors found that states' rights disputes, the Union blockade, and inadequate southern forces did not fully account for the surrender. Rather, they concluded, the South lacked the will to win. Its strength sapped by a faltering Confederate nationalism and weakened by a peculiar brand of evangelical Protestantism, the South withdrew from a war not yet lost on the field of battle. Roughly one-half the size of its parent study, The Elements of Confederate Defeat retains all the essential arguments of the earlier edition, forming for the student a book that at once follows the events of the war and presents the major interpretations of its outcome in the South.
Author : Edward H. Bonekemper
Publisher : Sergeant Kirkland's Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 16,10 MB
Release : 1999-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9781887901338
This book challenges the general view that Robert E. Lee was a military genius who staved off inevitable Confederate defeat against insurmountable odds. Instead, the author contends that Lee was responsible for the South's loss in a war it could have won. Instead, as this book demonstrates, Lee unnecessarily went for the win, squandered his irreplaceable troops, and weakened his army so badly that military defeat became inevitable. It describes how Lee's army took 80,000 casualties in Lees first fourteen months of command-while imposing 73,000 casualties on his opponents. With the Confederacy outnumbered four to one, Lee's aggressive strategy and tactics proved to be suicidal. Also described arc Lee's failure to take charge of the battlefield (such as on the second day of Gettysburg), his overly complex and ineffective battle plans (such as those at Antietam and during the Seven Days' campaign), and his vague and ambiguous orders (such as those that deprived him of Jeb Stuart's services for most of Gettysburg). Bonekemper looks beyond Lee's battles in the East and describes how Lee's Virginia-first myopia played a major role in crucial Confederate failures in the West. He itemizes Lee's refusals to provide reinforcements for Vicksburg or Tennessee in mid-1863, his causing James Longstreet to arrive at Chickamauga with only a third of his troops, his idea to move Longstreet away from Chattanooga just before Grant's troops broke through the undeemanned Confederates there, and his failure to reinforce Atlanta in the critical months before the 1864 presidential election. Bonekemper argues that Lee's ultimate failure was his prolonging of the hopeless and bloody slaughter even afterUnion victory had been ensured by a series of events: the fall of Atlanta, the re-election of Lincoln, and the fall of Petersburg and Richmond. Finally, the author explores historians' treatment of Lee, including the deification of him by failed Confederate generals attempting to resurrect their own reputations. Readers will not fred themselves feeling neutral about this stinging critique of the hero of The Lost Cause.
Author : Gabor S. Boritt
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 24,80 MB
Release : 1992
Category : History
ISBN : 9780195085495
Five major historians return to the battlefield to explain the South's defeat. Provocatively argued and engagingly written, this work rejects the notion that the Union victory was inevitable and shows the importance of the commanders, strategies, and victories at key moments.
Author : A. J. Langguth
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 30,28 MB
Release : 2014-09-16
Category : History
ISBN : 1451617321
With Lincoln's assassination, his "team of rivals" was left adrift. President Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner from Tennessee, was challenged by radical Republicans in Congress, who wanted to punish the defeated South. When Johnson's policies placated the rebels at the expense of the black freed men, radicals in the House impeached him for trying to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Even William Seward, Lincoln's closest ally in his cabinet, seemed to waver. By the 1868 election, united Republicans nominated Ulysses Grant, Lincoln's winning Union general. The night of his victory, Grant lamented to his wife, "I'm afraid I'm elected." His attempts to reconcile Southerners with the Union and to quash the rising Ku Klux Klan were undercut by implacable Southern resistance and by corruption during his two terms.--From publisher description.
Author : Edward L. Ayers
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 140 pages
File Size : 37,57 MB
Release : 2006-08-17
Category : History
ISBN : 0393285154
“An extremely good writer, [Ayers] is well worth reading . . . on the South and Southern history.”—Stephen Sears, Boston Globe The Southern past has proven to be fertile ground for great works of history. Peculiarities of tragic proportions—a system of slavery flourishing in a land of freedom, secession and Civil War tearing at a federal Union, deep poverty persisting in a nation of fast-paced development—have fed the imaginations of some of our most accomplished historians. Foremost in their ranks today is Edward L. Ayers, author of the award-winning and ongoing study of the Civil War in the heart of America, the Valley of the Shadow Project. In wide-ranging essays on the Civil War, the New South, and the twentieth-century South, Ayers turns over the rich soil of Southern life to explore the sources of the nation's and his own history. The title essay, original here, distills his vast research and offers a fresh perspective on the nation's central historical event.
Author : Bevin Alexander
Publisher : Forum Books
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 25,16 MB
Release : 2008-11-25
Category : History
ISBN : 0307450104
Could the South have won the Civil War? To many, the very question seems absurd. After all, the Confederacy had only a third of the population and one-eleventh of the industry of the North. Wasn’t the South’s defeat inevitable? Not at all, as acclaimed military historian Bevin Alexander reveals in this provocative and counterintuitive new look at the Civil War. In fact, the South most definitely could have won the war, and Alexander documents exactly how a Confederate victory could have come about—and how close it came to happening. Moving beyond fanciful theoretical conjectures to explore actual plans that Confederate generals proposed and the tactics ultimately adopted in the war’s key battles, How the South Could Have Won the Civil War offers surprising analysis on topics such as: •How the Confederacy had its greatest chance to win the war just three months into the fighting—but blew it •How the Confederacy’s three most important leaders—President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson—clashed over how to fight the war •How the Civil War’s decisive turning point came in a battle that the Rebel army never needed to fight •How the Confederate army devised—but never fully exploited—a way to negate the Union’s huge advantages in manpower and weaponry •How Abraham Lincoln and other Northern leaders understood the Union’s true vulnerability better than the Confederacy’s top leaders did •How it is a myth that the Union army’s accidental discovery of Lee’s order of battle doomed the South’s 1862 Maryland campaign •How the South failed to heed the important lessons of its 1863 victory at Chancellorsville How the South Could Have Won the Civil War shows why there is nothing inevitable about military victory, even for a state with overwhelming strength. Alexander provides a startling account of how a relatively small number of tactical and strategic mistakes cost the South the war—and changed the course of history.
Author : MacKinlay Kantor
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 99 pages
File Size : 26,57 MB
Release : 2001-11-03
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1466841613
Just a touch here and a tweak there . . . . MacKinlay Kantor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, master storyteller, shows us how the South could have won the Civil War, how two small shifts in history (as we know it) in the summer of 1863 could have turned the tide for the Confederacy. What would have happened: to the Union, to Abraham Lincoln, to the people of the North and South, to the world? If the South Had Won the Civil War originally appeared in Look Magazine nearly half a century ago. It immediately inspired a deluge of letters and telegrams from astonished readers and became an American classic overnight. Published in book form soon after, Kantor's masterpiece has been unavailable for a decade. Now, this much requested classic is once again available for a new generation of readers and features a stunning cover by acclaimed Civil War artist Don Troiani, a new introduction by award-winning alternate history author Harry Turtledove, and fifteen superb illustrations by the incomparable Dan Nance. It all begins on that fateful afternoon of Tuesday, May 12, 1863, when a deplorable equestrian accident claims the life of General Ulysses S. Grant . . . . At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Author : Howard Jones
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 433 pages
File Size : 48,67 MB
Release : 2010-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0807898570
In this examination of Union and Confederate foreign relations during the Civil War from both European and American perspectives, Howard Jones demonstrates that the consequences of the conflict between North and South reached far beyond American soil. Jones explores a number of themes, including the international economic and political dimensions of the war, the North's attempts to block the South from winning foreign recognition as a nation, Napoleon III's meddling in the war and his attempt to restore French power in the New World, and the inability of Europeans to understand the interrelated nature of slavery and union, resulting in their tendency to interpret the war as a senseless struggle between a South too large and populous to have its independence denied and a North too obstinate to give up on the preservation of the Union. Most of all, Jones explores the horrible nature of a war that attracted outside involvement as much as it repelled it. Written in a narrative style that relates the story as its participants saw it play out around them, Blue and Gray Diplomacy depicts the complex set of problems faced by policy makers from Richmond and Washington to London, Paris, and St. Petersburg.
Author : Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 20,36 MB
Release : 2009-01-06
Category : History
ISBN : 0375703837
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
