The North Fights The Civil War

Drawing on a wide range of up-to-date scholarship and addressing the issues from a fresh perspective, the author offers a uniquely compact synthesis of this important aspect of the Civil War.

In the wake of the firing on Fort Sumter, outraged Northerners looked forward to a quick and decisive victory over the Confederate rebels. But after the First Battle of Bull Run it became clear to supporters of the Union that the Civil War would be prolonged and deadly. How Northern society mobilized to fight this first great modern war is the subject of J. Matthew Gallman's perceptive history. Drawing on a wide range of up-to-date scholarship and addressing the issues from a fresh perspective, his book fills a surprising void in Civil War literature. Gallman's focus is on continuity and change—what traditions the North relied on in preparing for war, and what adjustments it made in its behavior and institutions. From his analysis it seems clear that the Civil War was not the great watershed in political, economic, and social development that is often supposed. Gallman's investigation of the status of women and blacks, for example, shows that wartime gains, if significant for a few, were on the whole decidedly modest. And while "total war" came to the battlefield in a frightening manner, its impact on the Northern home front was far less certain. American Ways Series.

On a cold day in early January 1864, Robert E. Lee wrote to Confederate president Jefferson Davis "The time is at hand when, if an attempt can be made to capture the enemy's forces at New Berne, it should be done." Over the next few months, Lee's dispatch would precipitate a momentous series of events as the Confederates, threatened by a supply crisis and an emerging peace movement, sought to seize Federal bases in eastern North Carolina. This book tells the story of these operations—the late war Confederate resurgence in the Old North State. Using rail lines to rapidly consolidate their forces, the Confederates would attack the main Federal position at New Bern in February, raid the northeastern counties in March, hit the Union garrisons at Plymouth and Washington in late April, and conclude with another attempt at New Bern in early May. The expeditions would involve joint-service operations, as the Confederates looked to support their attacks with powerful, homegrown ironclad gunboats. These offensives in early 1864 would witness the failures and successes of southern commanders including George Pickett, James Cooke, and a young, aggressive North Carolinian named Robert Hoke. Likewise they would challenge the leadership of Union army and naval officers such as Benjamin Butler, John Peck, and Charles Flusser. Newsome does not neglect the broader context, revealing how these military events related to a contested gubernatorial election; the social transformations in the state brought on by the war; the execution of Union prisoners at Kinston; and the activities of North Carolina Unionists. Lee's January proposal triggered one of the last successful Confederate offensives. The Fight for the Old North State captures the full scope, as well as the dramatic details of this struggle for North Carolina.

Loyal Americans marched off to war in 1861 not to conquer the South but to liberate it. In Armies of Deliverance, Elizabeth Varon offers both a sweeping narrative of the Civil War and a bold new interpretation of Union and Confederate war aims. Lincoln's Union coalition sought to deliver the South from slaveholder tyranny and deliver to it the blessings of modern civilization. Over the course of the war, supporters of black freedom built the case that slavery was the obstacle to national reunion and that emancipation would secure military victory and benefit Northern and Southern whites alike. To sustain their morale, Northerners played up evidence of white Southern Unionism, of antislavery progress in the slaveholding border states, and of disaffection among Confederates. But the Union's emphasis on Southern deliverance served, ironically, not only to galvanize loyal Amer icans but also to galvanize disloyal ones. Confederates, fighting to establish an independent slaveholding republic, scorned the Northern promise of liberation and argued that the emancipation of blacks was synonymous with the subjugation of the white South.

Daughters of the Union casts a spotlight on some of the most overlooked and least understood participants in the American Civil War: the women of the North. Unlike their Confederate counterparts, who were often caught in the midst of the conflict, most Northern women remained far from the dangers of battle. Nonetheless, they enlisted in the Union cause on their home ground, and the experience transformed their lives. Nina Silber traces the emergence of a new sense of self and citizenship among the women left behind by Union soldiers. She offers a complex account, bolstered by women's own words from diaries and letters, of the changes in activity and attitude wrought by the war. Women became wage-earners, participants in partisan politics, and active contributors to the war effort. But even as their political and civic identities expanded, they were expected to subordinate themselves to male-dominated government and military bureaucracies. Silber's arresting tale fills an important gap in women's history. She shows the women of the North--many for the first time--discovering their patriotism as well as their ability to confront new economic and political challenges, even as they encountered the obstacles of wartime rule. The Civil War required many women to act with greater independence in running their households and in expressing their political views. It brought women more firmly into the civic sphere and ultimately gave them new public roles, which would prove crucial starting points for the late-nineteenth-century feminist struggle for social and political equality.

Historians of the Civil War often speak of 'wars within a war' - the military fight, wartime struggles on the home front, and the political and moral battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. In this broadly conceived book, Thavolia Glymph provides a comprehensive new history of women's roles and lives in the Civil War - North and South, white and black, slave and free - showing how women were essentially and fully engaged in all three arenas. Glymph focuses on the ideas and ideologies that drove women's actions, allegiances, and politics.

During the Civil War, Americans confronted profound moral problems about how to fight in the conflict. In this innovative book, D. H. Dilbeck reveals how the Union sought to wage a just war against the Confederacy. He shows that northerners fought according to a distinct "moral vision of war," an array of ideas about the nature of a truly just and humane military effort. Dilbeck tells how Union commanders crafted rules of conduct to ensure their soldiers defeated the Confederacy as swiftly as possible while also limiting the total destruction unleashed by the fighting. Dilbeck explores how Union soldiers abided by official just-war policies as they battled guerrillas, occupied cities, retaliated against enemy soldiers, and came into contact with Confederate civilians. In contrast to recent scholarship focused solely on the Civil War's carnage, Dilbeck details how the Union sought both to deal sternly with Confederates and to adhere to certain constraints. The Union's earnest effort to wage a just war ultimately helped give the Civil War its distinct character, a blend of immense destruction and remarkable restraint.

A gripping and original account of how the Civil War began and a second American revolution unfolded, setting Abraham Lincoln on the path to greatness and millions of slaves on the road to freedom. An epic of courage and heroism beyond the battlefields, 1861 introduces us to a heretofore little-known cast of Civil War heroes—among them an acrobatic militia colonel, an explorer’s wife, an idealistic band of German immigrants, a regiment of New York City firemen, a community of Virginia slaves, and a young college professor who would one day become president. Their stories take us from the corridors of the White House to the slums of Manhattan, from the waters of the Chesapeake to the deserts of Nevada, from Boston Common to Alcatraz Island, vividly evoking the Union at its moment of ultimate crisis and decision. Hailed as “exhilarating….Inspiring…Irresistible…” by The New York Times Book Review, Adam Goodheart’s bestseller 1861 is an important addition to the Civil War canon. Includes black-and-white photos and illustrations.

“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.

When the South bombarded Fort Sumter in April 1861, the Ellithorpe family in rural New York answered President Lincoln’s call to defend the Union. For the next four years, the two Ellithorpe brothers and two of their brothers-in-law fought in some of the Civil War’s most storied regiments, on nearly every major battlefield in the East. In this utterly unique Civil War history/biography, John A. Simpson reconstructs the intertwined lives and wars of four Union soldiers, from Bull Run to Gettysburg and beyond. When the Civil War broke out, Phillip Ellithorpe, Philander Ellithorpe, Asa Burleson, and Oliver Moore did not hesitate to volunteer to fight for the Union. Their service would encompass virtually every branch of the Northern army: infantry (including sharpshooters), cavalry (mounted and dismounted), and artillery as well as commissary, engineering, and ambulance duty. They would serve in six different regiments: the 13th Pennsylvania Reserves (the legendary Bucktails); the 27th New York Infantry (the Union Regiment); the 2nd New York Mounted Rifles; the 5th Vermont Infantry; the 1st New York Dragoons; and the 1st Minnesota, which gained immortality at Gettysburg. They would participate in the major battles of the war’s Eastern theater: First Bull Run, the Peninsula, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Grant’s Overland campaign through Petersburg. Phillip would die at Gettysburg, and the other three would return home and live under the shadow of the Civil War for the rest of their lives. All for the Union tells the dramatic story of these four soldiers, weaving their lives and wars into a tapestry of how one family navigated home front and battle front during the Civil War. Based on 180 family letters, voluminous primary and second sources, and visits to homes and battlefields from Allegany County, New York, to Richmond, Virginia, All for the Union is a remarkable contribution to Civil War history.