The first book of its kind to appear in a generation, this comprehensive study details the experiences of the black men, women, and children who lived in the South during the traumatic time of secession and civil war. The Black Experience in the Civil War South is the first comprehensive study of the Southern black wartime experience to appear in a generation. Incorporating the most recent scholarship, this thematically organized book does justice to the richness of its subject, looking at the lives of blacks in the Confederate states and the nonseceding Southern states; at blacks on farms and plantations and in towns and cities; at blacks employed in industry and the military; and at black men, women, and children. Drawing on memoirs, autobiographies, and other original source materials, the author details the experiences of blacks who took up residence in Union "contraband camps" and on free-labor plantations and those who enlisted in the Union army. He introduces individuals who escaped from slavery, as well as the small minority of Southern blacks who were free when the war began. Most significantly, this revealing study deals not only with those who gained freedom during the war, but those whose freedom came only after the conflict's end.

This book examines newspapers, magazines, photographs, illustrations, and editorial cartoons to tell the important story of journalism, documenting its role during the Civil War as well as the impact of the war on the press. Civil War Journalism presents a unique synthesis of the journalism of both the North and South during the war. It features a compelling cast of characters, including editors Horace Greeley and John M. Daniel, correspondents George Smalley and Peter W. Alexander, photographers Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, and illustrators Alfred Waud and Thomas Nast. Written to appeal to those interested in the Civil War in general and in journalism specifically, as well as general readers, the work provides an introductory overview of journalism in the North and South on the eve of the Civil War. The following chapters examine reporting during the war, editorializing about the war, photographing and illustrating the war, censorship and government relations, and the impact of the war on the press.

This book fills a gap in Civil War literature on the strategies employed by the Union and Confederacy in the East, offering a more integrated interpretation of military operations that shows how politics, public perception, geography, and logistics shaped the course of military operations in the East. For all the literature about Civil War military operations and leadership, precious little has been written about strategy, particularly in what has become known as the eastern theater. Yet it is in this theater where the interaction of geography and logistics, politics and public opinion, battlefront and home front, and the conduct of military operations and civil-military relations can be highlighted in sharp relief. With opposing capitals barely 100 miles apart and with the Chesapeake Bay/tidewater area offering Union generals the same sorts of opportunities sought by Confederate leaders in the Shenandoah Valley, geography shaped military operations in fundamental ways: the very rivers that obstructed Union overland advances offered them the chance to outflank Confederate-prepared positions. If the proximity of the enemy capital proved too tempting to pass up, generals on each side were aware that a major mishap could lead to an enemy parade down the streets of their own capital city. Presidents, politicians, and the press peeked over the shoulders of military commanders, some of who were not reluctant to engage in their own intrigues as they promoted their own fortunes. The Civil War in the East does not rest upon new primary sources or an extensive rummaging through the mountains of material already available. Rather, it takes a fresh look at military operations and the assumptions that shaped them, and offers a more integrated interpretation of military operations that shows how politics, public perception, geography, and logistics shaped the course of military operations in the East. The eastern theater was indeed a theater of decision (and indecision), precisely because people believed that it was important. The presence of the capitals raised the stakes of victory and defeat; at a time when people viewed war in terms of decisive battles, the anticipation of victory followed by disappointment and persistent strategic stalemate characterized the course of events in the East.

A second volume of the collected correspondence of the great African-American reformer and abolitionist features correspondence written during the Civil War years The second collection of meticulously edited correspondence with abolitionist, author, statesman, and former slave Frederick Douglass covers the years leading up to the Civil War through the close of the conflict, offering readers an illuminating portrait of an extraordinary American and the turbulent times in which he lived. An important contribution to historical scholarship, the documents offer fascinating insights into the abolitionist movement during wartime and the author's relationship to Abraham Lincoln and other prominent figures of the era.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Winner of the J. B. Jackson Prize from the Association of American Geographers Originally published in 1998. "The plantation," writes Charles Aiken, "is among the most misunderstood institutions of American history. The demise of the plantation has been pronounced many times, but the large industrial farms survive as significant parts of, not just the South's, but the nation's agriculture."In this sweeping historical and geographical account, Aiken traces the development of the Southern cotton plantation since the Civil War—from the emergence of tenancy after 1865, through its decline during the Depression, to the post-World War Two development of the large industrial farm. Tracing the geographical changes in plantation agriculture and the plantation regions after 1865, Aiken shows how the altered landscape of the South has led many to the false conclusion that the plantation has vanished. In fact, he explains, while certain regions of the South have reverted to other uses, the cotton plantation survives in a form that is, in many ways, remarkably similar to that of its antebellum predecessors. Aiken also describes the evolving relationship of African-Americans to the cotton plantation during the thirteen decades of economic, social, and political changes from Reconstruction through the War on Poverty—including the impact of alterations in plantation agriculture and the mass migration of Southern blacks to the urban North during the twentieth century. Richly illustrated with more than 130 maps and photographs (many original and many from FSA photographers), The Cotton Plantation South is a vivid and colorful account of landscape, geography, race, politics, and civil rights as they relate to one of America's most enduring and familiar institutions.

Woodworth compiles and presents brief biographies of individuals important to the Civil War and Reconstruction era, relying on biographical detail and historical correspondence to give a humanistic perspective to the age.

The University of North Carolina Press and the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at the Pennsylvania State University are pleased to Publish The Journal of the Civil War Era. William Blair, of the Pennsylvania State University, serves as founding editor. Table of Contents for this issue: Volume 1, Number 3: September 2011 Articles Jon Grinspan "Sorrowfully Amusing": The Popular Comedy of the Civil War Joan E. Cashin Trophies of War: Material Culture in the Civil War Era Anne E. Marshall The 1906 Uncle Tom's Cabin Law and the Politics of Race and Memory in Early-Twentieth-Century Kentucky Review Essay Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh Total War and the American Civil War Reconsidered: The End of an Outdated "Master Narrative" Book Reviews Books Received Professional Notes Barbara Franco Planned Commemorations: Unexpected Consequences Notes on Contributors The Journal of the Civil War Era takes advantage of the flowering of research on the many issues raised by the sectional crisis, war, Reconstruction, and memory of the conflict, while bringing fresh understanding to the struggles that defined the period, and by extension, the course of American history in the nineteenth century.

A controversial character largely known (as depicted in the movie Glory) as a Union colonel who led Black soldiers in the Civil War, James Montgomery (1814–71) waged a far more personal and radical war against slavery than popular history suggests. It is the true story of this militant abolitionist that Todd Mildfelt and David D. Schafer tell in Abolitionist of the Most Dangerous Kind, summoning a life fiercely lived in struggle against the expansion of slavery into the West and during the Civil War. This book follows a harrowing path through the turbulent world of the 1850s and 1860s as Montgomery, with the fervor of an Old Testament prophet, inflicts destructive retribution on Southern slaveholders wherever he finds them, crossing paths with notable abolitionists John Brown and Harriet Tubman along the way. During the tumultuous years of “Bleeding Kansas,” he became a guerilla chieftain of the antislavery vigilantes known as Jayhawkers. When the war broke out in 1861, Montgomery led a regiment of white troops who helped hundreds of enslaved people in Missouri reach freedom in Kansas. Drawing on regimental records in the National Archives, the authors provide new insights into the experiences of African American men who served in Montgomery’s next regiment, the Thirty-Fourth United States Colored Troops (formerly Second South Carolina Infantry). Montgomery helped enslaved men and women escape via one of the least-explored underground railways in the nation, from Arkansas and Missouri through Kansas and Nebraska. With support of abolitionists in Massachusetts, he spearheaded resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act in Kansas. And, when war came, he led Black soldiers in striking at the very heart of the Confederacy. His full story thus illuminates the actions of both militant abolitionists and the enslaved people fighting to destroy the peculiar institution.

Whether it was planter patriarchs struggling to maintain authority, or Jewish families coerced by Christian evangelicalism, or wives and mothers left behind to care for slaves and children, the Civil War took a terrible toll. From the bustling sidewalks of Richmond to the parched plains of the Texas frontier, from the rich Alabama black belt to the Tennessee woodlands, no corner of the South went unscathed. Through the prism of the southern family, this volume of twelve original essays provides fresh insights into this watershed in American history.