In many ways, John H. Black typified the thousands of volunteers who fought for the Union during the Civil War. Born in 1834 and raised on his family’s farm near Allegheny Township, Pennsylvania, Black taught school until he, like many Pennsylvanians, rushed to defend the Union after the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861. He served with the Twelfth Pennsylvania Cavalry, one of the Union’s most unruly, maligned, and criticized units. Consistently outperformed early in the conflict, the Tw...

Long overshadowed by the American Civil War, the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) has received significantly less attention from historians partly because of its questionable origin and controversial outcome. Rather than treat the conflict with a form of historical amnesia, the contributors to this volume argue that the Mexican-American War was a formative experience for the more than three hundred future Civil War generals who served in it as lower-grade officers. The Mexican War was the ...

Widely known as the “poor man’s lawyer” in antebellum Boston, John Albion Andrew (1818–1867) was involved in nearly every cause and case that advanced social and racial justice in Boston in the years preceding the Civil War. Inspired by the legacies of John Quincy Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and mentored by Charles Sumner, Andrew devoted himself to the battle for equality. By day, he fought to protect those condemned to the death penalty, women seeking divorce, and fugitives ensnared by...

Major General Don Carlos Buell stood among the senior Northern commanders early in the Civil War, led the Army of the Ohio in the critical Kentucky theater in 1861–62, and helped shape the direction of the conflict during its first years. Only a handful of Northern generals loomed as large on the military landscape during this period, and Buell is the only one of them who has not been the subject of a full-scale biography.A conservative Democrat, Buell viewed the Civil War as a con...

In this rich study of Union governors and their role in the Civil War, Stephen D. Engle examines how these politicians were pivotal in securing victory. In a time of limited federal authority, governors were an essential part of the machine that maintained the Union while it mobilized and sustained the war effort. Charged with the difficult task of raising soldiers from their home states, these governors had to also rally political, economic, and popular support for the conflict, at times ...

Lauded as a hero in his native land for his sensational but ultimately unsuccessful exploits during the 1848 German Revolution, Franz Sigel—who immigrated to the United States in 1852—is among the most misunderstood figures of the American Civil War. He was appointed by Abraham Lincoln as a political general in the Union army, a move that successfully galvanized northern support and provided a huge influx of German recruits who were eager to “fight mit Sigel.” But Sigel proved an inept and...

Final Resting Places brings together some of the most important and innovative scholars of the Civil War era to reflect on what death and memorialization meant to the Civil War generation—and how those meanings still influence Americans today.In each essay, a noted historian explores a different type of gravesite—including large marble temples, unmarked graves beneath the waves, makeshift markers on battlefields, mass graves on hillsides, neat rows of military headstones, ...

Widely known as the "poor man's lawyer" in antebellum Boston, John Albion Andrew (1818–1867) was involved in nearly every cause and case that advanced social and racial justice in Boston in the years preceding the Civil War. Inspired by the legacies of John Quincy Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and mentored by Charles Sumner, Andrew devoted himself to the battle for equality. By day, he fought to protect those condemned to the death penalty, women seeking divorce, and fugitives ensnared by...

Ulysses S. Grant was the first four-star general in the history of the United States Army and the only president between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to serve eight consecutive years in the White House. As general in chief, Grant revolutionized modern warfare. Rather than capture enemy territory or march on Southern cities, he concentrated on engaging and defeating the Confederate armies in the field, and he pursued that strategy relentlessly. As president, he brought...

The Battle of Antietam fought on September 17 1862 was the bloodiest single day in American history with more than 6000 soldiers killed--four times the number lost on D-Day and twice the number killed in the September 11th terrorist attacks. In Crossroads of Freedom America's most eminent Civil War historian James M. McPherson paints a masterful account of this pivotal battle the events that led up to it and its aftermath. As McPherson shows by September 1862 the survival of the United Sta...

Despite the abundance of books on the Civil War, not one has focused exclusively on what was in fact the determining factor in the outcome of the conflict: differences in Union and Southern strategy. In The Grand Design, Donald Stoker provides for the first time a comprehensive and often surprising account of strategy as it evolved between Fort Sumter and Appomattox. Reminding us that strategy is different from tactics (battlefield deployments) and operations (campaigns conducted ...

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War is a joyful, myth-busting, rebel yell that shatters today’s Leftist and demeaning stereotypes about the South and the Civil War.