From the time of Lincoln’s nomination for the presidency until his assassination, John G. Nicolay served as the Civil War president’s chief personal secretary. Nicolay became an ...intimate of Lincoln and probably knew him as well as anyone outside his own family. Unlike John Hay, his subordinate, Nicolay kept no diary, but he did write several memoranda recording his chief’s conversation that shed direct light on Lincoln. In his many letters to Hay, to his fiancée, Therena Bates, and to others, Nicolay often describes the mood at the White House as well as events there. He also expresses opinions that were almost certainly shaped by the president             For this volume, Michael Burlingame includes all of Nicolay’s memoranda of conversations, all of the journal entries describing Lincoln’s activities, and excerpts from most of the nearly three hundred letters Nicolay wrote to Therena Bates between 1860 and 1865. He includes letters and portions of letters that describe Lincoln or the mood at the White House or that give Nicolay’s personal opinions. He also includes letters written by Nicolay while on troubleshooting missions for the president.             An impoverished youth, Nicolay was an unlikely candidate for the important position he held during the Civil War. It was only over the strong objections of some powerful people that he became Lincoln’s private secretary after Lincoln’s nomination for the presidency in 1860. Prominent Chicago Republican Herman Kreismann found the appointment of a man so lacking in savoir faire “ridiculous.” Henry Martin Smith, city editor of the Chicago Tribune , called Nicolay’s appointment a national loss. Henry C.Whitney was surprised that the president would appoint a “nobody.”             Lacking charm, Nicolay became known at the White House as the “bulldog in the ante-room” with a disposition “sour and crusty.” California journalist Noah Brooks deemed Nicolay a “grim Cerberus of Teutonic descent who guards the last door which opens into the awful presence.” Yet in some ways he was perfectly suited for the difficult job. William O. Stoddard, noting that Nicolay was not popular and could “say 'no'about as disagreeably as any man I ever knew,” still granted that Nicolay served Lincoln well because he was devoted and incorruptible. Stoddard concluded that Nicolay “deserves the thanks of all who loved Mr. Lincoln.”             For his part, Nicolay said he derived his greatest satisfaction “from having enjoyed the privilege and honor of being Mr. Lincoln’s intimate and official private secretary, and of earning his cordial friendship and perfect trust.”            
This is a story of New Yorkers who were recruited primarily from the gentle farmlands of central New York - young and middle-aged, American and European, farmer and tradesman, poor and well-off - all ...of whom were among the first to step forward and answer their fledgling nation's call during the Civil War. Though those young men marched proudly off to war anticipating glory and quick victory, victory was usually absent and glory was not their companion. Official accolades never seemed to materialize, and death soon wrapped its cold arms around the 'Second Oneida' with a vengeance experienced by very few other blue-clad regiments. To be fair, more often than not the regiment was placed in difficult, often impossible tactical situations, which resulted in the New Yorkers being forced to leave the field in disorder. They did their best and played their small role in a much bigger production whose results helped to shape America into what it is today. This work covers the regiment's entire two-year term of enlistment from May 1861 to May 1863. ""Glory Was Not Their Companion"" draws upon numerous unpublished letters and diaries from the collections of individuals, private libraries and public institutions, as well as contemporary newspapers and obscure government documents. Appendices cover the order of command within campaigns and post assignments. Also included is a regimental roster listing the 1,182 men who served in the Twenty-sixth.
Few American Civil War operations matched the controversy, intensity, and bloodshed of Confederate general John Bell Hood’s ill-fated 1864 campaign against Union forces in Tennessee. In the ...first-ever anthology on the subject, The Tennessee Campaign of 1864, edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear, fourteen prominent historians and emerging scholars examine the three-month operation, covering the battles of Allatoona, Spring Hill, and Franklin, as well as the decimation of Hood’s army at Nashville.
Contributors explore the campaign’s battlefield action, including how Major General Andrew J. Smith’s three aggressive divisions of the Army of Tennessee became the most successful Federal unit at Nashville, how vastly outnumbered Union troops held the Allatoona Pass, why Hood failed at Spring Hill and how the event has been perceived, and why so many of the Army of Tennessee’s officer corps died at the Battle of Franklin, where the Confederacy suffered a disastrous blow. An exciting inclusion is the diary of Confederate major general Patrick R. Cleburne, which covers the first phase of the campaign. Essays on the strained relationship between Ulysses S. Grant and George H. Thomas and on Thomas’s approach to warfare reveal much about the personalities involved, and chapters about civilians in the campaign’s path and those miles away show how the war affected people not involved in the fighting. An innovative case study of the fighting at Franklin investigates the emotional and psychological impact of killing on the battlefield, and other implications of the campaign include how the courageous actions of the U.S. Colored Troops at Nashville made a lasting impact on the African American community and how preservation efforts met with differing results at Franklin and Nashville.
Canvassing both military and social history, this well-researched volume offers new, illuminating perspectives while furthering long-running debates on more familiar topics. These in-depth essays provide an expert appraisal of one of the most brutal and notorious campaigns in Civil War history.
The law called for limiting provisions such a prohibiting the gathering of more than three slaves at once, all African Americans not allowed to hold, purchase, or sell property, and masters being ...allowed to punish their slaves as they saw fit.3 When the state legislature voted in 1799 to end slavery, they extended the system via a clause that stated that children bom after 1799 would be freed at age twenty-eight for men, and age twentyfive for women.4 The system continued until July 4, 1827. Taking her case to the state Supreme Court, the judicial body ruled in favor of Jennings, stating that African Americans "could not be forcibly removed by any rules of the company nor by force or by violence. Immediately, the mob targeted African Americans and abolitionists, destroying a number of churches and terrorizing the city for three days before authorities arrested the mob leaders.8 Albany, the state capital, also experienced its share of racial violence in 1832, when a white mob destroyed a house that held African American and white residents, with the mayor and constable looking on.9 Irish immigration was another factor that increased racial tensions in New York. Throwing bricks and stones, they charged the building, dragging out at least one male worker, and screamed "Hand out the damned niggers!" "Fire the buildings - bum out the damned niggers!"12 Seeking refuge on the second floor of the building, the African American workers were successful in forcing mob members who broke into the factory down the stairs, before the police dispersed the mob.
Often called Lee's greatest triumph, the battle of Chancellorsville decimated the Union Eleventh Corps, composed of large numbers of German-speaking volunteers. Poorly deployed, the unit was routed ...by StonewallJackson and became the scapegoat for the Northern defeat, blamed by many on the flightof German immigrant troops. The impact on America's large German community was devastating. But there is much more to the story than that. Drawing for the first time on German-language newspapers, soldiers' letters, memoirs, and regimental records, Christian Keller reconstructs the battle and its aftermath from the German-American perspective, military and civilian. He offers a fascinating window into a misunderstood past, one where the German soldiers' valor has been either minimized or dismissed as cowardly. He critically analyzes the performance of the German regiments and documents the impact of nativism on Anglo-American and German-American reactions-and on German self-perceptions as patriots and Americans. For German-Americans, the ghost of Chancellorsville lingered long, and Keller traces its effects not only on ethnic identity, but also on the dynamics of inclusion andassimilation in American life.
Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the ...largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and this book reveals, it had deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people. The book recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history—that the emancipation of the slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history, had devastating consequences for innumerable freedpeople. Drawing on new research into the records of the Medical Division of the Freedmen’s Bureau—a nascent national health system that cared for more than 500,000 freed slaves—this book shows how the collapse of the plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. The book shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople, including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. The book concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was disastrously applied to Native Americans.
Civil War Settlers is the first comprehensive analysis of Scandinavian Americans and their participation in the US Civil War. Based on thousands of sources in multiple languages, that have to date ...been inaccessible to most US historians, Anders Bo Rasmussen brings the untold story of Scandinavian American immigrants to life by focusing on their lived community experience and positioning it within the larger context of western settler colonialism. Associating American citizenship with liberty and equality, Scandinavian immigrants openly opposed slavery and were among the most enthusiastic foreign-born supporters of the early Republican Party. However, the malleable concept of citizenship was used by immigrants to resist draft service, and support a white man's republic through territorial expansion on American Indian land and into the Caribbean. Consequently, Scandinavian immigrants after emancipation proved to be reactionary Republicans, not abolitionists. This unique approach to the Civil War sheds new light on how whiteness and access to territory formed an integral part of American immigration history.
Why did eleven slave states secede from the Union in 1860-61? Why did the eighteen free states loyal to the Union deny the legitimacy of secession, and take concrete steps after Fort Sumter to subdue ...what President Abraham Lincoln deemed treasonous rebellion?At the Precipiceseeks to answer these and related questions by focusing on the different ways in which Americans, North and South, black and white, understood their interests, rights, and honor during the late antebellum years. Rather than give a narrative account of the crisis, Shearer Davis Bowman takes readers into the minds of the leading actors, examining the lives and thoughts of such key figures as Abraham Lincoln, James Buchanan, Jefferson Davis, John Tyler, and Martin Van Buren. Bowman also provides an especially vivid glimpse into what less famous men and women in both sections thought about themselves and the political, social, and cultural worlds in which they lived, and how their thoughts informed their actions in the secession period. Intriguingly, secessionists and Unionists alike glorified the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, yet they interpreted those sacred documents in markedly different ways and held very different notions of what constituted "American" values.
