Ironmaker to the Confederacy

Ironmaker to the Confederacy PDF Author: Charles B. Dew
Publisher: New Haven, Yale U. P
ISBN:
Category : ANDERSON, JOSEPH REID,1813-1892
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Under the guidance of Joseph Reid Anderson, the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond - the largest iron manufacturer in the Confederacy - reflected, and to an important degree shaped, the fortunes of the South. Mr. Dew traces in detail the history of the company from 1859-67. Dependence on the North for raw materials and skilled labor, increasing competition from Yankee manufacturers in the Southern iron market, and the Tredegar owners' growing antagonism toward the North are the dominant themes of the prewar chapters. Secession , which the Richmond industrialists desired and encouraged, made Tredegar production crucial to the South but also brought crippling shortages of strategic materials. The book outlines the dramatic expansion of the company's activities as it attempted, with government aid, to overcome these deficiencies. Production successes and failures and their influence on Confederate military fortunes, efforts to correct labor shortages, the condition of slave and free industrial workers during the war, and the owners' attempts to maximize profits in the face of galloping inflation are all examined. The final chapter on the war years traces the decline in military production as the Tredegar management funneled increasing amounts of iron to private consumers and the Southern industrial economy disintegrated. Of both human and historical interest is Mr. Dew's account of successful efforts by Anderson and his associates to secure pardons, from the President and capital from Northern industrialists in order to reclaim and rebuild the Tredegar. -- Publisher.

Ironmaker to the Confederacy

Ironmaker to the Confederacy PDF Author: Charles B. Dew
Publisher: New Haven, Yale U. P
ISBN:
Category : ANDERSON, JOSEPH REID,1813-1892
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Under the guidance of Joseph Reid Anderson, the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond - the largest iron manufacturer in the Confederacy - reflected, and to an important degree shaped, the fortunes of the South. Mr. Dew traces in detail the history of the company from 1859-67. Dependence on the North for raw materials and skilled labor, increasing competition from Yankee manufacturers in the Southern iron market, and the Tredegar owners' growing antagonism toward the North are the dominant themes of the prewar chapters. Secession , which the Richmond industrialists desired and encouraged, made Tredegar production crucial to the South but also brought crippling shortages of strategic materials. The book outlines the dramatic expansion of the company's activities as it attempted, with government aid, to overcome these deficiencies. Production successes and failures and their influence on Confederate military fortunes, efforts to correct labor shortages, the condition of slave and free industrial workers during the war, and the owners' attempts to maximize profits in the face of galloping inflation are all examined. The final chapter on the war years traces the decline in military production as the Tredegar management funneled increasing amounts of iron to private consumers and the Southern industrial economy disintegrated. Of both human and historical interest is Mr. Dew's account of successful efforts by Anderson and his associates to secure pardons, from the President and capital from Northern industrialists in order to reclaim and rebuild the Tredegar. -- Publisher.

The Virginia Landmarks Register

The Virginia Landmarks Register PDF Author: Calder Loth
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813918626
Category : Historic buildings
Languages : en
Pages : 650

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Book Description
The Virginia Landmarks Register, fourth edition, will create for the reader a deeper awareness of a unique legacy and will serve to enhance the stewardship of Virginia's irreplaceable heritage.

The Elements of Confederate Defeat

The Elements of Confederate Defeat PDF Author:
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820310778
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
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.

Apostles of Disunion

Apostles of Disunion PDF Author: Charles B. Dew
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813939453
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion has established itself as a modern classic and an indispensable account of the Southern states’ secession from the Union. Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of our great national crisis. The fifteen years since the original publication of Apostles of Disunion have seen an intensification of debates surrounding the Confederate flag and Civil War monuments. In a powerful new afterword to this anniversary edition, Dew situates the book in relation to these recent controversies and factors in the role of vast financial interests tied to the internal slave trade in pushing Virginia and other upper South states toward secession and war.

Old Dominion Industrial Commonwealth

Old Dominion Industrial Commonwealth PDF Author: Sean Patrick Adams
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM
ISBN: 1421400510
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
A look at the role of state policies in North-South economic divergence and in American industrial development leading up to the Civil War. In 1796, famed engineer and architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe toured the coal fields outside Richmond, Virginia, declaring enthusiastically, “Such a mine of Wealth exists, I believe, nowhere else!” With its abundant and accessible deposits, growing industries, and network of rivers and ports, Virginia stood poised to serve as the center of the young nation’s coal trade. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Virginia’s leadership in the American coal industry had completely unraveled while Pennsylvania, at first slow to exploit its vast reserves of anthracite and bituminous coal, had become the country’s leading producer. Sean Patrick Adams compares the political economies of coal in Virginia and Pennsylvania from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War, examining the divergent paths these two states took in developing their ample coal reserves during a critical period of American industrialization. In both cases, Adams finds, state economic policies played a major role. Virginia’s failure to exploit the rich coal fields in the western part of the state can be traced to the legislature’s overriding concern to protect and promote the interests of the agrarian, slaveholding elite of eastern Virginia. Pennsylvania’s more factious legislature enthusiastically embraced a policy of economic growth that resulted in the construction of an extensive transportation network, a statewide geological survey, and support for private investment in its coal fields. Using coal as a barometer of economic change, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth addresses longstanding questions about North-South economic divergence and the role of state government in American industrial development.

Two Months in the Confederate States

Two Months in the Confederate States PDF Author: William Carson Corsan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780807120378
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Corsan visited the Confederacy in the fall of 1862 to judge the impact of the American Civil War on his business's future prospects. In a clear, lively, and, at times, humorous style, Corsan details his experiences, which include nearly being drafted into the Rebel army. He also records southerners' attitudes toward the war.

The Black Experience in the Civil War South

The Black Experience in the Civil War South PDF Author: Stephen V. Ash
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313042047
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
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.

Congress of States

Congress of States PDF Author: David Carlson
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817360913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
"In 1923, the Southern Historical Society (SHS) published 'Proceedings of the Confederate Congress' in its journal, Southern Historical Society Papers. It was the first of nine issues containing congressional minutes from the public sessions of the Confederate Congress that met in Richmond, Virginia from February 1862 to March 1865. Unlike the summary notations of the official US congressional journals, the 'Proceedings' were drawn primarily from the archives of two newspapers from Richmond, Virginia-the Examiner and the Dispatch-which served the Confederacy's capital city. These journalists['] reports preserved nearly verbatim transcripts of speeches, debates, and bills considered by the Confederate legislature, including details seldom available from other sources, and have proven to be invaluable sources for Confederate political history. 'Proceedings of the Confederate Congress' is not without problems, however, chief among them its lack of completeness. Owing to budgetary constraints and lack of resources, SHS president Douglas Southall Freeman was forced to focus exclusively on the sessions of the Regular Confederate Congress beginning in 1862. None of the proceedings of the Montgomery and Richmond Provisional Congresses of 1861 and 1862 were included in the series. With 'Congress of States,' David Carlson fills this void by compiling and editing the minutes of these early legislative sessions from daily press reports published in newspapers in Richmond, Virginia; Montgomery, Alabama; Charleston, South Carolina; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Savannah and Augusta, Georgia, in the process assembling a complete set of transcriptions documenting the creation of the Confederate government. When delegations from South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and, later, Texas met in Montgomery, Alabama in February 1861 to discuss the creation of a southern national government, none had been authorized to do so by the conventions that sent them. Within weeks, however, they launched a de facto constitutional convention, formed a government, and selected Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens to serve as president and vice president of the new nation. This transpired at a critical juncture prior to Abraham Lincoln's first inauguration when eight other slave states had yet to act. The delegates understood their place on the public stage and newspapers' usefulness in espousing and galvanizing their cause. From its initial formation through the expansion of the Confederacy and the new government's official establishment in the capital city of Richmond, Virginia, the Provisional Congress provided a vehicle around which the new nation coalesced as members negotiated with states and foreign governments, mobilized a military, consulted with constituents, and forged a national culture. As the conflict deepened, sensitive business increasingly took place behind closed doors away from the public, reporters, and the risk of espionage (as would also be true in the Regular Confederate Congress), but even the public functions that remained and were reported on in open chambers provide valuable insights into the workings and mindset of the Confederate government. Intended as a primary source and reference for libraries, historians, and political scientists of the nineteenth century, 'Congress of States' provides an introduction explaining the Provisional Confederate Congress and the background and purpose of the book relative to the SHS and its 'Proceedings of the Confederate Congress'; a chronology outlining the major events surrounding the secession crisis which informed and influenced the Provisional Congress; annotated minutes for each of Provisional Confederate Congress's five sessions; and appendices featuring the leadership and committees of the Provisional Congress, primary source documents referenced but not included in the proceedings, and examples of the proposed emblem and flags debated as symbols of the Confederacy"--

Ellen Glasgow

Ellen Glasgow PDF Author: Susan Goodman
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801873140
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
With such critically acclaimed and best-selling novels as Barren Ground, The Sheltered Life, Vein of Iron, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning In This Our Life, Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945) established herself as one of America's most talented, dedicated, and influential writers. Chronicling the struggles of a fallen South, she pioneered a poetic realism that influenced a generation of southern writers (Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner among them) and shaped the course of American letters. In Ellen Glasgow: A Biography, Susan Goodman vividly brings to life the famously secretive writer, penetrating the myths, half-truths, and lies that have swirled around Glasgow since the publication of her first novel, The Descendent, in 1896. Drawing on previously unpublished papers and personal interviews, Goodman uncovers the engrossing details of Glasgow's family history, social milieu, personal tragedies, and literary career.

Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South

Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South PDF Author: Michael S. Frawley
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807171395
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
In the aftermath of the Civil War, contemporary narratives about the American South pointed to the perceived lack of industrial development in the region to explain why the Confederacy succumbed to the Union. Even after the cliometric revolution of the 1970s, when historians first began applying statistical analysis to reexamine antebellum manufacturing output, the pervasive belief in the region’s backward-ness prompted many scholars to view slavery, not industry, as the economic engine of the South. In Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South, historian Michael S. Frawley engages a wide variety of sources—including United States census data, which many historians have underutilized when gauging economic growth in the prewar South—to show how industrial development in the region has been systematically minimized by scholars. In doing so, Frawley reconsiders factors related to industrial production in the prewar South, such as the availability of natural resources, transportation, markets, labor, and capital. He contends that the Gulf South was far more industrialized and modern than suggested by census records, economic historians like Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, and contemporary travel writers such as Frederick Law Olmsted. Frawley situates the prewar South firmly in a varied and widespread industrial context, contesting the assumption that slavery inhibited industry in the region and that this lack of economic diversity ultimately prevented the Confederacy from waging a successful war. Though southern manufacturing firms could not match the output of northern states, Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South proves that such entities had established themselves as vital forces in the southern economy on the eve of the Civil War.