The Civil War Diary of Gideon Welles, Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy

The Civil War Diary of Gideon Welles, Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy PDF Author: Gideon Welles
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252096436
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 881

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Book Description
Gideon Welles’s 1861 appointment as secretary of the navy placed him at the hub of Union planning for the Civil War and in the midst of the powerful personalities vying for influence in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. Although Welles initially knew little of naval matters, he rebuilt a service depleted by Confederate defections, planned actions that gave the Union badly needed victories in the war’s early days, and oversaw a blockade that weakened the South’s economy. Perhaps the hardest-working member of the cabinet, Welles still found time to keep a detailed diary that has become one of the key documents for understanding the inner workings of the Lincoln administration. In this new edition, William E. and Erica L. Gienapp have restored Welles’s original observations, gleaned from the manuscript diaries at the Library of Congress and freed from his many later revisions, so that the reader can experience what he wrote in the moment. With his vitriolic pen, Welles captures the bitter disputes over strategy and war aims, lacerates colleagues from Secretary of State William H. Seward to General-in-Chief Henry Halleck, and condemns the actions of the self-serving southern elite he sees as responsible for the war. He just as easily waxes eloquent about the Navy's wartime achievements, extols the virtues of Lincoln, and drops in a tidbit of Washington gossip. Carefully edited and extensively annotated, this edition contains a wealth of supplementary material. The appendixes include short biographies of the members of Lincoln’s cabinet, the retrospective Welles wrote after leaving office covering the period missing from the diary proper, and important letters regarding naval matters and international law.

General E.A. Paine in Western Kentucky

General E.A. Paine in Western Kentucky PDF Author: Dieter C. Ullrich
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476630984
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
When General E. A. Paine assumed command of the U.S. Army's District of Western Kentucky at Paducah in the summer of 1864, he faced a defiant populace, a thriving black market and undisciplined troops plagued by low morale. Guerrillas pillaged towns and murdered the vocal few that supported the Union. Paine's task was to enforce discipline and mollify the secessionist majority in a 2,300-square-mile district. In less than two months, he succeeded where others had failed. For secessionists, his tenure was a "reign of terror"--for the Unionist minority, a "happy and jubilant" time. An abolitionist, Paine encouraged the enlistment of black troops and fair wages for former slaves. Yet his principled views led to his downfall. Critics and enemies falsified reports, leading to his removal from command and a court-martial. He was exonerated on all but one minor charge yet historians have perpetuated the Paine-the-monster myth. This book tells the complete story.

The Civil War Diary of Gideon Welles, Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy

The Civil War Diary of Gideon Welles, Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy PDF Author: Gideon Welles
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252096436
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 881

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Book Description
Gideon Welles’s 1861 appointment as secretary of the navy placed him at the hub of Union planning for the Civil War and in the midst of the powerful personalities vying for influence in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. Although Welles initially knew little of naval matters, he rebuilt a service depleted by Confederate defections, planned actions that gave the Union badly needed victories in the war’s early days, and oversaw a blockade that weakened the South’s economy. Perhaps the hardest-working member of the cabinet, Welles still found time to keep a detailed diary that has become one of the key documents for understanding the inner workings of the Lincoln administration. In this new edition, William E. and Erica L. Gienapp have restored Welles’s original observations, gleaned from the manuscript diaries at the Library of Congress and freed from his many later revisions, so that the reader can experience what he wrote in the moment. With his vitriolic pen, Welles captures the bitter disputes over strategy and war aims, lacerates colleagues from Secretary of State William H. Seward to General-in-Chief Henry Halleck, and condemns the actions of the self-serving southern elite he sees as responsible for the war. He just as easily waxes eloquent about the Navy's wartime achievements, extols the virtues of Lincoln, and drops in a tidbit of Washington gossip. Carefully edited and extensively annotated, this edition contains a wealth of supplementary material. The appendixes include short biographies of the members of Lincoln’s cabinet, the retrospective Welles wrote after leaving office covering the period missing from the diary proper, and important letters regarding naval matters and international law.

Joseph and Harriet Hawley's Civil War

Joseph and Harriet Hawley's Civil War PDF Author: Paul E. Teed
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498504116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This book explores the remarkable partnership of Joseph and Harriet Hawley, a married couple from Connecticut whose lives were transformed by overlapping experiences in the American Civil War era. When Joseph became the colonel of the 7th Connecticut Infantry Regiment in 1862, Harriet ignored family advice and social convention, and travelled to Union military headquarters at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where Joseph’s regiment was stationed. From that bold beginning, she spent the next three years as a visitor at field hospitals, a teacher at freedman’s schools, a wartime journalist, a ward nurse, and her husband’s informal advisor and publicist. Moving in and around the scenes of military action, she lived and worked in spaces usually reserved for men and took on responsibilities that implicitly challenged conventional understandings of women’s physical and emotional dependency. While Joseph struggled for recognition and promotion in the brutally competitive environment of Union military politics, Harriet shrewdly used her own personal contacts with power brokers in Hartford and Washington to protect his interests and those of his men. And as the terrible realities of the Civil War pushed them both to the brink of physical and emotional collapse, Harriet and Joseph remained committed to the cause and found ways to sustain their devotion to both Union and emancipation in the very worst moments of the conflict.

Diary of Gideon Welles

Diary of Gideon Welles PDF Author: Gideon Welles
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Reconstruction
Languages : en
Pages : 638

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Book Description


The Limits of Loyalty

The Limits of Loyalty PDF Author: Jarret Ruminski
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496813995
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Jarret Ruminski examines ordinary lives in Confederate-controlled Mississippi to show how military occupation and the ravages of war tested the meaning of loyalty during America's greatest rift. The extent of southern loyalty to the Confederate States of America has remained a subject of historical contention that has resulted in two conflicting conclusions: one, southern patriotism was either strong enough to carry the Confederacy to the brink of victory, or two, it was so weak that the Confederacy was doomed to crumble from internal discord. Mississippi, the home state of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, should have been a hotbed of Confederate patriotism. The reality was much more complicated. Ruminski breaks the weak/strong loyalty impasse by looking at how people from different backgrounds--women and men, white and black, enslaved and free, rich and poor--negotiated the shifting contours of loyalty in a state where Union occupation turned everyday activities into potential tests of patriotism. While the Confederate government demanded total national loyalty from its citizenry, this study focuses on wartime activities such as swearing the Union oath, illegally trading with the Union army, and deserting from the Confederate army to show how Mississippians acted on multiple loyalties to self, family, and nation. Ruminski also probes the relationship between race and loyalty to indicate how an internal war between slaves and slaveholders defined Mississippi's social development well into the twentieth century.

American Civil War Diaries

American Civil War Diaries PDF Author:
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0979447739
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description


I Do Wish This Cruel War Was Over

I Do Wish This Cruel War Was Over PDF Author: Mark K. Christ
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 1610755405
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
I Do Wish this Cruel War Was Over collects diaries, letters, and memoirs excerpted from their original publication in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly to offer a first-hand, ground-level view of the war's horrors, its mundane hardships, its pitched battles and languid stretches, even its moments of frivolity. Readers will find varying degrees of commitment and different motivations among soldiers on both sides, along with the perspective of civilians. In many cases, these documents address aspects of the war that would become objects of scholarly and popular fascination only years after their initial appearance: the guerrilla conflict that became the "real war" west of the Mississippi; the "hard war" waged against civilians long before William Tecumseh Sherman set foot in Georgia; the work of women in maintaining households in the absence of men; and the complexities of emancipation, which saw African Americans winning freedom and sometimes losing it all over again. Altogether, these first-person accounts provide an immediacy and a visceral understanding of what it meant to survive the Civil War in Arkansas.

The Era of the Civil War--1820-1876

The Era of the Civil War--1820-1876 PDF Author: Louise A. Arnold-Friend
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 724

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Book Description


Big Trouble

Big Trouble PDF Author: J. Anthony Lukas
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 912

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Book Description
Story of Frank Steuneberg, Governor of Idaho, who was assassinated in 1905

Field Armies & Fortifications in the Civil War

Field Armies & Fortifications in the Civil War PDF Author: Earl J. Hess
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807829315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
"Hess studies the use of fortifications by tracing the campaigns of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia from April 1861 to April 1864. He considers the role of field fortifications in the defense of cities, river crossings, and railroads and in numerous battles. Blending technical aspects of construction with operational history, Hess demonstrates the crucial role these earthworks played in the success or failure of field armies." "Based on fieldwork at 300 battle sites and extensive research in official reports, letters, diaries, and archaeological studies, this book stands to become an indispensable reference for Civil War historians."--BOOK JACKET.