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Civil War
DRAWN WITH THE SWORD
by James M. McPherson , Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $25.00. CODE: OUP-13
While fully and freely admitting that my knowledge of the field is not much greater than George M. Cohan’s, I will say that a great many CD-ROMs look pretty feeble to me.
American Heritage’s debut on CD-ROM mentioned in “Letter From the Editor,” American Heritage: The Civil War—The Complete Multimedia Experience , is available from Byron Preiss Multimedia and Simon & Schuster Interactive (two CD-ROMs, for Wind
The Union Army’s siege ended in 1865, but it still has a grip on Petersburg, Virginia
This isn’t the first time a Virginia governor has found himself embroiled in controversy about the commercialization of a Civil War site
WHEN THE CIVIL War ended, a second fierce and divisive conflict began, fought on the same battlefields but over a different issue: not political secession but the commercial development of the battlefields themselves.
A scholar searches across two centuries to discover the main engine of our government’s growth—and reaches a controversial conclusion
Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835 that America had no neighbors and hence no enemies.
After every war in the nation’s history, the military has faced not only calls for demobilization but new challenges and new opportunities. It is happening again.
Not many people appreciate a military base closing. Like the shutting of a factory, it can devastate nearby towns, throwing thousands of people out of work. Merchants face losses and even bankruptcy as sales fall off.
There is something irresistible about Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the soft-spoken, be-spectacled Bowdoin College professor who somehow transformed himself into one of the Union Army’s ablest commanders.
Lee. Grant. Jackson. Sherman. Thomas. Yes, George Henry Thomas belongs in that company. The trouble is that he and Grant never really got along.
Of all the great commanders in the Civil War, the most consistently underrated and overlooked is Gen. George H. Thomas, the big Virginia cavalryman who fought for the Union.
During three days in May 1863, the Confederate leader took astonishing risks to win one of the most skillfully conducted battles in history. But the cost turned out to be too steep.
The ability of Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. (“Stonewall”) Jackson never showed itself more vividly than during three days of battle in May 1863 around a rustic crossroads called Chancellorsville.
More than the Revolution, more than the Constitutional Convention, it was the crucial test of the American nation. The author of Battle Cry of Freedom, the most successful recent book on the subject, explains why the issues that fired the Civil War are as urgent in 1990 as they were in 1861.
McPherson’s Basic Reading List
In September 1862 the New York Tribune ran a masterly account of the Battle of Antietam. Here were no vague claims of “Great and Glorious Victory” or “Great Slaughter of the Rebels.” Instead, the paper offered six columns of accurate, forceful prose—and got it to the readers less than thirty-six hours after the fight.
New York throbbed with the usual breakfast-hour bustle on September 19, 1862, apparently undisturbed by the recent Confederate invasion of Northern soil.
The storm broke over their small town and changed their lives forever
James Alexander Wal
The bloodiest day’s fighting in our nation’s history took place on ground that has hardly changed since 1862. Antietam today offers a unique chance to grasp what a great Civil War battle was actually like.
During the recent Third Battle of Manassas—the struggle in northern Virginia between a shopping-mall developer and the Manassas National Battlefield Park—I noticed among the flying brickbats a letter to the Washington Post from
The more fiercely the Confederacy fought for its independence, the more bitterly divided it became. To fully understand the vast changes the war unleashed on the country, you must first understand the plight of the Southerners who didn’t want secession.
Americans tend to think of the Civil War as a titanic struggle between two regions of the country, one united in commitment to the Union, the other equally devoted to its own nationhood. Yet neither North nor South was truly unified.
In the Republic’s direst hour, he took command. In the black days after Bull Run, he won West Virginia for the Union. He raised a magnificent army and led it forth to meet his “cautious & weak” opponent, Robert E. Lee. Why hasn’t history been kinder to George B. McClellan?
Gen. George B. McClellan possessed a particular talent for dramatic gesture, and on the afternoon of September 14, 1862, at South Mountain in western Maryland, he surpassed himself.
The United States had promised black soldiers that they would be paid as much as whites. Sergeant Walker believed that promise.
This is in honor of Sgt. William Walker, of the 3d South Carolina Infantry Regiment, a young black soldier who believed in the United States government’s promises of equal rights. This is in honor of Sgt. William Walker, who was brave enough to act on his belief in his rights.
Extraordinary correspondence, never published before, takes us inside the mind of a military genius. Here is William Tecumseh Sherman in the heat of action inventing modern warfare, grieving the death of his little boy, struggling to hold Kentucky with levies, rolling invincibly across Georgia, and—always—battling the newspapermen whose stories, he believes, are killing his soldiers.
William Tecumseh Sherman,” announced The New York Times near the end of the Civil War, “has surpassed all newspaper correspondents in writing about military affairs...for conciseness, perspicacity and comprehensiveness with brevity he is the perf
Oliver Wendell Holmes was wounded three times in some of the worst fighting of the Civil War. But for him, the most terrible battles were the ones he had missed.
He was born in 1841, in a Boston that took its water from backyard wells and its light from whale-oil lamps. He died ninety-four years later in a nation that the army pilot James Doolittle had just crossed in twelve hours.
The Civil War ignited the basic conflict between a free press and the need for military security. By war’s end, the hard-won compromises between soldiers and newspapermen may not have provided all the answers, but they had raised all the modern questions.
Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman was a good hater, and he hated few things more than newspapermen. His encounter with the correspondent Floras B. Plympton of the Cincinnati Commercial in September 1861, five months into the Civil War, was typical.
How our wartime experience conquered a wide range of problems from hemorrhagic shock to yellow fever
WHEN HIPPOCRATES wrote in the fifth century B.C. that “he who would learn surgery should join an army and follow it,” he illuminated the central irony of military medicine.
All this Florida boy wanted to do was rejoin his regiment. Instead they drafted him into the Confederate secret service.
A FTER HE WAS MUSTERED out of his beaten army in 1865, Charles Hemming went west to Texas and a highly successful career as a banker.
Whatever you were taught or thought you knew about the post-Civil War era is probably wrong in the light of recent study
Most surveys of American painting begin in New England in the eighteenth century, move westward to the Rockies in the nineteenth, and return to New York in the twentieth. Now we’ll have to redraw the map .
TAKING STOCK of painting in the South in 1859, a critic for the New Orleans Daily Cresent concluded glumly, “Artist roam the country of the North, turning out pictures by the hundred yearly, but none come to glean t
Charles Hopkins received the Congressional Medal of Honor for gallantry at the battle of Gaines’ Mill, but his toughest fight was trying to survive at the Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp. He left this never-before-published record.
Original documents tell the story of a Civil War steamboat captains sorrowful cruise with the most destructive cargo of all
How Juliette “Daisy” Low, an unwanted child, a miserable wife, a lonely widow, finally found happiness as the founder of the Girl Scouts of America
In 1911 Juliette “Daisy” Low taught her first seven female Girl Guides to raise chickens and to spin wool.
Henry Ware Lawton
He arrived in Manila on March 18, 1899, bearing his six-foot-four frame with such easy strength that it would have been natural to wonder how he could so recently have suffered the “ill health” for which he had been relieved of the military governorship of Santiago.
In the portfolio of Civil War photographs that ran in our June/July 1981 issue, we identified Colonel Joseph Plympton, on page 50, as a Northerner—which was true enough. What wasn’t true was the implication that he’d served in the Civil War.
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