Examining the life of an early advocate of the legal rights of Black Americans In this brisk, engaging exploration of 19th-century radical reformer and abolitionist Wendell Phillips, Peter Charles Hoffer makes the case that Phillips deserves credit as the nation's first public interest lawyer, someone who led the antebellum crusade against ......
In August 1862, nineteen-year-old Edward G. Granger joined the 5th Michigan Cavalry Regiment as a second lieutenant. On August 20, 1863, the newly promoted Brig. Gen. George Armstrong Custer appointed Granger as one of his aides, a position Granger would hold until his death in August 1864. Many of the forty-four letters the young lieutenant wrote ......
The US Christian Commission on the Civil War Battlefront
Examining how a civilian organization used the Civil War to advance their religious mission Tabernacles in the Wilderness discusses the work of the United States Christian Commission (USCC), a civilian relief agency established by northern evangelical Protestants to minister to Union troops during the American Civil War. USCC workers saw in ......
In the U.S. Civil War, Mary Richards, a free Black woman, risked her life posing as an illiterate slave to spy in the home of rebel President Jefferson Davis. Whether as a Union agent sending vital intelligence to the U.S. military or facing down the Klan while teaching freed slaves in postwar Georgia, hers was a heroic one-woman fight for ......
James McPherson's classic book For Cause & Comrades explained "why men fought in the Civil War"-and spurred countless other historians to ask and attempt to answer the same question. But few have explored why men did not fight. That's the question Paul Taylor answers in this groundbreaking Civil War history that examines the reasons why at least ......
Taking a novel approach to the military history of the post-Civil War West, distinguished historian Robert M. Utley examines the careers of seven military leaders who served as major generals for the Union in the Civil War, then as brigadier generals in command of the U.S. Army's western departments. By examining both periods in their careers, ......
Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy
As the sectional crisis gripped the United States, the rancor increasingly spread to the halls of Congress. Preston Brooks's frenzied assault on Charles Sumner was perhaps the most notorious evidence of the dangerous divide between proslavery Democrats and the new antislavery Republican Party. But as disunion loomed, rifts within the majority ......
The Campaign and Battle of Tupelo/Harrisburg, Mississippi, June-July 1864
Fighting Nathan Bedford Forrest in North Mississippi During the summer of 1864, a Union column commanded by Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson Smith set out from Tennessee with a goal that had proven impossible in all prior attempts-to find and defeat the cavalry under the command of Confederate major general Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest's cavalry was ......
Slavery, Westward Expansion, and the Roots of the Civil War
By the time Abraham Lincoln asserted in 1858 that the nation could not "endure permanently half slave and half free," the rift that would split the country in civil war was well defined. The origins and evolution of the coming conflict between North and South can in fact be traced back to the early years of the American Republic, as Stephen G. ......
