Civil War Biography

Robert E. Lee is remembered by history as a tragic figure, stoic and brave but distant and enigmatic. Using dozens of previously unpublished letters as departure points, Pryor produces a stunning personal account of Lee's military ability, his beliefs, and his time, shedding new light on every aspect of the complex and contradictory general's life story.

Volume Four begins in March, 1865 with Lee's starving soldiers facing annihilation at the hands of Grant's enormous army. Surrounded, with all avenues of escape cut off, Lee honorably surrendered the remnants of his valiant Army of Northern Virginia at Appamattox on April 9. Having done his military duty to his people, Lee next asked himself, "What is now my duty?" Declining handsome financial rewards for the use of his name in commercial ventures, Lee decided to share the misery of the people of Virginia and the South.

Volume three opens in May 1863 as Lee assessed his situation after the great Confederate victory at Chancellorsville and the loss of General Jackson. Lee quickly reorganized his army and headed north, hoping to inflict a war-ending defeat on the Union. But absent Jackson, his army was not the same.

Volume Two opens in March, 1862 with Lee back in Richmond after a lengthy absence. He was shocked by the chaos and panic evident in the Confederate capital. McClellan had assembled a superbly equipped army of over 100,000 soldiers which Virginians feared might invade at any time. In May, McClellan began to move his huge Army of the Potomac up the peninsula and so close to Richmond that church steeples were within his view. The situation seemed hopeless.

Where previous Lincoln biographers describe his temperament as "moderate", "passive", or even "conservative", historian Richard Striner offers a stunningly original perspective that will shed significant new light on one of the most studied figures in American history. Striner shows Lincoln's audacity as no other book has ever done. By emphasizing the workings of Lincoln's mind - stressing his cunning, his overall honesty, strategic thinking - even his ability to change his mind - Striner looks anew at many topics and themes important to Lincoln's story....

When Frank Thompson sees a poster requesting recruits for the new Union army, he is ready and willing to enlist. Except Frank isn’t his real name. In fact, Frank isn’t a man—he is really Sarah Emma Edmonds. At only nineteen years old, Sarah had already been dressing as a man for three years and living on the run in order to escape an arranged marriage. She had tasted freedom, and there was no going back.

Following up on the award-winning Longstreet at Gettysburg, this collection of new essays addresses some of the persistent questions regarding Confederate General James Longstreet's performance at the Battle of Gettysburg. Influential interpretations of his actions are evaluated for historical accuracy, drawing on often overlooked primary source material. Points of contention about Longstreet's July 2, 1863, attack are examined, along with the roots of the Longstreet-Gettysburg Controversy and the merits of Helen Longstreet's early 20th-century attempt to address it.

In April 1865, Richmond fell to the Union army and Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to his Northern counterpart, Ulysses S. Grant, at the Appomattox Court House. But the Civil War was far from over. Determined to keep Confederate dreams of secession alive, President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet fled the burning capital city. With Union troops in pursuit, the fugitives rallied loyalists across the South and made plans to escape to Cuba. Finally captured in Irwinville, Georgia, the former US senator and secretary of war became a prisoner of the American government.

The Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, have been highly revered figures in American history, lauded for leaving behind their lives as elite slave-owning women on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand abolitionists in the North. Yet the focus on their story has obscured the experiences of their Black relatives, the progeny of their brother, Henry, and one of the enslaved people he owned, a woman named Nancy Weston.

Confederate John Singleton Mosby forged his reputation on the most exhilarating of military activities: the overnight raid. Mosby possessed a genius for guerrilla and psychological warfare, taking control of the dark to make himself the "Gray Ghost" of Union nightmares. Gray Ghost, the first full biography of Confederate raider John Mosby, reveals new information on every aspect of Mosby's life, providing the first analysis of his impact on the Civil War from the Union viewpoint.

During the Civil War his movements from battlefield to battlefield were followed in the North and in the South nearly as closely as those of generals, though he was not in the military. After the war, his swift response to Ku Klux Klan violence sparked passage of a landmark civil rights law, though he was not a politician. When he died newspapers reported his death from coast to coast, yet he's unknown today. He was the man who delivered the most valuable ingredient in United States soldiers' fighting spirit during those terrible war years—letters between the front lines and the home front.

Historian Sarah Hopkins Bradford details the life of heroic abolitionist Harriet Tubman, who was born into slavery but escaped to lead other enslaved people to freedom.

In 1861 a Scotsman living in Louisiana took up the Confederate Flag. William Watson presents a narrative of his observations and experience in the Southern States, both before and during the American Civil War. Prior to the War, Watson lived in the hot, fertile state of Louisiana. With Lincoln in office, and the secession of the southern states, North and South was plunged in a violent Civil War. Watson recounts the widespread lack of political interest until the country reached this point.

The Boy Generals: George Custer, Wesley Merritt, and the Cavalry of the Army of the Potomac is the first installment in a remarkable trilogy to examine the strategy, tactics, and relationships of the leading Union army’s mounted arm and their influence on the course of the Civil War in the Eastern Theater. George Armstrong Custer’s career has attracted its fair share of coverage, but most Custer-related studies focus on his decision-making and actions to the exclusion of other important factors, including his relationships with his fellow officers.

While it’s widely known in the US that the first president did not have any biological children, few are aware that he had several stepgrandchildren. In First Family, we see Washington as a father figure, as well as meet the children he helped raise and trace their complicated roles in American history. First Family brings new focus and attention to this surprisingly neglected aspect of George Washington’s life and legacy.

Abraham Lincoln, unlike most of his political brethren, kept organized Christianity at arm’s length. He never joined a church and only sometimes attended Sunday services with his wife. But as he came to appreciate the growing political and military importance of the Christian churches, and when death touched the Lincoln household in an awful, intimate way, the erstwhile skeptic effectively evolved into the nation’s first evangelical president. The war, he told Americans, was in some fashion divine retribution for the sin of slavery.

No American president has enjoyed as intimate a relationship with the soldiers in his army as did the man they called “Father Abraham.” In Lincoln’s Men, historian William C. Davis draws on thousands of unpublished letters and diaries—the voices of the volunteers—to tell the hidden story of how a new and untested president became “Father” throughout both the army and the North as a whole. Lincoln’s Men casts a new light on our most famous president and on America’s revolution—on our country’s father and its rebirth.

From 1861 till his assassination in 1865, Abraham Lincoln was an American legal representative and statesman who functioned as the 16th president of the United States. Lincoln led the nation through the American Civil War, preserving the Union, eliminating slavery, enhancing the federal government, and helping the economy of the United States. Lincoln grew up on the frontier, mainly in Indiana, and was born into poverty in a log cabin.

In 1862, Andrew “Andy” Jackson Smith, son of a white landowner and enslaved woman, es­caped to Union troops operating in Kentucky, made his way to the North, and volunteered for the 55th Massachusetts, one of the newly formed African American regiments. The regiment was deployed to South Carolina, and during a desperate assault on a Confederate battery, the color bearer was killed. Before the flag was lost, Smith quickly retrieved it and under heavy fire, held the colors steady while the decimated regiment withdrew.

The year was 1862. The Union’s first large scale offensive, the Peninsula campaign led by Major General George B. McClellan, had been disastrous. Doubt in Congress grew that President Lincoln and his generals could win the war. In Saving the Union, Joe Scarborough analyzes the hard choice Lincoln faced—the debate raging inside him over how quickly to move toward emancipation, if at all.