Civil War Memoirs

Merle Hoffman's life story is riveting. A former classical pianist, a self-made millionaire, and a feminist who found her life's work providing abortions, she has been a fearless crusader for women's right to choose. Over the years, Hoffman has used her entrepreneurial spirit to build one of the most comprehensive women's medical centers in the country. In 1971 (two years before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision to legalize abortion nationally), Hoffman founded Choices, an abortion clinic in New York.

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.

In October 1859, abolitionist John Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. His goal was to secure weapons and start a slave rebellion. The raid was a failure, but it galvanized the nation and sparked the Civil War. Still one of the most controversial figures in American history, John Brown's actions raise interesting questions about unsanctioned violence that can be justified for a greater good.

"The real war will never get in the books," Walt Whitman wrote in this diary he kept during the Civil War. Whitman chronicled his visits to Washington, D.C. hospitals where he comforted wounded men and assisted nurses and doctors. This journal, written by one of America's greatest poets and writers, captures the details and ironies of war.

Every memoir of the American Civil War provides us with another view of the catastrophe that changed the country forever. The Other Side of the War reveals the war as experienced by the thousands of women volunteered to work in hospitals and for the Sanitary Commission, the organization that advocated better practices and lobbied for increased supplies. Katharine Prescott Wormeley was one of those volunteers, an American nurse in the Civil War, as well as author, editor, and and one of America’s best-known translators of French language literary works.

Authors Agostino Von Hassell and Ed Breslin present Sherman as once man and phenomenon. From Bull Run to Shiloh, from Vicksburg to Chattanooga, and from Atlanta to Savannah, Sherman carved the Confederacy with a feral singularity of purpose.

Benjamin Franklin Butler was one of the most important and controversial military and political leaders of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Remembered most often for his uncompromising administration of the federal occupation of New Orleans during the war, Butler reemerges in this lively narrative as a man whose journey took him from childhood destitution to wealth and profound influence in state and national halls of power. Leonard's nuanced portrait peels away generations of previous assumptions and characterizations to provide a definitive life of a consequential man.

Lt. Benjamin Loring (1824-1902) lived the life of an everyman Civil War sailor. He commanded no armies and devised no grand strategies. Loring was a sailor who just wanted to return home, where the biggest story of his life awaited him. Covering almost a year of Loring’s service, I Held Lincoln describes the lieutenant’s command of the gunboat USS Wave, the Battle of Calcasieu Pass, the surrender of his ship, and his capture by the Confederates.

Although he finds himself on the wrong side of history, Stonewall Jackson has become known as one of the American Civil War’s most brilliant strategists. His ride to acclaim was not easy; Jackson grew up poor, was orphaned by seven, jumped between different relatives’ homes, and had no real education, yet at 18 he was accepted into the prestigious military academy at West Point.

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.

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.

One of the most important and objective firsthand accounts of the Civil War. Unlike some other Confederate memoirists, General Edward Porter Alexander objectively evaluated and criticized prominent Confederate officers, including Robert E. Lee. The result is a clear-eyed assessment of the bloody conflict that divided but subsequently united the nation.

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.

In this startling and original work, best-selling author Charles Higham (Howard Hughes: The Secret Life) addresses one of the greatest historical mysteries: Did John Wilkes Booth act alone on the night of Good Friday, 1865, or was he part of a wide conspiracy? Drawing from letters, diaries, previously unstudied records of official hearings, railway timetables, and obscure shipping manifests, Higham weaves a spellbinding account of intrigue.

Although Lincoln’s adult life as president, statesman, and savior of the Union has been well documented and analyzed, most biographers have regarded his early years as inconsequential to his career and accomplishments. But in 1920, a group of historians known as the Lincoln Inquiry were determined to give Lincoln’s formative years their due. Abe’s Youth takes a look into their writings, which focus on Lincoln’s life between seven and 21 years of age.

In a little-noted eulogy delivered after Lincoln's assassination, Frederick Douglass called the president "emphatically the black man's president," the "first to show any respect for their rights as men." Douglass pointed not just to Lincoln's official acts and utterances, like the Emancipation Proclamation or the Second Inaugural Address, but also to the president's own personal experiences with Black people.

When the United States was founded in 1776, its citizens didn’t think of themselves as “Americans.” They were New Yorkers or Virginians or Pennsylvanians. It was decades later that the seeds of American nationalism—identifying with one’s own nation and supporting its broader interests—began to take root. But what kind of nationalism should Americans embrace? The state-focused and racist nationalism of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson? Or the belief that the US Constitution made all Americans one nation, indivisible, which Daniel Webster and others espoused?

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.

John Brown was fiercely committed to the militant abolitionist cause, a crusade that culminated in Brown’s raid on the Federal armory at Harpers Ferry in 1859 and his subsequent execution. Less well known is his devotion to his family, and they to him. Two of Brown’s sons were killed at Harpers Ferry, but the commitment of his wife and daughters often goes unacknowledged. As detailed by Laughlin-Schultz, Brown’s second wife and his daughters were in many ways the most ordinary of women. However, they also lived extraordinary lives.

Rebirthing Lincoln, a Biography by Southern Historian Howard Ray White is the most impressive and truthfully educational book of the 13 books he has authored to date. White's biography of President Abraham Lincoln properly tells the essential biographical history concerning "how an Illinois lawyer kept secret his illegitimate birth and won the 1860 presidential nomination of the northern states' Republican party".