Civil War Military History

The Confederate States of America was born in defense of slavery. Between Fort Sumter to Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands African American men, women, and children. These transactions in humanity made the internal slave trade a cornerstone of Confederate society, a bulwark of the Rebel economy, and a central part of the experience of the Civil War for all inhabiting the American South.

Listen to this audiobook to learn more about Major General William Farrar Smith, volunteer in the Civil War.

The heart of the Southern secessionist movement was in Charleston, South Carolina. This bustling harbor town on the southeastern coast of America was home to politicians, civilians, and militia loyal to the newly formed Confederate States of America. These “Rebels”, as they were known to the Northern Yankees, were just itching to start a real fight with the federal government. The Confederates considered President Abraham Lincoln’s government to be tyrannical in its intentions to abolish slavery and permanently alter the Southern way of life.

The Civil War is seen anew, and a great American family is brought to life, in Robert Roper’s brilliant evocation of the family Whitman. Walt Whitman’s work as a nurse to the wounded soldiers of the Civil War had a profound effect on the way he saw the world. Much less well known is the extraordinary record of his younger brother George Washington Whitman, who led his men in 21 major battles almost to die in a Confederate prison camp as the fighting ended.

The definitive refutation of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, this volume includes original essays, lectures, and interviews with historians. Topics addressed include the complex development of slavery in the New World, the American Revolution, the sectional crisis over slavery and the Civil War, the struggle for social equality in the 20th century, and the class politics of racial identity in the present.

Thaddeus Stevens was among the first to see the Civil War as an opportunity for a second American revolution - a chance to remake the country as a genuine multiracial democracy. As one of the foremost abolitionists in Congress in the years leading up to the war, he was a leader of the young Republican Party’s radical wing, fighting for anti-slavery and anti-racist policies long before party colleagues like Abraham Lincoln endorsed them. These policies - including welcoming black men into the Union’s armies - would prove crucial to the Union war effort.

A fast paced, gritty murder mystery through the wilds of territorial New Mexico's Rio Grande Valley with the feel of a Tony Hillerman novel and the complexity of a Ngaio Marsh mystery. Pueblos, Apache, former Mexican citizens and the US Army collide in a tale of greed and murder. A new civil war mystery series by best-selling author Phillip and Jennifer Bryant. Peter Thomas Smith's days on the post of Fort Craig, New Mexico territory, are spent fighting boredom, keeping cool, and giving the spiritual state of the fifth California Mounted Infantry volunteers a ready ear.

The Battle of Antietam was a turning point in the Civil War. In the span of several hours, there would be more loss of American life than in any other battle before or since, leaving one in four of the soldiers who took part either dead or wounded by the end of the day. What led to such a disastrous conclusion? And could something positive come from such an appalling massacre? The focus of the war was about to change. So, too, was how the American people viewed war as a whole.

A magnificent history of the opening years of the Civil War by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Bruce Catton. The first book in Bruce Catton's Pulitzer Prize-winning Army of the Potomac Trilogy, Mr. Lincoln's Army is a riveting history of the early years of the Civil War, when a fledgling Union Army took its stumbling first steps under the command of the controversial general George McClellan.

As a conductor for the Underground Railroad - the covert resistance network created to aid and protect slaves seeking freedom - William Still helped as many as 800 people escape enslavement. He also meticulously collected the letters, biographical sketches, arrival memos, and ransom notes of the escapees. The Underground Railroad Records is an archive of primary documents that trace the narrative arc of the greatest, most successful campaign of civil disobedience in American history.

The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants: Edda L. Fields-Black shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats.

Kim Wickens, a lawyer and dressage rider, became fascinated by this legendary horse when she learned that twelve of Thoroughbred racing's thirteen Triple Crown winners descended from Lexington. Wickens spent years meticulously researching the horse and his legacy—and with Lexington, she presents an absorbing, exciting account that transports listeners back to the raucous beginning of American horse racing and introduces them to the stallion at its heart.

The Battle of Chancellorsville took place in 1863. One hundred and fifty-seven years later, what Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson did on that battlefield in Virginia is still being taught at the United States Military Academy, also known as West Point, and other military schools around the world. This battle, more than any other in the Civil War, cemented these two Southern military leaders as legends and as bold and innovative battlefield commanders.

The northwestern third of the Commonwealth of Virginia finally broke away in 1863 to form the Union's 35th state. In Seceding from Secession: The Civil War, Politics, and the Creation of West Virginia, authors Eric J. Wittenberg, Edmund A. Sargus, and Penny L. Barrick chronicle those events in an unprecedented study of the social, legal, military, and political factors that converged to bring about the birth of the West Virginia.

On September 17th, 1862, US President Abraham Lincoln got the great victory he had desired ever since the outbreak of the American Civil War over a year before. Declaring victory would give him the political breathing space he needed to do something that he had been pondering for some time — freeing the slaves. The great victory Lincoln wanted took place near Antietam Creek in Maryland, near the town of Sharpsburg. The Union called it “The Battle of Antietam".

Occupied by Union forces, Fredericksburg lies in ruins. After four years of devastating conflict, sisters Amanda and Alice are plunged into the turbulent world of the war's aftermath. Amanda struggles to maintain harmony in her home life, while her husband, Union Colonel Samuel Prescott, strives for order in the newly reunited country.

No person excited greater emotion in Kansas than James Henry Lane, the US senator who led a volunteer brigade in 1861-1862. In fighting numerous skirmishes and liberating hundreds of slaves, Lane and his brigade garnered national attention. Bryce Benedict draws on a wealth of previously unexploited sources, including letters by brigade members, to dramatically re-create the violence along the Kansas-Missouri border and challenge some of the time-honored depictions of Lane’s unit as bloodthirsty and indiscriminately violent.

Among the pressing concerns of Americans in the first century of nationhood were day-to-day survival, political harmony, exploration of the continent, foreign policy, and - fixed deeply in the collective consciousness - hell and eternal damnation. The fear of fire and brimstone and the worm that never dies exerted a profound and lasting influence on Americans' ideas about themselves, their neighbors, and the rest of the world.

Though generally remembered by history as two very different personalities, the soft-spoken Lincoln and often-crude Grant in fact shared similar drive and determination, as this in-depth character study illustrates.

The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states, claiming the authority to maintain the domestic peace, enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling their boundaries and restricted the rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws.