History Commons^™

The Trophies Of Victory And The Relics Of Defeat: Returning Home In The Spring Of 1865, Peter S. Carmichael

History Faculty Publications

The remains of a lone apple tree, cut down and carved into small pieces by Confederate soldiers, lay along a rutted dirt road that led to the village of Appomattox Court House. Earlier on 9 April 1865, Robert E. Lee had waited under the shade of the apple tree, anxious to hear from Ulysses S.Grant about surrendering his army. Messages between the generals eventually led to a brief meeting between Lee and two Union staff offices who then secured the parlor in Wilmer McLean's house, where Grant dictated the surrender terms to Lee. As soon as the agreement was signed …

A Whole Lot Of Blame To Go Around: The Confederate Collapse At Five Forks, Peter S. Carmichael

History Faculty Publications

While Confederate major general George E. Pickett was finishing his plate of fried fish at a shad bake, Union major general Philip H. Sheridan was devouring Pickett's command at Five Forks. The sounds of the Federal assault were supposedly silenced by abnormal atmospheric conditions called an acoustic shadow. Pickett and his luncheon companions -- Maj. Gen. Thomas Rosser and Maj. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee -- heard nothing over the sounds of conviviality, but the sudden appearance of the courier alerted the dining party to an alarming reality. This solider claimed that he was nearly shot out of his saddle by Federal …

Free Labor: The Civil War And The Making Of An American Working Class By Mark A. Lause (Review), Joanne Pope Melish

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Burnishing Buchanan's Brand On His Birthday, Michael J. Birkner

History Faculty Publications

James Buchanan’s brand needs refreshing.

Outside his hometown, his name does not much register with Americans today. When it does, the reaction is usually negative. What a comedown from the high hopes associated with Old Buck’s election to the presidency in 1856. [excerpt]

Cohen: Reconstructing The Campus: Higher Education And The American Civil War (Book Review), Julie Mujic

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Julie Mujic.

Cohen, Michael David. Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780813933177

"We Are No Grumblers": Negotiating State And Federal Military Service In The Pennsylvania Reserve Division, Timothy J. Orr

History Faculty Publications

The article discusses the status of state and federal military officers from Pennsylvania during the U.S. Civil War. It examines the alleged confusion as to the expiration of contracts for soldiers and sailors in the Pennsylvania Reserve Division who had enlisted in 1861. According to the article, the problems arose from organizational difficulties as the mobilization of the Union army fluctuated following the 1861 call to volunteer service from state governors. The article states that following that call, soldiers were transferred from state service into federal service. According to the article, the organizational dilemma caused discord among the Pennsylvania Reserve …

The United States On The Eve Of The Civil War, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

The four-year war that eventually descended on the nation seemed impossible only months before it began. Powerful conflicts pulled the United States apart in the decades before 1860, but shared interests, cultures, and identities tied the country together, sometimes in new ways. So confident were they in the future that Americans expected that the forces of cohesion would triumph over the forces of division.

Dead Reckoning (Book Review), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Long before she became the first female president of Harvard University in July 2007, Drew Gilpin Faust showed herself to be an inventive, energetic, and restless historian. Her first book, in 1977, focused on a subject many people had doubted was a subject, "the intellectual in the Old South." Five years later, she produced what is still the fullest — and most disturbing — portrayal of a white Southern planter, a man who sought complete mastery over the white women in his charge as well as over the enslaved people he claimed as property.

Soon after that, in a series …

"Momentous Events In Small Places": The Coming Of The Civil War In Two American Communities, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Historians, professional and otherwise, have written thousands of regimental histories, county histories, and town histories of the Civil War years. These studies make the coming of the war concrete and compelling. Inspired by such accounts, it seemed to me that two local portrayals could be even better than one, that exploring communities on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line as they each confronted the events from the late fifties to the late sixties might make both sides more comprehensible.

Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life And Trial Of An American Slave Trader, Julie Mujic

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Julie Mujic.

Soodalter, Ron. Hanging Captain Gordon: the life and trial of an American slave trader. New York: Atria Books, 2006.

ISBN 9780743267274

The American Civil War, Emancipation, And Reconstruction On The World Stage, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Americans demanded the world's attention during their Civil War and Reconstruction. Newspapers around the globe reported the latest news from the United States as one vast battle followed another, as the largest system of slavery in the world crashed into pieces, as American democracy expanded to include people who had been enslaved only a few years before.

Lincoln's Defense Of Politics: The Public Man And His Opponents In The Crisis Over Slavery (Book Review), Julie Mujic

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Julie Mujic.

Schneider, Thomas E. Lincoln’s Defense of Politics: The Public Man and His Opponents in the Crisis over Slavery. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.

ISBN 9780826216069

What Caused The Civil War?, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

The challenge of explaining the Civil War has led historians to seek clarity in two ways of thought. One school, the fundamentalists, emphasizes the intrinsic, inevitable conflict between slavery and free labor. The other, the revisionists, emphasizes discrete events and political structures rather than slavery itself. Both sides see crucial parts of the problem, but it has proved difficult to reconcile the perspectives because they approach the Civil War with different assumptions about what drives history.

So Far From God And So Close To Stonewall Jackson: The Executions Of Three Shenandoah Valley Soldiers, Peter S. Carmichael

History Faculty Publications

Mount Pisgah Church had long been a place where Orange County Baptists sought salvation and spiritual comfort. Wars have a way of turning such holy places into brutal scenes of killing. Although a battle was never fought on the sacred ground of the church, Pisgah witnessed man's inhumanity on 19 August 1862, when a firing squad executed three deserters from Brig. Gen. William B. Taliaferro's division of Stonewall Jackson's command - all of whom were conscripts from the Shenandoah Valley. Until that depressing afternoon, when veterans formed a hollow square and waited for the condemned, no deserters in Jackson's command …

Slavery, Economics And Constitutional Ideals, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

As we think about endings, however, it is also useful to think about beginnings. That is what President Abraham Lincoln did in his Second Inaugural Address, delivered just five weeks before the surrender at Appomattox and his own assassination soon thereafter. All knew, he said reflecting sadly and thoughtfully on how the Civil War came about, that slavery was, "somehow," the cause. In fact, "somehow," however, lay puzzles, contradictions, and questions. The connections between slavery and the Civil War have concerned Americans ever since the events at Appomattox.

Civil War Visitor Center At Tredegar Iron Works (Exhibition Review), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review of exhibition, Civil War Visitor Center at Tredegar Iron Works.

The Great Valley And The Meaning Of The Civil War, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

To understand the coming of the Civil War, then, we need to pick up the story before Fort Sumter and to carry it deeper than national events. We need to understand both the advocated of conflict and those who sought to avoid it regardless of the cost. We need to understand the communities people fought to defend, the institutions that held them together and that drove them apart.

W.J. Cash, The New South And The Rhetoric Of History, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Despite the attention devoted to the fiery early chapters of The Mind of the South, where Cash's language and audacity take us by surprise, the heart of the book lies in the New South. Cash wrote above all, I think, to explain why the white Southerners he knew--those in the cotton mill country of the Carolina Piedmont--behaved the way they did. The years after Reconstruction consume two-thirds of Cash's book because those are the years that troubled him, that posed the problems he felt most acutely.

The Heart Of American History (Book Review), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review of the book, The Heart of American History by James McPherson. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.

The era of the Civil War and Reconstruction remains the crucible of American history, the trial that decisively defined this country and its self-perceived mission. The American people seem to recognize that fact, for no era in our history attracts the general reading public as does that between 1861 and 1877.