Drawing on records of about 5,500 soldiers and veterans, Shades of Green traces the organization of Irish regiments from the perspective of local communities in Connecticut, Illinois, and Wisconsin and the relationships between soldiers and the home front. Research on the impact of the Civil War on Irish Americans has traditionally fallen into one of two tracks, arguing that the Civil War either further alienated Irish immigrants from American society or that military service in defense of the Union offered these men a means of assimilation. In this study of Irish American service, Ryan W. Keating argues that neither paradigm really holds, because many Irish Americans during this time already considered themselves to be assimilated members of American society.

This comprehensive study argues that the local community was often more important to ethnic soldiers than the imagined ethnic community, especially in terms of political, social, and economic relationships. An analysis of the Civil War era from this perspective provides a much clearer understanding of immigrant place and identity during the nineteenth century.

With a focus on three regiments not traditionally studied, the author provides a fine-grained analysis revealing that ethnic communities, like other types of communities, are not monolithic on a national scale. Examining lesser-studied communities, rather than the usual those of New York City and Boston, Keating brings the local back into the story of Irish American participation in the Civil War, thus adding something new and valuable to the study of the immigrant experience in America’s bloodiest conflict.

Throughout this rich and groundbreaking study, Keating supports his argument through advanced quantitative analysis of military-service records and an exhaustive review of a massive wealth of raw data; his use of quantitative methods on a large dataset is an unusual and exciting development in Civil War studies. Shades of Green is sure to “shake up” several fields of study that rely on ethnicity as a useful category for analysis; its impressive research provides a significant contribution to scholarship.

While most of the fighting took place in the South, the Civil War profoundly affected the North. As farm boys became soldiers and marched off to battle, social, economic, and political changes transformed northern society. In the generations following the conflict, historians tried to understand and explain the North’s Civil War experience. Many historical explanations became taken for granted, such as that the Union Army was ideologically Republican, northern Democrats were disloyal, and German Americans were lousy soldiers. Now in this eye-opening collection of eleven stimulating essays, new and important information is unearthed that solidly challenges the old historical arguments. The essays in This Distracted and Anarchical People range widely throughout the history of the Civil War North, using new methods and sources to reexamine old theories and discover new aspects of the nation’s greatest conflict. Many of these issues are just as important today as they were a century and a half ago. What were the extent and limits of wartime dissent in the North? How could a president most effectively present himself to the public? Can the savagery of war ever be tamed? How did African Americans create and maintain their families? This Distracted and Anarchical People highlights the newest scholarship on a diverse array of topics, bringing fresh insight to bear on some of the most important topics in history today—such as the democratic press in the antebellum North, peace movements, the Union Army and the elections of 1864, Liberia and the U.S. Civil War, and African American veterans and marriage practices after Emancipation.

The irreducibly constitutional nature of the Civil War’s prelude and legacy is the focus of this absorbing collection of nine essays by a diversity of political theorists and historians. The contributors examine key constitutional developments leading up to the war, the crucial role of Abraham Lincoln’s statesmanship, and how the constitutional aspects of the war and Reconstruction endured in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This thoughtful, informative volume covers a wide range of topics: from George Washington’s conception of the Union and his fears for its future to Martin Van Buren’s state-centered, anti-secessionist federalism; from Lincoln’s approach to citizenship for African Americans to Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to appropriate Lincoln for the goals of Progressivism. Each essay zeroes in on the constitutional causes or consequences of the war and emphasizes how constitutional principles shape political activity. Accordingly, important figures, disputes, and judicial decisions are placed within the broader context of the constitutional system to explain how ideas and institutions, independently and in dialogue with the courts, have oriented political action and shaped events over time.

Lincoln and Leadership offers fresh perspectives on the 16th president—making novel contributions to the scholarship of one of the more studied figures of American history. The book explores Lincoln’s leadership through essays focused, respectively, on Lincoln as commander-in-chief, deft political operator, and powerful theologian. Taken together, the essays suggest the interplay of military, political, and religious factors informing Lincoln’s thought and action and guiding the dynamics of his leadership. The contributors, all respected scholars of the Civil War era, focus on several critical moments in Lincoln’s presidency to understand the ways Lincoln understood and dealt with such issues and concerns as emancipation, military strategy, relations with his generals, the use of black troops, party politics and his own re-election, the morality of the war, the place of America in God’s design, and the meaning and obligations of sustaining the Union. Overall, they argue that Lincoln was simultaneously consistent regarding his commitments to freedom, democratic government, and Union but flexible, and sometimes contradictory, in the means to preserve and extend them. They further point to the ways that Lincoln’s decision making defined the presidency and recast understandings of American “exceptionalism.” They emphasize that the “real” Lincoln was an unabashed party man and shrewd politician, a self-taught commander-in-chief, and a deeply religious man who was self-confident in his ability to judge men and to persuade them with words but unsure of what God demanded from America for its collective sins of slavery. Randall Miller’s Introduction in particular provides essential weight to the notion that Lincoln’s presidential leadership must be seen as a series of interlocking stories. In the end, the contributors collectively remind readers that the Lincoln enshrined as the “Great Emancipator” and “savior of the Union” was in life and practice a work-in-progress. And they insist that “getting right with Lincoln” requires seeing the intersections of his—and America’s—military, political, and religious interests and identities.

New Bedford’s Civil War examines the social, political, economic, and military history of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the nineteenth century, with a focus on the Civil War homefront from 1861 to 1865 and on the city’s black community, soldiers, and veterans. Earl Mulderink’s engaging work contributes to the growing body of Civil War studies that analyzes the “war at home” by focusing on the bustling center of the world’s whaling industry in the nineteenth century. Using a broad chronological framework of the 1840s through the 1890s, this book contextualizes the rise and fall of New Bedford’s whaling enterprise and details the war’s multifaceted impacts between 1861 and 1865. A major goal of this book is to explore the war’s social history by examining how the conflict touched the city’s residents—both white and black. Known before the war for both its wealth and its antislavery fervor, New Bedford offered a congenial home for a sizeable black community that experienced a “different Civil War” than did native-born whites. Drawing upon military pension files, published accounts, and welfare records, this book pays particular attention to soldiers and families connected with the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the “brave black regiment” (made famous by the Academy Award–winning 1989 film Glory) that helped shape national debates over black military enlistment, equal pay, and notions of citizenship. New Bedford’s enlightened white leaders, many of them wealthy whaling merchants with Quaker roots, actively promoted military enlistment that pulled 2,000 local citizen-soldiers (about 10 percent of the city’s total population) into the Union ranks. As the Whaling City gave way to a postwar landscape marked by textile manufacturing and heavy foreign immigration, the black community fought to keep alive the meaning and history of the Civil War. Joining their one-time neighbor Frederick Douglass, New Bedford’s black veterans used the memory of the war and their participation in it to push for full equality—a losing battle by the turn of the twentieth century.

Despite a wealth of books on the campaigns of the American Civil War, the subject of combined or joint operations has been largely neglected. This revealing book offers ten case studies of combined Army–Navy operations by Union forces. Presented in chronological order, each essay illuminates an aspect of combined operations during a time of changing technology and doctrine. The essays cover the war along the “rebel coast,” including the operations in the North Carolina Sounds in 1861, the Union thrusts up the York and James rivers during the Peninsular Campaign in 1862 and 1864, and the various Union efforts to seize rebel seaports from the Texas coast to Charleston and Wilmington in 1863–65. Concluding the volume are two essays that evaluate the impact of Union combined operations on subsequent doctrine in both the United States and England.

Many of the farm families in the river country of southern Ohio sent fathers, husbands, and sons to fight and die in the Civil War. Few families have bequeathed a record of that experience as remarkable as that created by the Evans family: an extraordinary collection of letters that offers a unique portrait of life both on the home front and on the front lines. From his homestead near Ripley on the Ohio River, patriarch Andrew Evans sent two sons to war, and from 1862 to 1866 father and sons wrote each other hundreds of letters. Called “the soldier’s letters” by the family, this cache lay untouched in a barn until the 1980s, when Robert Engs was invited to edit them. Here are 273 family letters, most between Andrew and son Samuel, that draw us into the complicated lives of a Midwestern family not just suffering the dislocations of war, but also experiencing—and describing in intimate detail—the sorrows and occasional joys of rural life in nineteenth-century America. From the front lines with the 70th Ohio and, later, as an officer commanding a unit of “colored troops,” Samuel writes of the horrors of Shiloh, of the loneliness and fear of patrolling Union lines in Tennessee. Andrew writes of the seasons of rural life, of illness and deaths in the family, of the complicated politics of this borderland where abolitionists and “Copperhead” pro-slavery voices shared daily debates. One of the very few collections of Civil War letters from home front and front lines, this meticulously edited book is an engrossing chronicle of war and peace, family and country, and an indispensable addition to the history of the Civil War.

The author of an acclaimed account of the lives of children in the Civil War, Marten here provides a more comprehensive introduction to the civilian history of the Civil War. Concise, vividly written chapters describe the home front through the lives of individuals and the histories of events and institutions in the North and South. The stories are organized around five broad themes: the Northern home front, the Southern home front, children, African Americans, and the war’s aftermath. The case studies feature voices of the famous, like Edmund Riffin and Booker T. Washington, but more often they offer the testimony of ordinary men, women, and children. A superb blend of traditional narrative, case studies, and individual stories, Civil War America is a valuable resource for students and their teachers seeking to understand the many ways in which the Civil War was truly a people’s war.

Often called Lee’s greatest triumph, the battle of Chancellorsville decimated the Union Eleventh Corps, composed of large numbers of German-speaking volunteers. Poorly deployed, the unit was routed by “Stonewall” Jackson and became the scapegoat for the Northern defeat, blamed by many on the “flight” of German immigrant troops. The impact on America’s large German community was devastating. But there is much more to the story than that. Drawing for the first time on German-language newspapers, soldiers’ letters, memoirs, and regimental records, Christian Keller reconstructs the battle and its aftermath from the German-American perspective, military and civilian. He offers a fascinating window into a misunderstood past, one where the German soldiers’ valor has been either minimized or dismissed as cowardly. He critically analyzes the performance of the German regiments and documents the impact of nativism on Anglo-American and German-American reactions—and on German self-perceptions as patriots and Americans. For German-Americans, the ghost of Chancellorsville lingered long, and Keller traces its effects not only on ethnic identity, but also on the dynamics of inclusion and assimilation in American life.

"Invaluable…many insights into the life and thought of the nineteenth century…. [Fisher's] comments are stimulating, often barbed….the narrative is smooth-flowing and fascinating."-American Historical Review "An important literary event….an invaluable historical source. Unexcelled." -Pennsylvania History "Fisher was an astute and acerbic commentator on politics and society in Philadelphia, Washington, and the country as a whole during the Civil War. While legal, historical, and literary scholars will mine this diary for its penetrating insights, lovers of history will delight in Fisher's ability to record the quotidian and the monumental with clarity, force, and lasting effect."-Herman Belz, University of Maryland "An indispensable source for the Northern home front during the Civil War."-Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Pennsylvania State University An aristocratic member of a prominent Philadelphia family, Sidney George Fisher (1809-1871) was a prolific man of letters. Between 1834 and 1871, he kept a detailed diary that chronicled not only daily life in America's second city but also the key political, social, and cultural events of the nineteenth century. Published in 1967, Fisher's diary quickly became one of the most remarkable works of its kind; few published diaries are as incisive and illuminating of their era. This book makes available once again the pages of Fisher's diary written during the Civil War. As he wrote on November 9, 1861, "My diary has become little else than a record of the events of the war, which occupies all thoughts and conversation." His "record of the events" is a uniquely valuable portrait of a city, and a nation, at war. Fisher recorded everything from conversations on street corners to arrests of civilians for treason (including some members of his family), critiques of partisan speeches and pamphlets to descriptions of battles, accounts of runaway slaves, and tales of mob violence. At the same time, he reports on dinners, parties, weddings, and funerals among the city's elite. Brilliant journalism, the Diary is rich with Fisher's own observations- on secession, war and peace, on his admiration for Lincoln and his complicated feelings about slavery and emancipation. The Diary, with a new introduction by Jonathan W. White, joins those of George Templeton Strong and Mary Boykin Chesnut as classic windows on American life During the War Between the States. Jonathan W. White's articles on Civil War politics have appeared in such journals as Civil War History, American Nineteenth Century History, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, and Pennsylvania History. Awarded a John T. Hubbell prize for the best article in Civil War History, he is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Maryland, College Park. Cover illustrations: Cover design by Fordham University Press New York www.fordhampress.com

One hundred and forty years after his assassination on April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln towers more than ever above the landscape of American politics. In myth and memory, he is always the Great Emancipator and savior of the Union, second in stature only to George Washington. But was Lincoln always so exalted? Was he, as some historians argue, a poor President, deeply disliked, whose legacy was ennobled only by John Wilkes Booth’s bullet? In this fascinating book, a leading historian finally takes the full measure of Lincoln’s reputation. Drawing on a remarkable range of primary documents, speeches, newspaper accounts and editorials, private letters, memoirs, and other sources—Hans L. Trefousse gives us the voices of Lincoln’s own time. From North and South, at home and abroad, here are politicians and ordinary people, soldiers and statesmen, abolitionists and slaveholders alike, in a rich chorus of American opinion. The result is a masterly portrait of Lincoln the President in the eyes of his fellow Americans.

Freedom, Union, and Power analyzes the beliefs of the Republican Party during the Civil War, how those beliefs changed, and what those changes foreshadowed for the future. The party's pre-war ideology of "free soil, free labor, free men" changed with the Republican ascent to power in the White House. With Lincoln's election, Republicans faced something new-responsibility for the government. With responsibility came the need to wage a war for the survival of that government, the country, and the party. And with victory in the war came responsibility responsibility for saving the Union-by ending slavery-and for pursuing policies that fit into their belief in a strong, free Union. Michael Green shows how Republicans had to wield federal power to stop a rebellion against freedom and union. Crucial to their use of federal power was their hope of keeping that power-the intersection of policy and politics.

Yours for the Union is a collection of letters that takes us inside the life and mind of a Civil War soldier. John Chase's reports of his service with the Army of the Potomac, reveal what the war was really like for the men who fought it. Chase was a 36 year-old cabinetmaker from Roxbury, a widower with four young children when he enlisted as a private in the First Massachusetts Light Artillery. These well written letters portray a man who is trying to provide for his children, maintain his finances, obtain food and clothing to supplement his meager rations, all while marching in the mud and fighting a war. While he was a patriotic Northerner, his occasionally crude language reflects his strong opinion of abolitionists, and especially, of abolitionist politicians.

Originally untrained in military science, Francis Channing Barlow ended the Civil War as one of the North's premier combat generals. He played decisive roles in historic campaigns throughout the War and his letters are classic accounts of courage combat, and the burdens of command as experienced by one of the Union's fiercest officers.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Barlow enlisted in April 1861 at the age of twenty six, commanded the 61st New York Infantry regiment by April 1862, and found himself a general in command of a division by 1863. He played a key role at Fair Oaks, Antietam, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Petersburg, suffered two serious wounds in combat, and was left for dead at Gettysburg, where part of the battlefield is named after him. Barlow's war correspondence not only provides a rich description of his experiences in these actions but also offers insight into a civilian learning the realities of war.

As a young intellectual, Barlow was also well connected with many eminent figures of his time. He spent part of his youth at Brook Farm, graduated first in his Harvard College class, and became a successful New York City lawyer by the time he enlisted. Among his friends he counted Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., and Winslow Homer's family. Transformed by his experiences in the War, Barlow entered politics and served as New York's Secretary of State and Attorney General.

Superbly edited by Christian G. Samito, Barlow's letters not only illuminate the life of a talented battlefield commander; they also fill a gap in Civil War scholarship by providing a valuable window into Northern intellectual responses to the War.

Focusing on middle-class women’s contributions to the northern Civil War effort, Patricia Richard shows how women utilized their power as moral agents to shape the way men survived the ravages of war. Busy Hands investigates the ways in which white and African American women used images of family and domestic life in their relief efforts to counter the effects of prostitution, gambling, profanity, and drinking, threatening men’s postwar civilian fitness.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and memoirs of Civil War nurses, sanitary workers, soldiers, and the soldiers’ aid societies, Richard develops a new perspective on domestic influence on the war, as women sought to save soldiers from the dangers of the military world.

In this portrait of Dubuque, Iowa, Russell Johnson combines personal narratives with social, political, and economic analysis to shed new light on what the War meant for one city and for the rapidly growing north. Johnson examines the experiences of Dubuque’s soldiers and their families to answer crucial questions: What impact did the Civil War have on the economic and social life of Dubuque? How did military service affect the social mobility of veterans? And how did army service, as a form of industrial organization, help create a modern workforce? Warriors into Workers makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the formation of American industrial society, and addresses key issues in labor history, military history, political culture, and gender.

In this innovative book, Kyle Sinisi explores a little-known chapter in the history of American politics—the struggle between states and the federal government over the costs of fighting the Civil War. At stake was the disposition of some 8 million. Focusing on Kansas, Kentucky, and Missouri, Sinisi explores the process by which states were reimbursed by Washington in the most expensive intergovernmental contact of the 19th century. Recasting our understanding of governance, he shows that traditional sources of influence—courts and political parties—were less important in settling claims than adjutants general and private agents who fought for cash bonanzas. These power brokers helped shape the federal bureaucracy—and the process of state building.

Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments explores the North's Civil War in ways that brings fresh perspectives to our knowledge of the way soldiers and civilians interacted in the Civil War North. Northerners rarely confronted the hardships their southern counterparts faced, but they still found the war a challenging event that to varying degrees would re-shape and transform their old comfortable assumptions about their lives. Having given up their sons to save the Union, they craved information and followed the progress of the companies and regiments that they had sent off to fight. At the same time, their soldier boys never fully severed their ties with home, even as the rigors of war made them rougher versions of their old selves. The home front and the front lines remained intimately connected. This book expands our understanding of those connections.

The authors of the essays in this volume bring new and different approaches to some familiar topics while offering answers to some questions that other scholars have ignored for too long. They explore such varied experiences as recruitment, soldiers' motivation, civilian access to the combat experience, wartime correspondence, benevolence and organized relief, race relations, definitions of freedom and citizenship, and ways civilians interacted with soldiers who sojourned in their communities. It is important that they do not stop with the end of the fighting, but also explore such postwar problems as the reintegration of soldiers into northern life and the claims to public memory, including those made by African Americans. Taken as a whole, the essays in Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front provide a better understanding of the larger scope and depth of wartime events experienced by both civilians and soldiers and of the ways those events nurtured the enduring connections between those who fought and those who remained at home. In that regard, the essays go to the very heart of the Civil War experience.

This striking portrait of Abraham Lincoln found in this book is drawn entirely from the writing of his contemporaries and extends from his political beginnings in Springfield to his assassination. It reveals a more severely beleaguered, less godlike, and finally a richer Lincoln than has come through many of the biographies of Lincoln written at a distance after his death. To those who are familiar only with the various “retouched” versions of Lincoln’s life, Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait will be a welcome—if sometimes surprising—addition to the literature surrounding the man who is perhaps the central figure in all of American history.

The brutality, indeed that malignancy of some of the treatment Lincoln received at the hands of the press may well shock those readers who believe the second half of the twentieth century has a monopoly on the journalism of insult, outrage, and indignation. That Lincoln acted with the calm and clarity he did under the barrage of such attacks can only enhance his stature as one of the great political leaders of any nation at any time.

Herbert Mitgang is author of several books, including Once upon a Time in New York, The Man Who Rode the Tiger, The Letters of Carl Sandburg, The Return, America at Random, and Working for the Reader.

Holmes’s wartime letters and diary entries have attracted students of war as well as biographers of Holmes as rare glimpses into the mind and heart of a soldier who withstood the great slaughter.

This extensive and unique collection, consisting of over 180 letters and hundreds of drawings, covers Reed's period of service (1862-65) and provides the modern reader a wealth of information on the role of the Union army in the eastern theater, the events in the life of the Civil War soldier, and the war in general.

A native of Boston, Reed served as bugler of the Ninth Massachusetts Battery, whose desperate holding action at Gettysburg ranks as one the most heroic actions of the war. During this battle Reed performed a deed of selfless bravery by saving his wounded captain from between the lines, an act for which he was later awarded the Medal of Honor. In addition to Gettysburg, Reed saw action in nearly all of the battles in the East from 1862 to 1865, including Bristoe Station, Mine Run, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, North Ana, Bethesda Church, Cold Harbor, and the siege of Petersburg.

Reed's letters chronicle events, from the most common to the extraordinary, with simple yet thoughtful eloquence. His drawings capture a wide variety of events to which he was not only an eyewitness but also a participant. His talent was considered equal to that of leading newspaper artists of his day, and his drawings were used to illustrate a best-selling Civil War book, Hardtack and Coffee (1887). We are fortunate that Reed's writings and drawings have been preserved, and can be presented here in a single volume.

From First to Last is a complete life story of one of the most controversial yet least well known generals on either side during the Civil War. The number one graduate of the West Point class of 1843, William Buel Franklin served in the U.S. Army's Corps of Topographical Engineers and contributed greatly to the building of the nation's internal improvements, including a stint as chief engineer in charge of construction of the U.S. Capitol's dome and extension from 1859 to 1861.

During the Civil War Franklin ascended rapidly in rank and command authority, from command of a Union brigade at Bull Run, to leadership of the Sixth Corps of the Army of the Potomac on the Peninsula and during the Maryland Campaign, to command of the Left Grand Division, of that army at the terrible Battle of Fredericksburg. In the wake of Fredericksburg, Franklin was unjustly blamed for the Union army's defeat, not so much because of his generalship-or lack thereof-but because of his politics and the highly-charged political nature of high-level leadership in the Army of the Potomac. Censured by the notorious Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, Franklin was banished to the Department of the Gulf, where he participated in the ill-fated Sabine Pass Expedition and Red River Campaign. Wounded during the Red River Campaign and captured by Confederate partisan rangers Franklin would escape his captors but could not escape the wrath of the Lincoln administration, which refused to place him back in command even though his old West Point classmate-U. S. Grant-personally requested his services.

Franklin resigned his commission in 1866 and began a highly successful post-war career as Vice President and General Manager of Colt's Firearms Company in Hartford, Connecticut. A respected citizen of that city, Franklin continued to serve his country in a number of public positions, including leadership of a government bureau that eventually became the U.S. Veterans Administration. Snell's study of Franklin is evenly balanced, correctly pointing out Franklin's flaws and lapses of judgment-such as the Battle of Crampton's Gap on September 14, 1862-but giving him credit where he received none in the past. Snell provides readers with a complete picture of Franklin: brilliant engineer, doting husband, respected businessman, and controversial Union general. From First to Last will change the way historians interpret this important figure of American history.

"For a Vast Future Also": Essays from The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, brings together the most informative and thoughtful articles by fourteen accomplished scholars in the Lincoln field. The essays provide compact, detailed treatments concerning different facets of three general themes: Lincoln and the problems of emancipation; Lincoln and presidential politics; and the Lincoln legacy. Readers of the collection will understand why the Civil War profoundly changed the nation. These essays give insight into how Lincoln and his administration dealt with the profound issues of war and slavery and the continuing legacy of Lincoln and the war.

No book or essay collection brings together the writings of such luminaries in the field as John Hope Franklin, James M. McPherson, Don E. Fehrenbacher, T. Harry Williams, Phillip S. Paludan, Harold Hyman, John Niven, William A. Gienapp, Norman B. Ferris, John T. Hubbell, Arthur Zilversmit, Eugene H. Berwanger, Christopher N. Breiseth, and Michael Vorenberg. Researchers now have these valuable essays available in one volume. It offers the general public the distillation of scholarship supported by the Abraham Lincoln Association over the past twenty-five years. And college and university introductory courses will find this book a valuable summary of, and introduction to, the major issues of the Civil War period.

Frank L. Klement reassesses Clement L. Vallandigham, the passionate critic of Lincoln's policies, and history's judgment of him.

Abner Small wrote one of the most honest, poignant, and moving memoirs to come out of the Civil War. He served as a non-commissioned officer in the Third Maine Infantry during the summer of 1861, experiencing battle for the first time at First Bull Run. As a recruiting officer, he helped to raise the Sixteenth Maine Infantry and served as its adjutant. The Sixteenth Maine gained fame for its heroic delaying action on July 1 at Gettysburg, where it lost 180 of its 200 men. It went on to serve in Grant’s Overland Campaign in Virginia.

Small was an articulate observer of all this. He wrote his memoirs with a keen sense of the irony of life during wartime, and with a gift for expression. His descriptions of the dead at Gettysburg, his characterizations of famous men such as Major General Oliver Otis Howard, and his reflections on the emotions of men under fire are outstanding. Small was captured in the battle of Globe Tavern on August 18, 1864. His account of prison life at Libby, Salisbury, and Danville is gripping. Small was exchanged just in time to lead his regiment in the final days of the war. His book reveals more of the inner soldier than almost any other account written by a Union veteran.

New Masters: Northern Planters during the Civil War and Reconstruction, analyzes the North’s efforts to transform the South, both during and after the war, into a free labor economy and society. In this ground-breaking work, Lawrence N. Powell addresses the role that the twenty to fifty thousand "new masters," or northern planters, had on the post-reconstruction system. Covering evidence of over five hundred northern planters, Powell asserts that northern emigrants provided much of the capital that hard-pressed southern planters used to stave off bankruptcy; showing that these planters became both the catalyst that perpetuated the plantation system of servitude and debt, as well as became the reason behind the revitalization of the South. New Masters deals with a variety of issues, including race relations, Northern planters’ motivations, work habits, capital investment patterns, and the planters’ gradual disillusionment as problems mounted and profits declined.

Oliver Otis Howard devoted his life to the service of his country, both as a distinguished army officer in two wars and as the founder of two universities. Oliver Otis Howard was a graduate of Bowdoin College and of West Point. Being reared in a pious New England (Maine) atmosphere gave him a deep sense of obligation to lead a Christian life, for the good of others and for the development of his own best self. He was often disturbed by the conflict presented him in his dual career in peace and war.

General Howard’s strong sense of duty to his country brought about his distinguished career of command during the Civil War—at the Battle of Chancellorsville, itself a disappointing rout, and at Gettysburg, where he recovered any reputation the earlier defeat might have lost him. Under General Sherman, in the Atlanta campaign, and as a leader of the Army of the Tennessee he won special distinction. In total, Howard fought at the First Bull Run, Fair Oaks (where severe wounds forced the amputation of his right arm), Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg.

The same strong sense of duty made him accept the commission of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the promotion of African–American education. Following his service in the Nez Perce Campaign of 1877 he was superintendent of West Point and the founder of Lincoln Memorial University. His greatest service to education, however, was as founder and president of Howard University, where his name and career are held in honor.

The biography of Carl Schurz is a story of an amazing life. At the age of 19, Schurz, a student at the University of Bonn, became involved in the Revolution of 1848. Participating in the revolutionary army, he managed to escape through a sewer during the siege of Rastatt, flee across the Rhine to France, and come back to rescue his professor, Gottfried Kinkel, from a jail near Berlin. This deed made him famous, and when he came to American in 1852, Schurz was nominated for lieutenant governor of Wisconsin on the Republican ticket. He quickly rose in the party and was the head of the Wisconsin delegation at the 1860 National Convention. He worked hard for the cause, and Lincoln rewarded him with the post of Minister to Spain. At the outbreak of war he returned to join the Union Army, became a Major General, and took part in several important battles. After the war, he moved to Missouri, was elected Senator from that State, and became a role model for his fellow German Americans. In 1871 he became one of the main figures in the Liberal Republican movement, and in 1877 President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him Secretary of the Interior.

After his retirement from the cabinet, Schurz became active in the politics of New York, as an advocate of municipal and civil service reform. He was a leading Mugwump who supported Grover Cleveland in 1884 and at the end of his life became a violent opponent of imperialism. He died in 1906.

Carl Schurz, the man, his story, his ideals and his example, are particularly appropriate today because of the light his life sheds on the never-ending problems of immigration, assimilation, and the retention of ethnic identity. Carl Schurz’s career furnishes a model example for all of these.

Melting Pot Soldiers is the story of the way immigrants responded to the drama of the Civil War. When the war began in 1861, there were, in most states in the North (primarily from Western Europe), large populations of immigrants whose leaders were active in American politics at the local, state, and national levels. Just as native-born Americans, both individually and collectively, reacted to war, so did these newcomers. A characteristic feature of the formation of the Union armies was the role played by politicians in the recruitment of the regiment, the basic unit of the army. Ethnic politicians (and a few were women!) like their native-born counterparts, actively recruited young men into regiments- in this case regiments based upon the country of origin of the recruits.

There were dozens of such regiments, mostly German and Irish, but also a Scandinavian unit, a polygot outfit, and there was an attempt to form a Scottish regiment. AS the war progressed and casualties mounted, these regiments gradually lost their ethnic composition. Ethnic entreprenuers were the key figures in the organization of these regiments, and such men ordinarily intended to parlay their military service into a post-war political career. Burton examines the impact ethnic entreprenuers had during the war, both by their key role in the organization of their regiments and by their post-war political careers.

Mr. Dunn Browne's Experiences in the Army, edited by noted Civil War writer Stephen Sears, provides a candid, often witty, behind-the-scenes look at the Civil War. A collection of battlefront letters composed by Browne (pseudonym of Captain Samuel Wheelock Fiske of the 14th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry), this book is unique in the literature of the Civil War. Fiske was at once a fighting infantryman and an experienced newspaper correspondent, and no one in this war, on either side, wrote better accounts of a soldier's experiences in battle and in camp. From Antietam to the Wilderness, readers of the Springfield Republican had Dunn Browne to explain to them just how it was in the Army of the Potomac. In addition, he was an investigative reporter (before that term was invented) who delved into the follies of the army bureaucracy, the sophistries of the Copperheads, and the abuses of conscription. He delved, too, into the complexities of why men fight.

Affairs of party, Jean Baker asserts, were a central feature of public life in nineteenth-century America. In this book she explores the way in which the Northern Democrats of the mid-eighteen hundreds lived their public lives. She begins with a psychobiographical explanation of how people became Democrats, weighing the importance of such influences as education and family life. She then discusses two major elements that set Democrats apart from members of other political organizations: a modified Republican ideology tailored to the circumstances of the Civil War, and a mordant racism conveyed most strikingly through minstrelsy. Finally, Baker studies the neglected subject of partisan behavior, concentrating on the significance of parades, voting, and other rituals.

In Affairs of Party Jean Baker brings together the three basic components of a political culture—education, thought, and behavior—and provides an understanding of the collective values of Northern Democrats and an insight into the elusive meaning of party experience.

In her new preface, Professor Baker places her book in the context of both recent scholarship and recent political and cultural developments.

This striking portrait of Abraham Lincoln found in this book is drawn entirely from the writing of his contemporaries and extends from his political beginnings in Springfield to his assassination. It reveals a more severely beleaguered, less godlike, and finally a richer Lincoln than has come through many of the biographies of Lincoln written at a distance after his death. To those who are familiar only with the various “retouched” versions of Lincoln’s life, Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait will be a welcome—if sometimes surprising—addition to the literature surrounding the man who is perhaps the central figure in all of American history.

The brutality, indeed that malignancy of some of the treatment Lincoln received at the hands of the press may well shock those readers who believe the second half of the twentieth century has a monopoly on the journalism of insult, outrage, and indignation. That Lincoln acted with the calm and clarity he did under the barrage of such attacks can only enhance his stature as one of the great political leaders of any nation at any time.

Concentrating on ideology and cultural values, Liberty, Virtue, and Progress explores the motivations that casued Northerners to fight America's Civil War. Arguing for the primary significance of ideals and cultural values in defining a war, the book examines the opinions of both the Northern soldier and civilian about the meaning of the Civil War in terms of defining American nationalism, the character of the American people, and the future of free government. The book addresses the intellectual and social elites of Northern society, but gives a new emphasis to the opinions of the common man on the subject and ideology of the war.

In addition to identifying and discussing the ideas and cultural values that played a role in motivation, Hess looks at how the experience of war (battlefield death and suffering) interacted with that ideology. Contrary to the commonly held belief that war is disruptive to pre-war ideals, Hess argues that Northern soldiers and civilians made a conscious effort to use ideology as a tool with which to retain their faith in ideas. Liberty, Virtue, and Progress is based on extensive research in both published and unpublished sources.

On September 8, 1962, John H. Westervelt enlisted as a private into the 1st New York Volunteer Engineer Corps. That same year, he shipped out of New York on the "Star of the South" to South Carolina to fight for the North in the Civil War. The following April, he began a journal for his 13-year-old son Frazee so that his child could know of his experiences in the war.

Sixty-two years later, John Westervelt’s journal – 68 entries written on tattered, yellow pages, a record of "such things as may come under [his] personal observation" – was found in the trash outside his former home now West Farms. In early 1995, his drawings, meant to accompany the written journal, were discovered in the West Point Special Collections Archives. The two have been reunited in Diary of a Yankee Engineer.

Westervelt’s words, intended not for the history books but for the education of his young son, present a more humble vision of military life and of the North’s struggle in the Civil War, than the often told sagas of glory. The journal gives us a rare look at the soldier’s life of relentless tedium, the fatiguing fight of brother against brother – of pestilence and illness, giving us a "truer, if not beautiful" picture of war. This is the story of an ordinary man in an extraordinary time – a man who merely lived as he though right and who died in consequence.

Anita Palladino’s introduction provides us with a brief history of the man and the events of his life. By salvaging John Westervelt’s journal and reuniting its text with its art, Ms. Palladino has unearthed a rare, firsthand look at the men behind the war of Rebellion.