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Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard once wrote that “no people ever warred for independence with more relative advantages than the confederates.” If there was any doubt as to what Beauregard sought to imply, he later chose to spell it out: the failure of the confederacy lay with the Confederate President Jefferson Davis. This book presents examinations of the men who led the South through the nation's bloodiest conflict, focusing in particular on Jefferson Davis's relationships with five key generals who held independent commands: Joseph E. Johnston, Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, Braxton Bragg, and John Bell Hood. One chapter examines the underlying implications of a withering trust between Johnston and his friend Jefferson Davis. And was there really harmony between Davis and Robert E. Lee? If there was, it was a tenuous harmony at best. Another chapter explores how Beauregard and Davis worked through a deep and mutual loathing, while another chapter makes contrasting evaluations of the competence of Generals Braxton Bragg and John Bell Hood. Taking a different angle on Davis's ill-fated commanders, one chapter probes the private side of war through the roles of the generalsʼ wives, and another investigates public perceptions of the confederate leadership through printed images created by artists of the day. The final chapter ties the individual chapters together and offers a new perspective on Confederate strategy as a whole.

In the autumn of 1834, New York City was awash with rumors of a strange religious cult operating nearby, centered around a mysterious, self-styled prophet named Matthias. It was said that Matthias the Prophet was stealing money from one of his followers; then came reports of lascivious sexual relations, based on odd teachings of matched spirits, apostolic priesthoods, and the inferiority of women. At its climax, the rumors transformed into legal charges, as the Prophet was arrested for the murder of a once highly regarded Christian gentleman who had fallen under his sway. This book recaptures the strange tale, providing a window into the turbulent movements of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening—movements which swept up great numbers of evangelical Americans and gave rise to new sects like the Mormons. Into this teeming environment walked a down-and-out carpenter named Robert Matthews, who announced himself as Matthias, prophet of the God of the Jews. His hypnotic spell drew in a cast of unforgettable characters: the meekly devout businessman Elijah Pierson, who once tried to raise his late wife from the dead; the young attractive Christian couple, Benjamin Folger and his wife Ann, who seduced the woman-hating Prophet; and the shrewd ex-slave Isabella Van Wagenen, regarded by some as “the most wicked of the wicked.” None was more colorful than the Prophet himself, a bearded, thundering tyrant who gathered his followers into an absolutist household, using their money to buy an elaborate, eccentric wardrobe, and reordering their marital relations. By the time the tensions within the kingdom exploded into a clash with the law, Matthias had become a national scandal.

During the early nineteenth century, 2 million acres of New York's farmland were controlled by a handful of great families, such as the Van Rensselaers and the Livingstons. Some 260,000 men, women, and children—a twelfth of the population of New York, the nation's most populous state—worked this land as tenants. Beginning in 1839, these tenants created a movement dedicated to destroying the estates and distributing the land to those who farmed it. The “anti-rent” movement quickly became one of the most powerful and influential movements of the antebellum era. The anti-renters raised issues that lay at the heart of America's Republican experiment: the distribution of land, the nature of democracy, and the meaning of freedom. In doing so, they left an indelible mark on politics and public ideals in both New York and the nation. They influenced and bitterly divided both major political parties, and helped create the Republican Party. Moreover, they shaped the ideas, policies, and careers of such national leaders as Martin Van Buren, Silas Wright, Horace Greeley, and William Seward. This book brings to life the voices of antebellum northern farmers as they debated the critical social and political issues of their day. It grounds those debates in a detailed analysis of social and political change on New York's estates, and demonstrates the impact of farmers' ideas and initiatives on the broader social and political order.

This is the story of a bitterly divided Southern community during the American Civil War. Knoxville was the commercial center of East Tennessee, a prosperous mixed-farming area little reliant on slavery. Although the region as a whole was predominantly Unionist in sympathy, Knoxville split right down the middle on the question of secession. After Tennessee seceded, most Knoxville Unionists pursued a low profile, yet the town soon came to be perceived as a stronghold of stalwart Unionism, thanks to a handful who openly denounced the Confederacy. Chief among these was William G. Brownlow, editor of the most widely circulated Unionist newspaper in the South and a popular speaker across the North later in the war. Knoxville also attracted attention because of its strategic significance as a vital commercial and transportation center. Consequently, the townspeople endured military occupation for the entire war, hosting Confederate troops during the first half of the conflict and Union forces throughout the remainder, the transition punctuated by the bloody battle of Fort Sanders in November 1863. Mining a treasure-trove of manuscript collections and civil and military records, the book complicates our understanding of Southern Unionism and documents the complex ways in which patterns of allegiance informed the daily routine of a town gripped in a civil war within the Civil War. The narrative testifies to the capacity of war both to reveal and to re-shape the values of those swept up in it.

This book provides a panoramic portrait of family and community life in and around Loudoun County, Virginia—weaving the fascinating personal stories of planters and slaves, of free blacks and poor-to-middling whites, into a powerful portrait of southern society from the mid-18th century to the Civil War. Loudoun County's most illustrious families—the Lees, Masons, Carters, Monroes, and Peytons—helped forge southern traditions and attitudes that became characteristic of the entire region while mingling with yeoman farmers of German, Scotch-Irish, and Irish descent, and free black families who lived alongside abolitionist Quakers and thousands of slaves. The book builds the complex picture of their intertwined lives, revealing how their combined histories guaranteed Loudon's role in important state, regional, and national events and controversies. Both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, for example, were hidden at a local plantation during the War of 1812 The area also was the birthplace of celebrated fugitive slave Daniel Dangerfield, the home of John Janney, chairman of the Virginia secession convention, a center for Underground Railroad activities, and the location of John Brown's infamous 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry. The book breaks new ground in her depiction of slave family life. Following the lead of historian Herbert Gutman, most scholars have accepted the idea that, like whites, slaves embraced the nuclear family, both as a living reality and an ideal. The book destroys this notion, showing that the harsh realities of slavery allowed little possibility of a nuclear family. Far more important were extended kin networks and female headed households.

This book examines how practices of commemoration and arguments about history informed early American debates over slavery and citizenship. The setting is a time and place in which people were hyperconscious of their role as historical actors and narrators: Massachusetts in the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Drawing on a rich and varied source base, the narrative traces how historical memory was implicated in three different forms of emancipation: the construction of a “free” national identity; the abolitionist movement against chattel slavery; and the fight for full citizenship for people of color. Harnessing these political causes to Bay Staters' understanding of their local history — especially the legacies of the American Revolution — was crucial to the success of each of them. In moving from the particular context of early national Massachusetts toward a broader consideration of the politics of memory in American history, this book shows that historical narratives are not merely reflections of their political and social context but also interventions into the power struggles of their moment.

This book draws fully on first-hand sources to paint a compelling portrait of the private life of Margaret Fuller, the organizer of the Dial (the journal of the Transcendental movement) and an important figure in early American literature. This text is the first of a two-volume biography.

Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America’s most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Margaret Fuller ever written, and one of the great biographies in American history. In this book, Volume II, the author illuminates Fuller’s “public years”, focusing on her struggles to establish her identity as an influential intellectual woman in the Romantic Age. He brings to life Fuller’s dramatic mixture of inward struggles, intimate social life, and deep engagements with the movements of her time. He describes how Fuller struggled to reconcile high avant-garde cultural ideals and Romantic critical methods with democratic social and political commitments, and how she strove to articulate a cosmopolitan vision for her nation’s culture and politics. The author also offers fresh and often startlingly new treatments of Fuller’s friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Giuseppe Mazzini, in addition to many others.

During the Civil War, Northerners fought each other in elections with almost as much zeal as they fought Southern rebels on the battlefield. Yet politicians and voters alike claimed that partisanship was dangerous in a time of national crisis. This book challenges the prevailing view that political processes in the North somehow helped the Union be more stable and effective in the war. Instead, it argues, early efforts to suspend party politics collapsed in the face of divisions over slavery and the purpose of the war. At the same time, new contexts for political mobilization, such as the army and the avowedly nonpartisan Union Leagues, undermined conventional partisan practices. The administration's supporters soon used the power of antiparty discourse to their advantage by connecting their own antislavery arguments to a powerful nationalist ideology. This book offers a reinterpretation of Northern wartime politics that challenges the “party period paradigm” in American political history and reveals the many ways in which the unique circumstances of war altered the political calculations and behavior of politicians and voters alike. As this book shows, beneath the superficial unity lay profound differences about the implications of the war for the kind of nation that the United States was to become.

This book provides the first detailed scholarly study of culture and sociability in Colombia during the period c.1850 and 1930. It gives a vivid picture of some of the factors that reduced social distances in the province of Antioquia during this period of relative harmony and prosperity. It examines hundreds of groups and voluntary associations that flourished at this time and that brought a growing number of Antioqueños of different social backgrounds together around religious practices and societies, the exercising of charity, a concern for education, and the pursuit of cultural progress. It describes the crucial role played by religion and the Catholic Church, which underwent considerable growth after the turbulent period of mid-19th century liberal reforms until the end of the conservative era in 1930, and traces the progress of parishes, devotional associations, religious communities, private and public religiosity, and numerous philanthropic societies, all of which brought about the bonds between the classes. The book examines achievements in education and the emergence of a thriving gamut of literary groups, public libraries, social clubs, and other associations created to promote public instruction, pedagogy, manners, temperance, ‘cultivated’ music, and moral improvement. The description of social and cultural dynamism, set against the background of growing religiosity, challenges the seldom-discussed assumption that religion slowed down social and cultural modernisation. Primary evidence, drawn from extensive research in proceedings and reports by groups, associations, periodical publications, statistics, diaries and memoirs, travellers’ accounts, books of etiquette, genre literature and other contemporary publications, as well as visual images, particularly photographs, document important topics that have in the past attracted little attention from scholars.