Between March 1863 and July 1865, Confederate newlyweds Brigadier General Gabriel C. Wharton and Anne Radford Wharton wrote 524 letters, and all survived, unknown until now. Separated by twenty years in age and differing opinions on myriad subjects, these educated and articulate Confederates wrote frankly and perceptively on their Civil War world. Sharing opinions on generals and politicians, the course of the war, the fate of the Confederacy,...
Between March 1863 and July 1865, Confederate newlyweds Brigadier General Gabriel C. Wharton and Anne Radford Wharton wrote 524 letters, and all survived, unknown until now. Separated by twenty years in age and differing opinions on myriad subjects, these educated and articulate Confederates wrote frankly and perceptively on their Civil War world. Sharing opinions on generals and politicians, the course of the war, the fate of the Confederacy,...
How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life during the conflict? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael's sweeping new study of men at war. Based on close examination of the letters and records left behind by individual soldiers from both the North and the South, Carmichael explores the totality of the Civil War experience--the marching, the fighting, the boredom, the idealism, the exhaus...
During the American Civil War, William R.J. Pegram became one of the most prominent artillerists in the Army of Northern Virginia. Pegram shared the values of the South's ruling elite and this book argues that he entered Confederate service to defend a way of life he believed was ordained by God.
Despite the literary outpouring on the life of Robert E. Lee, the southern chieftain remains an enigma. The existing scholarship is so voluminous, complex, and contradictory that it is difficult to penetrate the inner Lee and appreciate him as a general. Peter S. Carmichael has assembled a formidable array of Civil War historians who rigorously return to Lee's own words and actions in interpreting the war in Virginia. This is the first collect...
Challenging the popular conception of Southern youth on the eve of the Civil War as intellectually lazy, violent, and dissipated, this book looks at the lives of more than one hundred young white men from Virginia's last generation to grow up with the institution of slavery.