This biography of the Civil War officer who established the Union’s intelligence network “is an absolute treasure trove of . . . operational information” (Military History Magazine). In this biography of George H. Sharpe, acclaimed historian Peter Tsouras recounts the significance of Sharpe’s grand contribution to the Union war effort: the creation of an all-source intelligence operation known as the Bureau of Military Information. Tsouras contends that, under Sharpe’s leadership, the BMI was the combat multiplier that ultimately brought the Union to victory. By early 1863, in the two-and-half months before the Chancellorsville Campaign, Sharpe had compiled a thorough and accurate Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield. His reports identified every brigade and its location in Lee’s army, provided an order-of-battle down to the regiment level, and a complete analysis of the railroad. Beyond this, Sharpe assembled a staff of thirty to fifty scouts and support personnel to run the military intelligence operation of the Army of the Potomac. He later supported Grant’s armies operating against Richmond during the Siege of Petersburg, where the BMI played a fundamental role in the victory. After the war, Sharpe became one of the most powerful Republican politicians in New York State, had close friendships with presidents Grant and Arthur, and was a champion of African American civil rights. With a wealth of newly discovered primary documents, including the diaries of Sharpe’s deputy John C. Babcock, Tsouras sheds significant new light on the evolution of Civil War intelligence reporting.

Based on two years living and researching in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, What Though the Field Be Lost uses the battlefield there as a way to engage ongoing issues involving race, regional identity, and the ethics of memory. With empathy and humility, Kempf reveals the overlapping planes of historical past and public present, integrating archival material—language from monuments, soldiers' letters, eyewitness accounts of the battle—with reflection on present-day social and political unrest. Here monument protests, police shootings, and heated battle reenactments expose the ambivalences and evasions involved in the consolidation of national (and nationalist) identity. In What Though the Field Be Lost, Kempf shows that, though the Civil War may be over, the field at Gettysburg and all that it stands for remain sharply contested. Shuttling between past and present, the personal and the public, What Though the Field Be Lost examines the many pasts that inhere, now and forever, in the places we occupy.

The local community around the Nat Turner rebellion The 1831 Southampton Rebellion led by Nat Turner involved an entire community. Vanessa M. Holden rediscovers the women and children, free and enslaved, who lived in Southampton County before, during, and after the revolt. Mapping the region's multilayered human geography, Holden draws a fuller picture of the inhabitants, revealing not only their interactions with physical locations but also their social relationships in space and time. Her analysis recasts the Southampton Rebellion as one event that reveals the continuum of practices that sustained resistance and survival among local Black people. Holden follows how African Americans continued those practices through the rebellion’s immediate aftermath and into the future, showing how Black women and communities raised children who remembered and heeded the lessons absorbed during the calamitous events of 1831. A bold challenge to traditional accounts, Surviving Southampton sheds new light on the places and people surrounding Americas most famous rebellion against slavery.

“A treasure trove for historians . . . A real addition to Civil War history” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). At the end of the American Civil War, most of the intelligence records disappeared—remaining hidden for over a century. As a result, little has been understood about the role of espionage and other intelligence sources, from balloonists to signalmen with their telescopes. When, at the National Archives, Edwin C. Fishel discovered long-forgotten documents—the operational files of the Army of the Potomac’s Bureau of Military Information—he had the makings of this, the first book to thoroughly and authentically examine the impact of intelligence on the Civil War, providing a new perspective on this period in history. Drawing on these papers as well as over a thousand pages of reports by General McClellan’s intelligence chief, the detective Allan Pinkerton, and other information, he created an account of the Civil War that “breaks much new ground” (The New York Times). “The former chief intelligence reporter for the National Security Agency brings his professional expertise to bear in this detailed analysis, which makes a notable contribution to Civil War literature as the first major study to present the war’s campaigns from an intelligence perspective. Focusing on intelligence work in the eastern theater, 1861–1863, Fishel plays down the role of individual agents like James Longstreet’s famous ‘scout,’ Henry Harrison, concentrating instead on the increasingly sophisticated development of intelligence systems by both sides. . . . Expertly written, organized and researched.” —Publishers Weekly “Fundamentally changes our picture of the secret service in the Civil War.” —The Washington Post

This Civil War sourcebook organizes the crucial details of the war in an inventive format designed to enhance the reader's knowledge base and big-picture understanding of key events and outcomes. The war's causes, political and economic issues, important personalities, campaigns and battles are examined. Nearly 200 reader challenges stimulate reviews of critical moments, with suggested further reading. Photographs and maps have been carefully selected to supplement the topic being explored.

The Confederacy’s Secretary of State burned all the intelligence records he could find as federal troops entered Richmond in 1865. Union intelligence records were kept sealed in the National Archives until 1953! Here is a report by the U.S. CIA about intelligence gathering in the American Civil War. Read about the Richmond society woman who ran a spy ring in the Confederate capital. Read about intelligence operations by the Confederates in Europe. Read how freed slaves risked their lives for the Union cause. This short but fascinating compilation of secrets provides a compelling overview of the men and women who spied during America's bloodiest war. Every memoir of the American Civil War provides us with another view of the catastrophe that changed the country forever. For the first time, this long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers, tablets, and smartphones. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.

Dan Butterfield played a pivotal role during the Civil War. He led troops in the field at the brigade, division, and corps level, wrote an 1862 Army field manual, was awarded a Medal of Honor, composed “Taps,” and served as the chief-of-staff for Joe Hooker in the Army of the Potomac. He introduced a custom that remains in the U.S. Army today: the use of a distinctive hat or shoulder patch to denote the soldier’s unit. Butterfield was also controversial, not well-liked by some, and tainted by politics. Award-winning author James S. Pula unspools fact from fiction to offer the first detailed and long overdue treatment of the man and the officer in Union General Daniel Butterfield: A Civil War Biography. Butterfield was born into a wealthy New York family whose father co-founded American Express. He was one of the war’s early volunteers and made an important contribution with his manual Camp and Outpost Duty for Infantry (1862). He gained praise leading a brigade on the Virginia Peninsula and was wounded at Gaines’ Mill, where his heroism would earn him the Medal of Honor in 1892. It was in the solemnity of camp following the Seven Days’ Battles that he gained lasting fame for composing “Taps.” When its commander went missing, Butterfield took command of a division at Second Bull Run and did so with steadiness and intelligence. His abilities bumped him up to lead the Fifth Corps during the bloodbath at Fredericksburg, where he was charged with managing the dangerous withdrawal across the Rappahannock River. Shocked and hurt when he was supplanted as the head of the Fifth Corps, he received another chance to shine when General Hooker named him chief-of-staff of the Army of the Potomac. In this capacity Butterfield was largely responsible for several innovations. He used insignia he designed himself to identify each corps, streamlined the supply system, and improved communications between commands. He played a pivotal role during the Chancellorsville and Gettysburg campaigns in managing logistics, communications, and movements, only to be discarded while home recuperating from a Gettysburg wound. Politics and his testimony before the Committee on the Conduct of the War tainted his rising star. When Hooker was sent west, Butterfield went along as chief-of-staff and earned positive comments from Hooker and Gens. George Thomas, William T. Sherman, and U. S. Grant. Butterfield led a division in the XX Corps during the Atlanta Campaign with conspicuous ability at Resaca before a recurring illness forced him from the field. Pula’s absorbing prose, meticulous research into primary source material, and evenhanded treatment of this important Civil War figure will be welcomed by historians and casual readers alike. Union General Daniel Butterfield: A Civil War Biography is a study long overdue.

The recent conclusion to the war in Afghanistan — America’s longest and one of its most frustrating — serves as a vivid reminder of the unpredictability and tragedy of war. In this timely book, esteemed military expert Michael O’Hanlon examines America’s major conflicts since the mid-1800s: the Civil War, the two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Now updated with a new preface that addresses the Revolutionary War and brief observations on three other conflicts in U. S. History, O’Hanlon’s unique book — combining brevity and clarity with a broad conceptual approach —serves as an important treatment of America’s military history at the strategic and theater of operations levels. It should appeal to students of security studies and military history at universities and war colleges as well as generalists. He addresses profound questions. How successful has the United States been when it waged these wars? Were the wars avoidable? Did America’s leaders know what they were getting into when they committed to war? And what lessons does history offer for future leaders contemplating war? O’Hanlon looks for overarching trends and themes, along with the lessons for the military strategists and political leaders of today and tomorrow, including the observation that war is usually far more difficult than expected, and that its outcomes are rarely predictable.

The third installment of this award-winning Civil War series offers a vivid and authoritative chronicle of Meade and Lee’s conflict after Gettysburg. The Eastern Theater of the Civil War during the late summer and fall of 1863 was anything but inconsequential. Generals George Meade and Robert E. Lee clashed in cavalry actions and pitched battles that proved that the war in Virginia was far decided at Gettysburg. Drawing on official reports, regimental histories, letters, newspapers, and other archival sources, Jeffrey Wm Hunt sheds much-needed light on this significant period in Meade and Lee at Rappahannock Station. After Gettysburg, the Richmond War Department sent James Longstreet and two divisions from Lee’s army to reinforce Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee. Washington followed suit by sending two of Meade’s corps to reinforce William Rosecrans’ Army of the Cumberland. Despite his weakened state, Lee launched a daring offensive that drove Meade back but ended in a bloody defeat at Bristoe Station on October 14th. What happened next is the subject of Meade and Lee at Rappahannock Station, a fast-paced and dynamic account of Lee’s bold strategy to hold the Rappahannock River line. Hunt provides a day-by-day, and sometimes minute-by-minute, account of the Union army’s first post-Gettysburg offensive action and Lee’s efforts to repel it. In addition to politics, strategy, and tactics, Hunt examines the intricate command relationships, Lee’s questionable decision-making, and the courageous spirit of the fighting men.

The Civil War fascinates Americans like no other war in their history. Many Americans are still fighting some of the war’s issues in an Odyssey that stretches back to the first settlement and will persist until the end of time. The war itself was an Iliad of brilliant generals like Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan for the Union, or Lee, Jackson, and Forrest for the Confederacy; epic battles like Gettysburg and Chickamauga; epic sieges like Vicksburg and Petersburg; and epic naval combats such as Monitor versus Merrimack, or Kearsarge versus Alabama. It was America’s most horrific war, with more dead than all others combined. Around 625,000 soldiers and 125,000 civilians died from various causes, bringing the total to 750,000 people. Of 31 million Americans, 2.1 million northerners and 880,000 southerners donned uniforms. Why did eleven states eventually ban together to rebel against the United States? President Jefferson Davis began an answer when he said: ‘If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone, Died of a Theory.’ That theory justified the enslavement of blacks by whites as a natural right and duty of a superior race over an inferior race; a theory, it was believed, that morally and economically elevated both races. Although slavery was the Civil War’s core cause, there were related chronic conflicts over the nature of government, citizenship, liberty, property, equality, wealth, race, identity, justice, crime, voting, power, and history – some of which issues have never entirely gone away. America’s Unending Civil War is unique among thousands of books on the subject. None before has explored the Civil War’s related and enduring conflicts of ideas and principles through four centuries of a nation’s history.