Randall Lee Gibson of Louisiana offers the first biography of one of Louisiana's most intriguing nineteenth-century politicians and a founder of Tulane University. Gibson (1832--1892) grew up on his family's sugar plantation in Terrebonne Parish and was educated at Yale University before studying law at the University of Louisiana in New Orleans. He purchased a sugar plantation in Lafourche Parish in 1858 and became heavily involved in the pro-secession faction of the Democratic Party. Elected colonel of the Thirteenth Louisiana Volunteer Regiment at the start of the Civil War, he commanded a brigade in the Battle of Shiloh and fought in all of the subsequent campaigns of the Army of Tennessee, concluding in 1865 with the Battle of Spanish Fort. As Gibson struggled to establish a law practice in postwar New Orleans, he experienced a profound change in his thinking and came to believe that the elimination of slavery was the one good outcome of the South's defeat. Joining Louisiana's Conservative political faction, he advocated for a postwar unification government that included African Americans. Elected to Congress in 1874, Gibson was directly involved in the creation of the Electoral Commission that resulted in the Compromise of 1877 and peacefully solved the disputed 1876 presidential election. He crafted legislation for the Mississippi River Commission in 1879, which eventually resulted in millions of federal dollars for flood control. Gibson was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1880 and became Louisiana's leading "minister of reconciliation" with his northern colleagues and its chief political spokesman during the highly volatile Gilded Age. He deplored the growing gap between the rich and the poor and embraced a reformist agenda that included federal funding for public schools and legislation for levee construction, income taxes, and the direct election of senators. This progressive stance made Gibson one of the last patrician Democrats whose noblesse oblige politics sought common middle ground between the extreme political and social positions of his era. At the request of wealthy New Orleans merchant Paul Tulane, Gibson took charge of Tulane's educational endowment and helped design the university that bears Tulane's name, serving as the founding president of the board of administrators. Highly readable and thoroughly researched, Mary Gorton McBride's absorbing biography illuminates in dramatic fashion the life and times of a unique Louisianan.

"The Invisible Line" shines light on one of the most important, but too often hidden, aspects of American history and culture. Sharfstein's narrative of three families negotiating America's punishing racial terrain is a must read for all who are interested in the construction of race in the United States." --Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello In America, race is a riddle. The stories we tell about our past have calcified into the fiction that we are neatly divided into black or white. It is only with the widespread availability of DNA testing and the boom in genealogical research that the frequency with which individuals and entire families crossed the color line has become clear. In this sweeping history, Daniel J. Sharfstein unravels the stories of three families who represent the complexity of race in America and force us to rethink our basic assumptions about who we are. The Gibsons were wealthy landowners in the South Carolina backcountry who became white in the 1760s, ascending to the heights of the Southern elite and ultimately to the U.S. Senate. The Spencers were hardscrabble farmers in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, joining an isolated Appalachian community in the 1840s and for the better part of a century hovering on the line between white and black. The Walls were fixtures of the rising black middle class in post-Civil War Washington, D.C., only to give up everything they had fought for to become white at the dawn of the twentieth century. Together, their interwoven and intersecting stories uncover a forgotten America in which the rules of race were something to be believed but not necessarily obeyed. Defining their identities first as people of color and later as whites, these families provide a lens for understanding how people thought about and experienced race and how these ideas and experiences evolved-how the very meaning of black and white changed-over time. Cutting through centuries of myth, amnesia, and poisonous racial politics, The Invisible Line will change the way we talk about race, racism, and civil rights.

The bloody two-week siege of Spanish Fort, Alabama (March 26–April 8, 1865) was one of the final battles of the Civil War. Despite its importance and fascinating history, surprisingly little has been written about it. Many considered the fort as the key to holding the important seaport of Mobile, which surrendered to Maj. Gen. Edward R. S. Canby on April 12, 1865. Paul Brueske’s “Digging All Night and Fighting All Day”: The Civil War Siege of Spanish Fort and the Mobile Campaign, 1865 is the first full-length study of this subject. General U. S. Grant had long set his eyes on capturing Mobile. Its fall would eliminate the vital logistical center and put one of the final nails in the coffin of the Confederacy. On January 18, 1865, Grant ordered General Canby to move against Mobile, Montgomery, and Selma and destroy anything useful to the enemy’s war effort. The reduction of Spanish Fort, along with Fort Blakeley—the primary obstacles to taking Mobile—was a prerequisite to capturing the city. After the devastating Tennessee battles of Franklin and Nashville in late 1864, many Federals believed Mobile’s garrison—which included a few battered brigades and most of the artillery units from the Army of Tennessee—did not have much fight left and would evacuate the city rather than fight. They did not. Despite being outnumbered about 10 to 1, 33-year-old Brig. Gen. Randall Lee Gibson mounted a skillful and spirited defense that “considerably astonished” his Union opponents. The siege and battle that unfolded on the rough and uneven bluffs of Mobile Bay’s eastern shore, fought mainly by veterans of the principal battles of the Western Theater, witnessed every offensive and defensive art known to war. Paul Brueske, a graduate student of history at the University of South Alabama, marshaled scores of primary source materials, including letters, diaries, reports, and newspaper accounts to produce an outstanding study of a little known but astonishingly important event rife with acts of heroism that rivaled any battle of the war. It will proudly occupy a space on the bookshelf of any serious student of the war.

Biographical dictionary detailing the pre- and post-war activities of over 500 Yale College students during the Civil War era.

This expansive, multivolume reference work provides a broad, multidisciplinary examination of the Civil War period ranging from pre-Civil War developments and catalysts such as the Mexican-American War to the rebuilding of the war-torn nation during Reconstruction. The Civil War was undoubtedly the most important and seminal event in 19th-century American history. Students who understand the Civil War have a better grasp of the central dilemmas in the American historical narrative: states rights versus federalism, freedom versus slavery, the role of the military establishment, the extent of presidential powers, and individual rights versus collective rights. Many of these dilemmas continue to shape modern society and politics. This comprehensive work facilitates both detailed reading and quick referencing for readers from the high school level to senior scholars in the field. The exhaustive coverage of this encyclopedia includes all significant battles and skirmishes; important figures, both civilian and military; weapons; government relations with Native Americans; and a plethora of social, political, cultural, military, and economic developments. The entries also address the many events that led to the conflict, the international diplomacy of the war, the rise of the Republican Party and the growing crisis and stalemate in American politics, slavery and its impact on the nation as a whole, the secession crisis, the emergence of the "total war" concept, and the complex challenges of the aftermath of the conflict.

Allen J. Ellender, born in 1890 on a sugar plantation in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, rose to become one of the most dominant men in the U.S. Senate. This biography, based on prolonged examination of the voluminous Ellender Papers and extensive research in other primary and secondary sources, including interviews with people who knew Ellender during various stages of his lengthy career, makes an important contribution to our understanding of Louisiana and national politics during much of this century. Ellender began life in a farm family and never lost his close ties to rural Louisiana. Still, he sought a career as a lawyer and served as city attorney and district attorney before being elected to the Louisiana state legislature in 1924. Originally an opponent of Huey Long, Ellender converted to Longism after Huey was elected governor in 1928. But because he refused to condone questionable oil-leasing practices on state lands, he was bypassed as Long’s state political heir in the thirties. He was elected instead to the U.S. Senate, where he served until his death in 1972. In Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana, Thomas A. Becnel methodically traces the extended career of this contradictory politician—a man who, though essentially a conservative, was surprisingly liberal on many issues. He supported progressive legislation in areas such as education, public housing, censorship, and the separation of church and state. He was also one of the first senators to criticize his colleague Joseph McCarthy. Yet throughout his career he remained a staunch advocate of racial segregation. During Ellender’s long tenure in the Senate, in which he served under Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, through the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, McCarthyism, the Korean conflict, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War, he was intimately involved in decisions and debates that have shaped the recent history of the country. Becnel astutely places Ellender in the context of the history of his time and the social, economic, and political milieu of his state. The result is a careful, balanced portrait of one of the most influential legislators of this century.

The Louisiana Brigade served the Confederacy in the Army of Tennessee, battling on the western frontier. Commanded by Daniel W. Adams and Randall L. Gibson, the brigade fought from the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862 to the surrender at Meridian in May 1865. This volume follows the formation and history of the individual units, the politics of command, and the war's end and aftermath.