In 1864, a Union draft officer was shot and killed in Columbia County, Pennsylvania. The military response was to send a thousand soldiers into the county. Over 100 suspects were rounded up in an early morning raid and over fourty were confined at Fort Mifflin near Philadelphia. After trial by military tribunal, several were convicted for impeding the war effort and the draft. Jacob Saddler, a Quaker orphan, is caught up in the melee and imprisoned. He is befriended by an Irish Captain and harassed by a prison guard. Jacob accidently kills the guard and finds reason to question his pacifist views. Meanwhile, his Republican girlfriend is overcome with the sight of so many maimed men returning from the war and adopts a pacifist viewpoint. Local residents use the Bible to support their views on both sides of the slavery and war issues. Both sides hold rallies repleat with speeches both praising the war effort and freedom for the slaves and condemming the same. In the end, the Democrats hold a massive rally condemning the Lincoln Administration and the Emancipation Proclamation, but praising the saving of the Union.

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Chapter 1: Columbia County Goes to War, 1861-1862 -- Chapter 2: The Democrats Grow Stronger -- Chapter 3: The Draft Comes to the North -- Chapter 4: Columbia County and the Draft, 1863 -- Chapter 5: Columbia County and the Draft, January-July 1864 -- Chapter 6: A Shooting -- Chapter 7: Military Intervention -- Chapter 8: Soldiers and Civilians -- Chapter 9: Prison -- Chapter 10: The Military Trials -- Chapter 11: The War's End and Knob Mountain -- Chapter 12: Postwar Reverberations -- Chapter 13: Historiography -- Chapter 14: Conclusions -- Appendix: List of Prisoners Sent to Fort Mifflin, September 1, 1864 -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

In 1864, a Union draft officer was shot and killed in Columbia County, Pennsylvania. The military response was to send a thousand soldiers into the county. Over 100 suspects were rounded up in an early morning raid and over fourty were confined at Fort Mifflin near Philadelphia. After trial by military tribunal, several were convicted for impeding the war effort and the draft. Jacob Saddler, a Quaker orphan, is caught up in the melee and imprisoned. He is befriended by an Irish Captain and harassed by a prison guard. Jacob accidently kills the guard and finds reason to question his pacifist views. Meanwhile, his Republican girlfriend is overcome with the sight of so many maimed men returning from the war and adopts a pacifist viewpoint. Local residents use the Bible to support their views on both sides of the slavery and war issues. Both sides hold rallies repleat with speeches both praising the war effort and freedom for the slaves and condemming the same. In the end, the Democrats hold a massive rally condemning the Lincoln Administration and the Emancipation Proclamation, but praising the saving of the Union.

Historians have traditionally viewed the Creek War of 1836 as a minor police action centered on rounding up the Creek Indians for removal to Indian Territory. Using extensive archival research, John T. Ellisor demonstrates that in fact the Second Creek War was neither brief nor small. Indeed, armed conflict continued long after peace was declared and the majority of Creeks had been sent west. Ellisor’s study also broadly illuminates southern society just before the Indian removals, a time when many blacks, whites, and Natives lived in close proximity in the Old Southwest. In the Creek country, also called New Alabama, these ethnic groups began to develop a pluralistic society. When the 1830s cotton boom placed a premium on Creek land, however, dispossession of the Natives became an economic priority. Dispossessed and impoverished, some Creeks rose in armed revolt both to resist removal west and to drive the oppressors from their ancient homeland. Yet the resulting Second Creek War that raged over three states was fueled both by Native determination and by economic competition and was intensified not least by the massive government-sponsored land grab that constituted Indian removal. Because these circumstances also created fissures throughout southern society, both whites and blacks found it in their best interests to help the Creek insurgents. This first book-length examination of the Second Creek War shows how interethnic collusion and conflict characterized southern society during the 1830s.

The commander of the three-hundred-wagon Union supply train never expected a large ragtag group of Texans and Native Americans to attack during the dark of night in Union-held territory. But Brigadier Generals Richard Gano and Stand Watie defeated the unsuspecting Federals in the early morning hours of September 19, 1864, at Cabin Creek in the Cherokee nation. The legendary Watie, the only Native American general on either side, planned details of the raid for months. His preparation paid off--the Confederate troops captured wagons with supplies that would be worth more than $75 million today. Writer, producer and historian Steve Warren uncovers the untold story of the last raid at Cabin Creek in this Jefferson Davis Historical Gold Medal-winning history.

Charles F. Gunther is a Yankee ice peddlar who is trapped in the South at the outbreak of the war. Presented here are two years of diaries of Gunther's experiences working on the steamboat Rose Douglas, ferrying Confederate troops and supplies. After the war, Gunther makes a fortune in the candy business across the street from Marshal Field's in Chicago, becomes a premier collector and preserver of Civil War artifacts and Lincoln memorabilia, endows the Chicago history Museum with its Civil War collection, and goes on to hold political office as an alderman and City Treasurer of Chicago. In Two Years Before the Paddlewheel, readers can follow the day-by-day survival of an ordinary ice merchant turned Confederate steamboat purser during the Civil War. Gunther's day-by-day account as a civilian in military service illuminates the economic, military, social, and personal side of America's Civil War.