Major N. F. Cheairs, a privileged and enterprising Middle Tennessee farmer, went to war with misgivings in 1861. An active Whig, he viewed Lincoln's election as revolution. Secession was equally revolutionary, however, and he voted against it in the special Tennessee referendum of February 1861. Nevertheless, when war came Cheairs sided with his neighbors and his state. He raised and equipped an infantry company and led it north to Kentucky and disaster at Fort Donelson. Two long years of imprisonment followed, broken by exchange and a chance to fight alongside his friend Nathan Bedford Forrest, only to be imprisoned again in Camp Chase, Ohio, where he barely escaped with his life. Upon his release in early 1865, Cheairs took up the fight again, joining Forrest for his last battle at Selma, Alabama. Major Cheairs writes of his war experiences in this detailed memoir, and the editor includes Cheairs's letters home from Fort Warren, Massachusetts, and Camp Chase, Ohio. Extended postwar newspaper interviews are also provided, as well as a biographical sketch of the major and the story of how this pioneer family established itself at Rippavilla in Spring Hill, Tennessee, only to confront ruin in 1865: in the war's waning days, the major was indicted for treason, and Rippavilla declared abandoned and confiscated. A feisty Southerner, Cheairs fights back, regains Rippavilla, and makes restitution for his “Confederate Sins.” Cheairs's indomitable spirit comes through in every page of his writings, and this work provides an invaluable account of how a proud family endured the nation's greatest conflict.
Commonly portrayed in Civil War literature as a bungling general who disgraced himself at Fort Donelson, Gideon Johnson Pillow (1806-78) is one of the most controversial military figures of nineteenth-century America. In this first full-length biography,
Besides his illustrious name, the Union general Jefferson Columbus Davis is best known for two appalling actions: the September 1862 murder of General William "Bull" Nelson -- his former commanding officer -- and the abandonment of hundreds of African American refugees to the mercy of Confederate cavalry at Ebenezer Creek during Sherman's march through Georgia in 1864. Historians have generally dismissed Davis (1828--1879) as a reckless assassin, a racist, a journeyman soldier at best, and an embarrassment to the Lincoln war effort. But Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr., and Gordon D. Whitney shatter the collective memory of "Jef" Davis as a grim, destructive child of war and replace it with a more rounded portrait of a complex military leader. They bring order to the muddle of contradictions that was Davis's life and offer an impartial profile of the soldier and the man, who must be remembered for his splendid contributions as well as his startling failures.
In The Pride of the Confederate Artillery, Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr., illustrates the significance of the unit and, for the first time, positions this pivotal group in its rightful place in history. The Fifth Company, Washington Artillery of New Orleans, fought with the Army of Tennessee from Shiloh to Chickamauga, from Perryville to Mobile, and from Atlanta to Jackson, Mississippi. Slocomb's Battery, as it was also known, won repeated praise from every commander of that army. Although it sustained high losses, the company was recognized for its bold, tenacious fighting and was considered the Army of Tennessee's finest close-combat battery. The Pride of the Confederate Artillery is the compelling story of four hundred men, their organization and service, their victories and defeats in over forty battles.
The battle of Belmont was the first battle in the western theater of the Civil War and, more importantly, the first battle of the war fought by Ulysses S. Grant. It set a pattern for warfare not only in the Mississippi Valley but at Fort Donelson and Shiloh as well. Grant's 7 November 1861 strike against the Southern forces at Belmont, in southeastern Missouri on the Mississippi River, made use of the newly outfitted Yankee timberclads and all the infantry available at the staging area in Cairo, Illinois. The Confederates, led by Leonidas Polk and Gideon Pillow, had the advantages of position and superior numbers. They hoped to smash Grant's expeditionary force on the Missouri shore and cut off the escape of the Illinois and Iowa troops from their boats. The confrontation was a bloody, all-day fight that a veteran of a dozen major battles would later call "frightful to contemplate." At first successful, the Federals were eventually driven from the field and withdrew up the Mississippi to safety. The battle cost some twenty percent of his troops, but as a result of this engagement Grant became known as an audacious fighting general. Using diaries and letters of participants, official documents, and contemporary newspaper accounts, Nathaniel Hughes provides the only full-length tactical study of the battle that catapulted Grant into prominence. Throughout the narrative, Hughes draws sketches of the lives and fates of individual soldiers who fought on both sides, especially of the colorful and enormously dissimilar principal actors, Grant and Polk.
The battle of Bentonville, the only major Civil War battle fought in North Carolina, was the Confederacy's last attempt to stop the devastating march of William Tecumseh Sherman's army north through the Carolinas. Despite their numerical disadvantage, General Joseph E. Johnston's Confederate forces successfully ambushed one wing of Sherman's army on March 19, 1865 but were soon repulsed. For the Confederates, it was a heroic but futile effort to delay the inevitable: within a month, both Richmond and Raleigh had fallen, and Lee had surrendered.
With this book, Nathaniel Hughes and Thomas Ware offer the first complete biography of O'Hara and also analyze how "The Bivouac of the Dead" - originally written in honor of Kentuckians who had died in the War with Mexico - became so famous even as its author fell into obscurity. Hughes and Ware have meticulously researched O'Hara's life to present as complete a picture as possible of this forgotten figure.
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