A collection of ten new essays from some of our finest Civil War historians working today, Gateway to the Confederacy offers a reexamination of the campaigns fought to gain possession of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Each essay addresses how Americans have misconstrued the legacy of these struggles and why scholars feel it necessary to reconsider one of the most critical turning points of the American Civil War. The first academic analysis that delineates all three Civil War campaigns fought from 1862 to 1863 for control of Chattanooga -- the trans-portation hub of the Confederacy and gateway to the Deep South -- this book deals not only with military operations but also with the campaigns' origins and consequences. The essays also explore the far-reaching social and political implications of the battles and bring into sharp focus their impact on postwar literature and commemoration. Several chapters revise the traditional portraits of both famous and con-troversial figures including Ambrose Bierce and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Others investigate some of the more salient moments of these cam-paigns such as the circumstances that allowed for the Confederate breakthrough assault at Chickamauga. Gateway to the Confederacy reassesses these pivotal battles, long in need of reappraisal, and breaks new ground as each scholar re-shapes a particular aspect of this momentous part of the Civil War. CONTRIBUTORS Russell S. Bonds Stephen Cushman Caroline E. Janney Evan C. Jones David A. Powell Gerald J. Prokopowicz William Glenn Robertson Wiley Sword Craig L. Symonds

"Mr. Sheldon Vanauken has shown a singular consistency in pursuing an idea that was originally the subject of his graduate research at Oxford University to its presentation in this volume. Mr. Vanauken believes -- and there is a good deal of evidence to support him -- that English sympathies during the American Civil War were largely on the Southern side of the conflict. British intervention would have secured a Southern victory which might have suited British commercial interests and British conceptions of the balance of power and put an end to American hopes of annexing Canada. Support for the South would have conformed to the general British disposition to give credence to struggles for national self-determination. Why then, did Britain not intervene as at one moment she seemed on the point of doing? Mr. Sheldon Vanauken dismisses the view that British anti-slavery sentiment and hence popular support for the Northern cause was the root of the matter and plumps for what he calls the 'glittering illusion' namely the belief that Southern military skills, and in particular the generalship of Robert E. Lee, were thought to make a Southern defeat unthinkable, so that the South could win its independence without the foreign assistance that the American colonies had enjoyed in winning their independence from the British Empire in the war of the American Revolution. It is an interesting idea and one that challenges many accepted beliefs. Interesting also are Mr. Vanauken's subsequent speculations on what would have happened if the South had actually won and as he believes would have followed had freed its slaves of its own violation"--Preliminary page.

This book explains how the Battle of Antietam—a conflict that changed nothing militarily—still played a pivotal role in the Civil War by affording Abraham Lincoln an opportunity to announce the emancipation of slaves in states in rebellion. Antietam 1862: Gateway to Emancipation examines the connections between the Maryland Campaign culminating in the battle of Antietam in 1862 and the drive to emancipate slaves to win the war for the Union. The work's thematic chapters discuss how slaves' resistance to the Confederacy and flight to Union armies influenced Union domestic and diplomatic politics, Confederate military strategy, and above all, the leadership of President Lincoln. By focusing on the complex topics of antislavery politics, diplomacy, and slaves' resistance rather than the specific occurrences on the battlefield, this book shows how shrewd Abraham Lincoln was in assessing the consequences of fighting a civil war about slavery. The concept that slaves' resistance played a part in Lee and Davis's decision to cross the Potomac and invade Maryland is explored, as is the idea that this strategy delayed and ultimately dashed all of the Confederacy's hopes of help from the British.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History A dramatic, riveting, and “fresh look at a region typically obscured in accounts of the Civil War. American history buffs will relish this entertaining and eye-opening portrait” (Publishers Weekly). Megan Kate Nelson “expands our understanding of how the Civil War affected Indigenous peoples and helped to shape the nation” (Library Journal, starred review), reframing the era as one of national conflict—involving not just the North and South, but also the West. Against the backdrop of this larger series of battles, Nelson introduces nine individuals: John R. Baylor, a Texas legislator who established the Confederate Territory of Arizona; Louisa Hawkins Canby, a Union Army wife who nursed Confederate soldiers back to health in Santa Fe; James Carleton, a professional soldier who engineered campaigns against Navajos and Apaches; Kit Carson, a famous frontiersman who led a regiment of volunteers against the Texans, Navajos, Kiowas, and Comanches; Juanita, a Navajo weaver who resisted Union campaigns against her people; Bill Davidson, a soldier who fought in all of the Confederacy’s major battles in New Mexico; Alonzo Ickis, an Iowa-born gold miner who fought on the side of the Union; John Clark, a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s who embraced the Republican vision for the West as New Mexico’s surveyor-general; and Mangas Coloradas, a revered Chiricahua Apache chief who worked to expand Apache territory in Arizona. As we learn how these nine charismatic individuals fought for self-determination and control of the region, we also see the importance of individual actions in the midst of a larger military conflict. Based on letters and diaries, military records and oral histories, and photographs and maps from the time, “this history of invasions, battles, and forced migration shapes the United States to this day—and has never been told so well” (Pulitzer Prize–winning author T.J. Stiles).

The New York Times-bestselling final book by the beloved, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Tony Horwitz. With Spying on the South, the best-selling author of Confederates in the Attic returns to the South and the Civil War era for an epic adventure on the trail of America's greatest landscape architect. In the 1850s, the young Frederick Law Olmsted was adrift, a restless farmer and dreamer in search of a mission. He found it during an extraordinary journey, as an undercover correspondent in the South for the up-and-coming New York Times. For the Connecticut Yankee, pen name "Yeoman," the South was alien, often hostile territory. Yet Olmsted traveled for 14 months, by horseback, steamboat, and stagecoach, seeking dialogue and common ground. His vivid dispatches about the lives and beliefs of Southerners were revelatory for readers of his day, and Yeoman's remarkable trek also reshaped the American landscape, as Olmsted sought to reform his own society by creating democratic spaces for the uplift of all. The result: Central Park and Olmsted's career as America's first and foremost landscape architect. Tony Horwitz rediscovers Yeoman Olmsted amidst the discord and polarization of our own time. Is America still one country? In search of answers, and his own adventures, Horwitz follows Olmsted's tracks and often his mode of transport (including muleback): through Appalachia, down the Mississippi River, into bayou Louisiana, and across Texas to the contested Mexican borderland. Venturing far off beaten paths, Horwitz uncovers bracing vestiges and strange new mutations of the Cotton Kingdom. Horwitz's intrepid and often hilarious journey through an outsized American landscape is a masterpiece in the tradition of Great Plains, Bad Land, and the author's own classic, Confederates in the Attic.

In the summer of 1863, Federal forces scored major victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, turning the tide of war in favor of the Union. President Lincoln and his advisors now focused attention on the small town of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The important railroad center offered a gateway to the Confederate heartland. But just as complete victory in the West appeared imminent, General Braxton Bragg's reinforced Rebel army struck back at Chickamauga, driving the Federal invaders into Chattanooga, where they were soon besieged. A desperate Lincoln now turned to the hero of Vicksburg, General U. S. Grant, who directed the relief of the beleaguered garrison and, with the help of reinforcements from Virginia and Mississippi, turned a possible disaster into a stunning victory--a victory that opened the door to the Deep South and sealed the Confederacy's doom. In this picturesque setting along the Tennessee River, as Federal troops scaled the heights of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, one Confederate general beheld a scene "grand and imposing in the extreme." Here Lincoln found the winning combination, the men who would lead his armies to ultimate victory--Grant, William T. Sherman, and Philip Sheridan. For the Confederates, who invested such hope and so many resources, the disaster at Chattanooga would be a dark chapter, as veteran troops broke and ran before the Federal onslaught. It was a body blow from which the Army of Tennessee, and indeed the Confederacy, would never recover.

Abraham Lincoln knew if the Union could cut off shipping to and from New Orleans, the largest exporting port in the world, and control the Mississippi River, it would be a mortal blow to the Confederate economy. Union military leaders devised a secret plan to attack the city from the Gulf of Mexico with a formidable naval flotilla under one commander, David G. Farragut, a native New Orleanian. Jefferson Davis also understood the city’s importance—but he and his military leaders remained steadfastly undecided about where the threat to the city lay, sending troops to Tennessee rather than addressing the Union forces amassing in the Gulf. In the city, Confederate General Mansfield Lovell, a new commander, was thrust into the middle and poised to become a scapegoat. He was hamstrung by conflicting orders from Richmond and lacked both proper seagoing reconnaissance and the unity of command. In the spring of 1862, when a furious naval battle began downriver from the city at Forts Jackson and St. Philip, the joyous celebrations of Mardi Gras turned into the Easter season of dread as the sound of the distant bombardment reached New Orleans, portending an ominous outcome. History has not devoted a great deal of attention to the fall of New Orleans, a Civil War drama that was an early harbinger of the dark days to come for the Confederacy. In A Mortal Blow to the Confederacy: The Fall of New Orleans, 1862, historian Mark F. Bielski tells of the leaders and men who fought for control of New Orleans, the largest city in the South, the key to the Mississippi, and the commercial gateway for the Confederacy.