This book is a vast and stirring collection of first-person accounts and landmark documents—by soldiers, generals, politicians, presidents, poets, slaves, wives, mothers and children—that brings the Civil War to vivid life through the words of those who fought it, influential documents fro the era's foremost political thinkers, heartfelt words from families at home—all combine to depict the war between the states with a power and immediacy unmatched by conventional historical retellings.
Expanding upon Civil War-historian Henry Steele Commager's seminal two-volume work, The Blue and the Gray, editor Erik Bruun adds an array of new voices to the public record. The result is a modern view of the war that takes into account recent scholarship and historical interpretations that have emerged since Commager's work was first published in 1950. Each chapter opens with a discussion of the relevant themes, and every selection is presented with an introduction establishing the historical, military or political context.
All the momentous documents of the era are included, from the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation to the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession and the Confederate order of surrender. But perhaps what fascinates us most about the Civil War are the people who lived it: timeless symbols of character and leadership like Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, and icons of valor and grit like Stonewall Jackson, J. E. B. Stuart and William Tecumseh Sherman. The Civil War Archive presents these characters in personal letters, public speeches and private communications with the candor and insight that only their own words can achieve.
Along with those whose names belong to history are the forgotten many whose lives the war irrevocably altered. The Civil War Archive features the men who fought the war's battles, then detailed the events in diaries each night. It shows us the mothers who tended crops back home and wrote letters of encouragement to anxious sons on the front lines; slaves who hungered desperately for their first taste of freedom and voiced these longings in notes to relatives in the North; reporters who labored alongside the troops and conveyed the horrors of battle in stories filled for readers thousands of miles away; and poets who struggled to make sense of a complicated war through verse. Witness the bloodiest day of the war through a soldier's account of the horrors at Antietam, sympathize with the child who must spend her days in a basement during the siege of Atlanta, and rejoice with freed slaves as the "day of jubilee" finally arrives.
An entirely new chapter addressing the African-American war experience supplements the original text: slaves detail the misery inflicted by owners embittered by wartime hardship, a Union general reports on the "unequaled coolness and bravery" of African-American soldiers in battle, and "The Colored Citizens of Nashville" attest to the hardships suffered by newly emancipated blacks. A new chapter on emancipation offers a fresh look at the subject, informed by twentieth century developments of the Civil Rights movement. The poetry of the Civil War merits its own discussion, as well; a collection has been added that includes notable works like Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Killed at the Ford," alongside selections from lesser-known voices like soldier/poet Will Hays' mournful "Drummer Boy of Shiloh." Finally, two new sections examine Reconstruction and the war's aftereffects and feature Southern views on life after the war, constitutional amendments geared towards rebuilding the nation, harrowing reports of crimes perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan, letters debating foreign policy, and Congressional Acts encouraging the establishment of new free states. These documents highlight the policies triggered by the war that continue to affect the nation long after Appomattox. And in existing chapters throughout the book, Erik Bruun has added new selections that expand upon Commager's original work.
With hundreds of unique and powerful voices from all points of American society, The Civil War Archive portrays with stark immediacy a country during its most tumultuous period. Its view of the war veers from the violent to the humorous, the joyful to the chilling, in a first-person collection that is moving, enlightening and utterly accessible throughout.
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