A ruined land : the end of the Civil War / Michael Golay. [electronic resource]

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Golay, Michael, 1951-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Social aspects.

United States.

United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Peace.

United States--Politics and government--1865-1869.

Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877).

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xv, 384 p. ) ill. ;

Place of Publication:

New York : Wiley, c1999.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

As the Civil War drew to a close, its final battles and unsolved issues left a complex legacy of pain. Southern plantation owners stripped of their land struggled to find a way to survive amid shortages, and watched the growing changes around them with resentment and fear. Newly freed slaves searched for a way to make a home in a land that had viewed them as chattel. Northern reformers struggled to educate an enormous population of former slaves to prepare them for a new life. The author shows the impact of victory and defeat on the ordinary Americans who both influenced events and were caught up in them. Among the events of this bitter conflict, the author illuminates the impact of Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas, and the brutal conditions of the infamous Confederate prison at Andersonville--the struggle of its inmates to survive and the shock it created throughout the land once its crimes were made public. He goes on to describe the despair caused by the assassination of Lincoln, the first bitter weeks of armistice, the immediate postwar life in a devastated, chaotic South, and the promise of freedom for African American slaves. Some of the chief characters whose stories unfold include Oliver Otis Howard, one of Sherman's generals and commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau; Lew Wallace, an amateur soldier, author, and member of the courts martial for the Lincoln conspirators and the Andersonville commandant; Laura Towne, a northern volunteer teacher in the reformist community on the Sea Islands; George Julian, a Radical Republican congressman from Indiana and bitter opponent of President Andrew Johnson; and Emily LeConte, the teenage daughter of a slaveholding southern family.

Contents:

pt. 1. War and revolution. Honey Hill

The laws of war

The Sherman lands

pt. 2. The end of the war. The smoky march

The shell of rebellion

Booth and his crime

pt. 3. Something like peace. Exile and return

Crime, punishment, absolution

Fallow and neglected lands.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. 369-374) and index.

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

ISBN:

0-585-24672-6