Themes of the American Civil War

Timeline victory at
Gettysburg
13th–16th
.New
York draft riots
(Pennsylvania)
4th
.Vicksburg surrender to
Grant
13th–14th
.Lee retreats back across
Potomac
18th
.Attack on
Fort
Wagner
(Charleston)/Massachusetts
24th
.Death of
Robert
Gould
Shaw
August
September
8th
.Fall of
Fort
Wagner to
Union
September–November
.Jefferson
Davis
19th–20th
.Bragg defeats
Rosecrans setback in congressional elections at
Chickamauga
October
17th
.Ulysses
S.
Grant appointed
Union commander in west
October–November
.Local and state elections see
Republican recovery
November
24th–25th
.Union victory at
19th
.Lincoln gives
“Gettysburg
Address”
Chattanooga at dedication ceremony for cemetery
December
8th
.Lincoln’s proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction proposals

1864
January
Lincoln and
Congress debate reconstruction
February
17th
Hunley
(Confederate
New tax law.
New law on impressment of submarine)
sinks
USS
Housatonic
slaves.
Renewed authority to suspend
habeas
corpus
March
9th
.Grant becomes general-in-chief of
Union armies
April
8th
.Union defeated at
Sabine
Cross
16th
.Alexander
Stephens addresses
Georgia
Roads/Mansfi eld
(Louisiana);
end of legislature;
attacks
Davis’s administration’s
Red
River expedition record on civil liberties and conduct of war
12th
.Fort
Pillow massacre
May
5th–6th
.Battle of the
Wilderness
June
1st–3rd
.Battle of
Coldharbor
7th
.Baltimore
Convention:
Lincoln
14th–16th
.Grant moves south of renominated,
Andrew
Johnson selected
James river as vice-presidential candidate
15th–18th
.Beginning of siege of
Petersburg
27th
.Sherman defeated at
Kenesaw mountain

Timeline vetoes
Wade–Davis
Bill threatens
Washington
17th
.John
Bell
Hood replaces
Johnston as commander at
Atlanta
30th
.Battle of the
Crater
(Petersburg):
Union defeat
August
5th
.Union navy victorious at
29th
.Democrats nominate
McClellan
Mobile
Bay as their presidential candidate
September
2nd
.Fall of
Atlanta to
Sherman’s forces
19th–22nd
.Union victories at
Opequon
Creek and
Fisher’s
Hill
(Shenandoah valley)
October
19th
.Union victory at
Cedar
Creek
(Shenandoah valley)
23rd
.Union victory at
Westport
(Missouri)
November
15th–16th
.Sherman begins his
8th
.Reelection of
Lincoln
“March to the
Sea”
30th
.John
Bell
Hood defeated at
Franklin
(Tennessee)

December
15th–16th
.Hood defeated at
Nashville
21st
.Fall of
Savannah
(to
Sherman)
1865
January
15th
.Union captures
Fort
Fisher
31st
.Thirteenth
Amendment passed:
(North
Carolina)
abolishes slavery.
Section
1.
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as a
punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,
shall exist within the
United
States,
or anyplace subject to their jurisdiction.”
Section
2.
“Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation”
February
1st
.Sherman begins to move up
3rd
.Conference at
Hampton
Roads through
Carolinas
6th
.Lee appointed commander-in-chief of
17th
.destruction of
Columbia
Confederate armies
(South
Carolina).
Confederate evacuation of
Charleston
March
21st–23rd
.Sherman meets up with
4th
.Lincoln’s second inauguration and
7th
.Confederate
Congress:
Second
Congress,
Schofield in
North
Carolina
Second
Inaugural
Address:
“With malice
Second
Session,
Senate,
March
7:
toward none;
with charity for all;
with
“The
Congress of the
Confederate
States of firmness in the right,
as
God gives us to
America do enact:
That in order to provide seethe right,
let us strive onto finish the additional forces to repel invasion,
maintain the work we are into bind up the nation’s rightful possession of the
Confederate
States,

Timeline care for him who shall have secure their independence and preserve their borne the battle,
and for his widow,
and institutions,
the
President be and he is hereby his orphan
.”
authorized to ask for and accept from the owners of slaves the services of such number of able-bodied negro men as he may deem expedient,
for and during the war,
to perform military service in whatever capacity he may direct.”
(“The
Negro
Soldier
Question,”
Southern
Historical
Society
Papers
52,
1959,
pp.
452–7)
13th
.Congress authorizes recruitment of slaves
April
2nd
.Fall of
Petersburg
14th–15th
.Lincoln assassinated by
10th
.Lee bids farewell to the
Army of
Northern
3rd
.Fall of
Richmond
John
Wilkes
Booth
Virginia:
“After four years of arduous service,
9th
.Lee surrenders to
Grant at
26th
.Booth shot and killed marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude,
Appomattox
Court
House the
Army of
Northern
Virginia has been
26th
.Joseph
E.
Johnston surrenders compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers
(North
Carolina)
and resources.”
May
26th
.Edmund
Kirby
Smith surrenders
23rd
and
24th
.Grand
Review of the
Army
10th
.Davis captured at
Irwinville
(Georgia)
(trans-Mississippi).
War officially
23rd
.Army of the
Potomac in terminates
Washington,
DC
24th
.Army of
Georgia in
Washington,
DC

Guide to Further Reading
SUSAN-MARY GRANT
Civil War Origins and General Works on the War
General works covering the war in its entirety vary between the long and involved (and involving, the short and sharp, and the still shorter but perhaps less geared toward the general reader, being aimed primarily at a school or college curriculum that requires simply the basic facts of, say,
the Compromise of 1850. The most comprehensive treatment of the war remains Allan Nevins’s eight-volume study Ordeal of the Union (New York:
Collier Books, 1947–71), although the popular trilogy by Shelby Foote,
The Civil War A Narrative (New York Random House, 1958–74) is perhaps more readily available these days. Of the single-volume studies of the war,
the more substantial includes Peter J. Parish, The American Civil War (New
York: Holmes & Meier, 1975), James M. McPherson’s Ordeal by Fire The
Civil War and Reconstruction (New York Alfred A. Knopf, 1982) and his prizewinning Battle Cry of Freedom The Civil War Era (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, now available in Penguin) and, in the first of a two-volume study, Brian Holden Reid, America’s Civil War
The Operational Battlefield, 1861–1863 (London: Prometheus Books, With its focus on the military side of the conflict, David J. Eicher’s The Longest
Night: A Military History of the Civil War (New York Simon & Schuster, London Pimlico, 2002) is packed with information on battles and weaponry as well as the individuals involved.
Shorter studies of the war itself and the Civil War era more broadly include Susan-Mary Grant, The War fora Nation The American Civil
War (New York Routledge, 2006), Robert Cook, Civil War America Making

a Nation, 1848–1877 (London: Longman, 2003), William R. Brock, Conflict
and Transformation The United States, 1844–1877 (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1973), William L. Barney, Battleground for the Union The Era of the
Civil War and Reconstruction, 1848–1877 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-
Hall, 1990), and Adam Smith, The American Civil War (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007). Useful studies that adopt a particular focus in order to get at the heart of the Civil War include Phillip S. Paludan, “A People’s
Contest”: The Union and Civil War, 1861–1865 (New York Harper & Row, Charles Royster’s, The Destructive War William Tecumseh Sherman,
Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (1991, repr. New York Random House, and Charles P. Roland, An American Iliad The Story of the Civil War
(New York and London McGraw-Hill, 1991), while a more comparative approach is adopted in Brian Holden Reid, The American Civil War and
the Wars of the Industrial Revolution (London: Cassell, 1999). A longer textbook treatment of the war is provided by David Herbert Donald, Jean
Harvey Baker, and Michael F. Holt in The Civil War and Reconstruction (New
York and London WW. Norton, 2001), whilst basic short/seminar studies of the war include the useful Access to History series by Alan Farmer,
available in various editions now, including The American Civil War and
its Origins, 1848–1865 (London: Hodder Murray, 2006), The American Civil
War, 1861–1865 (2002), and Reconstruction and the Results of the American
Civil War, 1865–1877 (1997).
Most of the studies above cover the Civil War’s origins, but there are many valuable works that focus on the causes of the war, specifically. The standard,
and still most valuable for its political detail, remains David M. Potter,
The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York Harper & Row, 1976) but see also Brian Holden Reid, The Origins of the American Civil War (Harlow:
Longman, 1996). Older and still useful studies include Avery Craven, The
Coming of the Civil War (2nd edn. Chicago, IL University of Chicago Press, 1957), and more recent ones Richard H. Sewell, A House Divided:
Sectionalism and the Civil War (Baltimore, MD Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1988), James A. Rawley, Race and Politics Bleeding Kansas and
the Coming of the Civil War (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1969), Gerald W.
Wolff, The Kansas–Nebraska Bill Party, Section, and the Coming of the
Civil War (New York Revisionist Press, 1980), James L. Huston, The Panic of
1857 and the Coming of the Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA Louisiana State
University Press, 1987), Kenneth M. Stampp, 1857: A Nation on the Brink
(New York Oxford University Press, 1990), and Bruce Levine, Half Slave
and Half Free The Roots of Civil War (New York Hill & Wang, 1992; rev.
edn. 2005).
364
•
Guide to Further Reading

WWW
William G. Thomas and Alice E. Carter, The Civil War on the Web A Guide
to the Very Best Sites (Wilmington, DE Scholarly Resources, 2001, remains valuable, as many of the sites that are of interest to both serious scholar and general reader are stable.
In terms of access to primary sources for the antebellum through
Reconstruction periods, the Making of America and the Library of Congress are good places to start. The Making of America site offers access to, among other things, through Cornell University the Official Records of the War of
the Rebellion (Washington, DC Government Printing Office, and the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the
Rebellion (Washington, DC Government Printing Office, In addition, the University of Virginia hosts several excellent sites for students of American history generally for the Civil War specifically, Edward Ayers’s
“Valley of the Shadow website, providing access to records, diaries, census information, newspapers, church records, and maps from two counties on opposite sides of the sectional divide Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin
County, Pennsylvania. There is an accompanying monograph Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies War in the Heart of America,
1859–1863 (New York WW. Norton, 2003). This is a marvelous resource,
in terms of both ease of use and the range of material on offer.
Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amhome.html.
The Making of America (MOA): http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moagrp/.
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion:
http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/browse.monographs/waro.html.
Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the
Rebellion:
http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/browse.monographs/ofre.html.
Valley of the Shadow http://jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU/vshadow/.

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