Books about Unionists from Amazon.com

Why did the Confederacy lose the Civil War? Most historians point to the larger number of Union troops, or to the North's greater industrial might. Now, in The South Vs. the South, a leading authority on the Civil War era offers a critical supplementary viewpoint William Freehling argues that 450,000 Union troops from the South--especially border state whites and southern blacks--helped cost the Confederacy the war. In addition, when the southern border states rejected the Confederacy, half the South's industrial capacity swelled the North's advantage. Whether revising our conception of Union military strategy or of slavery, or changing our perceptions of blacks' role in producing Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, or finding new meanings in what is arguably America's greatest piece of sculpture, Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Shaw Memorial, or establishing the antecedents to Martin Luther King, Jr., Freehling's piercing insight and rhetorical verve yield a major new Civil War narrative..
Price: $5.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Remembered as the "Rock of Chickamauga," Thomas was so effective he became one of the most prominent Union generals and at one point was considered for overall command of the Union Army. Yet he has been eclipsed in fame by such names as Grant, Sherman, or Sheridan.

Offering vivid accounts of combat, Einolf depicts the fighting from Thomas's perspective to allow a unique look at the real experience of decision making on the battlefield. He examines the general's recurring confrontations with the Union high command to make a strong case for Thomas's integrity and competence, even as he exposes Thomas's shortcomings and poor decisions. The result is a more balanced, nuanced picture than has previously been available. Einolf also explores Thomas's schooling at West Point, early military service in the Seminole and Mexican wars, and his postwar life--notably his service as a military commander in Tennessee protecting freed slaves from the terror of the Ku Klux Klan..
Price: $19.77 [Notify me when price goes down.]

New Orleans was the largest city—and one of the richest—in the Confederacy, protected in part by Fort Jackson, which was just sixty-five miles down the Mississippi River. On April 27, 1862, Confederate soldiers at Fort Jackson rose up in mutiny against their commanding officers. New Orleans fell to Union forces soon thereafter. Although the Fort Jackson mutiny marked a critical turning point in the Union's campaign to regain control of this vital Confederate financial and industrial center, it has received surprisingly little attention from historians. Michael Pierson examines newly uncovered archival sources to determine why the soldiers rebelled at such a decisive moment.

The mutineers were soldiers primarily recruited from New Orleans's large German and Irish immigrant populations. Pierson shows that the new nation had done nothing to encourage poor white men to feel they had a place of honor in the southern republic. He argues that the mutineers actively sought to help the Union cause. In a major reassessment of the Union administration of New Orleans that followed, Pierson demonstrates that Benjamin "Beast" Butler enjoyed the support of many white Unionists in the city.

Pierson adds an urban working-class element to debates over the effects of white Unionists in Confederate states. With the personal stories of soldiers appearing throughout, Mutiny at Fort Jackson presents the Civil War from a new perspective, revealing the complexities of New Orleans society and the Confederate experience..
Price: $21.29 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Deborah Levenson-Estrada provides the first comprehensive analysis of how urban labor unions took shape in Guatemala under conditions of state terrorism In Trade Unionists against Terror, she explores how workers made sense of their struggle for rights in the face of death squads and other forms of violent opposition from the state.

Levenson-Estrada focuses especially on the case of 400 workers at the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Guatemala City, who, in order to protect their union, successfully occupied the factory for over a year beginning in 1984 while the country was under a state of siege. According to Levenson-Estrada, religion provided the language of resistance, and workers who were engaged in what seemed to be a dead-end battle constructed an identity for themselves as powerful agents of change. Based on oral histories as well as documentary sources, Trade Unionists against Terror also illuminates complex relationships between urban popular culture, gender, family, and workplace activism in Guatemala..
Price: $20.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Some of the Civil War's most intense violence occurred on the Confederate home front, as families and neighbors were pitted against one another in bloody struggles for control. Editor Daniel Sutherland gathers eleven essays by such noted Civil War scholars as Michael Fellman, Donald Frazier, and B. F. Cooling, each one exploring the Confederacy's internal war in a different state..
Price: $21.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

As provisional governor of Missouri during the Civil War, Hamilton Gamble (1798–1864) worked closely with the Lincoln administration to keep the state from seceding from the Union. Without Gamble and other loyal Unionist governors, the war in the West might have been lost. Dennis Boman’s full-scale account of Gamble’s life tells the little-known story of a prominent frontier lawyer who became chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court and boldly dissented in the infamous Dred Scott decision. Revealing how Gamble, one of the wealthiest and most renowned citizens of pre–Civil War Missouri, fought to end slavery and to protect the integrity of the Union, Lincoln’s Resolute Unionist corrects prevailing notions about solidarity among the South’s antebellum elite on these issues.

The slaveholding border state of Missouri figured greatly in the sectional crisis from the time of its controversial admission to the Union up through the war itself, when it was the site of internecine battles between Unionists and Confederates. The complexities of the period and of the political alliances formed then emerge clearly in Boman’s biography of Gamble. A fundamental conservatism—Gamble believed judges should interpret, not make, law—led the southern slave owner to dissent from his colleagues’ proslavery decision in Scott v. Emerson. These same principles, along with Gamble’s Whig affiliation and Christian convictions, made firm his antisecessionist stance despite his proslavery predilections. Boman provides a groundbreaking analysis of Lincoln’s involvement in Missouri’s affairs, including his assistance to Gamble in maintaining security and passing a state ordinance for gradual emancipation. Lincoln’s Resolute Unionist brings to light in a compelling fashion the meaning—and the drama—of the life of a key figure at a critical time in American history. AUTHOR BIO: Dennis K. Boman is the author of Abiel Leonard: Yankee Slaveholder, Eminent Jurist, and Passionate Unionist. He teaches history at St. Louis University..
Price: $32.45 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Daniel Crofts examines Unionists in three pivotal southern states—Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee—and shows why the outbreak of the war enabled the Confederacy to gain the allegiance of these essential, if ambivalent, governments..
Price: $24.30 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Though slavery was widespread and antislavery sentiment rare in Alabama, there emerged a small loyalist population, mostly in the northern counties, that persisted in the face of overwhelming odds against their cause. Margaret M. Storey’s welcome study explores those Alabamians who maintained allegiance to the Union when their state seceded in 1861—and beyond. Her extensive, groundbreaking research discloses a socioeconomically diverse group that included slaveholders and nonslaveholders, business people, professionals, farmers, and blacks. Narratives of their wartime experiences indicate in astonishingly rich detail the chaos and destruction that occurred on the southern home front.

Storey considers the political, social, and military aspects of unionism in Alabama. And by treating the years 1861-1874 as a whole, she clearly connects loyalists’ sometimes brutal wartime treatment with their postwar behavior. In extending the study of unionism into the Deep South, Storey sheds important light on the internal strife of the Confederacy as well as the nature of resistance itself..
Price: $22.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]