Tag: U.S. Grant

Latin America in the Civil War Era: A working bibliography and research memo

This evolving list is the first of many steps of an intellectual process to comprehend the scope of relevant literature in this field. It is a very broad initial attempt to identify important books, essays, articles, memoirs, archival collections and other primary and secondary sources.

 

The U.S. Civil War sent economic, political and social shockwaves around the world.

One of my objectives is to understand how those shockwaves were felt throughout Latin America, specifically throughout the republican and imperial governments, the intelligentsia, the diplomatic circles, the street-level multiracial societies, and the military commands. I am especially interested and focused on Mexico’s civil war between supporters of the republican government of Benito Juarez and the supporters of Maximilian, the French puppet emperor. The civil strife began when France invaded in the early 1860s. I am particularly interested in exploring how these two civil wars churned like two hurricanes, feeding off each other, destroying everything within reach, and setting the stage for new eras of democratic government.

I will also explore how both wars resonated in the Texas-Mexico borderlands communities and how people in that region thrived economically, endured privation and tragedy, and reimagined their relationship to their respective republican states. I also hope to better understand through literature and letters how men and women throughout Latin America – and particularly in Mexico — intellectually and politically perceived their own futures as they watched the U.S. republic break apart over slavery and the French invaders attempt to build a European monarchy from the ruins of Mexican democracy.

This evolving list of sources is the first of many steps of an intellectual process to comprehend the scope of relevant literature in this field. It is a very broad attempt to identify important books, essays, articles, memoirs, archival collections and other primary and secondary sources. Studies of communities throughout the Western Hemisphere and Europe are included to inform the larger transnational and transatlantic context I will prepare.

The second step will be an annotated bibliography. That will then lead to a comprehensive review essay analyzing the evolution of the literature, the conversations, and the debates. The essay will also identify potential avenues of future research and the challenges of traveling down those avenues.

I certainly welcome corrections, comments and suggestions as this process continues. You may reach me at this address: remembrance_@hotmail.com.

MEXICO

Aldis, Owen F. “Louis Napoleon and the Southern Confederacy,” North American Review 129 (October 1879): 342-362.

Auer, Jeffrey J. “Lincoln’s Minister to Mexico,” Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 57 (1950).

Bacha-Garza, Roseann, Christopher L. Miller and Russell K. Skowronek. The Civil War on the Rio Grande, 1846-1876. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019.

Baguley, David. Napoleon III and His Regime: An Extravaganza. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

Barker, Nancy N. “France, Austria, and the Mexican Venture, 1861-1864,” French Historical Studies (Autumn 1963): 224-245.

—. “Monarchy in Mexico: Harebrained Scheme or Well-Considered Prospect?” The Journal of Modern History 48, no. 1 (March 1976): 51-68.

—. “The Factor of ‘Race’ in the French Experience in Mexico, 1821-1861,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 59, no. 1 (February 1979): 64-80.

Bernstein, Harry. Matias Romero, 1837-1898. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1973.

Beverton, Alys. “Transborder Capitalism and National Reconciliation: The American Press Reimagines U.S.-Mexico Relations after the Civil War,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2022): 40-61.

Bissell, Jonathan. “The Conflicting National Narratives of the 1846-1848 North American Invasion of Mexico,” Historical Geography 45 (2017): 220-251.

Bock, Carl H. Prelude to Tragedy: The Negotiation and Breakdown of the Tripartite Convention of London, October 31, 1861. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966.

Brettle, Adrian Robert. “The Fortunes of War: Confederate Expansionist Ambitions During the American Civil War.” PhD diss. University of Virginia, 2014.

Callahan, James Morton. Evolution of Seward’s Mexican Policy. West Virginia University Studies in American History ser. 1, Diplomatic History, nos. 4, 5, and 6. Morgantown, W.Va.: West Virginia University, 1909.

Dabbs, Jack Autrey. The French Army in Mexico, 1861-1867: A Study in Military Government. The Hague: Mouton, 1963.

Downs, Gregory P. “The Mexicanization of American Politics: The United States’ Transnational Path from Civil War to Stabilization.” American Historical Review 117 (April 2012): 408.

Delaney, Robert W. “Matamoros, Port for Texas during the Civil War,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 4 (April 1955): 473-487.

Flint, Henry M. Mexico Under Maximilian. HardPress Publishing, 2013.

Frazier, Robert W. “Matias Romero and the French Intervention in Mexico.” PhD diss. University of California, Los Angeles, 1941.

—. “Latin American Projects to Aid Mexico during the French Intervention,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 28 (August 1948): 377-388.

Goldwert, Marvin. “Matias Romero and Congressional Opposition to Seward’s Policy toward the French Intervention in Mexico,” The Americas 22, no. 1 (July 1965): 22-40.

Gonzalez-Quiroga, Miguel Angel. “Conflict and Cooperation in the Making of Texas-Mexico Border Society, 1840-1880” in Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories, 33-58, edited by Benjamin H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.

Greenberg, Amy S. A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico. New York: Knopf, 2012.

Hanna, A.J. “The Role of Matthew Fontaine Maury in the Mexican Empire,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 55 (April 1947): 105-125.

Hanna, Kathryn Abbey. “The Roles of the South in the French Intervention in Mexico,” The Journal of Southern History 20, no. 1 (February 1954): 3-21.

—. Napoleon III and Mexico: American Triumph over Monarchy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971.

—. “Incidents of the Confederate Blockade,” The Journal of Southern History 11: 222.

Hardy, William E. “South of the Border: Ulysses S. Grant and the French Intervention.” Civil War History 54, no. 1 (March 2008): 63-86.

Hart, John Mason. Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Henderson, Timothy J. A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008.

Horgan, James J. “A Confederate Bull in a Mexican China Shop” in Divided We Fall: Essays on Confederate Nation Building, edited by John M. Belohlavek. Saint Leo, Fla: Saint Leo College Press, 1991.

Hudson, Linda S. Mistress of Manifest Destiny: A Biography of Jane McManus Storm Cazneau, 1807-1878. Austin: Texas State Historical Society, 2001.

Ibsen, Kristine. Maximilian, Mexico, and the Invention of Empire. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010.

Irby, James. Backdoor at Bagdad: The Civil War on the Rio Grande. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1977.

Jonas, Raymond. Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024.

Kiser, William S. “We Must Have Chihuahua and Sonora: Civil War Diplomacy in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands,” The Journal of Civil War History 9, no. 2 (June 2019): 196-222.

McAllen, M.M. Maximilian and Carlotta, Europe’s Last Empire in Mexico. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2014.

McCormack, Richard. “James Watson Webb and the French Withdrawal from Mexico,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 31 (May 1951): 274-286.

Mahoney, Harry Thayer., and Marjorie Locke Mahoney. Mexico and the Confederacy: 1860-1867. San Francisco, California: Austin & Winfield, 1998.

Malloy, George Wallace. “The United States and the French Intervention in Mexico, 1861-1867.” PhD diss. University of California, Berkeley, 1937

Martin, Percy F. Maximilian in Mexico: The Story of the French Intervention (1861-1867). New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1914.

“The Mexico Question,” Harper’s Weekly, September 12, 1863, 578.

Mijangos y Gonzalez, Pablo. “Guerra Civil y Estado-Nacion en Norteamerica (1848-1867),” in El poder y la sangre: Guerra, Estado y nacion en la decada de 1860, edited by Guillermo Palacios and Erika Pani. Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 2014: 43-62.

Miller, Robert Ryal. “Californians against the Emperor,” California Historical Society Quarterly 37 (1958): 192-214.

—. “The American Legion of Honor in Mexico,” Pacific Historical Review 30 (1961): 229-241.

—. “Gaspar Sanchez Ochoa: A Mexican Secret Agent in the United States,” The Historian 23 (1961): 316-329.

—. “Placido Vega: A Mexican Secret Agent in the United States,” The Americas 19 (1962): 137-148.

—. “Lew Wallace and the French Intervention in Mexico,” Indiana Magazine of History 59 (1963): 31-50.

—. “Matias Romero: Mexican Minister to the United States during the Juarez-Maximilian Era,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 45 (May 1965): 228-245.

—. “Arms across the Border: United States Aid to Juarez during the French Intervention in Mexico,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s, 63, no. 6 (1973): 1-68.

Monaghan, Jay. Abraham Lincoln Deals with Foreign Affairs: A Diplomat in Carpet Slippers. Lincoln, Neb.: Bison Books, 1997.

Mora-Torres, Juan. The Making of the Mexican Border: The State, Capitalism, and Society and Nuevo Leon, 1848-1910. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.

Pani, Erika. “Dreaming of a Mexican Empire: The Political Projects of the Imperialistas,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 1 (2002): 1-31.

—. “Law, Allegiance, and Sovereignty in Civil War Mexico, 1857-1867,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 4 (December 2017): 570-596.

—. Torn Asunder: Republican Crises and Civil Wars in the United States and Mexico, 1848–1867. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2025.

Resendez, Andres. “North American Peonage,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 4 (December 2017): 597 619.

Ridley, Jasper. Maximilian and Juarez. London: Constable, 2001.

Rippy, J. Fred. The United States and Mexico. New York, 1926.

—. “Mexican Projects of the Confederates,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 22: 219-317.

Rister, Carl Coke. “Carlota: A Confederate Colony in Mexico,” The Journal of Southern History 11 (February 1945): 33-50.

Roeder, Ralph. Juarez and His Mexico: A Biographical History. New York: Viking, 1947.

Rolle, Andrew F. The Lost Cause: The Confederate Exodus to Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965.

Romero, Matias. A Mexican View of America in the 1860s: A Foreign Diplomat Describes the Civil War and Reconstruction, ed. and trans. Thomas D. Schoonover. London: Associated University Presses, 1991.

Salm-Salm, Felix C. My Diary in Mexico in 1867 Including the Last Days of the Emperor Maximilian. London, 1868.

Schoonover, Thomas. “Mexican Affairs and the Impeachment of President Johnson,” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 46 (1974): 76-93.

—. Dollars Over Dominion: The Triumph of Liberalism in Mexican-United States Relations, 1861-1867. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

—., ed., Mexican Lobby: Matias Romero in Washington 1861-1867. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986.

—., “Napoleon Is Coming! Maximilian Is Coming? The International History of the Civil War in the Caribbean Basi,” in The Union, The Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim, edited by Robert E. May. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1995. 101-130.

Smith, Gene. Maximilian and Carlota: A Tale of Romance and Tragedy. Morrow, 1973.

St. John, Rachel. “The Unpredictable America of William Gwin: Expansion, Secession, and the Unstable Borders of Nineteenth Century North America,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 6 no. 1 (March 2016): 56-84.

Thompson, Jerry Don. Mexican Texans in the Union Army. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1986.

—. “Mutiny and Desertion on the Rio Grande: The Strange Saga of Captain Adrian J. Vidal,” Military History XII, no. 3.

—. “A Stand Along the Border: Santos Benavides and the Battle of Laredo,” Civil War Illustrated (August 1980).

—, ed. Juan Cortina and the Texas-Mexico Frontier: 1859-1877. El Paso: University of Texas at El Paso Press, 1994.

—. Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007.

Truett, Samuel. Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Tyler, Ronnie C. Santiago Vidaurri and the Southern Confederacy. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1973.

Tyrner-Tyrnauer, A.R. Lincoln and the Emperors. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962.

Wahlstrom, Todd W. The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

Waite, Kevin. “Jefferson Davis and Proslavery Visions of Empire in the Far West,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 4 (December 2016): 554-557.

Wasserman, Mark. Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth Century Mexico: Men, Women, and War. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000.

Wilson, William Moss. “Lincoln’s Mexican Visitor.” Disunion: The New York Times. January 17, 2011. Accessed on January 25, 2023. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/lincolns-mexican-visitor.

CANADA

Bachand, Marise. “Disunited Daughters of the Confederates: Creoles and Canadians at the Intersection of Nations, States, and Empires.” The Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 4 (December 2017): 541-569.

Buckner, Phillip. “‘British North America and a Continent in Dissolution:’ ” The American Civil War in the Making of the Canadian Confederation,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 4 (December 2017): 512-540.

Dashew, Doris W. “The Story of an Illusion: The Plan to Trade the Alabama Claims for Canada,” Civil War History 15 (December 1969): 332-348.

Jenkins, Danny R. “British North Americans Who Fought in the American Civil War: 1861-1865.” MA thesis, University of Ottawa, 1993.

Morton, W.L. “British North America and a Continent in Dissolution, 1861-71.” History 47 (January 1962): 139-156.

Reid, Richard M. African Canadians in Union Blue: Volunteering for the Cause in the Civil War. Vancouver: University of British Colombia Press, 2014.

Winks, Robin. Canada and the United States: The Civil War Years. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1960.

CHILE

Burr, Robert N. By Reason or Force: Chile and the Balancing of Power in South America, 1830-1905. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

PERU

Blanchard, Peter. Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 1992.

Eichhorn, Niels. “The Many South Carolinas in the Americas,” Muster: The Journal of the Civil War Era. May 2, 2023. Accessed on May 23, 2023. https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2023/05/the-many-south-carolinas-in-the-americas.

“Emancipation Declared in Peru,” Anti-Slavery Reporter, July 2, 1855, 157.

Love, Thomas F. The Independent Republic of Arequipa: Making Regional Culture in the Andes. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.

GENERAL SOUTH AMERICA

Ferris, Nathan L. “The Relations of the United States with South America during the Civil War,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 21 (February 1941): 51-78.

Fitz, Caitlin A. “The Hemispheric Dimensions of Early U.S. Nationalism: The War of 1812, Its Aftermath, and Spanish American Independence,” The Journal of American History 102 (September 2015): 356–379.

—. Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of Revolutions. New York: Norton, 2016.

Gobat, Michel. “The Invention of Latin America: The Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race,” American Historical Review 118 (December 2013): 1345-1375.

Joseph, Gilbert M., Catherine C. Legrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds. Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998.

Kelly, Patrick J. “The Cat’s-Paw: Confederate Ambitions in Latin America” in American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe and the Crisis of the 1860s. Edited by Don H. Doyle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

—. “The Lost Continent of Abraham Lincoln,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 9, no. 2 (June 2019): 223-248.

May, Robert E. Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

—. Slavery, Race and Conquest in the Tropics: Lincoln, Douglass and the Future of Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

—. “The Irony of Confederate Diplomacy; Visions of Empire, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Quest for Nationhood,” The Journal of Southern History 81 (February 2017): 69-106.

Rothera, Evan C. Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States Mexico and Argentina, 1860-1880. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022.

Sanders, James E. The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy in Nineteenth Century Latin America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014.

Scott, Rebecca, et. al. The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988.

Tenorio-Trillo, Mauricio. Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

CUBA

Chaffin, Tom. Fatal Glory: Narciso López and the First Clandestine U.S. War Against Cuba. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996.

Corwin, Arthur. Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 1817-1886. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967.

Levander, Caroline. “Confederate Cuba,” American Literature 78 (December 2006): 821-845

Scott, Rebecca. Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

—. Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

GENERAL SPANISH CARIBBEAN

González-Quintero, Nicolás. “Empire, Slavery, and Exile in the 19th Century Spanish Caribbean.” PhD diss. University of Texas at Austin, 2020.

May, Robert E. The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

Rugemer, Edward Bartlett. The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.

Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1870. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.

—. “From Aggression to Crisis: The Spanish Empire in the 1860s” in American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe and the Crisis of the 1860s. Edited by Don H. Doyle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

HAITI

Clavin, Matthew. “A Second Haitian Revolution: John Brown, Toussaint Louverture and the Making of the American Civil War,” Civil War History 54 no. 2 (June 2008): 117-145.

HONDURAS

Coryell, Janet L. “’The Lincoln Colony:’ Aaron Columbus Burr’s Proposed Colonization of British Honduras,” Civil War History 43, no. 1 (March 1997): 5-16.

NICARAGUA

Gobat, Michel. Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005.

BRITISH EMPIRE

Barnes, James J., and Patience P. Barnes. The American Civil War Through British Eyes: Dispatches from British Diplomats. Kent, OH: Kent University Press, 2005.

Blackett, R.J.M. Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

Blume, Kenneth J. “Coal and Diplomacy in the British Caribbean during the Civil War,” Civil War History 41 no. 2 (June 1995): 116-141.

Campbell, Duncan Andrew. English Public Opinion and the American Civil War. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Royal Historical Society, 2003.

Dubrulle, Hugh. “A Military Legacy of the Civil War: The British Inheritance,” Civil War History 49, no. 2 (June 2003): 153-180.

—. Ambivalent Nation: How Britain Imagined the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018.

Elkins, Caroline. Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. New York: Knopf, 2022.

Foner, Philip. British Labor and the American Civil War. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981.

Foreman, Amanda. A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. New York: Random House, 2010.

Hughes, Michael F. “’The Personal Observations of a Man of Intelligence:’ Sir James Fergusson’s Visit to North America, 1861,” Civil War History 45, no. 3 (September 1999): 238-247.

Jenkins, Brian. Britain and the War for the Union. 2 vols. Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974-1960.

Jones, Howard. Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Kinser, Brent E. The American Civil War in the Shaping of British Democracy. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

Logan, Frenise. “India – Britain’s Substitute for American Cotton, 1861-1865,” Journal of Southern History 24 (November 1958): 472-480.

Meyers, Philip. Caution and Cooperation: The American Civil War in British-American Relations. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2008.

Mulligan, William. “Mobs and Diplomats: The Alabama Affair and British Diplomacy, 1865-1872” in The Diplomats’ World: A Cultural History of Diplomacy, 1815-1914, eds. Markus Mosslang and Torsten Riotte (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 105-132.

Myers, Phillip E. Caution and Cooperation: The American Civil War in British American Relations. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2008.

O’Connor, Peter. American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832-1863. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017.

Tal, Nimrod., “Putting Out the ‘Embers of This Resentment:’ Anglo-American Relations and the Rewriting of the British Response to the American Civil War, 1914-1925,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 1 (March 2018): 87-110.

FRANCE

Belanger, Damien-Claude. Franco-Americans in the Civil War Era (1861-1865). Montreal: n.p., 2001.

Case, Lynn M., and Warren F. Spencer. The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970.

Curtis, Eugene M. “American Opinion of the French Nineteenth Century Revolutions,” American Historical Review 29 (January 1924): 25-60.

Gavronsky, Serge. French Liberals and the American Civil War. New York: The Humanities Press, 1968.

Gray, Walter D. Interpreting American Democracy in France: The Career of Edouard Laboulaye, 1811-1883. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994.

Katz, Philip M. From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

GERMANY

McGrane, Reginald C. “The American Position on the Revolution of 1848 in Germany,” Historical Outlook 11 (1920): 333-339.

SPAIN

Bowen, Wayne S. Spain and the American Civil War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011.

ITALY

Adams, Charles Francis. “Lincoln’s Offer to Garibaldi,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 41 (1907-1908): 315-393.

Dal Lago, Enrico. “Lincoln, Cavour, and National Unification: American Republicanism and Italian Liberal Nationalism in Comparative Perspective,” The Journal of Civil War Era 3, no. 1 (March 2013): 85-113.

—. Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Doyle, Don H. Nations Divided: America, Italy and the Southern Question. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002.

Gay, H. Nelson. “Lincoln’s Offer of a Command to Garibaldi: Light on a Disputed Point of History,” Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 75, no. 1 (November 1907): 63-74.

Gemme, Paola. Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005.

CIVIL WAR ERA DIPLOMACY / FOREIGN POLICY

Baker, George., ed. The Works of William H. Seward in The Diplomatic History of the War for the Union. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884.

Bonner, Robert E. “Slavery, Confederate Diplomacy, and the Racialist Mission of Henry Hotze,” Civil War History 51, no. 3 (September 2005): 288-316.

Carwardine, Richard, and Jay Sexton, eds. The Global Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Chaffin, Tom. “Abe Lincoln and Filibuster Fever.” Disunion: The New York Times, January 10, 2011. Accessed on January 25, 2023. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/abe-lincoln-and-filibuster-fever.

Crook, David Paul. The North, the South, and the Powers, 1860-1865. New York: Wiley, 1974.

—. Diplomacy during the Civil War. New York: Wiley, 1975.

Ferris, Norman B. Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward’s Foreign Policy, 1861. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976.

Fry, Joseph A. Henry Sanford: Diplomacy and Business in Nineteenth-Century America. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1982.

Green, Jennifer R., and Patrick M. Kirkwood. “Reframing the Antebellum Democratic Mainstream: Transatlantic Diplomacy and the Career of Pierre Soulé,” Civil War History 61, no. 3 (September 2015): 212-251.

Hubbard, Charles M. The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998.

—. “James Mason, the ‘Confederate Lobby’ and the Blockade Debate of March 1862,” Civil War History 45, no. 3 (September 1999): 223-237.

Jones, Howard. Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

—. Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Karp, Matthew. This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

Mattson, Gregory Louis. “Pariah Diplomacy: The Slavery Issue in Confederate Foreign Relations.” PhD diss. University of Southern Mississippi, 1999.

Owsley, Frank Lawrence. King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.

Palen, Marc-William. “The Civil War’s Forgotten Transatlantic Tariff Debate and the Confederacy’s Free Trade Diplomacy,” The Journal of the Civil War Era. 3, no. 1 (March 2013): 35-61.

Paolino, Ernest. The Foundations of the American Empire: Willian Henry Seward and U.S. Foreign Policy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Peraino, Kevin. Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power. New York: Crown, 2013.

Perkins, Dexter. The Monroe Doctrine, 1826-1867. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965.

Quigley, Paul, and James Hawdon, eds. Reconciliation After Civil War. Global Perspectives. Routledge Press, 2018.

Robinson, Michael. “William Henry Seward and the Onset of the Secession Crisis,” Civil War History 59, no. 1 (March 2013): 32-66.

Sexton, Jay. “Towards a Synthesis of Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1848-1877,” American Nineteenth Century History. 5 (Fall 2004): 50-73.

—. The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Hill & Wang, 2012.

—. “William H. Seward in the World,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no. 3 (September 2014): 398-430.

—. “The Civil War and U.S. World Power” in American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe and the Crisis of the 1860s. Edited by Don H. Doyle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Seward, William H., and Olive Risley Seward. William H. Seward’s Travels around the World. New York: D. Appleton, 1873

Stahr, Walter. Seward: Lincoln Indispensable Man. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.

Taylor, John. William Henry Seward: Lincoln’s Right Hand. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Tyrner-Tyrnauer, A.R. Lincoln and the Emperors. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962.

Warren, Gordon H. Fountain of Discontent: The Trent Affair and Freedom of the Seas. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981.

Whitaker, Arthur P. “The Origins of the Western Hemisphere Idea,” Proceedings of the American Philosophy Society 98 (October 15, 1954): 323.

TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY – ANTEBELLUM, WARTIME, POSTWAR

Ayers, Edward L. “The American Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction on the World Stage,” OAH Magazine of History 20, no. 1 (January 2006): 54-61.

Beckert, Sven. “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109 (December 2004): 1405-1438.

Bolton, Herbert E. “The Epic of Greater America,” American Historical Review 38 (April 1933): 448-474.

Bonner, Robert E. “The Salt Water Civil War: Thalassological Approaches, Ocean-Centered Opportunities,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 2 (June 2016): 243-267.

Brettle, Adrian. Colonial Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020.

Brown, Charles H. Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Cummins, Light T. “Getting beyond Bolton: Columbian Consequences and the Spanish Borderland, A Review Essay,” New Mexico Historical Review 70 (April 1995): 201-215.

Curti, Merle. “The Impact of the Revolutions of 1848 on American Thought,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 93 (1949): 209-215.

Davis, William C. “Confederate Exiles.” American History Illustrated 5, no. 3 (June 1970): 30-43.

Doyle, Don H., ed. Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America’s Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010.

—. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War. New York: Basic Books, 2015.

Egerton, Douglas R. “Rethinking Atlantic Historiography in a Postcolonial Era: The Civil War in a Global Perspective,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 1 (March 2011): 79-95.

Eichhorn, Niels. “North Atlantic Trade in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: A Case for Peace during the American Civil War,” Civil War History 1, no. 2 (June 2015): 138-172.

Fleche, Andre. “The American Civil War in the Age of Revolution,” South Central Review 33 no. 1 (Spring 2016): 5-20.

—. Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Graber, Samuel S. “Twice Divided Nation: The Civil War and National Memory in the Transatlantic World,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2008).

Graybill, Andrew R. “Civil Wars and Their Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands,” Reviews in American History 46, no. 4 (December 2018): 586-591.

Greenberg, Amy S. Manifest Manhood and Antebellum American Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

—. Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion: A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012.

Guterl, Matthew Pratt. American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Hahn, Steven. “What Sort of World Did the Civil War Make?” in The World the Civil War Made. Edited by Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Hammond, John Craig. “Slavery, Sovereignty, and Empires: North American Borderlands and the American Civil War,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no 2 (June 2014): 264-298.

Honeck, Mischa. “Men of Principle: Gender and the German American War for the Union,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 1 (March 2015): 38-67.

Johnson, Benjamin H., and Andrew R. Graybill, eds. Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.

Kaye, Anthony E. “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” The Journal of Southern History 75 (August 2009): 627-50.

Keehn, David C. Knights of the Golden Circle: Secret Empire, Southern Secession, Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013.

Kelly, Patrick J. “The North American Crisis of the 1860s,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 3 (September 2012): 337-368.

—. “1848 and the Transnational Turn in Civil War History,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no. 3 (September 2014): 431-443.

LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963.

Lewis, Kay Wright. A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017.

Lonn, Ella. Foreigners in the Confederacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

McDaniel, W. Caleb, and Bethany L. Johnson. “New Approaches to Internationalizing the History of the Civil War Era: An Introduction,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 2 (June 2012): 145-150.

McPherson, James. “‘The Whole Family of Man:’ Lincoln and the Last Best Hope Abroad” in The Union, the Confederacy and the Atlantic Rim. Edited by Robert May. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1995.

Mahin, Dean P. One War at a Time: The International Dimensions of the U.S. Civil War. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1999.

May, Robert E., ed. The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1995.

Morrison, Michael A. “American Reaction to European Revolutions, 1848-1852: Sectionalism, Memory, and the Revolutionary Heritage,” Civil War History 49, no. 2 (June 2003): 111-132.

Potter, David M. The South and the Sectional Conflict. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968.

—. “Civil War,” in The Comparative Approach to American History. Edited by C. Van Woodward. New York: Basic Books, 1968.

Roberts, Timothy Mason. Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.

Rood, Daniel B. The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Schoen, Brian. The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

—. “The Fates of Republics and Empires Hang in the Balance: The United States and Europe during the Civil War Era,” OAH Magazine of History 27, no. 2 (April 2013): 45.

Sexton, Jay. “Steam Transport, Sovereignty, and Empire in North America, circa 1850-1885,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 4 (December 2017): 620-647.

Tucker, Ann L. Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020.

Walther, Karine V. Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Weeks, William Earl. Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from Revolution to the Civil War. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996.

Zimmerman, Andrew. “From the Rhine to the Mississippi: Property, Democracy, and Socialism in the American Civil War,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 1 (March 2015): 3-37.

—. “From the Second American Revolution to the First International and Back Again: Marxism, the Popular Front, and the American Civil War” in The World the Civil War Made. Edited by Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

GENERAL WORKS

Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Bayly, C.A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004: 165-166.

Beckert, Sven, “Merchants and Manufacturers in the Antebellum North” in Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy. Edited by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

—. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf, 2014.

—. Capitalism: A Global History. New York: Penguin, 2025.

Bender, Thomas, ed. Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

—. A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.

Bensel, Richard Franklin. Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Blair, William. “Imagining a Hemispheric Greater America,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 4 (December 2017): 507-511.

Bledsoe, Andrew S. “Beyond the Chessboard of War: Contingency, Command and Generalship in Civil War Military History,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 9, no. 2 (June 2019): 275-301.

Boritt, Gabor S., Mark E. Neely Jr., and Harold Holzer, “The European Image of Abraham Lincoln,” Winterthur Portfolio 21 (Summer-Autumn 1986): 158-160.

Browning, Judkin, and Timothy Silver. “Nature and Human Nature: Environmental Influences on the Union’s Failed Peninsula Campaign, 1862.” The Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 3 (September 2018): 388-415.

Colby, Robert. “Negroes Will Bear Fabulous Prices.” The Journal of the Civil War Era 10, no. 4 (December 2020): 439-468.

Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Durham, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Fogel, Robert William. Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994.

Foster, Gaines M. “What’s Not in a Name.” The Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 3 (September 2018): 416-454.

Geyer, Michael, and Charles Bright. “Global Violence and Nationalizing Wars in Eurasia and America: The Geo Politics of War in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Studies in History and Society 38, no. 4, (October 1996): 619-657.

Goldfield, David. America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.

Grandin, Greg. “The Liberal Tradition in the Americas: Rights, Sovereignty, and the Origins of Multilateralism,” American Historical Review 117 (February 2012): 68-91.

Greene, Jack P., and Philip D. Morgan, eds. Atlantic History: A Critical Reappraisal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Grimsley, Mark, and Brooks D. Simpson, eds. The Collapse of the Confederacy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

Guterl, Matthew. American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Hamalainen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

—, and Samuel Truett. “On Borderlands,” The Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (September 2011): 338-361.

Hunt, Aurora. The Army of the Pacific: Its Operations in California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Plains Region, Mexico, etc. 1860-1866. Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1951.

Hunt, Jeffrey William. The Last Battle of the Civil War: Palmetto Ranch. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.

Johnson, Walter. Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

—. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.

Jones, Howard. Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations to 1913. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.

Kerby, Robert L. Kirby Smith’s Confederacy: The Trans-Mississippi South, 1863-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972.

Lang, Andrew F. “Memory, the Texas Revolution, and Secession: The Birth of Confederate Nationalism in the Lone Star State,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 114, no. 1 (July 2010): 21-36.

Langley, Lester D. The Americans in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Levine, Bruce. The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

Lincoln, Abraham. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Edited by Roy P. Basler. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953-1955.

McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Marvel, William. The Alabama and the Kearsarge: The Sailor’s Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Morrison, Michael A. Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Nelson, Megan Kate. “Death in the Distance: Confederate Manifest Destiny and the Campaign for New Mexico, 1861-1862” in Civil War Tests: Testing the Limits of the United States. Edited by Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.

Prior, David M. et. al. “Teaching the Civil War in Global Context: A Discussion,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 1 (March 2015): 126-153.

Reynolds, Larry J. Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Richardson, Heather Cox. West From Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.

Rothman, Adam, “The Slave Power in the United States, 1783-1865” in Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy. Edited by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Rubin, Anne Sarah. A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Rugemer, Edward B. “Slave Rebels and Abolitionists: The Black Atlantic and the Coming of the Civil War,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 2 (June 2012): 179-202.

San Antonio Ledger. July 28, 1853.

Stokes, Donald. The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Silverman, Jason H. Lincoln and the Immigrant. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015.

Thomas, Emory M. The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Townsend, Stephen A. The Yankee Invasion of Texas. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006.

Tucker, Phillip Thomas. The Final Fury: Palmito Ranch, The Last Battle of the Civil War. Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2001.

U.S. War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880-1901.

Loreta’s Civil War: Had Grant fallen before my pistol

Velazquez experiences the Battle of Shiloh, and she restrains herself from personally killing U.S. Grant.

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Throughout 2016 and 2017, Stillness of Heart will share edited excerpts from the extraordinary memoir of Loreta Janeta Velazquez, who chronicled her adventures throughout the Civil War — either as herself, as a Confederate spy, or in disguise as Confederate Lt. Harry T. Buford. She fought and led men in terrible battles, fell in love, bore and lost children, and traveled throughout the U.S. and Europe, ultimately fulfilling her childhood dream of a rich and adventurous life.

You can read the entire 1876 memoir online here. Learn more about Velazquez (and the incredible documentary film Maria Agui Carter made about her) here.

Part 20: Velazquez experiences the Battle of Shiloh, and she restrains herself from personally killing U.S. Grant.

******

During the afternoon, I succeeded in gaining a good deal of very important information from several prisoners, and particularly from a sergeant belonging to the 27th Illinois Regiment. … From this prisoner I learned how desperate were the straits of the enemy and how anxiously they were awaiting the arrival of Buell with reinforcements, and I was, consequently, in despair, for I saw our brilliant victory already slipping from us, when Gen. [P.G.T.] Beauregard, who had succeeded to the command after the death of [Gen. Albert Sidney] Johnston, issued the order … for us to halt in our advance and to sleep on our arms all night instead of pursuing the routed enemy. …

When I heard Beauregard’s order, I felt that a fatal mistake was being committed … I could not resist the temptation of making an effort to find out for myself exactly what the situation within the enemy’s lines really was, and was willing to run all the risks of being caught and shot as a spy, rather than to endure the suspense of a long night of uncertainty. My station was with the advanced picket line, I having persuaded the captain to post me in a manner most favorable for carrying out my designs. I did not dare to tell him all I proposed to do. … I also refrained from telling my full design to my immediate companion of the picket station and made up a story about my intentions, which I thought would keep him quiet, and also promised to give him a drink of good whiskey when I got back if he would mind his own business. …

The command of [Union Maj. Gen. Lew] Wallace was stationed at this end of the Federal line, and I had a good deal of trouble to get past his pickets, being compelled to pause very frequently, and to keep close to the ground, watching favorable opportunities for advancing from one point to another. I finally, however, did manage to get past them, and gained a tolerably good point of observation near the river, where I could see quite plainly what was going on at the Landing.

It was just as I had anticipated. The Federals were crowding about the Landing in utter disorder and were without any means of crossing the river. They were completely in a trap, and so evidently keenly appreciated the fact, that the capture of the entire army ought to have been an easy matter. One more grand charge along the entire line, in the same brilliant fashion that we had opened the battle, and every officer and man on this side of the river would either have been slain or taken prisoner, while we would have gained possession of the Landing, and have prevented any of the expected reinforcements from crossing.

At this moment, I felt that if I could only command our army for two good hours I would be willing to die the moment the victory was won, while it maddened me to think that our commander should have permitted such an opportunity for inflicting a perfectly crushing defeat on the enemy to pass by unimproved. Beauregard, certainly, could not have understood the situation, or he would inevitably have pursued his advantage. …

While I was watching and chafing under the blunder that I was sure had been committed, a steamboat with reinforcements arrived at the Landing. These fresh troops were immediately formed and dispatched to the front. Another detachment came before I withdrew, overwhelmed with grief and disgust at the idea of our victory coming to nothing simply because there was not the requisite energy at headquarters to strike the final blow that was needed. …

There was, evidently, somebody on the Federal side who was bent on retrieving the disaster; for the hurried movements of the new troops, and the constant firing which the two gunboats — Tyler and Lexington — kept up, indicated an aggressiveness that augured unfavorably for our tired and badly cut-up army when the fight should reopen in the morning. The two gunboats had moved up to the mouth of Lick Creek and about dark commenced throwing shells into our lines in a manner … that demoralized our men more than any kind of attack they had been compelled to stand up under. I had been under musketry and artillery fire a number of times and did not find the sharp hiss of the bullets or the scream of the shells particularly pleasant. There was something horrible, however, about the huge missiles hurled by the gunboats. … These shells could easily be seen in the air for some seconds, and each individual that beheld them had an uncomfortable feeling that they were aiming directly at him, with a strong probability of striking. Sometimes they burst in the air, scattering in every direction; oftener they burst just as they struck, and the pieces inflicted ugly wounds if they happened to hit anybody, and occasionally they would bury themselves in the ground, and then explode, tearing holes large enough to bury a cart and horse in.

There was something almost comical in the way the soldiers, who had fought, without flinching, for hours in the face of a terrific artillery and musketry fire, attempted to dodge these shells. The hideous screams uttered by them just before striking [seemed] to drive all the courage out of the hearts of those against whom they were directed. Facing this kind of attack, without being able in any way to reply to it, was much more trying than the toughest fighting; and the rapidity with which the gunners on board the boats kept up their fire about dusk undoubtedly had a great effect in checking the Confederate’s advance and in saving the badly-beaten Federal army from utter rout. … A heavy rain storm in the middle of the night had much more to do with making the situation an unpleasant one than the firing from the gunboats, as it drenched every one to the skin and seriously disturbed the slumbers of the wearied soldiers.

While surveying from my post of observation in the bushes the movements of the routed Federal troops at the Landing, a small boat, with two officers in it, passed up the river. As it drew near the place where I was concealed, I recognized one of the officers as [Union Maj. Gen. U.S.] Grant, and the other one I knew by his uniform to be a general. Grant I had seen at Fort Donelson and I had met with pictures of him in some of the illustrated papers, so that I had no trouble in knowing him in spite of the darkness. The boat passed so close to me that I could occasionally catch a word or two of the conversation that was passing between the Federal commander and his associate, although, owing to the splashing of the oars, and the other noises, I could not detect what they were talking about.

My heart began to beat violently when I saw Grant, and my hand instinctively grasped my revolver. Both he, and the officer with him, were completely at my mercy, for they were within easy pistol shot, and my first impulse was to kill them, and run the risk of all possible consequences to myself. I did even go so far as to take a good aim, and in a second more, had I been a little firmer-nerved, the great Federal general, and the future president of the United States, would have finished his career. It was too much like murder, however, and I could not bring myself to do the deed. … Any soldier, however, will appreciate my feelings, for those who are bravest when standing face to face with the enemy will hesitate to take deliberate aim at a single man from an ambush. I therefore permitted Grant to escape, although I knew it was better for my cause to slay him than would be the loss of many hundreds less important soldiers.

Indeed, had Grant fallen before my pistol, the great battle of Shiloh might have had a far different termination, for his loss would have so completed the demoralization of the Federals that another rally would, in all probability, have been an impossibility. To have shot him, as I at first intended to do, would almost certainly have insured my own destruction, for large numbers of the Federals were so near me that I could plainly hear them talking and escape would have been almost out of the question. I would, however, have been willing to have made a sacrifice of myself, had I not been influenced in the course I did by other considerations than those of prudence. At any rate, I permitted my opportunity to slip by unimproved, and ere a great many moments the boat and its occupants were out of my reach, and I saw the two generals go on board one of the gunboats.

After I got back to my camp I could not help thinking that I had committed an error; but on reflecting over the matter in cooler moments, I was not sorry that I had resisted the temptation to pull the trigger when I had my finger on it. If I had fired, what would have been the consequences, so far as the results of the war were concerned? The Federals would have lost their ablest general, almost at the beginning of his career. Would they have found another man who would have commanded their armies with the brilliant success that Grant did? These are momentous questions, when we think of the events that have occurred since the battle of Shiloh. Much more than the life of a single man was probably dependent upon whether I concluded to fire or not, as I pointed my pistol at the men in the boat that April night.

After the boat had passed by, I was strongly tempted to go to the Federal camp and announce myself as a deserter. …. This, however, I thought rather too risky a proceeding, under all the circumstances and therefore concluded to get back to my post again. I succeeded in doing this, although not without considerable difficulty. … Capt. De Caulp was seriously perplexed at my report, but he said that attempting to instruct the general of an army was a risky business, and the probabilities were, that should I go to headquarters with my story, I would get into serious trouble. He further suggested that, perhaps, the general was as well informed with regard to the movements of the enemy as myself, if not better, and was making his arrangements accordingly, all of which did not relieve my mind of its premonitions of impending disaster. …

Wrapping myself in my blanket, therefore, I threw myself upon the ground and tried to sleep but I was so agitated and apprehensive for the morrow that slumber was an impossibility. Again and again as I tossed about, unable to close my eyes, I more than half repented of my resolution not to report the result of my spying expedition at headquarters. … Several times I fell into an uneasy doze, but the sound and refreshing slumbers that I so sorely needed would not visit my weary eyelids, and daybreak found me as wide awake as ever. …

The second day of the battle, therefore, opened favorably for the Federals, and we lost the advantage we might have gained by assuming the offensive, and hurling our forces on the enemy, with that elan for which our Southern soldiers were famous, and which had served them so well on many important occasions. The opportunity thus lost was never regained ; for although the fortunes of the fight seemed to waver, it was easily to be see that victory was no longer with the Confederates, and that the grievous mistake of the night before, in not promptly following up our success, and finishing our work then and there, would have all the terrible consequences I had feared. …

All my worst anticipations had come true, and the Federal army, which was almost annihilated the night before, had not only saved itself and recovered its lost ground but it had inflicted upon the Confederates a most disastrous defeat. This was the only name for it, for we were worse beaten than the Federals were at Bull Run, and the fact that we were not pursued on our retreat only proved that the Federal commanders, like our own at Bull Run, were either incapable of appreciating the importance of vigorous action under such circumstances, or were unable to follow up their advantages.

When I saw clearly that the day was lost, I determined to leave the field, and half resolved that if I succeeded in getting well away from our beaten army, I would give the whole thing up, and never strike another blow for the Confederacy as a soldier. I was scarcely able to contain myself for rage, not at the defeat, but at the inexcusable blunder that caused it. …. The Fort Donelson disaster, which I had hoped would be retrieved, had now been followed by another even more terrible, and the success of the Confederate cause was more remote, and more uncertain, than ever. It made me gnash my teeth with impotent fury to think of these things, and to have all my high hopes so suddenly dashed to the ground, just when the prospects for their realization seemed so bright.

Loreta’s Civil War: Strike terror to my soul

Velazquez finds herself at Fort Donelson as U.S. Grant’s Union forces attack and conquer the Confederate fort on the Cumberland River.

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Throughout 2016 and 2017, Stillness of Heart will share edited excerpts from the extraordinary memoir of Loreta Janeta Velazquez, who chronicled her adventures throughout the Civil War — either as herself, as a Confederate spy, or in disguise as Confederate Lt. Harry T. Buford. She fought and led men in terrible battles, fell in love, bore and lost children, and traveled throughout the U.S. and Europe, ultimately fulfilling her childhood dream of a rich and adventurous life.

You can read the entire 1876 memoir online here. Learn more about Velazquez (and the incredible documentary film Maria Agui Carter made about her) here.

Part 16: Velazquez finds herself at Fort Donelson as U.S. Grant’s Union forces attack and conquer the Confederate fort on the Cumberland River.

******

It was really, however, my intention to go back to Virginia, so soon as I could get relieved from the duty I was engaged in, and had that object in my mind when I sent in my resignation, although circumstances occurred that induced me to change my plans. My resignation was accepted without much hesitation at headquarters, and once more, after three weeks service as a military conductor, I was free to follow my own inclinations. …

It was because I thought that there would be a chance for me, ere a great while, in Kentucky, to demonstrate my value either as a soldier or as a spy — for some heavy fighting was undoubtedly about to begin. … I decided to try what could be done at the other end of the Confederate line of operations — at Bowling Green. …

On arrival at Gen. Hardee’s headquarters, I went to him, and showing him my commission, stated that I wanted to go into active service as a scout. He said that he thought there would soon be a chance for me; which was so nearly like the answers I had received from a number of other commanders, that I did not feel especially encouraged by it. …

I was bent, however, notwithstanding the disappointment under which I labored, on showing my devotion to the cause of Southern independence; and, in accordance with my general plan of not letting slip an opportunity of being on hand when there was any real, serious work to be done, I took part in the fight at Woodsonville, on Green River. … The affair at Woodsonville was something of a diversion from the monotony of camp life, but it did not satisfy my ambition or my intense desire for active service; and coming to the conclusion that lounging about Bowling Green and vicinity was much too slim a business for me, I decided to shift my quarters to where there was a somewhat better prospect of hard fighting to be done. It was by this time evident that the Federals intended making a determined attempt to capture Forts Henry and Donelson, on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, and as I felt confident that our people would make a brave and desperate resistance, I resolved to go and take a hand in the approaching battle. …

When I reached Fort Donelson, Gen. Pillow was in command, and preparations for meeting the enemy were being pushed forward with all possible energy. Fort Henry, on the Tennessee River, about fifteen miles from Fort Donelson, had been captured by the Federals, and Donelson, everyone knew, would be the next object of attack, both by land and water. The fortifications were very strong, although, being built for the purpose of commanding the river, they were weaker on the land than on the water side, and the great duty of the hour was the construction of earthworks for the protection of the exposed side. The labor required for the execution of this task was immense, but everyone went at it with a good will, and with a feeling of confidence in our ability to give the Federals the repulse that the garrison of Fort Henry had failed to do, although we were certain that they were about to assail us with a very large force, and that they considered the capture of the position a matter of such vital importance that they would spare no effort to accomplish it. …

My boy Bob and I, therefore, went into the trenches, and commenced to shovel dirt with all possible energy and good will. In the execution of such a task as this, Bob soon proved himself to be a much better man than I was, and he easily threw two shovelfuls to my one, and was apparently in a condition to keep on indefinitely, when I, finding that I had miscalculated my strength, was compelled to desist. There are some things which men can do better than women, and digging entrenchments in the frozen ground is one of them. … I repaired, with aching back and blistered hands, to the headquarters of Gen. Floyd, who had just arrived with his Virginians, where I lounged about, waiting for events so to shape themselves that I would be able to show my fighting qualities to advantage, for nature had evidently intended me for a warrior rather than for a dirt-digger.

The Federals made their appearance on the afternoon of Wednesday the 12th, and they could be seen at various points through the woods making preparations for commencing their attack by stationing themselves in advantageous positions for the environment of the fort on its land side, while the gunboats were to give us the benefit of their heavy ordnance from the river. … The battle opened on Thursday, February 13, 1862, and, as if to increase the discomforts and sufferings of the combatants, the weather, which had been quite moderate and pleasant, suddenly became intensely cold. On Thursday night, about eight o’clock, a tremendous storm of snow and sleet came on, to the full fury of which I was exposed. …

If repentance for my rashness in resolving to play a soldier’s part in the war was ever to overcome me, however, now was the time; and I confess that, as the sleet stung my face, and the biting winds cut me to the bones, I wished myself well out of it, and longed for the siege to be over in some shape, even if relief came only through defeat. The idea of defeat, however, was too intolerable to be thought of, and I banished it from my mind whenever it occurred to me, and argued with myself that I was no better than the thousands of brave men around, who were suffering from these wintry blasts as much as I.

The agonized cries of the wounded, and their piteous calls for water, really affected me more than my own discomfort. … Every now and then a shriek would be uttered that would strike terror to my soul, and make my blood run cold, as the fiercest fighting I had ever seen had not been able to do. I could face the cannon better than I could this bitter weather, and I could suffer myself better than I could bear to hear the cries and groans of these wounded men, lying out on the frozen ground, exposed to the beatings of this pitiless storm. …

In such a situation as the one I am describing, the most singular ideas run through one’s mind. The minutes are lengthened out into hours, and the hours into days, until the reckoning of time is lost; and as the past seems to fade away into a remoteness that makes the painlessness of yesterday appear like the fragment of a happy dream, so the future, when it will all be over, and the commonplace routine of uneventful everyday life will commence again, is as far off as a child’s imagination pictures heaven to be. We actually catch ourselves wondering whether it has always been so, and whether it will always be so until we die, and when we die, whether eternity will have anything better to offer. …

The battle lasted four days and nights, and, although the Confederates fought with desperate valor, they were at length compelled to yield, and the humiliation of defeat was added to the unspeakable sufferings which the conduct of a fierce and prolonged contest like this, in the middle of a winter of unparalleled severity, entailed upon them. Fortune, which had favored the side of the Confederacy in the battles in which I had heretofore been engaged, was against us now, however, and in spite of the fierce resistance which the garrison made to the Federal attacks, the result was, that nothing was left for us to do but surrender.

Kate Stone’s Civil War: Like mad demons

U.S. Grant’s stranglehold on Vicksburg overshadows Stone’s hopes for victory.

KS22

From 2012 to 2015, Stillness of Heart will share interesting excerpts from the extraordinary diary of Kate Stone, who chronicled her Louisiana family’s turbulent experiences throughout the Civil War era.

Learn more about Stone’s amazing life in 1861, 1862, 1863, 1864, 1865 and beyond. Click on each year to read more about her experiences. You can read the entire journal online here.

(Photo edited by Bob Rowen)

U.S. Grant’s stranglehold on Vicksburg overshadows Stone’s hopes for victory.

June 3, 1863

Near Monroe, La.

Lt. Valentine is back from his Northern prison and brings us blessed news of My Brother’s safety. He was wounded in the left arm above the elbow in the Battle at Chancellorsville but by this time has rejoined his regiment. … He could not tell us much that was interesting about the North. They were kept too close to see or hear anything. He represents prison life as most monotonous and wearisome, but they were not ill-treated.

He says My Brother is having a nice time in Richmond and regrets the hole in his coat more than the hole in his arm. The last Nature will heal, the first will take money. Lt. Valentine joined his regiment, which was under marching orders at once, and they are now somewhere in the swamp. We are massing quite a force there under Gen. Taylor. May we strike a telling blow.

The news from Vicksburg is very contradictory, but there seems to be constant fighting going on. We were repulsed in every engagement until the troops fell back behind our entrenchment, since then we have driven back every assault with heavy losses on their side. They have made desperate charges on the batteries only to fall back with great slaughter. Numbers of Negroes, placed by their friends in the forefront of the battles, have been slain. Poor things, I am sorry for them. Gen. Grant has surrounded Vicksburg with an immense army. The struggle has commenced, but the great battle is still to be fought. Our friends around Vicksburg must have lost everything before this.

June 5

Aunt Laura and Mrs. Young have had the long-expected falling out, and Aunt Laura has gone to board about three miles from here. We think that in a short time the fate of Vicksburg will be decided, and she will know whether to go on to Vicksburg or to Texas with us. Mamma is also waiting in the hope that our troops will drive the Yankees from the swamp and we can go back home until fall or at least get what is left of the furniture. …

I am trying to braid a pretty braid of rye straw, as I can get no palmetto here, and I have promised Lt. Valentine a hat. Plaited one for Johnny in less than a day. It is rough and ugly, but he likes it. It is so light. Hatmaking is as much the rage here now as it was last summer in the swamp. …

We had a charming ride the other evening. Went out huckleberrying but not a berry did we see. The ride part of the way was over high hills shaded by towering longleaf pines and carpeted with tall woods grass and wild flowers, and sloping in green waves from the hills lay deep ferny hollows. …

June 10

We have bidden Aunt Laura and Beverly a long adieu I fear. They started yesterday for Mississippi to join Dr. Buckner, if possible. They go to Harrisonburg on a boat and then through the country to the river, if possible. They are under the care of Mr. John Curry, and it is doubtful whether they can get on. But Aunt Laura, or rather Mamma, thought it better for her to attempt it than to go to Texas. Aunt Laura wished to go on with us, but Mamma feared she could not stand the hardships of the long trip camping out and the rough life with little hope of seeing or hearing from Dr. Buckner until the war is over. We hated so to see her go. We shall miss them for a long time. We went in to Monroe and saw them off. Sent numbers of letters by them.

The news of today is that our men were repulsed at Milliken’s Bend and are falling back to Delhi. A very different account from the first. It is hard to believe that Southern soldiers and Texans at that have been whipped by a mongrel crew of white and black Yankees. There must be some mistake. …

All of us were busy from 5 o’clock until dusk making mattresses for the wounded soldiers expected at Monroe from the fight at Milliken’s Bend. It is said the Negro regiments fought there like mad demons, but we cannot believe that. We know from long experience they are cowards. …

Aunt Laura spent Sunday with us, our last day together. She went off in fear and trembling but is determined to get through if possible. She is such a sensitive, nervous woman that it will be a great ordeal for her, but it could not be helped.

Julia Barr and I are quite friends. I like Miss Sarah very much, but she is so absorbed with Mrs. Morancy that we see little of her. We are staying so long I fear Mrs. Wadley will get tired of us, and so we are all reconciled to making an early start to Texas.

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

Has Madonna gone crazy? / Sandals and flip-flop advice / NBC’s Olympics coverage slammed / U.S. Grant’s third star / Too many Agrippinas

Most of these great items come from my Twitter feed or Facebook news feed. Follow me on Twitter and on Facebook for more fascinating videos, articles, essays and criticism.

1. The Truth About the Shoes of Summer, Sandals, Flip Flops and Wedges
By Steve Rosenberg | The Huffington Post | July 25
“Let the truth be told, most shoes are not designed for comfort — only for fashion.”

2. Nazis, breasts and guns: Has Madonna lost it?
By Laura Barcella | Salon | July 27
“Madonna’s European shows have included swastikas, sex and violence. Is it more than the usual button-pushing?”

3. NBC lambasted over banal butchering of opening ceremony
By Emma G. Keller | The Guardian | July 28
“Tim Berners-Lee? Who’s that? Madagascar? Oh, like the kids movie! If you’re going to make us wait hours to watch the ceremony live, NBC, the least you could have done is keep quiet”

4. Pot of crusader gold found where Richard I defeated Salahaddin
Al Arabiya | July 28
“The castle was used by the Crusaders as a stronghold between 1241 and its destruction in 1265 when it was attacked by the Egyptian Sultan Baybars.”

5. Lincoln, Congress, Grant, and the Lieutenant General Act
By Brooks D. Simpson | U.S. Capitol Historical Society | May 4
“The act made Ulysses S. Grant a lieutenant general and gave him command of the Union Army.”

6. They loaded mortars in the war, so now what?
By Pauline Jelinek | Associated Press | July 25
“U.S. combat troops patrol dusty pathways in Afghanistan, look for hidden roadside bombs, load and fire mortar shells at insurgents’ positions. So when they come home, how will that help them land a civilian job?”

7. Jakob Trollback rethinks the music video
TED | April 2008
“What would a music video look like if it were directed by the music, purely as an expression of a great song, rather than driven by a filmmaker’s concept?”

8. Sorting out the Agrippinas
By Mary Beard | A Don’s Life | July 24
“One of the problems of the first century AD is that there are simply too many Agrippinas.”

9. A Black Spy in the Confederate White House
By Lois Leveen | Disunion :: The New York Times | June 21
“Journalists, historians, even the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame and the C.I.A. have celebrated the extraordinary Mary Bowser, yet most Americans have never heard of her.”

10. Mariel Boatlift from Cuba
Witness :: BBC News | May 25
“In 1980, more than 100,000 Cubans left the island in a boatlift from Mariel harbour.”

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TUNES

Tonight I’m spending some time with the blues, specifically with the wonderful Texas Blues Café. Check out the line-up and then listen here.

1. Ron Artis Family Band — You Can’t Lie To Grandma
2. Z-Tribe — Defending the Blues
3. Ian Moore — Pay No Mind
4. John Mayall — With You
5. Grace Potter — Stop The Bus
6. Jerry Forney Blues Band — I’ll Play The Blues
7. Preacher Stone — Old Fashion Ass Whoopin
8. The Buddaheads — Howlin’ At The Moon
9. Lost Immigrants — Can’t You See
10. Paul Thorn — Pimps & Preachers
11. Jeff Strahan — Amen To The Blues
12. Stony Larue — Solid Gone
13. Bob Seger — Come To Papa