A Hundred Days To Richmond

In the spring of 1864, after three bloody years of civil war and with victory seemingly within reach for the Northern armies, John Brough, Ohio's energetic wartime governor, offered his state's militia for 100 days of federal service. Ordered east for duty in forts, railways, and prisons, they freed veteran troops to make the last great push against Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy. History soon overtook the Ohioans, however. They fought at Monocacy with Lew Wallace and under the watchful eye of Abraham Lincoln at Fort Stevens. They battled Mosby and other feared Southern guerrillas in Virginia and West Virginia. They fell to John Hunt Morgan's cavalry in Kentucky. They toiled and fought against thunderous Petersburg.

During the American Civil War, Washington, D.C. was the most heavily fortified city in North America. As President Abraham Lincoln's Capital, the city became the symbol of Union determination, as well as a target for Robert E. Lee's Confederates. As a Union army and navy logistical base, it contained a complex of hospitals, storehouses, equipment repair facilities, and animal corrals. These were in addition to other public buildings, small urban areas, and vast open space that constituted the capital on the Potomac. To protect Washington with all it contained and symbolized, the Army constructed a shield of fortifications: 68 enclosed earthen forts, 93 supplemental batteries, miles of military roads, and support structures for commissary, quartermaster, engineer, and civilian labor force, some of which still exist today. Thousands of troops were held back from active operations to garrison this complex. And the Commanders of the Army of the Potomac from Irvin McDowell to George Meade, and informally U.S. Grant himself, always had to keep in mind their responsibility of protecting this city, at the same time that they were moving against the Confederate forces arrayed against them. Revised in style, format, and content, the new edition of Mr. Lincoln's Forts is the premier historical reference and tour guide to the Civil War defenses of Washington, D.C.

"The time has come now," Abraham Lincoln told his cabinet as he presented the preliminary draft of a "Proclamation of Emancipation." Lincoln's effort to end slavery has been controversial from its inception-when it was denounced by some as an unconstitutional usurpation and by others as an inadequate half-measure-up to the present, as historians have discounted its import and impact. At the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, Louis Masur seeks to restore the document's reputation by exploring its evolution. Lincoln's Hundred Days is the first book to tell the full story of the critical period between September 22, 1862, when Lincoln issued his preliminary Proclamation, and January 1, 1863, when he signed the final, significantly altered, decree. In those tumultuous hundred days, as battlefield deaths mounted, debate raged. Masur commands vast primary sources to portray the daily struggles and enormous consequences of the president's efforts as Lincoln led a nation through war and toward emancipation. With his deadline looming, Lincoln hesitated and calculated, frustrating friends and foes alike, as he reckoned with the anxieties and expectations of millions. We hear these concerns, from poets, cabinet members and foreign officials, from enlisted men on the front and free blacks as well as slaves. Masur presents a fresh portrait of Lincoln as a complex figure who worried about, listened to, debated, prayed for, and even joked with his country, and then followed his conviction in directing America toward a terrifying and thrilling unknown.

Johan Martin Dostmann was born in 1730 in Nassig, Germany, and today his descendants can be found throughout the United States of America. One of them is Roy C. Ritter III, and he traces his family’s origins in this detailed history. Dostmann immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1752 with his sister and several friends and cousins, and so began the story of an enduring German-American family. After some time in Frederick County, Maryland, and Washington County, Pennsylvania, the family, which became known as Dustman, took advantage of the settlement opportunities in the newly formed Connecticut Western Reserve of Ohio, joining the state’s earliest pioneers. Johan Martin Dostmann died before that journey, but his surviving children and grandchildren made their mark in Ohio, particularly in Trumbull and Mahoning counties, where they prospered. Covering the first four generations of the Dustman family, this book will be a valuable resource for the descendants of Johan Martin Dostmann.

Napoleon was, after his defeat at Leipzig, “granted” the island of Elba to rule. He soon found this unsatisfactory, and, early in 1815, left for the south of France, and marched on Paris to some acclamation. He was, all too quickly, defeated at Waterloo. Observing all this was Byron’s friend J.C. Hobhouse, an ardent Bonapartist. Byron, who posed as one, never answered his letters from the thick of things in Paris. This book is structured in four layers, and begins with an essay about Byron and Napoleon, which is then followed by Byron’s poems about Napoleon and Hobhouse’s diary. Hobhouse’s letters conclude the volume. Most of Hobhouse’s diary has never been published. The book is published, aptly, on the bicentenary of The Hundred Days.

James McPherson’s classic book For Cause & Comrades explained “why men fought in the Civil War”—and spurred countless other historians to ask and attempt to answer the same question. But few have explored why men did not fight. That’s the question Paul Taylor answers in this groundbreaking Civil War history that examines the reasons why at least 60 percent of service-eligible men in the North chose not to serve and why, to some extent, their communities allowed them to do so. Did these other men not feel the same patriotic impulses as their fellow citizens who rushed to the enlistment office? Did they not believe in the sanctity of the Union? Was freeing men held in chains under chattel slavery not a righteous moral crusade? And why did some soldiers come to regret their enlistment and try to leave the military? ’Tis Not Our War answers these questions by focusing on the thoughts, opinions, and beliefs of average civilians and soldiers. Taylor digs deep into primary sources—newspapers, diaries, letters, archival manuscripts, military reports, and published memoirs—to paint a vivid and richly complex portrait of men who questioned military service in the Civil War and to show that the North was never as unified in support of the war as portrayed in much of America’s collective memory. This book adds to our understanding of the Civil War and the men who fought—and did not fight—in it.