Augusta Browne

The first comprehensive biography of any American woman musician born before the Civil War brings to life a composer whose story is both old-fashioned and strikingly modern.

E. Merton Coulter's biography of William Montague Browne portrays the life of an Irish journalist living in the north who moved south to adopt the Confederate cause. Born in County Mayo, Ireland, Browne moved to the U. S. in 1852 to be an editor at the New York Journal of Commerce. In 1859 he moved to Washington, D.C., where he edited and owned the Washington Constitution. As a journalist, Browne was an ardent champion of the southern cause and when Georgia seceded he moved south. During the Civil War he served as Director of Conscription in Georgia, aide-de-camp to President Davis, and brigadier general. Browne also took part in the defense of Savannah. After the war, Browne moved to Athens, Georgia, where he edited the Southern Banner, studied law, was admitted to the Georgia bar, and tried farming on a plantation in Oglethorpe County. Later he founded and edited the Southern Farm and Home and became secretary of the Carolina Life Insurance Co., of which Jefferson Davis was president. After the failure of this company, Browne returned to Athens and was elected the first Professor of History and Political Science at the University of Georgia.

An exciting and accurate portrayal of the military action in the southern colonies that led to a new American nation. A companion to Pancake’s study of the northern campaign, 1777: The Year of the Hangman, this volume deals with the American Revolution in the Carolinas. Together, the two books constitute a complete history of the Revolutionary War. Pancake tells a gripping story of the southern campaign, the scene of a grim and deadly guerilla war. In the savage internecine struggle, Americans fought Americans with a fierceness that appalled even a veteran like General Nathanael Greene. "Utilizing extensive manuscript collections, John Pancake explains not why the colonists won the War of Independence, but rather why the British lost. Yorktown, he argues, was not the result of a momentary oversight by the British navy, but the final consequence of the longstanding failure of British military and political leadership." So said the Journal of Southern History when This Destructive War was first published in 1985. The Florida Historical Quarterly further opined, "Pancake has given us a well-researched and beautifully—and tightly—written book." General readers as well as scholars and students of the American Revolution will welcome anew this classic, definitive study of the campaign in the Carolinas.