Confederate Admiral

"While Buchanan's Civil War experiences helped define the drama of the period, his fifty-year naval career illuminates the sweeping changes in the U.S. Navy of the antebellum years."--BOOK JACKET.

Richard Stoddert Ewell is best known as the Confederate General selected by Robert E. Lee to replace "Stonewall" Jackson as chief of the Second Corps in the Army of Northern Virginia. Ewell is also remembered as the general who failed to drive Federal troops from the high ground of Cemetery Hill and Culp's Hill during the Battle of Gettysburg. Many historians believe that Ewell's inaction cost the Confederates a victory in this seminal battle and, ultimately, cost the Civil War. During his long military career, Ewell was never an aggressive warrior. He graduated from West Point and served in the Indian wars in Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, and Arizona. In 1861 he resigned his commission in the U.S. Army and rushed to the Confederate standard. Ewell saw action at First Manassas and took up divisional command under Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign and in the Seven Days' Battles around Richmond. A crippling wound and a leg amputation soon compounded the persistent manic-depressive disorder that had hindered his ability to make difficult decisions on the battlefield. When Lee reorganized the Army of Northern Virginia in May of 1863, Ewell was promoted to lieutenant general. At the same time he married a widowed first cousin who came to dominate his life -- often to the disgust of his subordinate officers -- and he became heavily influenced by the wave of religious fervor that was then sweeping through the Confederate Army. In Confederate General R.S. Ewell, Paul D. Casdorph offers a fresh portrait of a major -- but deeply flawed -- figure in the Confederate war effort, examining the pattern of hesitancy and indecisiveness that characterized Ewell's entire military career. This definitive biography probes the crucial question of why Lee selected such an obviously inconsistent and unreliable commander to lead one-third of his army on the eve of the Gettysburg Campaign. Casdorph describes Ewell's intriguing life and career with penetrating insights into his loyalty to the Confederate cause and the Virginia ties that kept him in Lee's favor for much of the war. Complete with riveting descriptions of key battles, Ewell's biography is essential reading for Civil War historians.

This vivid and impeccably researched book details the life and Civil War battles of Admiral David Farragut. It shines a spotlight and shares new details about the admiral's leadership of the mission to recapture the port of New Orleans from the Confederacy - a campaign historians consider one of the most daring in military history. Farragut is perhaps best known for his order to “Damn the torpedoes.... Full speed ahead." during the Battle of Mobile Bay, which has become a touchstone and rallying cry for the United States Navy. A sweeping and riveting telling of Farragut's career and campaigns, Lincoln's Admiral offers fascinating insights into the strategy and decisions of one of the greatest military leaders on the Civil War - and of all time.

An award-winning biography of one of the Confederacy’s most successful—and most criticized—generals. Winner of the 2014 Albert Castel Book Award and the 2014 Walt Whitman Award John Bell Hood died at forty-eight after a brief illness in August 1879, leaving behind the first draft of his memoirs, Advance and Retreat: Personal Experiences in the United States and Confederate States Armies. Published posthumously the following year, the memoirs immediately became as controversial as their author. A careful and balanced examination of these controversies, however, coupled with the recent discovery of Hood’s personal papers—which were long considered lost—finally sets the record straight in this book. Hood’s published version of many of the major events and controversies of his Confederate military career were met with scorn and skepticism. Some described his memoirs as merely a polemic against his arch-rival Joseph E. Johnston. These opinions persisted through the decades and reached their nadir in 1992, when an influential author described Hood’s memoirs as a bitter, misleading, and highly biased treatise replete with distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications. Without any personal papers to contradict them, many writers portrayed Hood as an inept, dishonest opium addict and a conniving, vindictive cripple of a man. One went so far as to brand him a fool with a license to kill his own men. What most readers don’t know is that nearly all of these authors misused sources, ignored contrary evidence, and/or suppressed facts sympathetic to Hood. Stephen M. Hood, a distant relative of the general, embarked on a meticulous forensic study of the common perceptions and controversies of his famous kinsman. His careful examination of the original sources utilized to create the broadly accepted facts about John Bell Hood uncovered startlingly poor scholarship by some of the most well-known and influential historians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These discoveries, coupled with his access to a large cache of recently discovered Hood papers, many penned by generals and other officers who served with Hood, confirm Hood’s account that originally appeared in his memoir and resolve, for the first time, some of the most controversial aspects of Hood’s long career.

Jesse and Lee share a house owned by a very nice Chinese dentist, where it rains in the hall. They move to cabins on the cliffs at Big Sur where the deafening croaks of frogs can be temporarily silenced by the cry, 'Campbell's Soup'. Ultimately, we learn how the frogs are permanently silenced . . . and dreams disperse around a fire into 186,000 endings per second. In anticipating flower power and the ideals of the Sixties, Brautigan's debut novel was at least at decade before its time and remains a weird and brilliant classic.

"Life of Rear Admiral John Randolph Tucker, authored by James Henry Rochelle, offers a biographical portrait of a distinguished naval figure. Rochelle's meticulous research and storytelling provide insights into the life and accomplishments of Rear Admiral John Randolph Tucker. This book commemorates Tucker's contributions to naval history, shedding light on his naval career and the impact he had on maritime affairs."

As a leading Confederate general, Braxton Bragg (1817–1876) earned a reputation for incompetence, for wantonly shooting his own soldiers, and for losing battles. This public image established him not only as a scapegoat for the South's military failures but also as the chief whipping boy of the Confederacy. The strongly negative opinions of Bragg's contemporaries have continued to color assessments of the general's military career and character by generations of historians. Rather than take these assessments at face value, Earl J. Hess's biography offers a much more balanced account of Bragg, the man and the officer. While Hess analyzes Bragg's many campaigns and battles, he also emphasizes how his contemporaries viewed his successes and failures and how these reactions affected Bragg both personally and professionally. The testimony and opinions of other members of the Confederate army--including Bragg's superiors, his fellow generals, and his subordinates--reveal how the general became a symbol for the larger military failures that undid the Confederacy. By connecting the general's personal life to his military career, Hess positions Bragg as a figure saddled with unwarranted infamy and humanizes him as a flawed yet misunderstood figure in Civil War history.