Kirk S Civil War Raids Along The Blue Ridge

In the Southern Appalachian Mountains, no character was more loved or despised than George W. Kirk. This inured Union officer led a group of deserters on numerous raids between Tennessee and North Carolina in 1863, terrorizing Confederate soldiers and civilians alike. At Camp Vance in Morganton, Kirk's mounted raiders showcased guerrilla warfare penetrating deep within Confederate territory. As Home Guards struggled to keep Western North Carolina communities safe, Kirk's men brought fear and violence throughout the region for their ability to strike and create havoc without warning. Civil War historian Michael C. Hardy examines the infamous history of George W. Kirk and the Civil War along the Blue Ridge.

This is an account of the seven military operations conducted by the Confederacy against deserters and disloyalists and the concomitant internal war between secessionists and those who opposed secession in the Quaker Belt of central North Carolina. It explains how the "outliers" (deserters and draft-dodgers) managed to elude capture and survive despite extensive efforts by Confederate authorities to hunt them down and return them to the army. The author discusses the development of the secret underground pro-Union organization the Heroes of America, and how its members utilized the Underground Railroad, dug-out caves, and an elaborate system of secret signals and communications to elude the "hunters." Numerous instances of murder, rape, torture and other brutal acts and many skirmishes between gangs of deserters and Confederate and state troops are recounted. In a revisionist interpretation of the Tar Heel wartime peace movement, the author argues that William Holden's peace crusade was in fact a Copperhead insurgency in which peace agitators strove for a return of North Carolina and the South to the Union on the Copperhead basis--that is, with the institution of slavery protected by the Constitution in the returning states.

Is it possible that the woman who raised Abraham Lincoln was actually his half-sister, and that the man he knew as his grandfather had conducted a scandalous affair with a servant girl? Was Nancy Dude really a murderous witch, or the victim of relentless calamities that would stretch anyone beyond the bounds of sanity? Should Horace Kephart be considered a hero for his work to protect the area of the Great Smokies, where a moutain was named in his honor, or a drunken scoundrel who uprooted families from the homes and farms they’d had for generations? From Sam Houston’s childhood among the Cherokee to the mysterious “road to nowhere”, Great SmokiesMyths and Legends makes history fun and pulls back the curtain on some of this national park’s most fascinating and compelling stories.

In the mountains of western North Carolina, the Civil War was fought on different terms than those found throughout most of the South. Though relatively minor strategically, incursions by both Confederate and Union troops disrupted life and threatened the

In 1882, William Simpson Pearson, writing under the pseudonym Brinsley Matthews, published Well-Nigh Reconstructed, a thinly disguised autobiographical novel excoriating the enormous societal changes that had beset the former Confederacy during Reconstruction. Pearson’s work was especially notable in that the author was a onetime Radical Republican and supporter of Ulysses S. Grant’s bid for the presidency. A product of Pearson’s perception that northern Reconstruction policies had devastated his native North Carolina, the book set in motion a genre of politically motivated novels that would culminate near the turn of the twentieth century with Thomas Nelson Page’s Red Rock and later Thomas Dixon Jr.’s infamous The Clansman. Though set in Virginia and Alabama, it is clear that Well-Nigh Reconstructed drew heavily on Pearson’s own experiences and that it was conceived as a direct response to A Fool’s Errand, a pro-Reconstruction novel by fellow North Carolinian Albion Tourgée. Echoing Pearson’s own disillusionment with the Radical Republicans, the novel’s protagonist, Archie Moran, comes to see Radical Reconstruction as an attempt to turn the South into a carbon copy of the North, and through a series of encounters involving corrupt carpetbaggers, greedy politicians, and the Klan trials of the late 1870s, Moran grows weary of politics altogether and resigns his Republican Party affiliation. For Pearson and his doppelganger, Moran, Reconstruction became a vast breeding ground for corruption. Featuring an extensive introduction by historian Paul D. Yandle, who sets the political and regional scene of Reconstruction North Carolina, this reissue of Well-Nigh Reconstructed will shed new light on the ways in which sectionalism, regionalism, and the embrace of white supremacy tended to undermine the recently reconstituted Union among Appalachian residents.

A detailed collection of fifty full-color maps, each one representing a single month of the Civil War, chronicles the war's progression on all fronts, including battles, sieges, infantry campaigns, naval operations, cavalry raids, and shifts of national frontiers, accompanied by others documenting the political state of the union on the eve of war and the western campaigns.

Eleven battles and seventy-three skirmishes were fought in North Carolina during the Civil War. Although the number of men involved in many of these engagements was comparatively small, the campaigns and battles themselves were crucial in the grand strate

This Civil War story follows the real-life exploits of a married couple who fought side-by-side as soldiers for the North, the South, and finally for a band of marauding, pro-Union partisans.