The Cavalry Battle That Saved The Union

Civil War historians have long been puzzled by Pickett’s seemingly suicidal frontal attack on the Union center at Gettysburg. Here, for the first time, Paul D. Walker reveals Robert E. Lee’s true plan for victory at Gettysburg: a simultaneous strike against the Union center from the front and rear—Pickett’s infantry to charge the front, while Stuart’s cavalry struck the rear. The frontal assault by Pickett went off as scheduled, but as Stuart’s forces approached from the rear, they encountered a Union cavalry contingent. As the forces joined, the Union cavalry leader was quickly killed, and command fell to one of the most dynamic figures in American history—George Armstrong Custer. What followed was America’s greatest cavalry battle: 7,500 Confederate horsemen ranged against 5,000 Union cavalry, Jeb Stuart against George Custer, with the outcome of the Civil War at stake.

What happens when a smart, energetic, and courageous cavalry officer joins forces with a really amazing horse with similar qualities? Well, just about anything! Given the right circumstances, this team of two exceptional individuals might even change the course of history. Based in part on the exciting saga of "Sheridan's Ride," which occurred during the Battle of Cedar Creek on October 19, 1864, this "true tale" introduces the young reader to the richness of Civil War stories by retracing the life of Winchester, the black horse of General "Little Phil" Sheridan, from the young colt's first experiences in the U.S. Army through his retirement after the war. Extensively researched - but written with the young student in mind - this historical narrative is an enjoyable fast-paced read for all ages. The reader is certain to come away with a greater appreciation for why good character always counts, and why Winchester the horse, who had plenty of it, is the most honored animal in U.S. military history. To further the youthful reader's understanding of the subject matter - and to foster a conversation about the plot and the main themes of the Civil War between students, parents, and teachers - the author has included a useful list of discussion questions (with suggested answers), a glossary of terms, easy-to-understand maps, a list of additional resources, and suggestions of places for students to visit. The author, Bruce D. Slawter, is a retired Air Force officer and Energy Department official living in Northern Virginia. He has given numerous talks on the Civil War to audiences of all ages. The author has traveled the globe on business and during vacations with his family, always searching for exciting fact-based stories along the way. He is thrilled to have discovered Winchester in his own backyard and to be able to introduce the saga of this unusual American hero to a new generation.

George Armstrong Custer stands as the classic example of a fallen American hero. During his lifetime, he was revered by a grateful nation as the youngest, bravest, most colorful, and most successful general of the Civil War. Then, almost immediately after his death at the Little Bighorn, he was reviled as an incompetent, immature butcher who had recklessly led his regiment into a needless slaughter in the search for glory. In The Custer America Forgot, 1861 1865, author Paul D. Walker narrates the untold story of the young general, a man who had a special fearless determination and natural ability to win battle after battle for Union forces and who led more than one hundred battles that produced significant victories. Thoroughly researched, this study takes an in-depth look at Custer his birth in 1839, his childhood, his schooling at West Point, his young adulthood, his exploits as a military leader, his marriage to Libby, and his legendary last stand. Walker reveals the story of one of the United States' Greatest national heroes and restores Custer to his rightful place in American history.

An award-winning historical study of the important role played by Union and Confederate horse soldiers on the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg. The Union army’s victory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 3, 1863, is widely considered to have been the turning point in America’s War between the States. But the valuable contributions of the mounted troops, both Northern and Rebel, in the decisive three-day conflict have gone largely unrecognized. Acclaimed Civil War historian Eric J. Wittenberg now gives the cavalries their proper due. In Gettysburg’s Forgotten Cavalry Actions, Wittenberg explores three important mounted engagements undertaken during the battle and how they influenced the final outcome. The courageous but doomed response by Brig. Gen. Elon J. Farnsworth’s cavalry brigade in the wake of Pickett’s Charge is recreated in fascinating detail, revealing the fatal flaws in the general’s plan to lead his riders against entrenched Confederate infantry and artillery. The tenacious assault led by Brig. Gen. Wesley Merritt on South Cavalry Field is also examined, as is the strategic victory at Fairfield by Southern troops that nearly destroyed the Sixth US Cavalry and left Hagerstown Road open, enabling General Lee’s eventual retreat. Winner of the prestigious Bachelder-Coddington Award for historical works concerning the Battle of Gettysburg, Eric J. Wittenberg’s Gettysburg’s Forgotten Cavalry Actions rights a long-standing wrong by lifting these all-important engagements out of obscurity. A must-read for Civil War buffs everywhere, it completes the story of the battle that changed American history forever.

George Armstrong Custer, one of the most familiar figures of nineteenth-century American history, is known almost exclusively as a soldier, his brilliant military career culminating in catastrophe at Little Bighorn. But Custer, author James E. Mueller suggests, had the soul of an artist, not of a soldier. Ambitious Honor elaborates this radically new perspective, arguing that an artistic passion for creativity and recognition drove Custer to success—and, ultimately, to the failure that has overshadowed his notable achievements. Custer's ambition is well known and played itself out on the battlefield and in his persistent quest for recognition. What Ambitious Honor provides is the context for understanding how Custer's theatrical personality took shape and thrived, beginning with his training at a teaching college before he entered West Point. Teaching, Mueller notes, requires creativity and performance, both of which fascinated and served Custer throughout his life—in his military leadership, his politics, and even his attention-getting, self-designed uniforms. But Custer's artistic personality emerges most clearly in his writing career, where he displayed a talent for what we now call literary journalism. Ambitious Honor offers a close look at Custer's work as a best-selling author right up to the time of his death, when he was writing another book and planning a speaking tour after the 1876 campaign against the Sioux and Cheyenne. Custer's fate at Little Bighorn was so dramatic that it sealed his place in the national story—and obscured, Mueller contends, the more interesting facets of his true nature. Ambitious Honor shows us Custer anew, as an artist thrust into the military because of the times in which he lived. This nuanced portrait, for the first time delineating his sense of image, whether as creator or consumer, forever alters Custer's own image in our view.

A legendary professor at Louisiana State University, T. Harry Williams not only produced such acclaimed works as Lincoln and the Radicals, Lincoln and His Generals, and a biography of Huey Long that won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but he also mentored generations of students who became distinguished historians in their own right. In this collection, ten of those former students, along with one author greatly inspired by Williams’s example, offer incisive essays that honor both Williams and his career-long dedication to sound, imaginative scholarship and broad historical inquiry. The opening and closing essays, fittingly enough, deal with Williams himself: a biographical sketch by Frank J. Wetta and a piece by Roger Spiller that place Williams in larger historical perspective among writers on Civil War generalship. The bulk of the book focuses on Robert E. Lee and a number of the commanders who served under him, starting with Charles Roland’s seminal article “The Generalship of Robert E. Lee,” the only one in the collection that has been previously published. Among the essays that follow Roland’s are contributions by Brian Holden Reid on the ebb and flow of Lee’s reputation, George C. Rable on Stonewall Jackson’s deep religious commitment, A. Wilson Greene on P. G. T. Beauregard’s role in the Petersburg Campaign, and William L. Richter on James Longstreet as postwar pariah. Together these gifted historians raise a host of penetrating and original questions about how we are to understand America’s defining conflict in our own time—just as T. Harry Williams did in his. And by encompassing such varied subjects as military history, religion, and historiography, Lee and His Generals demonstrates once more what a fertile field Civil War scholarship remains. Lawrence Lee Hewitt is professor of history emeritus at Southeastern Louisiana University. Most recently, he and Arthur W. Bergeron, now deceased, coedited three volumes of essays under the collective title Confederate Generals in the Western Theater. Thomas E. Schott served for many years as a historian for the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Special Operations Command. He is the author of Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography, which won both the Society of American Historians Award and the Jefferson Davis Award.

*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the fighting and wounding of Stuart *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "He told me he never expected to live through the war, and that if we were conquered, that he did not want to live." - Major Andrew R. Venable, Stuart's aide Alongside Robert E. Lee, no one epitomized the chivalry and heroism celebrated by the Lost Cause more than J.E.B. Stuart, the most famous cavalry officer of the Civil War. Stuart was equal parts great and grandiose while leading the cavalry for the Confederacy in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Stuart was a throwback to the past, colorfully dressing with capes, sashes, and an ostrich plumed hat, while sporting cologne and a heavy beard, but he was also brilliant in conducting reconnaissance, and he proved capable of leading both cavalry and infantry at battles like Chancellorsville. As the eyes and ears of Robert E. Lee's army, none were better, despite the fact that he was only in his late 20s and early 30s during the Civil War, far younger than most men of senior rank. In early May of 1864, Union cavalry commander Philip Sheridan organized a massive raid against Confederate supply and railroad lines near Richmond. On May 9, the largest cavalry force ever assembled in the Eastern Theater, over 10,000 horsemen and 32 artillery pieces, arched southeast intending to slip behind Lee's army and head toward Richmond. By doing so, they could harass supply lines, cut up railroad tracks behind Lee's army, and at least feint towards Richmond in a way that would bring about a confrontation. This would give Sheridan the chance to seek his biggest objective: eliminate Stuart's cavalry. Moving aggressively, Sheridan crossed the North Anna River and seized Beaver Dam Station on the Virginia Central Railroad. Anticipating their arrival, Stuart and his cavalrymen had already destroyed most of the critical military supplies, so Sheridan's men destroyed railroad cars, ripped out telegraph lines, and rescued hundreds of Union prisoners of war who had been captured at the Battle of the Wilderness days earlier. Around noon on May 11, 1864, the two forces met at Yellow Tavern, an abandoned inn six miles north of Richmond, Virginia. Not only did the Union outnumber the Confederates, it had superior firepower because many of the horsemen were armed with newly-developed rapid-firing Spencer carbine rifles. Despite the disadvantages, however, the Confederates proved resilient for several hours as both sides conducted charges and countercharges, but during one of them, Stuart came into view of some retreating Union soldiers of George Custer's 5th Michigan cavalry. One of them, a 48 year old sharpshooter named John A. Huff, found himself only about 20 yards away from the vaunted and easily recognizable Stuart. Huff turned and shot Stuart with his .44-caliber pistol, sending a bullet slicing through his stomach and exiting his back, just right of his spine. In excruciating pain, an ambulance took Stuart to the home of his brother-in-law Dr. Charles Brewer, in Richmond, to await his wife's arrival, but before his wife could even reach him, Stuart died the following day at 7:38 p.m. In his final moments, Stuart ordered his sword and spurs be given to his son, and his last words were "I am resigned; God's will be done." He was just 31. The Battle of Yellow Tavern: The History of the Civil War Battle that Ended J.E.B. Stuart's Life comprehensively covers the events leading up to the battle, the fighting itself, and the aftermath of the battle. Accounts of the battle by important participants are also included, along with maps of the battle and pictures of important people, places, and events. You will learn about the Battle of Yellow Tavern like you never have before.

Winner of the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History An Economist Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year The Battle of Gettysburg has been written about at length and thoroughly dissected in terms of strategic importance, but never before has a book taken readers so close to the experience of the individual soldier. Two-time Lincoln Prize winner Allen C. Guelzo shows us the face, the sights and the sounds of nineteenth-century combat: the stone walls and gunpowder clouds of Pickett’s Charge; the reason that the Army of Northern Virginia could be smelled before it could be seen; the march of thousands of men from the banks of the Rappahannock in Virginia to the Pennsylvania hills. What emerges is a previously untold story of army life in the Civil War: from the personal politics roiling the Union and Confederate officer ranks, to the peculiar character of artillery units. Through such scrutiny, one of history’s epic battles is given extraordinarily vivid new life.