The Confederate Alamo

The first book-length study about the bloody, chaotic Battle of Fort Gregg: “Sweeping . . . insightful . . . military history at its best.” —Civil War News By April 2, 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant’s men had tightened their noose around the vital town of Petersburg, Virginia. Trapped on three sides with a river at their back, the soldiers from General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had never faced such dire circumstances. To give Lee time to craft an escape, a small motley group of threadbare Southerners made a suicidal last stand at a place called Fort Gregg. The venerable Union commander Major General John Gibbon called the struggle “one of the most desperate ever witnessed.” At 1:00 p.m., hearts pounded in the chests of thousands of Union soldiers in Gibbon’s 24th Corps. These courageous men fixed bayonets and charged across 800 yards of open ground into withering small arms and artillery fire. A handful of Confederates rammed cartridges into their guns and fired over Fort Gregg’s muddy parapets at this tidal wave of fresh Federal troops. Short on ammunition and men but not on bravery, these Southerners wondered if their last stand would make a difference. Many of the veterans who fought at this place considered it the nastiest fight of their war experience. Most could not shake the gruesome memories, yet when they passed on, the battle faded with them. On these pages, award-winning historian John Fox resurrects these forgotten stories, using numerous unpublished letters and diaries to take the reader from the Union battle lines all the way into Fort Gregg’s smoking cauldron of hell. Fourteen Federal soldiers would later receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for their valor during this hand-to-hand melee, yet the few bloody Confederate survivors would experience an ignominious end to their war. This richly detailed account is filled with maps, photos, and new perspectives on the strategic effect this little-known battle really had on the war in Virginia.

When Chicago lawyer Thomas Osborn set out to form a Union regiment in the days following the attack on Fort Sumter, he could not have known it was the beginning of a 6000-mile journey that would end at Appomattox Courthouse four years later. With assistance from Governor Richard Yates, the 39th Illinois Infantry--"The Yates Phalanx"--enlisted young men from Chicago, its (modern-day) suburbs, and small towns of northern and central Illinois. While most Illinois regiments fought in the west, the 39th marched through the Shenandoah Valley to fight Stonewall Jackson, to Charleston Harbor for the Second Battle of Fort Sumter and to Richmond for the year-long siege at Petersburg. This book chronicles day-to-day life in the regiment, the myriad factors that determined its path, and the battles fought by the Chicagoans--including two Medal of Honor recipients--who fired some of the last shots before the Confederate surrender.

A New York Times bestseller! “Lively and absorbing. . ." — The New York Times Book Review "Engrossing." —Wall Street Journal “Entertaining and well-researched . . . ” —Houston Chronicle Three noted Texan writers combine forces to tell the real story of the Alamo, dispelling the myths, exploring why they had their day for so long, and explaining why the ugly fight about its meaning is now coming to a head. Every nation needs its creation myth, and since Texas was a nation before it was a state, it's no surprise that its myths bite deep. There's no piece of history more important to Texans than the Battle of the Alamo, when Davy Crockett and a band of rebels went down in a blaze of glory fighting for independence from Mexico, losing the battle but setting Texas up to win the war. However, that version of events, as Forget the Alamo definitively shows, owes more to fantasy than reality. Just as the site of the Alamo was left in ruins for decades, its story was forgotten and twisted over time, with the contributions of Tejanos--Texans of Mexican origin, who fought alongside the Anglo rebels--scrubbed from the record, and the origin of the conflict over Mexico's push to abolish slavery papered over. Forget the Alamo provocatively explains the true story of the battle against the backdrop of Texas's struggle for independence, then shows how the sausage of myth got made in the Jim Crow South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As uncomfortable as it may be to hear for some, celebrating the Alamo has long had an echo of celebrating whiteness. In the past forty-some years, waves of revisionists have come at this topic, and at times have made real progress toward a more nuanced and inclusive story that doesn't alienate anyone. But we are not living in one of those times; the fight over the Alamo's meaning has become more pitched than ever in the past few years, even violent, as Texas's future begins to look more and more different from its past. It's the perfect time for a wise and generous-spirited book that shines the bright light of the truth into a place that's gotten awfully dark.

Collection of forty documents dating from the eve of the Civil War to the collaspe of the Confederacy chronicling the Civil War in Texas.

Harry Turtledove, author of perhaps the most famous alternate-history novel about Robert E. Lee (The Guns of the South, 1992), here returns with Lee at the Alamo, a look at what the great military leader might have done under only slightly different circumstances. In the history we know, General Robert E. Lee felt compelled to fight on the Confederate side, because honor (as he saw it) forbade him to take up arms against Virginia, his native state. But what if the demands of honor had led him in the other direction altogether? At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The novel Whittled Away is the tale of Corporal Bain Gill and Private Jesús McDonald. In 1862, Bain and Jesús enlist in the Confederate army in San Antonio, Texas, joining fifty-six other Texans as soldiers in the Alamo Rifles-Company K of the Sixth Texas Infantry regiment. The two young friends, not yet twenty when they put on their first uniforms, grew up on ranches on the western edge of civilization, herding stubborn longhorns and always wary of Comanche raiders and rattlesnakes. Naïve, as are new soldiers everywhere, they come of age during the next three years, far from home, experiencing the hardships and horrors of men in combat.This is a story of soldiering, friendship and loss during America's nightmare, the Civil War. For Bain and Jesús it begins with marching to central Arkansas. There, at a river fort called Arkansas Post they endure their first frightful artillery barrage, but also learn first-hand a lesson that in the years ahead will confound the generals of both armies: Soldiers in trenches and behind breastworks usually survive and prevail. But facing a Union force of over 30,000 infantry and several armored gunboats, there is a mass surrender of the 4,000 Rebel defenders of Arkansas Post. Capture leads to a freezing boat ride upriver to prison camp where deprivation, brutality, and disease take a heavy toll. So concludes Part I of Whittled Away, setting the stage for two more years of war.After a short time in prison camp, the Confederates captured at Arkansas Post are part of a prisoner exchange. The Texans are moved by Union trains to Richmond, Virginia, ready to again take up arms for the Confederacy. General Lee is beating the Union army in Virginia, but the men of the Alamo Rifles find that no general wants to accept men who surrendered in their first battle. The survivors of Arkansas Post and prison camp are put on Confederate trains and sent to Tennessee, assigned to an army that has not been victorious. Even there, only one general, Patrick Cleburne, an Irish immigrant from Arkansas, is willing to accept the Arkansas Post veterans. During the next seven months, the Alamo Rifles redeem their stained reputations fighting in three major battles without faltering, even when the rest of the army is in retreat.Part 3 finds Bain and Jesús in Georgia in late spring of 1864 about to begin three months of ongoing fighting during the Atlanta Campaign. All summer the days are marked by brutal weather, ceaseless hardships, and death. The surviving men from San Antonio are being whittled away and there are no replacements. The Confederate well is running dry of men and supplies. Atlanta falls after three intense battles in which the new Confederate commander, General John B. Hood, tries to regain the initiative. He orders his troops out of their defensive breastworks and takes the fight to the huge Union army in aggressive, but futile, attacks. Even more of the men from San Antonio are lost.In Part 4, in the closing months of 1864, General Hood leads his shrunken army back into Tennessee. The handful of men remaining in the Alamo Rifles are among the 20,000 Confederates -more Rebels than were in Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg - who are ordered forward to take the Union breastworks at Franklin. Here, Bain and Jesús are in the middle of the attack that wrecks their army. Two weeks later, the survivors of Franklin fight in bitter cold at Nashville in a last vain attempt to win in Tennessee. Whittled Away is grass-roots American military fiction, a thin slice of a vast war, seen through the eyes of a handful of young men who are not very reflective, not particularly brave, nor intentionally heroic. Mostly they carry on and make do, trying to do their duty and one day make it home.

For most people the details of the American Revolution, the history of Thanksgiving and the Battle of the Alamo are sketchy at best. However, help is at hand as Remember the Alamo? contains all the American history you learnt at school and promptly forgot, and perhaps some things that you were never taught in the first place. Broken down into easily digested bite-sized chunks, this book will teach you the basics of over 150 key events from Columbus to Nixon and from cowboys to cosmonauts. Remember the Alamo? assumes no other knowledge of world history and doesn't contain anything but the most salient points so that anyone can become clued up on the history of one of the world's most developed nations. Concise and informative, yet entertaining and engagingly written, Remember the Alamo? contains everything you will ever need to know about the United States.

"William C. Davis's Three Roads to the Alamo is far and away the best account of the Alamo I have ever read. The portraits of Crockett, Bowie, and Travis are brilliantly sketched in a fast-moving story that keeps the reader riveted to the very last word." — Stephen B. Oates Three Roads to the Alamois the definitive book about the lives of David Crockett, James Bowie and William Barret Travis—the legendary frontiersmen and fighters who met their destiny at the Alamo in one of the most famous and tragic battles in American history—and about what really happened in that battle.