William Marvel’s The Confederate Resurgence of 1864 examines a dozen understudied Confederate and Union military operations carried out during the winter and spring of 1864 that, taken cumulatively, greatly revived white southerners’ hopes for independence. Among the pivotal moments during this period were the sinking of the USS Housatonic by the CSS Hunley; Nathan Bedford Forrest’s defeat of William Sooy Smith’s cavalry raid; and the Confederate army’s victory a...

Focusing on the dramatic events of 1863, this is "a well-researched and well-written study that will be a fine addition to Civil War collections" ( Booklist).The Great Task Remaining is a striking, often poignant portrait of people in conflict—not only in battles between North and South, but within and among themselves as the cost of the ongoing carnage sometimes seemed too much to bear.As 1863 unfolds, we see draft riots in New York, the ...

A portrait of a pivotal chapter in the Civil War, "featuring scheming politicians, bumbling generals, and an increasingly disheartened Northern public" (Brooks Simpson, author of Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity, 1822–1865).In Mr. Lincoln Goes to War, award-winning historian William Marvel focused on President Abraham Lincoln's first year in office. In Lincoln's Darkest Year, he paints a picture of 1862—again relying on recently u...

Between February 1864 and April 1865, 41,000 Union prisoners of war were taken to the stockade at Anderson Station, Georgia, where nearly 13,000 of them died. Most contemporary accounts placed the blame for the tragedy squarely on the shoulders of the Confederates who administered the prison or on a conspiracy of higher-ranking officials. According to William Marvel, virulent disease and severe shortages of vegetables, medical supplies, and other necessities combined to create a crisis bey...

A "full and insightful" account of the Civil War's final year from the award-winning author of Lee's Last Retreat ( Publishers Weekly).Beginning with the Virginia and Atlanta campaigns of May 1864 and closing with the final surrender of Confederate forces in June 1865, Tarnished Victory follows the course of the Civil War's final year. As the death toll rises with each bloody battle, the home front is devastated and the nation suffers incr...

An account of how America's greatest crisis began, by "the Civil War's master historical detective" (Stephen W. Sears, author of Chancellorsville).This groundbreaking book investigates the mystery of how the Civil War began, reconsidering the big question: Was it inevitable?The award-winning author of Andersonville and Lincoln's Autocrat vividly recreates President Abraham Lincoln's first year in office, from his inauguration thro...

Ambrose Burnside, the Union general, was a major player on the Civil War stage from the first clash at Bull Run until the final summer of the war. He led a corps or army during most of this time and played important roles in various theaters of the war. But until now, he has been remembered mostly for his distinctive side–whiskers that gave us the term “sideburns” and as an incompetent leader who threw away thousands of lives in the bloody battle of Fredericksburg.In a biography fo...

Few events in Civil War history have generated such deliberate mythmaking as the retreat that ended at Appomattox. William Marvel offers the first history of the Appomattox campaign written primarily from contemporary source material, with a skeptical eye toward memoirs published well after the events they purport to describe.Marvel shows that during the final week of the war in Virginia, Lee’s troops were more numerous yet far less faithful to their cause than has been suggested. ...

On June 19, 1864, the Confederate cruiser Alabama and the USS Kearsarge faced off in the English Channel outside the French port of Cherbourg. About an hour after the Alabama fired the first shot, it began to sink, and its crew was forced to wave the white flag of surrender.Working with personal papers and diaries and contemporary reports, historian William Marvel interweaves the stories of these two celebrated Civil War warships, from their construction ...

Although Appomattox Court House is one of the most symbolically charged places in America, it was an ordinary tobacco-growing village both before and after an accident of fate brought the armies of Lee and Grant together there. It is that Appomattox — the typical small Confederate town — that William Marvel portrays in this deeply researched, compelling study. He tells the story of the Civil War from the perspective of one of the conflict’s most famous sites.The village sprang into...

Born into a distinguished military family, Fitz John Porter (1822–1901) was educated at West Point and breveted for bravery in the war with Mexico. Already a well-respected officer at the outset of the Civil War, as a general in the Union army he became a favorite of George B. McClellan, who chose him to command the Fifth Corps of the Army of the Potomac. Porter and his troops fought heroically and well at Gaines’s Mill and Malvern Hill. His devotion to the Union cause seemed unquestionabl...

Edwin M. Stanton (1814–1869), one of the nineteenth century’s most impressive legal and political minds, wielded enormous influence and power as Lincoln’s secretary of war during most of the Civil War and under Johnson during the early years of Reconstruction. In the first full biography of Stanton in more than fifty years, William Marvel offers a detailed reexamination of Stanton’s life, career, and legacy. Marvel argues that while Stanton was a formidable advocate and politician, his cha...