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Wilson's Creek: The Second Battle of the Civil War and the Men who Fought It.

William Garrett Piston and Richard W. Hatcher III

University of North Carolina Press, 2000. $37.50

In the summer of 1861, Americans were preoccupied by the question of which states would join the secession movement and which would remain loyal to the Union. This question was most fractious in the border states of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. In Missouri, it was largely settled at Wilson's Creek on August 10, 1861, in a contest that is rightly considered the second major battle of the Civil War.

Fought at extremely close range by poorly armed and largely un-uniformed troops,the combat at Wilson's Creek little resembled that of later battles. It pitted the forces of General Nathaniel Lyon, one of the Union's most competent commanders during the first months of the war, against an uneasy alliance formed by General Ben McCulloch's Confederate troops and the pro-secessionist Missouri State Guard commanded by General Sterling Price. Although outnumbered and short of supplies, Lyon launched a surprise attack on the Southerners as they lay camped along Wilson's Creek. Lyon was killed, but the Union assault so stunned the Southerners that his army was able to retreat safely. Both sides claimed victory; but, unwilling to cooperate, McCulloch and Price split their forces following the battle - a decision that may have cost the South its best opportunity to add Missouri to the Confederacy.

In addition to providing the first in-depth narrative and analysis of this important but largely overlooked battle, William Piston and Richard Hatcher illuminate the backgrounds and motivations of soldiers on both sides of the fighting at Wilson's Creek. In particular, they highlight the importance of the soldiers' sense of corporate honor - the desire to uphold the reputation of their hometowns - as a powerful motivator for enlistment, a source of sustenance during the campaign, and a lens through which soldiers evaluated their performance in battle.

Confederate John Singleton Mosby forged his reputation on the most exciting of military activities - the overnight raid. Mosby possessed a genius for guerrilla and psychological warfare, taking control of the dark to make himself the “Gray Ghost” of union nightmares.

For more than twenty-seven months Mosby led daring raids behind Union pickets and created false alarms up and down the Potomac. Although he never commanded more than four hundred men, his forces were regularly overestimated, once by a factor of forty. Union officials dispatched more than seventy search and destroy missions against him, but he retained the tactical advantage until Lee’s surrender at Appomattox ended the war.

Mosby’s dynamic personality, forged in childhood, was the foundation for his success as a guerrilla chief, but it was also his greatest weakness. Attempting to repeat patterns of heroic conflict after the war, he threw away his status as a leading southern hero and sacrificed a lucrative law practice to support the Republican party and U.S. Grant’s campaign for the presidency.

Forced into exile from his native Virginia, Mosby again charged into controversy. During his service as U.S. consul in Hong Kong, he worked to reform the office and single-handedly exposed the corruption of his predecessors. When his bosses in the State Department balked, Mosby sent information directly to President Hayes and, eventually, exposed the wrong-doing to the Washington Post.

In retirement, Mosby continued in his well-worn role of underdog by authoring the first defense of Jeb Stuart’s actions at Gettysburg, exposing Lee’s role in the debacle.

To Jefferson Davis, he was the "Stonewall of the West"; to Robert E Lee he was "a meteor shining from a clouded sky"; and to Braxton Bragg, he was an officer "ever alive to a success." He was Ronayne Cleburne, one of the greatest of all field commanders.

An Irishman by birth, Cleburne emigrated to the United States in 1849 at the age of 21. He achieved only modest success in the peacetime South but rose rapidly in the wartime army to become the Confederacy's finest division commander. He was admired by peers and subordinates alike for his leadership, loyalty, honesty, and fearlessness in the face of enemy fire. The valor of his command was so inspirational that his unit was allowed to carry its own distinctive battle flag.

In Stonewall of the West Craig Symonds offers the first full scale critical biography of the compelling figure. He explores all the sources of Cleburne's commoitment to the Southern cause, his growth as a combat leader from Shiloh to Chickamauga, and his emergence as one of the Confederacy's most effective field commanders at Missionary Ridge, Ringgold Gap, and Pickett's Mill. In addition, Symonds unravels the "mystery" of Spring Hill and recounts Cleburne's tragic and untimely death (at the age of 36) at Franklin, Tennessee, where he charged the enemy line of foot after having two horses shot from under him

Symonds also explores Cleburne's role in the complicated personal politic of the Army of Tennessee, as well as his astonishing proposal that the decimated Confederate ranks be filled by ending slavery and arming blacks against the Union. Stonewall of the West casts new light on Cleburne, on the Army of Tennessee and the Civil War in the West. It finally and firmly establishes Cleburne's rightful place in the pantheon of Southern military heroes.

Irish immigrant William McCarter was twenty-one years old when he enlisted in the Union army in August 1862. Little could he have imagined that his regiment, the 116th Pennsylvania Infantry, would soon become part of the Army of the Potomac's legendary Irish Brigade, and that one day he would pen what many historians are now hailing as one of the rare handful of classic personal accounts of the Civil War.

My Life in the Irish Brigade: The Civil War Memoirs of Private William McCarter, 116th Pennsylvania Infantry, is a sweeping saga of his wartime service - the first full-length memoir ever published by an enlisted man in the Irish Brigade.

The Irish Brigade (officially the Second Brigade, First Division, Second Corps, Army of the Potomac) was already the stuff of legend when McCarter's unit joined its ranks. Known by its distinctive emerald-green battle flags, the brigade had first made a name for itself in the Seven Days' Battles. Its powerful assault several months later against the Bloody Lane at Antietam solidified its battlefield reputation. The Irish veterans warmly greeted the Pennsylvania rookie reinforcements, knowing full well the deadly work that lay ahead. At Fredericksburg, Virginia on December 13, 1862, McCarter charged up Marye's Heights with the brigade in a bloody and futile attempt to defeat the Confederates entrenched on the hillside. Only a handful of the brigade's 1,200 men were left to answer the next morning's roll call; Private William McCarter was not among them.

My Life in the Irish Brigade is a richly-detailed and witty reminiscence that fills a historical gap in the brigade's record. Detailed as a personal scribe for the brigade's commander, General Thomas F. Meagher, McCarter was able to meet many of the army's most influential leaders, including Ambrose Burnside and Winfield Hancock. His candid assessments of these men, vivid descriptions of marches and encounters with the enemy, stories of foraging and daily army life, together with his remarkably detailed account of the Fredericksburg Campaign, making My Life in the Irish Brigade a classic in the truest sense of the word

Confederate Rifles & Muskets - Infantry Small Arms Manufactured in the Southern Confederacy 1861-1865
This impressive volume is the culmination of long years of exhaustive firearms research and examination. It comprises the first in depth and achedemic analysis and discussion of the "long" longarms produced in the South by and for the Confederacy during the American Civil War.

In combination with Dr. Murphy's earlier work, Confederate Carbines and Musketoons, the complete story of Confederate longarms manufacturing finally is told, both historically and technically, within these covers.

The extensive personal collection of Dr. Murphy, doubtless the largest and finst grouping of Conferate longarms in private hands today, together with specimens selected from the foremost private and public collections across the country, is thoroughly explored both in the detailed text and in the numerous large and clear photographs. Mr. Madaus, firearms museum curator and researcher, has provided us with an authoriative text based on knowledgable examination of both the firearms themselves, and previously-unexplored records, manuscripts, and other documents.

Herein the reader, whether historian, layman, or collector, will find a number of Conferate arms newly categorized and reclassified. Many, in fact, even have been re-identified.

The history of the time in which Confederate firearms were used, the crisis that necessitated their making, and the uses to which they were put both during and after the Civil War, long have intrigued and inspired collectors and researchers. Now, Confederate Rifles & Muskets puts those arms in their proper perspective - valuable historic and cultural relics of a brave people, and of the romantic era in which they fought their valiant but vain struggle.

The Secret War for the Union : The Untold Story of Military Intelligence in the Civil War
Previous histories of the Civil War have explained victory of defeat in terms of the skill of commanders, the fighting qualities of the troops, and resources of men and material. Intelligence has been largely ignored, not because it wasn't important - Lincoln called it the most difficult problem faced by the Union - but because so little has been known about it. At the end of the war, most intelligence records dissapeared and remained hidden for almost a century, until Edwin Fishel uncovered them during the forty years of research that went into this monumental book

The Secret War for the Union is unique among Civil War histories in its reliance upon original, previously unknown sources. It is the first book to examine in detail the impact of intelligence, and this intelligence explaination alters, sometimes radicaly, history's understanding of virtually every campaign. Both enthralling and authoritative, The Secret War for the Union is one of the most important books ever published about the Civil War.

The battle for the southern slope of Little Round Top at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, is perhaps the most studied small unit military action in American history. The author used more than seventy first-hand accounts of the battle for Vincent's Spur written by more than two dozen veterans to tell the story of that fight in critical detail, bringing the personal experiences of the soldiers to life. The story is told from both sides, revealing also the actions and feelings of the men from Alabama who tried, in vain, to seize the important position.