On April 24, 1862, Federal gunboats made their way past two Confederate forts to ascend the Mississippi River, and the Union navy captured New Orleans. News of the loss of the Crescent City came to Jefferson Davis as an absolute shock. In this exhaustive study, Chester G. Hearn examines the decisions, actions, individuals, and events to explain why. He directs his inquiry to the heart of government, both Union and Confederate, and takes a hard look at the selection of military and naval leaders, the use of natural and financial resources, and the performances of all personnel involved. His vivid, fast-paced narrative provides fascinating reading, as well as penetrating insight into this crucial campaign.

A provocative reinterpretation of Civil War–era diplomacy

It has long been a mainstay in historical literature that the Civil War had a deleterious effect on Anglo-American relations and that Britain came close to intervention in the conflict. Historians assert that it was only a combination of desperate diplomacy, the Confederacy’s military losses, and Lincoln’s timely issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation that kept the British on the sidelines. Phillip E. Myers seeks to revise this prevailing view by arguing instead that wartime relations between Britain and the United Staets were marked by caution rather than conflict.

Using a wide a rray of primary materials from both sides of the Atlantic, Myers traces the sources of potential Anglo-American wartime turmoil as well as the various reasons both sides had for avoiding war. And while he does note the disagreement between Washington and London, he convincingly demonstrates that transatlantic discord was ultimately minor and neither side serioiusly considered war against the other.

Myers further extends his study into the postwar period to see how that bond strengthened and grew, culminating with the Treaty of Washington in 1871. The Civil War was not, as many have believed for so long, an unpleasant interruption in British-American affairs; instead, it was an event that helped bring the two countries closer together to seal the friendship.

Soundly researched an cogently argued, Caution and Cooperation will surely prompt discussion among Civil War historians, foreign relations scholars, and readers of history.

“Phillip E. Myers’s Caution and Cooperation places Anglo-American relations during the Civil War within the broader context of the whole nineteenth century, arguing convincingly for the lack of any real chance of British intervention on the side of the Confederacy and dating the end-of-the-century Anglo-American rapprochement back about three decades. Based on extensive research in the United States and Great Britain, this major reinterpretation of the transatlantic special relationship is ‘international history’ in its truest sense.”<br />

Cecelia was a fifteen-year-old slave when she accompanied her mistress, Frances “Fanny” Thruston Ballard, on a holiday trip to Niagara Falls. During their stay, Cecelia crossed the Niagara River and joined the free black population of Canada. Although documented relationships between freed or escaped slaves and their former owners are rare, the discovery of a cache of letters from the former slave owner to her escaped slave confirms this extraordinary link between two urban families over several decades. Cecelia and Fanny: The Remarkable Friendship between an Escaped Slave and Her Former Mistress is a fascinating look at race relations in mid-nineteenth-century Louisville, Kentucky, focusing on the experiences of these two families during the seismic social upheaval wrought by the emancipation of four million African Americans. Far more than the story of two families, Cecelia and Fanny delves into the history of Civil War–era Louisville. Author Brad Asher details the cultural roles assigned to the two women and provides a unique view of slavery in an urban context, as opposed to the rural plantations more often examined by historians.

A variety of important but lesser-known dimensions of the Chancellorsville campaign are explored in this collection of eight original essays. Departing from the traditional focus on generalship and tactics, the contributors address the campaign's broad context and implications and revisit specific battlefield episodes that have in the past been poorly understood. Contributors include Keith S. Bohannon, Gary W. Gallagher, A. Wilson Greene, John J. Hennessy, Robert K. Krick, James Marten, Carol Reardon, and James I. Robertson Jr.

Collection of 8 essays about leadership, morale, and historical commemoration of the 1863 Campaign for Chickamauga. The campaign resulted in the war’s only major Confederate victory west of the Appalachians, on September 19-20 at the battle of Chickamauga, but the victory failed to achieve the truly decisive results that many high-ranking Confederates had expected.

A well-to-do planter and slave owner in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, Levi Holloway Naron was an unlikely supporter of the Union. And yet, at the outbreak of war in 1861, his agitation against the Confederacy so outraged his fellow Mississippians that they drove him from his home. Bent on retaliation, Naron headed North, contacted the Union army, and was ushered into the presence of General William T. Sherman, who quickly saw the possibilities for employing such a man. Thus began Levi Naron's career as "Chickasaw," Federal scout, spy, and raider. Dictated in 1865, when his memory of events was still fresh—as was his passion—Naron's memoir offers a rare and remarkably vivid firsthand account of a southerner loyal to the Union, operating behind Confederate lines. Active primarily in northern Mississippi and western Tennessee, Naron proved invaluable to Federal commanders in the West, not only Sherman but William Rosecrans, John Pope, Grenville Dodge, Benjamin Grierson, and others—leaders whose official testimony to that effect is included in an appendix here. Naron stood before Rebel commanders as well—Sterling Price, James Chalmers, and John C. Breckinridge—having bedeviled their security forces and intelligence agents. In these pages, he tells how he maneuvered under their noses, burning bridges and railcars full of supplies intended for Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Bell Hood, recruiting for the Union while clad in a Confederate uniform, chasing down Union deserters and Rebel spies, and, for diversion, suppressing guerrillas and bushwhackers. This long-forgotten historical document, newly edited and annotated, provides indispensable information about Confederate as well as Union espionage and counter-espionage activity. Naron's adventures illuminate this clandestine war in the West while allowing readers to experience with startling immediacy the agony, frustrations, and convictions of a pro-Union southerner trapped inside the Confederate States.

Based on careful work with rare archival sources, this book fills a gap in the history of New York Catholicism by chronicling anti-Catholic feeling in pre-Revolutionary and early national periods. Colonial New York, despite its reputation for pluralism, tolerance, and diversity, was also marked by severe restrictions on religious and political liberty for Catholics. The logic of the American Revolution swept away the religious barriers, but Anti-Federalists in the 1780s enacted legislation preventing Catholics from holding office and nearly succeeded in denying them the franchise. The latter effort was blocked by the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, who saw such things as an impediment to a new, expansive nationalist politics. By the early years of the nineteenth century, Catholics gained the right to hold office due to their own efforts in concert with an urban-based branch of the Republicans, which included radical exiles from Europe. With the contributions of Catholics to the War of 1812 and the subsequent collapse of the Federalist Party, by 1820 Catholics had become a key part of the triumphant Republican coalition, which within a decade would become the new Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren.Jason K. Duncan is Assistant Professor of History at Aquinas College.

“In the Union and the Confederacy, in the armed forces and on the home front, the Civil War caused people of different races and ethnicities to interact in new ways. The well‒written, well‒researched essays in this important new book offer a fine‒grained narrative about the experiences of different ethnic groups during the Civil War. The essays also probe, in provocative ways, the intersection between military service and the call by different ethnic groups for fuller inclusion and citizenship. This book is not only a fascinating read, it makes a real contribution to the study of ethnic groups during the Civil War era.”