The purpose of this thesis is not only to trace the diplomatic activities of the Confederate government with its neighbor, Mexico, during the period 1861 to 1865, but to evaluate these diplomatic efforts as to their practical consequences on behalf of the Confederate cause.

In October 1863 the United States Army's Rio Grande Expedition left New Orleans, bound for the Texas coast. Reacting to the recent French occupation of Mexico, President Abraham Lincoln believed that the presence of U.S. troops in Texas would dissuade the French from intervening in the American Civil War. The first major objective of this campaign was Brownsville, Texas, a port city on the lower Rio Grande. Its capture would not only serve as a warning to the French in Mexico; it would also disrupt a lucrative Confederate cotton trade across the border. The expedition had a mixed record of achievement. It succeeded in disrupting the cotton trade, but not stopping it. Federal forces installed a military governor, Andrew J. Hamilton, in Brownsville, but his authority extended only to the occupied part of Texas, a strip of land along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The campaign also created considerable fear among Confederate soldiers and civilians that the ravages of civil war had now come to the Lone Star State. Although short-lived, the panic generated by the Rio Grande Expedition left an indelible mark on the memories of Texans who lived through the campaign. The expedition achieved its greatest success by establishing a permanent Federal presence in Texas as a warning against possible French meddling north of the Rio Grande.

This thesis studies the issue of unionism in Texas during the era of the Civil War.

This study analyzes two successful exhibitions on American slavery in the South: In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black Life in Richmond, Virginia, 1790-1860 by the Valentine Museum and Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South by the Museum of the Confederacy. It puts the exhibitions in the context of the social history movement, and explains the difficulties exhibiting a sensitive topic. It examines the creation of the exhibitions, the controversies because of the subject, both real and potential, and the overwhelmingly positive reaction.

Although scholars have explored women’s public resistance in occupied cities during the Civil War, few have explored women in occupied New Orleans. Studies have been limited to the rambunctious activities of women in the city streets, armed with sharp tongues. The use of private spaces, specifically religious spaces, as a platform for protest, has not been explored. By analyzing the events surrounding the closure of an uptown church on October of 1862, known as “The Battle of Saint Paul’s,” this thesis will address Confederate female activism and protest to Union occupation in New Orleans. It will do so by examining competing press accounts as well as a song inspired by the event. For its female members, the church was the last community-held space in the city. The women of St. Paul’s fought Union control of the only public space that afforded them a degree of autonomy within occupied New Orleans.

When we talk about the Civil War, we often describe it in terms of battles that took place in small towns or in the countryside: Antietam, Gettysburg, Bull Run, and, most tellingly, the Battle of the Wilderness. One reason this picture has persisted is that few urban historians have studied the war, even though cities hosted, enabled, and shaped Southern society as much as they did in the North. Confederate Cities, edited by Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers, shifts the focus from the agrarian economy that undergirded the South to the cities that served as its political and administrative hubs. The contributors use the lens of the city to examine now-familiar Civil War–era themes, including the scope of the war, secession, gender, emancipation, and war’s destruction. This more integrative approach dramatically revises our understanding of slavery’s relationship to capitalist economics and cultural modernity. By enabling a more holistic reading of the South, the book speaks to contemporary Civil War scholars and students alike—not least in providing fresh perspectives on a well-studied war. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1011/thumbnail.jpg

This dissertation will examine the formation of the myth that William T. Sherman laid waste to the state of Georgia in 1864, and almost single-handedly invented the concept of “total war.” It will also examine how Sherman’s reputation has evolved over the years from accusations of being a Southern sympathizer and traitor at the end of the Civil War to the modern image of Sherman as the destroyer of the old South. William Tecumseh Sherman was the most controversial general of the American Civil War. The modern image of Sherman is either a destructive monster who violated the laws of civilized warfare or a strategic genius who invented modern warfare. Both of these images have evolved over the years. In large part, they have been the product of Lost Cause writers trying to reinterpret the history of the war, but also the product of Union generals and politicians attempting to glorify their own place in the history of the war, men with personal grudges against the general and modern historians using Sherman to make their own arguments about contemporary society. The sources used for this dissertation were the journals, letters and memoirs of the participants. The Official Records of both the Union and Confederacy were examined as well as nineteenth and twentieth century newspapers and magazines. This dissertation will show that the modern conception of General Sherman is not the same as the historical fact, but rather a post-war creation. Individuals’ agendas have created and sustained the myth of Sherman to explain defeat in the Civil War, justify later military strategy, condemn later conflicts and for personal gain. It is not enough to know that historical events as commonly understood are inaccurate; it is important to understand how and why these inaccuracies came about.

This thesis examines the methods and actions of selected Virginians who chose to adopt irregular tactics in wartime, and focuses on the reasons why they fought that way. The presence of the Cavalier image in Virginia had a direct impact on the military exploits of several cavalry officers in both the Revolutionary War and the American Civil War. The Royalist cavalry during the English Civil War gave rise to the original Cavalier image, but as migrants came to Virginia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the image became a general term for the Southern planter. This thesis contends that selected Virginia cavalry officers attempted to adhere to an Americanized version of the Cavalier image. They either purposefully embodied aspects of the Cavalier image during their military service, or members of the Southern populace attached the Cavalier image to them in the post-war period. The Cavalier thus served as a military ideal, and some cavalry officers represented a romanticized version of the Southern martial hero. This thesis traces the development of the Cavalier image in Virginia chronologically. It focuses on the origins of the Cavalier image and the role of the Royalist cavalry during the English Civil War. After the Royalist migration, and especially during the American Revolution, Virginians like Henry Lee embodied aspects of the Cavalier image during their military careers. Between the end of the American Revolution and the beginning of the Civil War, some Southern authors perpetuated the image by including Cavalier figures in many of their literary works. In the Civil War, select Virginians who fought for the Confederacy personified the Cavalier hero in the minds of many white Southerners. Despite a Confederate defeat, the Cavalier image persisted in Southern culture in the post-Civil War period and into the twentieth century.

This dissertation is a study of morale in the western Confederacy from early 1864 until the Civil War's end in spring 1865. It examines when and why Confederate morale, military and civilian, changed in three important western states, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. Focusing on that time frame allows a thorough examination of the sources, increases the opportunity to produce representative results, and permits an assessment of the lingering question of when and why most Confederates recognized, or admitted, defeat. Most western Confederate men and women struggled for their ultimate goal of southern independence until Federal armies crushed those aspirations on the battlefield. Until the destruction of the Army of Tennessee at Franklin and Nashville, most western Confederates still hoped for victory and believed it at least possible. Until the end they drew inspiration from battlefield developments, but also from their families, communities, comrades in arms, the sacrifices already endured, simple hatred for northerners, and frequently from anxiety for what a Federal victory might mean to their lives. Wartime diaries and letters of western Confederates serve as the principal sources. The dissertation relies on what those men and women wrote about during the war - military, political, social, or otherwise - and evaluates morale throughout the period in question by following primarily a chronological approach that allows the reader to glimpse the story as it developed.

One facet of the problem of state rights within the Confederacy is revealed through a study of the relations between President Davis and the war governors. As a means of investigating those relationships this study considers their attempts to solve several major problems. This work seeks to discover the degree of co-operation which existed between the President and governors and to establish what effect this co-operation or lack of it had on the failure of the states to support many important central government policies. It also seeks to determine what influence those relationships had on the outcome of the war.