In the Spring of 1861, men from Roanoke, Botetourt, Craig and Bedford Counties enlisted in Confederate service and became members of the 28th Virginia Infantry Regiment. Their story is an integral part of the history of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. This is a social-military study which documents the war-time careers of the men in the 28th Virginia. Letters, diaries, personal accounts and other primary sources were utilized in addition to various secondary sources. An examination of letters and diaries written by soldiers in the 28th Virginia is vital for one to understand Civil War army life. The 28th Virginia participated in most of the major eastern campaigns. As a part of Longstreet's corps, Pickett's division, they fought at 1st and 2nd Manassas, Seven Day's battles, Sharpsburg, Gettysburg, Seige of Richmond and Petersburg and the retreat to Appomattox. / Master of Arts

This study examines the efforts of the Union and Confederate diplomatic agents to influence the events along the Rio Grande during the Civil War. The paper compares the successful accomplishments of Confederate agent Jose Quintero to the hindered maneuverings of the Union representatives, Leonard Pierce and M. M. Kimuey. Utilizing microfilmed sources from State Department records and Confederate despatches, the paper relates the steps Quintero took to secure the Confederate-Mexico border trade, obtain favorable responses from the various ruling parties in northern Mexico, and hamper the Union agents' attempts to quell the border trade.

Arkansas occupied a key position in the Confederate Trans-Mississippi Department. It offered a gateway for Confederate troops to move north and secure Missouri for the Confederacy, or for Union troops to move south towards Texas and Louisiana. During the war, Union and Confederate armies moved back and forth across the state engaging in numerous encounters. This paper is a year by year study of those encounters and engagements occurring in Arkansas between 1861 and 1865. Emphasis is necessarily placed on the significant campaigns and engagements. Actions which occurred in adjacent states but which militarily affected Arkansas are also discussed. The majority of the material was compiled from the Official Records.

This thesis combines a traditional narrative history of a Confederate artillery battery with a socio-economic study of its members. A database was constructed using the Compiled Service Records, 1860 census, and county tax rolls. The information revealed similarities between the unit's members and their home area. Captain James M. Daniel organized the battery in Paris, Texas and it entered Confederate service in January 1862. The battery served in Walker's Texas Division. It was part of a reserve force at the Battle of Milliken's Bend and was involved in the battles of Bayou Bourbeau, Mansfield, and Pleasant Hill. The battery also shelled Union ships on the Mississippi River. Daniel's Battery officially surrendered at Natchitoches, Louisiana, in May 1865.

This thesis explores the impact of home front and battlefield morale on Texas's civilian and military population during the Civil War. It addresses the creation, maintenance, and eventual surrender of Confederate nationalism and identity among Texans from five different counties: Colorado, Dallas, Galveston, Harrison, and Travis. The war divided Texans into three distinct groups: civilians on the home front, soldiers serving in theaters outside of the state, and soldiers serving within Texas's borders. Different environments, experiences, and morale affected the manner in which civilians and soldiers identified with the Confederate war effort. This study relies on contemporary letters, diaries, newspaper reports, and government records to evaluate how morale influenced national dedication and loyalty to the Confederacy among various segments of Texas's population.

Historians have done their duty in commemorating an individual who was, as Sidney Hook’s Hero in History would describe, an “event making-man.” A myriad of works focused on understanding the martial effort behind George S. Patton Jr. from his ancestral lineage rooted in military tradition to his triumph during the Second World War. What is yet to be understood about Patton, however, is the role that the Civil War played in his transformation into one of America’s iconic generals. For Patton, the Lost Cause legacy, one that idealized the image of the Confederate soldier in terms of personal honor, courage, and duty, became the seed for his preoccupation for glory.

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 describes and analyses how the Richmond press operated as a propaganda machine during the final year of the Civil War. It argues that the newspapers of the Confederate capital regularly exploited the propaganda value of the news they reported, employing methods including distortion of facts and libelous personal attacks. They displayed a seemingly total disregard for veracity in their zeal to convince their readership that the cause was not lost, and created a false picture of the real situation to a population which was war-weary and desperate for reassurance that victory was still possible. Defeats were minimized and even the tiniest victory in the most insignificant skirmish was magnified. When the Northern army began its strategy of hard war, the Richmond press seized on that to help create a demonized portrait of the Yankee and the North.

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

Recent debates as to the place of Old South symbols and institutions in the South of the new millennium are evidence of a changing order in the South. I examine -- from a rhetorical perspective informed by Kenneth Burke's theory of identification and division -- four debates that have taken place in the South and/or about the South over roughly the past decade, 1995 to the present. In this decade, Southerners and interested others have debated such issues as 1) admitting women to the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel; 2) integrating displays of public art in Richmond to feature Confederates and African Americans side by side; 3) continuing to fly the Confederate battle flag in public spaces such as the South Carolina Capitol or including it in the designs of state flags such as those of Georgia and Mississippi; and 4) allowing Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, who seemed to speak out in support of the South's segregated past, to continue in his position of Senate leadership. Looking at each of these debates, it is clear that at issue in each is whether the ruling order of the South should continue to be one of division or whether that order should be supplanted by identification. Judging from the outcomes of the four debates analyzed here, the order of division seems to be waning just as the order of identification seems to be waxing in influence over the turn-of-the-millennium South. But a changing South is no less a distinctive, continuing South. I argue that a distinctive Southern culture based on a sense of order has existed and continues to exist amidst the larger American culture. If some form of "Southernism" is to continue as a distinctive mindset and way of life in the twenty-first century, Southerners will need to learn to strike a balance between their past, with its ruling order of division, and the present, with its ruling order of identification.