Hoopskirts, Union Blues, and Confederate Grays: Civil War Fashions from 1861 to 1865

• Upper-class women wore tight corsets, bustles, and wide hoop skirts to fancy balls. The layers weighed almost 30 pounds (14 kilograms)!
• For everyday, whether at home or nursing soldiers, women put on multiple layers of simple fabrics. Some daredevils sported women’s trousers—called Bloomers—to make a statement on women’s rights.
• Civil War soldiers wore flannel and wool uniforms—blue in the North and gray in the South.
• Men of fashion donned suits with velvet collars and silk lapels during the day and coats with fancy tails for parties.
• Underneath their everyday clothing—a shirt, tie, vest, coat, and trousers—men wore “drawers,” baggy long undergarments that buttoned in front and tied in back.
• Slaves wore whatever their owners gave them—usually only two sets of rough linen clothing, one for winter and one for summer.
• Girls had loose garments called pantalets and pinafores, while sailor suits were popular for boys. 

Read more about wartime fashions of the 1860s—from ankle boots to parasols and tiaras http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hoopskirts-union-blues-and-confederate-grays-kate-havelin/1110782821?ean=9780761358893

Confederate Soldier’s Bible

Cloth-bound Bible given to Dr. Albert Enos Higbee of the 12th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment, Company B, by Fred C. Cook.  Cook’s father found the bible on the body of Frank A. Gassett, a Private with the 6th Georgia Regiment, after the battle of Antietam.
Citation: Confederate Soldier’s Bible. 9949.4. Minnesota Historical Society.

(Source: collections.mnhs.org)

After the Glory-The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans

by Donald R. Shaffer

The heroics of black Union soldiers in the Civil War have been justly celebrated, but their postwar lives largely neglected. Donald Shaffer’s illuminating study shines a bright light on this previously obscure part of African American history, revealing for the first time black veterans’ valiant but often frustrating efforts to secure true autonomy and equality as civilians.

As Shaffer reveals, they also had nearly equal access to military pensions, financial resources available to few other blacks, and even found acceptance among white Union veterans in the Grand Army of the Republic fraternity. Shaffer makes clear, however, that their postwar pursuit of citizenship and a dignified manhood was never very easy for black veterans, their triumphs frequently neither complete nor lasting.

Photo: Unidentified African American Confederate Soldier: No information has been located online for the photo source or the name of this soldier. We can only imagine what his life must have been like, and remember him by a faded photo.

Sources: http://www.americancivilwar.ca/2012/02/15/commemorating-black-history-month-african-american-experiences-during-the-american-civil-war/

http://www.amazon.com/After-Glory-Struggles-Black-Veterans/dp/0700613285

The Best Civil War Books -From James McPherson’s definitive history to Tony Horwitz’s adventures among obsessives, here are the 11 best books on the Civil War in time for the 150th anniversary.

By Malcolm Jones who writes about books, music, and photography for The Daily Beast and Newsweek

Battle Cry of Freedom
By James McPherson

The Civil War: A Narrative
By Shelby Foote

Landscape Turned Red
By Stephen Sears

Memoirs
By Ulysses S. Grant

Mary Chesnut’s Diary

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
By Drew Gilpin Faust

The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans
By Charles Royster

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
By Doris Kearns Goodwin

The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
By Eric Foner

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
By David W. Blight

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War
By Tony Horwitz

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/04/15/10-best-books-on-the-american-civil-war.html

Private David Lowry, of Company E, 25th Virginia Cavalry Regiment, Company A, 41st Virginia Infantry Regiment, and Company D, 47th Virginia Infantry Regiment, in uniform and corsage of flowers with musket and book. Confederate States of America.—Army.—Virginia Cavalry Regiment

Like the Union Army, most Confederate soldiers were under 30. More than half the Confederate soldiers were farmers, although only a very small percentage of them owned slaves. The others came from many different types of jobs: carpenters, clerks, blacksmiths, students, etc. As in the Northern army, the Southern soldiers had educational backgrounds that ranged from university degrees to illiteracy.

Cavalry and artillery regiments attracted wealthier and more highly educated men than infantry units in the South, and a Confederate foot soldier was more likely to be illiterate than his Union counterpart. It is not certain how many foreigners fought for the Confederacy, but the number seems to be in the tens of thousands.

• Digital ID: (digital file from original item) ppmsca 32062 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.32062
• Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-ppmsca-32682 (digital file from original, tonality adjusted) LC-DIG-ppmsca-32062 (digital file from original item)
• Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
• Source: The Civil War Trust
• http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/warfare-and-logistics/warfare/who-fought.html

Wedded to War (Heroines Behind the Lines) By Jocelyn Green

Wedded to War is the debut novel by Jocelyn Green which depicts the struggle of the women who volunteered to nurse during the Civil War. The lead character is 28-year-old Charlotte Waverly, who leaves a life of privilege and wealth to be one of the first nurses for the Union Army.

Wedded to War is a work of fiction, but the story is inspired by the true life of Civil War nurse Georgeanna Woolsey. Woolsey’s letters and journals, written over 150 years ago, offer a thorough look of what pioneering nurses endured.

Jocelyn Green’s debut novel is endorsed by historians and professors for its historical accuracy and detail.

http://www.amazon.com/Wedded-Heroines-Behind-Lines-ebook/dp/B00836T5NG

Tasting Freedom, at Last, in Black, White and Sepia

Multiracial emancipated slaves, originally from Louisiana, in an 1863 photo in “Envisioning Emancipation.”

Barbara Krauthamer, left, and Deborah Willis, historians. Authors of Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery. Photo by Benjamin Norman

A 1905 Emancipation Day parade in Richmond, Va., in “Envisioning Emancipation,” which illustrates how slavery and freedom were depicted in photos.

In the book are “images that have gone missing from the historical record,” Dr. Willis said. There are pictures of enslaved people on plantations, but also well-off black families in tender poses, proud black Union soldiers, escaped slaves aboard a Union warship, Emancipation Day celebrations and reunions of former slaves. There are portraits of unknown black men and women who stepped into photography studios in their Sunday best to assert and showcase their new, postslavery self-images, along with well-known subjects like Frederick Douglass (who never smiled for photos) and Sojourner Truth, whose images were widely distributed for political purposes.

http://www.amazon.com/Envisioning-Emancipation-Black-Americans-Slavery/dp/1439909857

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/22/books/envisioning-emancipation-book-documents-slaverys-end.html?_r=0

Stories of Real Human Beings Make History Powerful. Photographs Make it Immediate- A Photo From “Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery,” Created by Historians Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer.

“We wanted to imagine what freedom looked like for these people,” says Willis, a North Philly native, a professor of photography and imaging at New York University, and a leading curator of African American images. “The people saving their money, going to a photographer’s studio, getting dressed and forming a biography - remaining themselves as free people.”

The two men were soldiers from Wisconsin’s 22d Infantry Regiment, and they were escorting the escaped teenage slave - who had disguised herself as a boy - from Kentucky to Cincinnati in 1862. They’d been assigned to take her to an Underground Railroad safe haven. The photographer and abolitionist J.P. Ball posed the soldiers to hold their pistols high, symbolizing bravery in protecting their young charge.

“The images allowed us to show [African Americans] in a way that written sources don’t yield that same kind of complexity,” says Krauthamer, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts. “When you see a picture of a washerwoman slave who got herself in the Union army, earned her freedom, and was part of the war effort, that’s deep.”

http://www.amazon.com/Envisioning-Emancipation-Black-Americans-Slavery/dp/1439909857

They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War 

A neglected chapter of Civil War history, telling the stories of hundreds of women who adopted male disguise and fought as soldiers. It explores their reasons for enlisting; their experiences in combat, and the way they were seen by their fellow soldiers and the American public.

“Albert Cashier” served three years in the Union Army and passed successfully as a man until 1911 when the aging veteran was revealed to be a woman named Jennie Hodgers. Frances Clayton kept fighting even after her husband was gunned down in front of her at the Battle of Murfreesboro. And more than one soldier astonished “his” comrades-in-arms by giving birth in camp.

http://www.amazon.com/They-Fought-Like-Demons-Soldiers/dp/1400033152

The Civil War Diary of Schoolgirl Alice Williamson- Gallatin TN-We know very little about Alice except what we can learn of her attitudes and circumstances through her own words. Alice Williamson died in 1869, at a young age of 21.

April 8th The young man that was shot Friday was from Sumner but no one can find out his name. Mrs. A and W was going from Col. G. and me! I think carrying him out to the pines. They say he wore a look of calm despair. The Yankees pretended that they were tired and sat down on the side of the road but made the soldier stand in the pike: he stood with arms folded across his noble heart (for well I know he was a noble Southron and eyes bent toward the ground as a pale as death while the yankees taunted him with such remarks as ‘I will have his boots;’ another would name something that he would.

June 10th The country is overrun with Yanks: they are camped in the woods in front of us and have already paid us several visits killed sheep, goats and chickens Our new yankees are very neighborly. They come over to see us every few minutes in the day. Some came today and demanded their dinner at two o’clock but did not get it. They went off cursing us for being d__n rebels

http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/williamson/text.html

Rare Images and Unique Stories of African American Civil War Soldiers

Cover for the book African American Faces of the Civil War: An Album by Ronald Coddington.

A stunning album of 77 portrait photographs–cartes de visite, ambrotypes and tintypes… African American Faces of the Civil War provides a unique visual record, quite literally documenting the faces of war at a transitional moment in U.S. history. Lincoln’s black warriors helped to overthrow slavery and to restore the Union. Their descendants spent the next century fighting new battles for true equality. (John David Smith Charlotte Observer 2012)-Amazon.com

Find it Here http://www.amazon.com/dp/142140625X

“You can get no troops from North Carolina”

Secretary of War Simon Cameron asked North Carolina to provide two regiments in response to President Lincoln’s request for volunteers to squash the rebellion. The Governor of North Carolina replied with this message condemning the Federal Government’s attempts at “subjugating the States of the South.” About a month after Lincoln’s proclamation, on May 20th, North Carolina seceded from the Union. 

National Archives, Records of the Office of the Secretary of War

A Great Novels Impact on Humanity: Uncle Tom’s Cabin -Social Change and Stereotype

In recent years, the negative associations with Uncle Tom’s Cabin have, to an extent, overshadowed the historical impact of the book as a “vital antislavery tool.”~

First published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel greatly helped the
aniti-slavery movement. The book was translated into all major languages, and in the United States it became the second best-selling book after the Bible

The impact attributed to the book is great, reinforced by a story that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, Lincoln declared, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.” 

A Brave Black Regiment: The History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry 1863-1865  Captain Luis F. Emilio (Author)

In January 1863 the Union War Department authorized the creation of “a special corps” composed of “persons of African descent”—the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, commanded by Col. Robert Gould Shaw. Hundreds of free blacks enlisted. When the 54th Massachusetts spearheaded the suicidal charge against Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863, the regiment was showered with acclaim, but that defining event was not its only illustrious moment. After the devastating repulse at Fort Wagner left all of the unit’s ranking officers dead or wounded, Captain Luis F. Emilio (1844–1918) emerged as the 54th’s acting commander. A Brave Black Regiment offers an unparalleled, moving, inside view of the entire history of the 54th Massachusetts, from recruitment through disbandment. With a new introduction, rare, previously unpublished photos of Emilio and members of the 54th, the complete regimental roster, and his lengthy appendix concerning Confederate treatment of black prisoners-of-war.