A forgotten shade of blue: support for the union and the constitutional republic in southeastern Kentucky during the civil war era.

This thesis analyzes Southeastern Kentucky’s political and military support for the Union during the Civil War era. In the decades prior to the 1860 election, Kentucky developed deep social and economic ties with all sections of the country. After the secession winter that followed Abraham Lincoln’s presidential election, the statewide population divided and pockets of significant Confederate sympathies emerged. Kentucky’s southeastern counties aligned with the Union at the outbreak of the Civil War because of a strong national identity and the absence of a large slave population. As the war unfolded, Southeastern Kentuckians played an important role in the disruption of repeated Confederate invasions. Kentucky split again in the emancipationist phase of the war when guerilla warfare engulfed the slave state, but southeastern Kentuckians continued to support federal efforts with votes, enlistments, and service. In the final months of the conflict, and the years that followed, a core of Kentucky’s southeastern counties did not drift toward the Confederacy’s “lost cause,” nor to the Democratic Party, as did much of the state. Instead, citizens from Southeastern Kentucky offered robust support for Union veterans and other Republican candidates who ran for both state and federal offices. This thesis illuminates the political activity and military service of citizens from Southeastern Kentucky during those turbulent years with attention to national events and other local populations proximate to the region of study

"I feel impelled to write": male intimacy, epistolary privacy, and the culture of letter writing during the American Civil War

This dissertation sheds light on the gendered and commemorative history of the Civil War. Many historians have recognized the importance of soldiers' letters as evidence of the cultural and ideological mentalities of Americans in wartime. Yet the scholarship has failed to notice the urgency with which soldiers sought to control and maintain the privacy of their correspondences. For millions of combatants, the Civil War presented problems of maintaining privacy unknown in civilian life. Yankees and rebels alike defined their letters as a form of personal property and regarded unauthorized access to their letters not simply as theft but as violations of their person. The safeguards they sought to impose on their mail reveal how these soldiers tried to defend the boundaries of privacy in the midst of a military environment generally devoid of personal space. This dissertation draws on thousands of soldiers' letters held at over three dozen archives and libraries across the United States. The prevailing model of combat motivation emphasizes the ideological components of cause and country. Soldiers' wartime letters suggest they fought not just for nation and ideology but also for the personal stakes associated with their public standings as honorable men. Women on the home front played key roles as the epistolary confidants of soldiers. After the war, these women, as well as veterans themselves, sought to maintain the public façade of masculine heroism by silencing the wartime admissions of fear, doubt, and desertion

THE RHETORIC OF DESTRUCTION: RACIAL IDENTITY AND NONCOMBATANT IMMUNITY IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA

This study explores how Americans chose to conduct war in the mid-nineteenth century and the relationship between race and the onset of “total war” policies. It is my argument that enlisted soldiers in the Civil War era selectively waged total war using race and cultural standards as determining factors. A comparative analysis of the treatment of noncombatants throughout the United States between 1861 and 1865 demonstrates that nonwhites invariably suffered greater depredations at the hands of military forces than did whites. Five types of encounters are examined: 1) the treatment of white noncombatants by regular Union and Confederate forces; 2) the fate of noncombatants caught up in the guerrilla wars of the border regions; 3) the relationship between native New Mexicans, Anglo Union troops and Confederate Texans; 4) the relationship between African American noncombatants and Union and Confederate forces; and 5) the conflict between various Indian tribes and Union and Confederate forces apart from the Civil War. By moving away from a narrow focus of white involvement in a single conflict and instead speaking of a “Civil War era,” new comparisons can be drawn that illuminate the multi-faceted nature of American warfare in the mid-nineteenth century. Such a comparison, advances the notion that there has been not one “American way of war,” but two – the first waged against whites, and the second against all others. A thorough study of the language soldiers employed to stereotype explains how the process of dehumanization functioned and why similar groups of men behaved with restraint in one instance and committed atrocity in another. Though the fates of Hispanic, black, and Indian noncombatants have generally been obscured by the “greater” aspects of the Civil War, they are integral to understanding both the capacity of mid-nineteenth century Americans to inflict destruction and the importance of race in shaping military responses. Ultimately, the racialist assumptions of white soldiers served to prevent atrocities against white noncombatants, while the desire to maintain white privilege virtually guaranteed the implementation of harsh tactics against nonwhites

Liberty protected by law: race, rights, and the Civil War in Illinois

Illinois was a hostile place for free blacks to live before the Civil War. Its racial laws, built on the principles of white supremacy and exclusivity, were among the most restrictive in the antebellum North. Illinois’s legal code discouraged blacks from moving to the state and severely circumscribed the rights of those who did. Yet, only weeks before the Civil War ended, Illinois lawmakers repealed the state’s most oppressive black laws. This dissertation explores how the war destabilized the racial order that white Illinoisans had constructed. It travels from the home front to the frontlines in order to understand the ways civilians and soldiers responded to a war that evolved into an assault on slavery. As Illinois soldiers became willing participants in the process of emancipation, Republicans back at home strove to eliminate the vestiges of slavery by striking down state statutes that denied blacks natural rights and equal protection under the law

Engineering Victory: The Ingenuity, Proficiency, and Versatility of Union Citizen Soldiers in Determining the Outcome of the Civil War

My dissertation explores the critical advantage the Union held over the Confederacy in military engineering. The skills Union soldiers displayed during the war at bridge building, railroad repair, and road making demonstrated mechanical ability and often revealed ingenuity and imagination. These skills were developed during the antebellum period when northerners invested in educational systems that served an industrializing economy. Before the war, northern states’ attempt at implementing basic educational reforms, the spread of informal educational practices directed at mechanics and artisans, and the exponential growth in manufacturing all generated a different work related ethos than that of the South. Plantation slavery generated fabulous wealth for a tiny percent of the southern white population. It fostered a particular style of agriculture and scientific farming that limited land use. It curtailed manufacturing opportunities, and it stifled educational opportunities for the middle and lower classes because those in political power feared that an educated yeomanry would be filled with radical ideas such as social equality, and, worst of all, abolition These differences in the North and South produced unique skill sets in both armies, and consequently, resulted in more successful and resourceful Union engineering operations during the war. Between 1861 and 1865 the North engineered victory

Enduring the Elements: Civil War Soldiers’ Struggles Against the Weather

This dissertation is an environmental history that studies the variety of ways that soldiers in the American Civil War experienced the pressures of weather over the course of their military service. For the troops of the U.S. and Confederacy, the weather was more than simply a passive backdrop to their time in the military, but a central preoccupation. This dissertation analyzes how weather intersected with some of the most central experiences of soldiering – tent camping and winter quarters, marching, bivouacking, manning sentry posts and field fortifications, and fighting in battles. Life in Civil War armies consisted of all of these assorted activities, with most troops engaging in many, if not, all of them. These various facets of wartime service were nowhere near as exacting and challenging when they took place in mild weather, as they were in adverse conditions such as rain or heat. Rank-and-file U.S. and Confederate troops accumulated knowledge and experience as they soldiered that shaped the ways that they perceived, reacted, and adjusted to the weather. Though their responses were conditioned by the different aspects of military service, men devised numerous methods, using any means available, to combat inclement weather and to alleviate its difficulties and hardships. Adapting to the environment turned out to be a critical element in how common soldiers became hardened veterans. But it was not only that. Federals and Confederates strove to adapt to the weather because they connected it to their identity as men. To these troops, successfully contending with human opponents as well as meteorological adversaries proved their manhood

Soldaten Des Westens: An Analysis of the Wartime Experiences of Three German-American Regiments from the St. Louis-Bellville Region

During the Civil War, Germans from the Greater St. Louis region enthusiastically volunteered for service in the Union Army and filled the companies of three regiments examined here: the 30th and 43rd Illinois and 12th Missouri Volunteer Infantry Regiments. This thesis argues that German-American soldiers serving in these regiments joined the army to save the Union and end slavery. Once mustered into service, they experienced less nativism within the Union Army of the Tennessee than Germans in the Union Army of the Potomac. In contrast to the predominantly German 43rd Illinois and 12th Missouri, the 30th Illinois was considered a native-born American regiment although 21 percent of the men identified as foreign born. This distinct ethnic makeup dispelled nativism from within the regiment, and allowed Germans to escape outside nativist prejudice. A result of St. Louis area German unit successes in the victorious Army of the Tennessee was their postwar acceptance of various Anglo-American cultural aspects. Contemporary scholarship focuses overwhelmingly on German-American soldiers serving in the Army of the Potomac and inaccurately analyzes Midwestern German volunteers through Eastern Germans’ wartime experiences. This thesis warrants Western serving German-American soldiers their proper attention and studies them within the context of their home communities and army. It also offers a scholarly examination of the relationships between German and native-born American soldiers in an ethnically mixed unit which challenges the historiographical trend of solely studying German experiences in ethnic units. This thesis relies on extensive soldier letters and diaries, official documents, and newspaper articles

Volume 63-3 Complete Issue

The complete issue of Volume 63, Issue 3, originally uploaded to Gamma Theta Upsilon Novemeber 202

The Annals of Iowa, Spring 2017, Vol. 76, no.

A quarterly journal of Iowa authors and their works produced by State Historical Society of Iowa