Modern War Studies
4 total works
A young Ohio lawyer, Thomas Taylor was a junior officer who fought under Sherman at Vicksburg and Chattanooga and on the march through Georgia, and his diary and letters contain vivid descriptions of numerous skirmishes and battles over four years. By interweaving Taylor's words with his own narrative, Albert Castel has fashioned a work on the Civil War as engrossing as a novel; by also including letters from Taylor's wife, he has created a whole new dimension for viewing that conflict.
Often written under adverse conditions, Taylor's descriptions of military encounters are filled with vivid details and perceptive observations. His passages especially provide new insight into the Georgia campaign--including accounts of the Battles of Atlanta and Ezra Church--and into the role of middle-echelon officers in both camp and combat. Castel's bridging narrative is equally dramatic, providing an overview of the fighting that gives readers invaluable context for Taylor's eyewitness reports.
The book chronicles not only Taylor's military career but also the strains it placed on his marriage. Taylor had gone off to war both to fight for his Unionist beliefs and to enhance his reputation in his community, while his wife, Netta, was a peace Democrat whose letters constantly urged Tom to return home. Their epistolary conversation-rare among Civil War sources-reflects a relationship that was as politically charged as it was passionate. Taylor's passages also reveal his changing attitudes: from favoring strong measures against the rebels at the beginning of the war to eventually deploring the destruction he witnessed in Georgia.
Tom Taylor's Civil War is a moving account of one man whose life was ripped apart by war and of the woman back home who remained his anchor through it all. Combining the best features of biography and autobiography, it paints a compelling picture of that conflict that will stir the heart as much as the imagination.
As they part, a Confederate calls to a Yankee, "I hope to miss you, Yank, if I happen to shoot in your direction." "May I, never hit you Johnny if we fight again," comes the reply.
The reprieve is short. A couple of months, dozens of battles, and more than 30,000 casualties later, the North takes Atlanta.
One of the most dramatic and decisive episodes of the Civil War, the Atlanta Campaign was a military operation carried out on a grand scale across a spectacular landscape that pitted some of the war's best (and worst) general against each other.
In Decision in the West, Albert Castel provides the first detailed history of the Campaign published since Jacob D. Cox's version appeared in 1882. Unlike Cox, who was a general in Sherman's army, Castel provides an objective perspective and a comprehensive account based on primary and secondary sources that have become available in the past 110 years.
Castel gives a full and balanced treatment to the operations of both the Union and Confederate armies from the perspective of the common soldiers as well as the top generals. He offers new accounts and analyses of many of the major events of the campaign, and, in the process, corrects many long-standing myths, misconceptions, and mistakes. In particular, he challenges the standard view of Sherman's performance.
Written in present tense to give a sense of immediacy and greater realism, Decision in the West demonstrates more definitively than any previous book how the capture of Atlanta by Sherman's army occurred and why it assured Northern victory in the Civil War.
Now acclaimed author Albert Castel brings his inimitable style, insight, and wit to a new reconsideration of these generals. With the assistance of Brooks Simpson, another leading light in this field, Castel has produced a remarkable capstone volume to a distinguished career. In it, he reassesses how battles and campaigns forged a decisive Northern victory, reevaluates the generalship of the victors, and lays bare the sometimes vicious rivalries among the Union generals and their effect on the war.
From Shiloh to the Shenandoah, Chickamauga to Chattanooga, Castel provides fresh accounts of how the Union commanders-especially Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, and Meade but also Halleck, Schofield, and Rosecrans-outmaneuvered and outfought their Confederate opponents. He asks of each why he won: Was it through superior skill, strength of arms, enemy blunders, or sheer chance? What were his objectives and how did he realize them? Did he accomplish more or less than could be expected under the circumstances? And if less, what could he have done to achieve more-and why did he not do it? Castel also sheds new light on the war within the war: the intense rivalries in the upper ranks, complicated by the presence in the army of high-ranking non-West Pointers with political wagons attached to the stars on their shoulders.
A decade in the writing, Victors in Blue brims with novel, even outrageous interpretations that are sure to stir debate. As certain as the Union achieved victory, it will inform, provoke, and enliven sesquicentennial discussions of the Civil War.
So begins Albert Castel's classic history of Kansas during the Civil War. Long recognized as a key study on the war in the trans-Mississippi West, Civil War Kansas describes the political, military, social, and economic events of the state's first four years. Castel contributes to a better understanding of the Civil War in this region through a realistic presentation and analysis of the Kansas-Missouri border conflict, the operations of the Missouri guerrillas under Quantrill, and the Union and Confederate military campaigns in Missouri, Arkansas, the Indian Territory, and Kansas itself.