Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H915
ISBN: 9780881465693
Price: $35.00
A JUST AND HOLY CAUSE? details the life of the family of Lieutenant Marcus Bethune Ely and his unit, the Russell Guards (Co. H, 54th Georgia Regiment) in the midst of one of our country’s greatest tragedies. The Russell Guards were organized in Columbus, Georgia by Captain Charles R. Russell in May 1862. Most of the recruits were from Muscogee and Harris County.
These letters provide a picture of life on both the battlefield and the homefront, often touched with humor and love.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H918
ISBN: 9780881465709
Price: $35.00
Of the many books written about the Battle of Gettysburg, none has included selections from the collected memoirs of the 238 chaplains, North and South, who were present at the battle—until now.
Because chaplains were considered noncombatants, most were largely ignored. This unique study has brought to light many of the observations of clergymen, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish, who accompanied their regiments wherever they marched, camped, or fought. Some of the memoirs have never been published, others unnoticed for a century. Because this is the first book to approach the Battle of Gettysburg from this perspective, rosters of Union and Confederate chaplains reportedly present at the battle are also included.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H923
ISBN: 9780881465891
Price: $29.00
Though far from the major theaters of battle, Floridians experienced every facet of the Civil War. While most Florida soldiers fought for the Confederacy, many Floridians, including former slaves, enlisted with the Union. Families were divided and partisanship tore communities apart. Some Floridians produced salt, beef, and supplies for the Confederacy; others profited during Union occupations. The one notable battle fought in Florida, the Battle of Olustee, was disproportionately bloody.
FLORIDA'S CIVIL WAR is a true tale of survival, ingenuity, and opportunism.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P538
ISBN: 9780881465945
Price: $30.00
Fair-minded and comprehensive, C. Mildred Thompson’s RECONSTRUCTION IN GEORGIA (1915) has long been considered among the best of the state studies to emerge from Columbia University’s Dunning School. This coterie of graduate students in Professor William A. Dunning’s famed Reconstruction seminar produced studies of Reconstruction in their native states. Widely admired and appreciatively reviewed in their time, they were increasingly pilloried by revisionist scholars after mid-century.
This new edition reintroduces Thompson’s classic to new readers as the Reconstruction Sesquicentennial gets underway. It corrects the major flaw of the original by including a full index, and also offers a detailed biographical sketch of the author.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H927
ISBN: 9780881466041
Price: $35.00
Greatly loved by those who served under him, Lieutenant Colonel William Gaston Delony possessed three admirable attributes: “commanding presence, bull dog courage, and superb generalship.”
THE LEGION'S FIGHTING BULLDOG relays the story of a young man, on the cusp of a promising law career in the 1850s who comes to the conclusion that his way of life, and that of his neighbors, is about to change forever. Interwoven with those of his wife, Rosa Eugenia Huguenin, the Delony correspondence furnishes us a window into the lives of independent individuals during the Civil War who also happened to be well-placed in society due to birth.
A graduate of the University of Georgia, Delony was well educated for the period. A lawyer prior to the war, his tremendous inherent tenacity and fighting ability made him the first Georgia Bulldog.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H928
ISBN: 9780881466058
Price: $35.00
Jefferson Davis faced the greatest crisis of his Confederate presidency in the fall of 1864. Stunning Union victories and thinning army ranks forced Davis to decide whether independence or slavery was most important. In November, Davis called on Congress to reconsider the role of the slave in the Southern war effort. His goal was not simply to find more men for Lee’s army but rather to create a new Confederate identity based in the experience of war rather than in the shadows of the Old South.
inal campaign by convincing many Southerners that the Confederate nation was more important than the institution of slavery.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H929
ISBN: 9780881466065
Price: $35.00
United States Supreme Court Justice James Moore Wayne is the most famous Georgian nobody knows. When his home state seceded from the Union in 1861, Wayne retained his seat on the US Supreme Court and remained loyal to the Union as the nation lunged headlong into war. He knew the insanity of secession, and warned of the folly of disunion, but his son, Col. Henry Wayne, resigned his commission in the US Army and cast his lot with the Confederacy. This book tells their story and examines the nature of Georgia’s strong and largely overlooked unionist sentiment in the decades before the Civil War.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H939
ISBN: 9780881466263
Price: $29.00
THE STRANGE JOURNEY OF THE CONFEDERATE CONSTITUTION is a collection of seventeen articles and essays on topics in Georgia and Southern history. Individual chapters are arranged by era and cover subjects ranging from The Great Yazoo Fraud of the 1790s, to Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Treasure of the 1860s, to the Reign of Terror visited by the Ku Klux Klan in Macon of the 1920s. While academic, the book’s varying topics are aimed at readers with a general interest in the intriguing and often convoluted history of the South.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H942
ISBN: 9780881466317
Price: $35.00
In September 1864, at a gathering in Macon, Georgia, Confederate President Jefferson Davis admitted that two-thirds of his troops were absent, most without leave. Some had opposed secession to begin with. Others came to see the conflict as a “rich man’s war.” But it was hardship and hunger among their families that drew most soldiers back home. For more than a century and a half, historians have often ignored the Confederacy’s home front difficulties, which had so much to do with desertion and defeat. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Civil War knows that Confederate armies were outnumbered two to one. In a presumptive way, the manpower disparity is usually attributed to the North’s larger population. Lost in that simplistic view is the impact that desertion had on sapping the Confederacy’s fighting strength. And this is but one of the many critical issues historians too often brush aside.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H947
ISBN: 9780881466379
Price: $35.00
Born 9 June 1838, James H. McNeilly grew up near Charlotte in Dickson County, Tennessee. At age thirteen, McNeilly was sworn in as deputy circuit court clerk of Dickson County. Raised in a devout Presbyterian home, he received his undergraduate degree from Jackson College in Columbia, Tennessee. Just as the Civil War broke out, he had earned his Doctor of Divinity from Danville Theological Seminary at Danville, Kentucky. As McNeilly returned home to Dickson County, in the summer of 1861, he preached on Sunday and recruited troops for the Confederacy during the week. In October 1861, McNeilly traveled to nearby Fort Donelson, where he offered his services to the South.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P554
ISBN: 9780881466409
Price: $30.00
The name of Union general William T. Sherman is still reviled in Atlanta, 150 years after his soldiers devastated this important Georgia city. Thirty-seven days of artillery bombardment, July-August 1864, wrecked countless downtown buildings and killed perhaps a score of civilians. Longtime Atlantan Stephen Davis describes Sherman’s shelling in detail unmatched in the Civil War literature.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H968
ISBN: 9780881466928
Price: $40.00
AN EDGEFIELD PLANTER AND HIS WORLD opens a window on the life of an elite family and its circle in a now iconic place, during a crystalizing decade of the Antebellum era. By the time he began a new diary volume in 1840, Brooks (1790-1851) was among the richest men in a South Carolina district known for its cotton-and-slave-generated wealth. His journal reveals Brooks’s attentiveness to his plantation and farms, self-image as a paternal master, religious sensibility, genteel but honor-bound bearing, personal and family connections, perspective on politics, and the effects of debilitating headaches.
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