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Enforcing a blockade of the southern coast constituted the Union Navy's principal Civil War mission, but federal gunboats and other vessels frequently supported Union Army operations by providing gunfire support, convoying and landing troops, defending army depots and supply bases, and participating in joint army–navy expeditions or raids into the interior. Union Navy vessels cooperated with the army in attacks on James Island and Fort Fisher, the capture of Fort Pulaski and Plymouth, North Carolina, and dozens of smaller operations. African Americans provided intelligence that prompted or supported these operations, contributed to them by acting as guides, and served as crewmen on navy vessels or as rank-and-file soldiers in U.S. Colored Troop units. These missions included liberating slaves as a means of recruiting able-bodied men for the newly formed black army regiments. As more such black regiments were created, these expeditions increasingly included African American infantry units, accompanied occasionally by cavalry or artillery.

Soon after the fall of Fort Sumter, the Navy Department realized that the fleet's rapid wartime expansion would require thousands of sailors, and it sent navy recruiters out to recruiting stations, called rendezvous, in large eastern cities and small coastal and river towns to lure men into the service. Only about 300 African American men reported to these stations, and by the end of 1861 they accounted for only about six percent of Union Navy crews. These numbers soon grew, however. According to Howard University's Black Sailors Project, 18,000 African American men (and 11 women) served in the Union Navy over the course of the Civil War. African American sailors constituted about 20 percent of the enlisted force, nearly double the proportion of black soldiers who served in the Union Army during the war. The largest number of black men joining the Union Navy listed their place of origin as either Maryland or Virginia.

This chapter presents Tally Simpsonsʼ wartime letters to his family in South Carolina dated from July to September 1863. Tally's last letter was written from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania on June 28 as General Robert E. Lee's army began its invasion of the North. His next letter was on July 17 as Lee's army slowly wound its way back home after they were defeated by the Union Army. This was the Battle of Gettysburg.

This chapter presents Tally Simpsonsʼ wartime letters to his family in South Carolina dated from May to June 1863. These letters tell about the battle between the Union Army's Joe Hooker and the Confederate Army's Robert E. Lee during the Maryland Campaign. Tally also describes how Lafayette McLawsʼ division prevented John Sedgwick's attempt to cross Fredericksburg in order to get behind Lee and threaten him from the rear.

This chapter examines the divide that existed between Union soldiers and civilians in the North during the Civil War. It argues that the separation between soldier and civilian was caused by the “hardening” of soldiers as a result of their experiences in combat. It considers how the harsh experiences led to a decline in traditional moral values and insensitivity to death and suffering as soldiers set aside the civilian morality that defined their prewar existence. Hardening, the chapter suggests, was a subtle process that culminated in the detachment of the soldier from prewar ideals, as evidenced by their declining acceptance of traditional social mores. The chapter also discusses the morally hardened Union Army's attitudes toward the Confederate Army and newspapers, as well as the soldier's casual acceptance of violence and death. Finally, it looks at letters from home as a means of correspondence between soldiers and families, along with the Union soldiers' flimsy sense of connection with residents of the Border States.

This essay will examine how northern partisanship tainted the promotion of Union officers and how these detrimental effects on partisan politics challenge the reigning paradigm that the North's two-party system offered it a decisive advantage. In 1958 David Potter and others argued that the North's two-party system benefited its war effort because action taken by the “loyal opposition” subdued harsh measures enacted by a paranoid Republican administration. The records of the adjutant generals’ offices of the various northern states, however, do not uphold this paradigm and reveal that the North's two-party system created conflict, not muted it. The North's two-party system compelled rival groups to engage in fierce confrontations that nearly unraveled the Union military affairs. In this case, partisan confrontations corrupted the promotion of Union officers. In almost every Union regiment, the politics of promotion became dishonest and often limited the meritocracy of combat service. Northern governors retained the authority to commission officers from second lieutenant to colonel, which in some states meant thousands of commissions. Throughout the war, northern applicants for officers’ positions tapped their partisan associations to advance in rank, retarding the development of an effective Union Army.

This chapter follows Mary Edwards Bryan’s second period of residence in Louisiana and her attempted reconciliation with her husband Iredell Bryan. As civil war approaches the Red River region, Mary gives birth to her first daughter, and Iredell increasingly absents himself in connection with Confederate service. Mary struggles to maintain her connections with Southern Field and Fireside, but that relationship lapses. She begins writing for the Natchitoches Union and its publisher Louis Dupleix. The frankness and challenging nature of her essays stir controversy, although the essays evidence the continuing development of her effective use of humor. By 1863, New Orleans has fallen, Union armies are advancing, and communications across the Mississippi are threatened. Mary seizes upon the opportunity to return to Atlanta to find a way to maintain an independent career and existence.

This chapter presents wartime letters from Tally Simpson's friends and officers addressed to his family in South Carolina dated from September to October 1863. These letters tell about the death of Tally in the Battle of Chickamauga in Georgia, where the Confederate Army was defeated by the Union Army. They expressed deepest sympathies and condolences to the family of Tally and provided the details about what they did with his body and his belongings.

This chapter examines the tactics employed by General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia against General George Gordon Meade and the Union Army of the Potomac as the former made their retreat to Virginia during the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, at the height of the Civil War. As fighting raged in the streets of Hagerstown and east of Williamsport on the afternoon of July 6, Lee's troops kept marching forward until they reached Hagerstown the next morning. Lee wanted Meade to attack while his troops occupied the eastern base of the South Mountain range and the two entrances to Monterey Pass. The steady but deliberate movement of Lee's army toward Monterey Pass from the morning of July 5 until the afternoon of the following day was one of the most critical episodes of their retreat. To obtain stores for future use, Lee's men conducted foraging as they advanced through the rain and mud.

This chapter follows Eliza Bogan’s journey, and those of many thousands more, as they moved through the Mississippi River valley during the tumultuous years of 1863 and 1864. It begins with Bogan’s flight to the refugee camp in Helena, Arkansas, where her third husband, Silas Small, had gone to enlist in a regiment of the United States Colored Troops. But the upheaval of combat violence, especially during the 1863 Vicksburg Campaign, pushed Bogan and thousands of other refugees out of Helena and into other parts of the Mississippi River valley. The chapter then describes Bogan’s decision to join her husband’s regiment as a laundress and argues that positions like these opened up room for women in the Union army’s combat apparatus. This, along with the Union’s decision to resettle women and children on leased plantations in the region, as workers but also as occupiers of those plantations, reveals how deeply embedded all formerly enslaved people were in formal combat -- and in the Union army’s determined effort to defeat their former owners.

This chapter examines the defense lines, comprised of trenchworks and gun emplacements, erected by General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia in their fight against General George Gordon Meade and the Union Army of the Potomac as the former made their retreat to Virginia during the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, at the height of the Civil War. Realizing that his men would not be able to cross the Potomac River, Lee decided to position his army in the strongest defenses he could find in the area between Hagerstown and the Potomac. He also built a bridge across the river. Only twelve miles away, Meade's army was approaching the mountain passes, and Lee had to keep them at a distance while he was constructing the nine-mile defense line. On July 10 and 11, he positioned his army into the Williamsport defense line west of Funkstown. Lee's defense line had significant military advantages because behind it was a network of roads.

This chapter discusses the Union army's advancement to the Deep South. Henry W. Halleck began to disperse his large concentration of troops at Corinth to occupy key points along the rail system through Tennessee and Kentucky. He also sent Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio eastward to secure control of Chattanooga, which serves as a gateway to the Deep South. By dispatching Buell to take this objective, Halleck separated the two major Union armies in the West and set them off toward divergent but equally significant objectives.

This chapter examines the battle between Confederate and Union armies in East Tennessee and southwestern Virginia during the period from October 1863 to March 1864. During this period, East Tennessee became a bloody battleground between the Union and Confederate armies, and while the war had left the mountains of eastern Kentucky, the Union army's movement into East Tennessee brought more pressure to bear on southwestern Virginia.

The process of emancipation played out in a more comprehensive way in the western theater than in the eastern. Western officers were forced to deal with huge numbers of slaves across a vast region and implement appropriate policies and programs to carry out emancipation. In particular, the Border South proved especially difficult in managing the legal and political questions surrounding emancipation. At the war’s beginning, the government in Washington had clearly stated that its goal was to preserve the Union and not free the slaves, a view shared by many western officers. But as the war dragged on into its second year, the armies and the government became more emancipationist. Many officers also came to support emancipation and even the use of black troops. However, most officers only embraced emancipation out of pragmatism and military necessity, and their policies reflected their lack of moral idealism. Officers in the western armies liberated slaves for the army’s benefit. As Reconstruction began, many in the North were not very concerned about securing political equality for former slaves. While the war had pushed Northerners to emancipate the slaves, it did not transform them into racial egalitarians.

This chapter focuses on the Union campaign to capture Vicksburg. It details Grant’s strategy; the Holly Springs debacle that forced Grant to retreat north toward Tennessee; and the battle of Chicksaw Bayou. The grand scheme concocted by Grant and Sherman had failed miserably. In their attempt to hurry up the campaign in order to have Vicksburg, they ignored the risks that lengthy supply lines, geography, and weather conditions could impose on an army.

This chapter examines the stories of white enlistees for the Union Army with respect to confronting wounds and sicknesses. It suggests that it was no easy matter for Union enlistees to suffer in the way they did, given the medical realities they confronted. This chapter also discusses the history of how tales of heroic sufferings first emerged in America and describes the story of a woman volunteer who witnessed wounded Union soldiers “scattered here and there without food or water for twenty-four hours.”

This chapter examines the Union army's offensive in the Appalachian region during the period from November 1862 to February 1863. Samuel Carter launched a successful raid of East Tennessee that provided additional problems for the Confederate army. These problems involved protecting the saltworks at Saltville and the railroad connecting the Confederacy's east and west. During this time, the Confederates already appeared weak and inept, having been affected by other factors such as outbreaks of disease and military problems of their commanders in the region.

This chapter focuses on the Shenandoah Valley, which served not only as corridor for the evacuation of General Robert E. Lee's sick and wounded troops but also as a holding area for much of his vast quartermaster and subsistence stores in July 1863, at the height of the Civil War. General George Gordon Meade and his Union Army of the Potomac were anticipating a climactic battle with Lee's Army of Northern Virginia on July 12 and 13 along the Williamsport defense line north of the Potomac River. The Union soldiers eventually realized that no such battle was going to happen, and many were angry that Meade and the high command allowed Lee to escape. Even President Abraham Lincoln and General Henry W. Halleck were of the impression that Meade was content to allow Lee's army to leave Pennsylvania and Maryland. The Valley Turnpike made the Shenandoah Valley an important corridor for the supply of Lee's army and the evacuation of its casualties.

This chapter examines how race and the purpose of the Civil War became debatable issues between the Union Army and Northern civilians. The Civil War was touted as “abolition war,” with the goal of ending slavery. The debate over whether the Civil War was an abolition war had significant implications for why soldiers fought, what they represented, and what they wanted the war to achieve. Civilians also debated the abolition issue, offering a variety of opinions on the virtue of abolitionism. Both civilians at home and soldiers in the field did not agree amongst themselves on the purpose of the war, but the latter derived their views from their side of the experience divide. Whereas soldiers experienced slavery and its consequences on a daily basis, Northerners discussed the institution as an abstraction. This chapter discusses three broad categories of Union soldiers with respect to their stand on what the war should achieve relative to the slavery issue: abolitionists, anti-abolitionists, and emancipationists.