The American Civil War & Reconstruction
Whistlestop Bookshop’s first store opened in Gettysburg in 1985. Eventually, over 19 years there, our Civil War section grew to be three large wall cases. A disproportionate percentage of it, naturally, was about the battle of Gettysburg and biographies of those who fought there. In addition to this book selling experience, my southern upbringing and Army family life created a lifelong interest in the War Between the States and all of its complexities. It is an understandable national obsession, considering how the first half of our nation’s history contributed to its ferocity, and the second half of our history has been the struggle to live with and understand the consequences.
Grant and Sherman: Civil War Memoirs [boxed set]
Grant and Sherman: Civil War Memoirs [boxed set]
The extraordinary memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman evoke the Civil War with a vividness unparalleled in American writing. Annotated by distinguished historians and filled with detailed maps, battle plans, and facsimiles reproduced from the original editions, these companion volumes offer a unique vantage on the most terrible, moving, and inexhaustibly fascinating event in American history.
Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters
Written while he was battling cancer 20 years after the conclusion of the Civil War and completed just weeks before he died, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant was published with the encouragement and under the supervision of Mark Twain and acclaimed during the next century by readers as diverse as Matthew Arnold, Gertrude Stein, and Edmund Wilson. Demonstrating his intense determination and trademark modesty, Grant’s autobiography is devoted almost entirely to his life as a soldier: his years at West Point, his service in the peacetime army, and his education in war during conflicts foreign and domestic. Grant’s account of the Civil War combines a lucid treatment of its political causes and its military actions with the story of his own growing strength as a commander. The volume includes 174 letters written by Grant from 1839 to 1865; many are to his wife, Julia, and offer an intimate portrait and others are to fellow-generals and government officials.
Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman
Hailed as a prophet of modern warfare and condemned as a harbinger of modern barbarism, Sherman is the most controversial general of the Civil War. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it,” he wrote in fury to the Confederate mayor of Atlanta. Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman provides both vivid firsthand accounts of crucial events—Shiloh, Chattanooga, Vicksburg, the Atlanta campaign, the marches through Georgia and the Carolinas—and a complex self-portrait of an innovative and relentless American warrior. The volume includes additional material added by the author in the expanded revised edition of 1886, including letters from readers and soldiers responding to, supplementing, and correcting the earlier edition.