[PDF] Confederate Admiral eBook

Author : Craig L. Symonds
Publisher : US Naval Institute Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 45,5 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :

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"While Buchanan's Civil War experiences helped define the drama of the period, his fifty-year naval career illuminates the sweeping changes in the U.S. Navy of the antebellum years."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : James P. Duffy
Publisher : New Word City
Page : 470 pages
File Size : 34,39 MB
Release : 2015-04-07
Category : History
ISBN : 1612308589

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This vivid and impeccably researched book details the life and Civil War battles of Admiral David Farragut. It shines a spotlight and shares new details about the admiral's leadership of the mission to recapture the port of New Orleans from the Confederacy - a campaign historians consider one of the most daring in military history. Farragut is perhaps best known for his order to “Damn the torpedoes.... Full speed ahead." during the Battle of Mobile Bay, which has become a touchstone and rallying cry for the United States Navy. A sweeping and riveting telling of Farragut's career and campaigns, Lincoln's Admiral offers fascinating insights into the strategy and decisions of one of the greatest military leaders on the Civil War - and of all time.

Author : Chester G. Hearn
Publisher : US Naval Institute Press
Page : 424 pages
File Size : 14,52 MB
Release : 1998
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :

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No admiral in America's Civil War fought with more distinction than David Glasgow Farragut, the first admiral of the U.S. Navy. Yet despite being considered by historians the most important American naval officer before World War II, no substantial biography of Farragut has been published in more than fifty years. Noted historian Chester Hearn's use of previously untapped family and archival records make this long-anticipated study worth waiting for. His history not only fully describes Farragut's extraordinary naval exploits but also his lifelong involvement with Capt. David Porter, his foster father, and David Dixon Porter, his foster brother - making this the most complete and illuminating picture ever assembled of one of America's greatest naval heroes. Focusing primarily on the Civil War, Hearn uses recently discovered family correspondence to detail Farragut's relationships with the elder Porter, who signed up Farragut as a seagoing midshipman in the U.S. Navy at the age of nine, and with Porter's son, the only other full admiral to emerge from the Civil War. Under the senior Porter's tutelage, Farragut by the age of thirteen had participated in more action during the War of 1812 than many of the Navy's senior officers. Farragut's legendary leadership is showcased in Hearn's thrilling description of the Battle of Mobile Bay. The author's detailed chronicle of Farragut's command of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, crowned by the capture of New Orleans and Port Hudson, reestablishes Farragut's nearly forgotten legacy.

Author : Spencer Tucker
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 406 pages
File Size : 45,64 MB
Release : 2003-01-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780813122663

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Brigadier General John D. Imboden is an extremely important but often overlooked figure in the Civil War. Born in Virginia and trained as a lawyer, Imboden was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1850. Despite his limited military training, he secured a commission as a captain of artillery in a militia company. When Virginia seceded from the Union, Imboden came to play a prominent role in the fighting and rose to the rank of brigadier generals commanding the Shenandoah Valley District. Imboden, his four brothers, and his brother-in-law all served in the Confederate Army and were known as the "Six Brothers in Gray." Imboden claimed to have participated in "67 encounters with the enemy, battles, affairs, etc., in which the fighting was hard." He organized and led the Staunton Artillery in the capture of the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry and participated in the First Battle of Bull Run/Manassas, organizing a cavalry command that fought under Stonewall Jackson in his Shenandoah Valley Campaign. His raid with Brigadier General William Jones into West Virginia, supported by 5,500 troops and cavalry, cut the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad line and ravaged the Kanawha Valley petroleum fields. Imboden's cavalry screened the Army of Northern Virginia's left flank during the 1863 invasion of Pennsylvania. His protection of the wagon trains carrying wounded soldiers during the retreat from Gettysburg, culminating in a brilliant defensive battle at Williamsport on the Potomac, helped prevent Union troops from capturing important Confederate supplies. Imboden later led his men in hard fighting in the Shenandoah Valley in the battles of New Market, Piedmont, and Lynchburg. In late 1864, Imboden contracted typhoid fever. On his return to duty, he closed out his war service in command of Confederate prisons in Georgia, Alambama, and Mississippi. One of Imboden's hallmark characteristics was his concern for others, especially those in his charge, including Union prisoners of war at Andersonville. After the war, Imboden turned his interests to restoring the economic well-being of his native Virginia. He worked to promote the extension of rail lines and, to overcome a prolileration of different gauges, he invented a car lifter that was adopted by a number of lines. He traveled extensively to secure investments to develop the state's natural resources, founding the city of Damascus, which he hoped to make into a new iron and steel center.

Author : Earl J. Hess
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 544 pages
File Size : 40,91 MB
Release : 2016-09-02
Category : History
ISBN : 1469628767

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As a leading Confederate general, Braxton Bragg (1817–1876) earned a reputation for incompetence, for wantonly shooting his own soldiers, and for losing battles. This public image established him not only as a scapegoat for the South's military failures but also as the chief whipping boy of the Confederacy. The strongly negative opinions of Bragg's contemporaries have continued to color assessments of the general's military career and character by generations of historians. Rather than take these assessments at face value, Earl J. Hess's biography offers a much more balanced account of Bragg, the man and the officer. While Hess analyzes Bragg's many campaigns and battles, he also emphasizes how his contemporaries viewed his successes and failures and how these reactions affected Bragg both personally and professionally. The testimony and opinions of other members of the Confederate army--including Bragg's superiors, his fellow generals, and his subordinates--reveal how the general became a symbol for the larger military failures that undid the Confederacy. By connecting the general's personal life to his military career, Hess positions Bragg as a figure saddled with unwarranted infamy and humanizes him as a flawed yet misunderstood figure in Civil War history.

Author : Scott L. Mingus
Publisher : Grub Street Publishers
Page : 599 pages
File Size : 20,72 MB
Release : 2013-04-19
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1611211301

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An award-winning biography of one of the Confederacy’s most colorful and controversial generals. Winner of the 2013 Nathan Bedford Forrest History Book Award for Southern History Nominated for the 2014 Virginia Book Award for Nonfiction Despite a life full of drama, politics, and adventure, little has been written about William “Extra Billy” Smith—aside from a rather biased account by his brother-in-law back in the nineteenth century. As the oldest and one of the most controversial Confederate generals on the field at Gettysburg, Smith was also one of the most charismatic characters of the Civil War and the antebellum Old South. Known nationally as “Extra Billy” because of his prewar penchant for finding loopholes in government postal contracts to gain extra money for his stagecoach lines, Smith served as Virginia’s governor during both the war with Mexico and the Civil War; served five terms in the US Congress; and was one of Virginia’s leading spokesmen for slavery and states’ rights. Extra Billy’s extra-long speeches and wry sense of humor were legendary among his peers. A lawyer during the heady Gold Rush days, he made a fortune in California—and, as with his income earned from stagecoaches, quickly lost it. Despite his advanced age, Smith took to the field and fought well at First Manassas, was wounded at Seven Pines and again at Sharpsburg, and marched with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania. There, on the first day at Gettysburg, Smith’s frantic messages about a possible Union flanking attack remain a matter of controversy to this day. Did his aging eyes see distant fence-lines that he interpreted as approaching enemy soldiers—mere phantoms of his imagination? Or did his prompt action stave off a looming Confederate disaster? This biography draws upon a wide array of newspapers, diaries, letters, and other firsthand accounts to paint a portrait of one of the South’s most interesting leaders, complete with original maps and photos.

Author : J. Timothy Cole
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 42,42 MB
Release : 2014-08-23
Category : History
ISBN : 0786483245

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This is the story of Collett Leventhorpe (1815-1889), an Englishman and former captain in the 14th Regiment of Foot. Leventhorpe came to North Carolina about 1843, settled there, and later served the Confederacy as a colonel in the 34th and 11th N.C. and brigadier general commanding the Home Guard in eastern North Carolina. Though he trained as a physician at the College of Charleston in the late 1840s, he never practiced and was a restless man, endlessly in search of fortune--before the war in the gold fields of North Carolina and Georgia, and after it in the pursuit of lost estates, art treasures and inventions. But he excelled first and foremost as a Confederate soldier. As a field commander he was never defeated in battle, and his record was marred only by his own rejection of a much deserved but very late promotion to CSA brigadier. He lies buried in the beautiful Happy Valley section of Caldwell County.