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On April 14, 1861, following the surrender of Fort Sumter, Washington was “put into the condition of a siege,” declared Abraham Lincoln. Located sixty miles south of the Mason-Dixon Line, the nation's capital was surrounded by the slave states of Maryland and Virginia. With no fortifications and only a handful of trained soldiers, Washington was an ideal target for the Confederacy. The South echoed with cries of “On to Washington!” and Jefferson Davis's wife sent out cards inviting her friends to a reception at the White House on May 1. Lincoln issued an emergency proclamation on April 15, calling for 75,000 troops to suppress the rebellion and protect the capital. One question now transfixed the nation: whose forces would reach Washington first, Northern defenders or Southern attackers? For 12 days, the city's fate hung in the balance. Washington was entirely isolated from the North-without trains, telegraph, or mail. Sandbags were stacked around major landmarks, and the unfinished Capitol was transformed into a barracks, with volunteer troops camping out in the House and Senate chambers. Meanwhile, Maryland secessionists blocked the passage of Union reinforcements trying to reach Washington, and a rumored force of 20,000 Confederate soldiers lay in wait just across the Potomac River. This book tells this story from the perspective of leading officials, residents trapped inside the city, Confederates plotting to seize it, and Union troops racing to save it, capturing with brilliance and immediacy the precarious first days of the Civil War.

The remarkable military career of General Winfield Scott spanned fifty-three years, fourteen presidents, and six wars, both foreign and domestic. However, his lengthy service did not secure his rightful place among the nation’s pantheon of great military leaders. Instead, he is most often remembered as the aged, overweight, and sickly commanding general who was replaced by George McClellan at the beginning of the Civil War. Originally published in 1864, only two years before his death, Scott’s memoirs touch on many of the significant events of the early and mid-nineteenth century. This new edition of those remembrances, expertly edited by Timothy D. Johnson, showcases Scott’s rare strategic insights, battlefield prowess, and diplomatic shrewdness, restoring him to his proper place as arguably the most important American general to ever serve his country. Scott joined the army in 1808, earned the rank of brigadier general in 1814, and was promoted to commanding general in 1841. During the Mexican-American War, he commanded one of the most brilliant military campaigns in American history and mentored the generation of officers who fought the Civil War, including Generals Grant, Lee, Longstreet, Beauregard, Jackson, and Meade. As a young general, he wrote the first comprehensive set of regulations to govern the army and pushed for the professionalization of the U.S. officer corps. Yet, he was ridiculed at the beginning of the war for his prescient prediction that the Civil War would be a prolonged conflict requiring extensive planning and superior strategic thinking. With this edition, Johnson has merged Scott’s large two-volume memoir into a single, manageable volume without losing any of the original 1864 text. Extensive new annotations update Scott’s outdated notes and provide valuable illumination and context. Covering a wide range of events—from the famous 1804 duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton through the end of the Civil War—Scott’s extraordinary account reveals the general as a sometimes egocentric but always astute witness to the early American republic. Timothy D. Johnson, professor of history at Lipscomb University in Nashville, is the author of Winfield Scott: The Quest for Military Glory and A Gallant Little Army: The Mexico City Campaign . He is coeditor, with Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr., of A Fighter from Way Back: The Mexican War Diary of Lt. Daniel Harvey Hill and Notes of the Mexican War by J. Jacob Oswandel.

Warriors Seven offers a fascinating collection of American commander \"profiles\" written in a lively and graphic style. The unique aspect of Dr. Sneiderman's approach is that each essay sketches the ironic twists of fate that befell these men at or near the peak of their careers.The subjects of this study include: Benedict Arnold, Andrew Jackson, Winfield Scott, Robert E. Lee, George Dewey, Billy Mitchell, and George Patton. These courageous leaders are successively featured in each of America's seven wars from 1775 to 1945: the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II. Each entry highlights or focuses upon a single battle: Saratoga (1777), New Orleans (1815), Mexico City (1847), Malvern Hill (1862), Manila Bay (1898), St. Mihiel (1918), and Messina (1943).Each entry highlights the life and military career of each commander up to the moment of the featured battle, with a thread of continuity coursing through each chapter. For example, the essay on Andrew Jackson opens with a battle fought during the Revolutionary War that Jackson witnessed as a 13-year-old courier for the Continental Army.Twenty-seven original battlefield maps facilitate the reader's understanding of the momentous events described in these pages. Warriors Seven will be welcomed by anyone who appreciates gripping narrative military history leavened with a slice of historical irony.Barney Sneiderman served as a professor in the Faculty Law, University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, Canada, from 1969 until illness prompted his retirement in 2006. He is the principal author of the acclaimed Canadian Medical Law: An Introduction for Physicians, Nurses, and other Health Care Professionals (3rd Edition, 2003, Carswell). The Connecticut native and former journalist is known for his lively and user-friendly writing style. Warriors Seven is a reflection of his long-time interest in American and European political and military history. He lives in Manitoba with his wife and children.PRAISE \"Dr. Sneiderman has written a brilliant and fascinating book. . . . that shows how genius, resolve, dedication, opportunity, and hard work create great military leaders, but also how demons sometimes lurk in the hearts of famous men and dull their glory.\" - Noted historian Bevin Alexander.

In an unpublished treatise titled \"But Much Yet Remains to Be Done,\" Featherston called for state laws to be \"faithfully administered,\" to ensure that \"life, liberty & property are well protected without regard to race, color or previous condition.\" On economic development, Woodward suggests, the traditional divide between forward-looking industrialists and backward-looking planters could erode.7 Rather than locating the modern South's ideas about law and order in scaled conservative traditions, historians might also look for the influence of New South liberalism. Michael O'Brien reserves the term liberal for white male members of the intelligentsia who consciously spurned the antebellum period's defensive posture toward racism, slavery, and regionalism. To the extent that it may be useful to think of these ideas as liberal, it is because this paradigm of armed state power reached back to classical liberalism's settler warfare and survived deep into the twentieth century, extending to what historians identify as the nonpartisan law-and-order liberalism of Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, and their inheritors.12 Building on N. D. B. Connolly's claim that \"Jim Crow was liberalism\" and his charge \"not to take at face value the presumed divides between classical liberalism, growth

Winfield Scott (1786-1866) was arguably the premier soldier of his era.More than any other, he was responsible for the professionalization of the U.S.Army during his long career (1807-61).He served as general in the War of 1812, commander of the U.S.

In recent years, the influence of the European intellectual tradition and Carl von Clausewitz's 1830s treatise On War over Francis Lieber's theories of war, particularly those expressed in General Orders No. 100, have become the source of much study. This article argues that while Lieber internalized Clausewitz's notion of war's political nature, Lieber's ideas were profoundly influenced by his time in the United States and the American Civil War itself. Clausewitz, living in a monarchical state without functioning democratic institutions, had not fully explored the interplay between war, nations, and democratic rule. Lieber's experience a generation later in the United States, where the soldiers were also citizens and the people played a direct role in the political processes, allowed him to better grasp modern war's complexities. Therefore, by transplanting and adopting Clausewitz's ideas to the American realities, Lieber created the template for waging war in the age of democratic nations.

When guerrilla war first broke out in northern Mexico, the motives and modalities of the violence Americans and Mexicans inflicted on each other were informed by previous fighting with Native Americans, and American attitudes were also shaped by Jacksonian Democracy, with its hardening racial attitudes and vigilantism. In northern Mexico, US officers tried and failed to control atrocities against Mexican civilians. During the later US invasion of central Mexico, US officers sought to prevent guerrilla warfare by restraining US troops and threatening Mexican civilians with reprisals. After guerrilla warfare developed there and began to hamper their operations, commanders implicitly encouraged atrocities through their lack of action against US soldiers who committed them and the assignment of known perpetrators to counterinsurgency duty. US leaders did not use explicit legal reasoning and did not even always document defacto policies. During the Civil War, in contrast, US officers and lawyers developed anti-guerrilla policies that they documented in orders and justified through legal reasoning.