1 January, 1862: Wednesday

US Government
President Lincoln holds a reception at the White House. All the Cabinet members, diplomatic corps, justices, and army and navy officers attend, as well as trhe public.

Prior to the reception, Lincoln attempts to get General Halleck from St. Louis and Cairo and General Buell from Louisville to cooperate "in concert" in drives on Nashville, Tennessee and Columbus, Kentucky. General McClellan continues to be ill.

Confederate Government
President Davis of the Confederacy gives a New Year's reception also.

General
Massachusetts
Provincetown: 4 men, Mason and Slidell and their secretaries, leave Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, and once in Provincetoen board the British sloop of war Renaldo en route to Halifax and Europe.

Florida
Union artillery bombards shipping and Fort Barrancas.

Confederates bombard Fort Pickens.

South Carolina
There is a sharp engagement at Port Royal Ferry on the Coosaw River, South Carolina, part of the continuing operations by the Union to enlarge their main enclave on the south Atlantic coast.

Missouri
Dayton, Missouri is virtually destroyed in a skirmish.

Western Virginia
Stonewall Jackson leads a Confederate force toward Romney, western Virginia. (This will eventually become known as the "Romney Campaign."

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

31 December, 1861: Tuesday

US Government
President Lincoln, concerned over the lack of action by his Army, finds that Major General McClellan, General-in-Chief, is ill. Lincoln wires to General Halleck, "Are General Buell and yourself in concert?"

Mississippi
A landing party from Ship Island captures Biloxi, Mississippi, destroys a Confederate battery, but does not attempt to hold the town.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

30 December 1861: Monday

Union government
The U. S. government, as well as banks in some of the major cities, suspend specie payment. This suspension (meaning no gold or silver will be given out when paper money is presented at the bank) will last until 1879.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

29 December, 1861: Sunday

Union military action
Western Virginia
The first of two days of skirmishing begin in Clay, Braxton and Webster counties.

Indian Territory
Skirmishing continues in the Indian Territory after the retreat of the pro-Union Creeks, who were opposed by Choctaws, Chickasaws, and portions of the Seminoles and Cherokees.

Confederate military action
Jeff Thompson's Confederates operate against Commerce, Missouri. They attack but fail to capture or sink the steamer City of Alton. (http://www.riverboatdaves.com/docs/bits_civilwar.html)



Who is Jeff Thompson
Meriwether Jeff Thompson (January 22, 1826 – September 5, 1876) was a brigadier general in the Missouri State Guard during the American Civil War. He served the Confederate Army as a cavalry commander, and had the unusual distinction of having a ship in the Confederate Navy named for him.

Early life
Father: Meriwether Thompson b. circa 1790
Mother: Martha Slaughter Broaddus b. circa 1800
Wife: Emma Catherine Hays b.circa 1830 , New Orleans, La.
Children: Emma Catherine Thompson b.1850

Meriwether Jeff Thompson was born at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, now West Virginia into a family with a strong military tradition on both sides. He moved to Liberty, Missouri in 1847 and St. Joseph the following year, beginning as a store clerk before taking up surveying and serving as the city engineer.

He later supervised the construction of the western branch of the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad. Thompson served as Mayor of St. Joseph from 1857–1860. He presided over the ceremony inaugurating the first ride of the Pony Express on April 3, 1860.Thompson also gained national attention in May, 1861, when he cut down a union flag from the St. Joseph post office flag pole and through it down to an angry crowd of southern sympathizers who shredded it to pieces.

Civil War
Thompson was a colonel in the Missouri state militia at the outbreak of the Civil War. In late July 1861, he was appointed brigadier general of the First Division, Missouri State Guard. He commanded the First Military District of Missouri, which covered the swampy southeastern quarter of the state from St. Louis to the Mississippi River. Thompson's battalion soon became known as the "Swamp Rats" for their exploits. He gained renown as the "Swamp Fox of the Confederacy."

When Union General John C. Fremont issued an emancipation proclamation purporting to free the slaves in Missouri, Thompson declared a counter-proclamation and his force of 3,000 soldiers began raiding Union positions near the border in October. On October 15, 1861, Thompson led a cavalry attack on the Iron Mountain Railroad bridge over the Big River near Blackwell in Jefferson County. After successfully burning the bridge, Thompson retreated to join his infantry in Fredericktown. Soon afterwards, he was defeated at the Battle of Fredericktown and withdrew, leaving southeastern Missouri in Union control.

After briefly commanding rams in the Confederate riverine fleet in 1862, Thompson was reassigned to the Trans-Mississippi region. There, he engaged in a number of battles before returning to Arkansas in 1863 to accompany Gen. John S. Marmaduke on his raid into Missouri. Thompson was captured in August in Arkansas, and spent time in St. Louis' Gratiot Street prison, as well as at the Fort Delaware and Johnson's Island prisoner-of-war camps, ("Poor old Jeff, how my heart went out to him; he a prisoner and his devoted wife in a madhouse". Source: My Life and My Lectures by Major Lamar Fontaine, a prisoner with M. Jeff Thompson in Fort Delaware, p. 238) Eventually he was exchanged in 1864 for a Union general. Later that year, Thompson participated in Major General Sterling Price's Missouri expedition, taking command of "Jo" Shelby's famed "Iron Brigade" when Shelby became division commander. He served competently in this role. In March 1865, Thompson was appointed commander of the Northern Sub-District of Arkansas. He surrendered his troops on May 11, 1865, in Jacksonport, Arkansas.

Although Thompson frequently petitioned for the Confederate rank of brigadier general it was never granted. His brigadier rank came from his Missouri State Guard service.

A ship in the Confederate Navy, the CSS General M. Jeff Thompson, was named in Thompson's honor. The side-wheel river steamer was converted at New Orleans to a "cottonclad" ram in early 1862. It was commissioned in April and sent up the Mississippi River to join the River Defense Fleet in Tennessee waters, seeing its first action in the Battle of Plum Point Bend. After being set afire by gunfire from Union warships in the Battle of Memphis on June 6, 1862, the ship ran aground and soon blew up.

Postbellum career
After the war, Thompson moved to New Orleans, where he returned to civil engineering. He designed a program for improving the Louisiana swamps, a job that eventually destroyed his health. He returned to St. Joseph, Missouri in 1876 where he succumbed to tuberculosis. He is buried in Mount Mora Cemetery in St. Joseph, Missouri.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

28 December, 1861: Saturday

Union military action
Western Virginia
Union forces occupy Beckley or Raleigh Court House in Western Virginia.

Kentucky
There is skirmishing in Sacramento, Kentucky
There is a skirmish at Grider's Ferry on the Cumberland River.

Missouri
There is skirmishing at Mount Zion Church, Missouri.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

27 December, 1861, Friday

Union - political
Representative Alfred Ely of New York arrives in Washington from Richmond, VA, where he had been a prisoner of war since his capture in July while watching the Battle of Bull Run/Manassas.

News of the release of the Confederate commissioners Mason and Slidell arrives in the newspapers in both North and South.

Confederate and Union armies settle in to winter quarters.

Missouri
A skirmish breaks out at Hallsville, Missouri

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

Civil War message decoded

Civil War message opened, decoded: No help coming
by
STEVE SZKOTAK, Associated Press Steve Szkotak, Associated Press – Sat Dec 25, 11:13 am ET

RICHMOND, Va. – A glass vial stopped with a cork during the Civil War has been opened, revealing a coded message to the desperate Confederate commander in Vicksburg on the day the Mississippi city fell to Union forces 147 years ago.

The dispatch offered no hope to doomed Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton: Reinforcements are not on the way.

The encrypted, 6-line message was dated July 4, 1863, the date of Pemberton's surrender to Union forces led by Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Siege of Vicksburg in what historians say was a turning point midway into the Civil War.

The message is from a Confederate commander on the west side of the Mississippi River across from Pemberton.

"He's saying, 'I can't help you. I have no troops, I have no supplies, I have no way to get over there,' " Museum of the Confederacy collections manager Catherine M. Wright said of the author of the dispiriting message. "It was just another punctuation mark to just how desperate and dire everything was."

The bottle, less than 2 inches in length, had sat undisturbed at the museum since 1896. It was a gift from Capt. William A. Smith, of King George County, who served during the Vicksburg siege.

It was Wright who decided to investigate the contents of the strange little bottle containing a tightly wrapped note, a .38-caliber bullet and a white thread.

"Just sort of a curiosity thing," said Wright. "This notion of, do we have any idea what his message says?"

The answer was no.

Wright asked a local art conservator, Scott Nolley, to examine the clear vial before she attempted to open it. He looked at the bottle under an electron microscope and discovered that salt had bonded the cork tightly to the bottle's mouth. He put the bottle on a hotplate to expand the glass, used a scalpel to loosen the cork, then gently plucked it out with tweezers.

The sewing thread was looped around the 6 1/2-by-2 1/2-inch paper, which was folded to fit into the bottle. The rolled message was removed and taken to a paper conservator, who successfully unfurled the message.

But the coded message, which appears to be a random collection of letters, did not reveal itself immediately.

Eager to learn the meaning of the code, Wright took the message home for the weekend to decipher. She had no success.

A retired CIA code breaker, David Gaddy, was contacted, and he cracked the code in several weeks.

A Navy cryptologist independently confirmed Gaddy's interpretation. Cmdr. John B. Hunter, an information warfare officer, said he deciphered the code over two weeks while on deployment aboard an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. A computer could have unscrambled the words in a fraction of the time.

"To me, it was not that difficult," he said. "I had fun with this and it took me longer than I should have."

The code is called the "Vigenere cipher," a centuries-old encryption in which letters of the alphabet are shifted a set number of places so an "a" would become a "d" — essentially, creating words with different letter combinations.

The code was widely used by Southern forces during the Civil War, according to Civil War Times Illustrated.

The source of the message was likely Maj. Gen. John G. Walker, of the Texas Division, who had under his command William Smith, the donor of the bottle.

The full text of the message to Pemberton reads:

"Gen'l Pemberton:

You can expect no help from this side of the river. Let Gen'l Johnston know, if possible, when you can attack the same point on the enemy's lines. Inform me also and I will endeavor to make a diversion. I have sent some caps (explosive devices). I subjoin a despatch from General Johnston."

The last line, Wright said, seems to suggest a separate delivery to Pemberton would be the code to break the message.

"The date of this message clearly indicates that this person has no idea that the city is about to be surrendered," she said.

The Johnston mention in the dispatch is Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, whose 32,000 troops were encamped south of Vicksburg and prevented from assisting Pemberton by Grant's 35,000 Union troops. Pemberton had held out hope that Johnston would eventually come to his aid.

The message was dispatched during an especially terrible time in Vicksburg. Grant was unsuccessful in defeating Pemberton's troops on two occasions, so the Union commander instead decided to encircle the city and block the flow of supplies or support.

Many in the city resorted to eating cats, dogs and leather. Soup was made from wallpaper paste.

After a six-week siege, Pemberton relented. Vicksburg, so scarred by the experience, refused to celebrate July 4 for the next 80 years.

So what about the bullet in the bottom of the bottle?

Wright suspects the messenger was instructed to toss the bottle into the river if Union troops intercepted his passage. The weight of the bullet would have carried the corked bottle to the bottom, she said.

For Pemberton, the bottle is symbolic of his lost cause: the bad news never made it to him.

The Confederate messenger probably arrived to the river's edge and saw a U.S. flag flying over the city.

"He figured out what was going on and said, 'Well, this is pointless,' and turned back," Wright said.

The Fiery Trial, by Eric Foner

The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, by Eric Foner
WW Norton and Company, 2010
336 pages, plus 16 pages of b&w photos, Acknowledgements, Chronology, Abbreviations, Notes, Index

Front Matter
In this landmark work of deep scholarship and insight, Eric Foner gives us the definitive history of Lincoln and the end of slaver in America. Foner begins with Lincoln's youth in Indiana, and Illinois and follows the trajectory of his career along an increasingly tense and shifting political terrain from Illinois to Washington, DC. Although "naturally anti-slavery" for as long as he can remember, Lincoln scrupulously holds to the position that the Constitution protects the institution in the original slave states. But the political landscape is transformed in 1854 when the Kansas-Nebraska Act makes the expansion of slavery a national issue.

A man of considered words and deliberate actions, Lincoln deftly navigates the dynamic politics of antislavery, taking measured steps, often along a path forged by abolitionists and radicals in his party. Lincoln rises to leadership in the new Republican party by calibrating his politics to the broadest possible antislavery coalition. As president of a divided nation and commander in chief at war, displaying a similar compound of pragmatism and principle, Lincoln finally embraces what he calls the Civil War's "fundamental and astounding" result: the immediate, uncompensated abolition of slavery and recognition of blacks as American citizens.

Foner's Lincoln emerges as a leader, one whose greatness lies in his capacity for moral and political growth through real engagement with allies and critics alike. This powerful work will transform our understanding of the nation's greatest president and the issue that mattered most.

Table of Contents
List of Maps and Illustrations
Preface
1. "I am naturally anti-slavery" Young Abraham Lincoln and Slavery
2. "Always a Whig": Lincoln, the Law, and the Second Party System
3. "The Monstrous Injustice": Becoming a Republican
4. "A House Divided": Slavery and Race in the late 1850s
5. "The Onlyu Substantial Difference": Secession and Civil War
6. "I Must Have Kentucky": The Border Strategy
7. "Forever Free": The Coming of Emancipation
8. "A New Birth of Freedom":Securing Emancipation
9. "A Fitting, and Necessary Conclusion": Abolition, Reelection, and the Challenge of Reconstruction
Epilogue: "Every Drop of Blood": The Meaning of the War
Acknowledgments
Chronology of Lincoln, Slavery and Emancipation
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
Notes
Index

Photos
Abraham Lincoln in 1858
Orville H. Browning
Lyman Trumbull
Stephen A. Douglas
Owen Lovejoy
"The Railsplitter" (1860 painting)
1860 Campaign Placard
"The Dis-United States" (Harper's Weekly)
"Stampede of Slaves from Hampton to Fortress Monroe" (Harper's Weekly)
Charles Sumner
Wendell Phillips
"First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln"
"Abe Lincoln's Last Card" (Punch)
"Sensation Among our 'Colored Brethren'" (Harper's Weekly)
Frederick Douglass
Alexander Crummell
Martin R. Delany
William H. Johnson's gravestone
"The Miscegenation Ball"
"Negro Volunteers Enrolling in Gen. Grant's Army Corps" (Le Mondre Illustre)
"Uncle Abe's Valentine Sent By Columbia" (Harper's Weekly)
"Lincoln and the Female Slave" (1863 painting)

26 December, 1861: Thursday

Union - Government
President Lincoln has another meeting with his Cabinet members and it is decided to accede to England's request that the two Confederate commissioners, Mason and Slidell, be released. A message is sent to the British minister in Washington, Lord Lyons.

When the news reaches the Confederates it is a blow - the reason for war between the US and England has now dissipated, as has chances for the Confederacy to be recognized by foreign powers (and thus be given foreign aid.)

Missouri
Martial law is proclaimed in St. Louis, and in and about all railroads operating in Missouri.

Indian Territory
There is an engagement at Chustenahlah, where there had been recent operations by Confederate Indians and Texans against pro-Union Creek Indians under Opothleyahola. The Creeks lose many men and flee, some of them reaching Kansas.

Confederacy
Brigadier General Philip St. George Cocke, who had distinguished himself earlier in the year, commits suicide at his home in Powhatan County, Virginia.

Georgia
At the mouth of the Savannah River, a 5-ship Confederate flotilla attacks Union blockaders and force them to retreat.

Union
Over 150 horses die in a fire in the government stables near Washington Observatory.

Brigadier General Philip St. George Cocke at Wikipedia

(Cocke in the 1850s)
Philip St. George Cocke (April 17, 1809 – December 26, 1861) was a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army during the first year of the American Civil War. He is best known for organizing the defense of Virginia along the Potomac River soon after the state's secession from the Union. He commanded troops in the Battle of Blackburn's Ford and the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas) in July 1861 before becoming despondent and committing suicide.

Early life and career
Philip St. George Cocke was born at Bremo Bluff in Fluvanna County, Virginia.[1] His father, John Hartwell Cocke, had been an officer in the United States Army during the War of 1812.

Cocke graduated from the University of Virginia in 1828 and then from the United States Military Academy in 1832 with the rank of brevet second lieutenant. He was soon assigned as second lieutenant to an artillery unit in Charleston, South Carolina. He served there during 1832 and 1833, becoming adjutant of the 2nd U.S. Artillery on July 13, 1833.[2]

On April 1, 1834, Cocke resigned from the military and became a cotton planter in Powhatan County, Virginia and in Mississippi. He married Sallie Elizabeth Courtney Bowdoin on June 4, 1834.

Cocke became an accomplished agriculturist, publishing frequent articles in journals,[3] as well as a book on plantation management entitled Plantation and Farm Instruction in 1852.[4] From 1853 to 1856, Cocke was president of the Virginia State Agricultural Society.[2] In 1859, concerned by John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry, he organized a militia infantry company known as the Powhatan Troop to help defend Powhatan County in case of a similar action or a slave revolt in the future.[5]

Civil War service
Organization of Virginia's defenses
On April 21, 1861, Cocke was appointed as a brigadier general in the service of the Commonwealth of Virginia by Governor John Letcher. He was assigned command of all state forces along the Potomac River. Three days later, from his headquarters at Alexandria, Virginia, he reported to newly commissioned Maj. Gen. Robert E. Lee (assigned on April 22 to the command of all Virginia forces) that he had only 300 men to defend against what he thought was 10,000 Union troops across the river in Washington, D.C. Cocke made his headquarters at Culpeper, Virginia, on April 27, in order to better oversee the entire line of the Potomac as well as the mustering of volunteer troops in a large part of the state. Alexandria was evacuated by Lt. Col. A. S. Taylor on May 5, despite Cocke's orders "not to abandon it without fighting, even against overwhelming numbers."

Under Lee's orders, Cocke organized a new defensive line at Manassas. Cocke may have been the first to formulate the Confederate defensive strategy of concentrating forces at Manassas and at Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley, and using the Manassas Gap Railroad to allow them to be mutually supporting. This strategy would be a decisive factor in the Confederate victory in the First Battle of Bull Run.

When Virginia's state forces were consolidated with the Provisional Army of the Confederate States, Cocke was given the rank of colonel in the new CSA forces. Because of this effective demotion, Cocke was superseded in command at Manassas on May 21 by Brig. Gen. Milledge L. Bonham.

First Bull Run Campaign
Cocke was eventually assigned to the army of P. G. T. Beauregard in command of the 5th Brigade, consisting of the 8th, 18th, 19th, 28th, and 49th Virginia Infantry regiments. His brigade was initially assigned to Centreville, but in the face of advancing Union forces, withdrew behind Bull Run on July 17.[8]

He was officially thanked by Beauregard for his ability shown in strategic movements at the Battle of Blackburn's Ford.

On July 20 Cocke was stationed at Ball's Ford on Bull Run. In the subsequent First Battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861, Cocke was assigned to advance against Centreville, a plan abandoned when the Federals began their flanking movement against the Confederate left. While Col. Nathan George Evans, reinforced by Brig. Gen. Barnard Bee and Col. Francis S. Bartow, opposed the enemy, Cocke's forces defended against attack in the vicinity of the Stone Bridge, with his headquarters at the Lewis house. At 2 p.m., about an hour before the arrival of Elzey, he led his brigade into action on the left with "alacrity and effect." He was promoted to brigadier general in the Confederate Army on October 21 and given command of the 3rd Brigade, 3rd Division of the Confederate Army of the Potomac.

Death
First Bull Run was Cocke's last battle. After eight months' service, during which he was promoted to brigadier general in the provisional Confederate army, he returned home, "shattered in body and mind." Exhausted from the strain, and despondent over perceived slights from General Beauregard stemming from the Battle of Manassas, Cocke shot himself in the head on December 26, 1861, at his mansion, "Belmead", in Powhatan County, Virginia. He was initially buried on the plantation grounds, but he was reintered in 1904 at Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia.

Family
Philip St. George Cocke was the son of John Hartwell Cocke (b. September 19, 1780 in Surry County, Virginia) and Anne Blaws Barraud (b. December 25, 1784, in Norfolk, Virginia.) He married Sallie Elizabeth Courtney Bowdoin (b. May 9, 1815) at Christ Church in Norfolk, Virginia, on June 4, 1834. The couple had 11 children.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

25 December, 1861: Wednesday

Union - government
President Lincoln and his Cabinet meet to discuss the Trent affair.

President Lincoln and his wife have Christmas dinner with guests.

Western Virginia
A skirmish takes place at Cherry, western Virginia.

Maryland
A skirmish takes place near Fort Frederick, Maryland

Cape Fear, North Carolina
Off Cape Fear, a blockade-runner is captured.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

24 December, 1861: Tuesday

Union- Government
The Union Congress passes a bill which increases duties on tea, coffee, sugar and molasses.

Military
Missouri
A skirmish takes place at Wadesboro, Missouri.

Virginia
Union troops scout toward Fairfax Courthouse, Virginia

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

23 December 1861: Monday

Government - Union
Lord Lyons meets once again with Secretary of State Seward, presenting him formally with England's demands that the two commissioners Slidell and Mason be released, and givng the United States seven days to comply.

A White House conference is held. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts urges the President to surrender the commissioners.

Kentucky
Union forces advance from Louisa, Kentucky into eastern Kentucky. This foray will last until January.

Missouri
A minor Union operation takes place around Lexington, Missouri and there is a skirmish at Dayton, Missouri.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

22 December, 1861: Sunday

Missouri
Union Major GEneral H. W. Halleck orders that anyone caugh burning bridges or destroying railroads or the telegraph will be shot.

Virginia
There is a light skirmish near New Market, Virginia (not far from Newport News.)

Biography of Halleck from Wikipedia:

Henry Wager Halleck (January 16, 1815 – January 9, 1872) was a United States Army officer, scholar, and lawyer. A noted expert in military studies, he was known by a nickname that became derogatory, "Old Brains." He was an important participant in the admission of California as a state and became a successful lawyer and land developer. Early in the American Civil War, he was a senior Union Army commander in the Western Theater and then served for almost two years as general-in-chief of all U.S. armies. He was "kicked upstairs" to be chief of staff of the Army when Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Halleck's former subordinate in the West, whose battlefield victories did much to advance Halleck's career, replaced him in 1864 as general-in-chief for the remainder of the war.

Halleck was a cautious general who believed strongly in thorough preparations for battle and in the value of defensive fortifications over quick, aggressive action. He was a master of administration, logistics, and the politics necessary at the top of the military hierarchy, but exerted little effective control over field operations from his post in Washington, D.C. President Abraham Lincoln once described him as "little more than a first rate clerk."

Postbellum career
After Grant forced Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House, Halleck was assigned to command the Military Division of the James, headquartered at Richmond. He was a pall-bearer at Lincoln's funeral. He lost his friendship with William Sherman when he quarreled with him over Sherman's tendency to be lenient toward former Confederates. In August 1865 he was transferred to the Division of the Pacific in California, essentially in military exile until March 1869, when he was assigned to command the Division of the South, headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky.[23]

Henry Halleck died at his post in Louisville. He is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York, and is memorialized by a street named for him in San Francisco and a statue in Golden Gate Park. He left no memoirs for posterity and apparently destroyed his private correspondence and memoranda. His estate at his death showed a net value of $474,773.16. His widow, Elizabeth, married Col. George Washington Cullum in 1875. Cullum had served as Halleck's chief of staff in the Western Theater and then on his staff in Washington

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

21 December, 1861: Saturday

Union - government
British minister Lord Lyons meets again, informally, with Secretary of State Seward. He then writes to Lord Russell, Foreign Minister: "I am so convinced that unless we give our friends here a good lesson this time, we shall have the same trouble with them again very soon...Surrender or war will have a very good effect on them."

Newspapers published in the South publish speculations from various writers of a possible war between the United States and England.

Confederacy - Military command
Brigadier General Henry A. Wise is assigned to duty in North CArolina.


Biography of Wise from Wikipedia:
Henry Alexander Wise (December 3, 1806 – September 12, 1876) was an American statesman from Virginia, as well as a general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War.

Early life
Wise was born in Drummondtown, Accomack County, Virginia, to Major John Wise and his second wife Sarah Corbin Cropper, whose families had been long settled there. He was privately tutored until his twelfth year and then entered Margaret Academy, near Pungoteague in Accomack County. He graduated from Washington College (now Washington & Jefferson College) in 1825. He was a member of the Union Literary Society at Washington College.

Wise was admitted to the bar in 1828, and settled in Nashville, Tennessee, in the same year, but returned to Accomack County in 1830.

Marriage and family
Wise was married three times, first in 1828 to Anne Jennings, the daughter of Rev. Obadiah Jennings and Ann Wilson of Washington, Pennsylvania. Anne died in 1837, leaving Henry with four children: two sons and two daughters. A fifth child died with her in a fire.

Wise was married a second time in November 1840, to Sarah Sergeant, daughter of Whig U.S. Congressman John Sergeant and Margaretta Watmough of Philadelphia. In nineteen years of marriage with two wives, Wise fathered fourteen children, only seven of whom survived to adulthood. Sarah gave birth to at least five children. She and the last child died soon after its birth on October 14, 1850. Henry married a third time to Mary Elizabeth Lyons in 1853.

After serving as governor, Wise settled with Mary and his younger children in 1860 at Rolleston, an 884-acre plantation which he bought from his brother John Cropper Wise, who also continued to live there.[7] It was located on the eastern branch of the Elizabeth River near Norfolk, Virginia. It had first been developed by William and Susannah Moseley, English immigrants who settled there in 1649.[8] After the Civil War, Henry and Mary Wise lived in Richmond, where he resumed his law career.

Political career
Henry A. Wise served in the United States Congress from 1833 to 1844. He was elected to Congress in 1832 as a Jacksonian Democrat. On the question of the rechartering of the United States Bank he broke with the Jackson administration, and became a Whig, but was sustained by his constituents. After his first election in 1832 he fought a duel with his competitor for the seat in Congress. He was reelected to Congress as a Whig in 1837, serving till 1841, and was reelected as a Tyler Democrat in 1843.

Wise was active in securing the election of John Tyler as Vice President in 1840. Tyler appointed Wise as United States minister to Brazil from 1844 to 1847, where two of his children were born in Rio de Janeiro. After his return, Wise identified with the Democratic Party. In 1855, after a remarkable campaign, he was elected governor of Virginia over the Know Nothing candidate. Wise supported the annexation of Texas by the United States. Wise County, Texas, was named in his honor.

In the statewide election of 1855 Wise defeated Thomas S. Flournoy and subsequently served as the 33rd Governor of Virginia from 1856 to 1860. Wise County, Virginia, was named after him when it was established in 1856. One of his last official acts as Governor was to sign the death warrant of John Brown. He was a member of the Virginia secession convention of 1861, and opposed immediate secession. Upon the withdrawal of the commonwealth from the Union, however, he joined the Confederate army and was commissioned as a brigadier general.

Military career
Wise served as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. He commanded the District of Roanoke Island during the Battle of Roanoke Island. His part in the decision to cede the island when faced with much greater Union forces drew the ire of some of the Confederate government leadership.

His forces were attached to the division of Maj. Gen. Theophilus H. Holmes during the Seven Days Battles. For the rest of 1862 and 1863 he held various commands in North Carolina and Virginia. In 1864 Wise was in command of a brigade in the Department of North Carolina & Southern Virginia. His brigade defended Petersburg and was credited with saving the city at the First Battle of Petersburg and to an extent at the Second Battle of Petersburg.

He then commanded a brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia during the final stages of the Siege of Petersburg, and was promoted to the rank of major general after the Battle of Sayler's Creek. He was with Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House, where he fought bravely but urged Lee to surrender.

Postbellum activities
After the war Wise resumed his law practice in Richmond, and settled there for the rest of his life. In 1865 he was unable to reclaim Rolleston, his plantation outside Norfolk, before he received pardon from the president. After Wise entered Confederate service, he and his family abandoned Rolleston in 1862 as Union troops were taking over Norfolk. Wise arranged then for residence for his family in Rocky Mount, Franklin County, Virginia.

As a result, Maj. Gen. Terry of the U.S. command in the Norfolk area did not permit Wise to reclaim the Rolleston property. In an exchange of letters published in the New York Times, Terry stated that under conditions of parole, Wise had claim only to the Rocky Mount property where he had been living when he went to war. The Freedmen's Bureau used Rolleston Hall and other plantations in the Norfolk area as schools for freedmen. Two hundred were said to be at Rolleston.

Along with working at his law career, Wise wrote a book based on his public service entitled Seven Decades of the Union (1872). His two surviving sons were both active in state and Federal politics.

One of his sons, John Sergeant Wise, wrote a memoir entitled The End of an Era. John Wise was fourteen in the summer of 1860 and served in the Confederate Army late in the war. He wrote about his own memories of Rolleston and the war years, as well as about his father's role and their family members. Henry A. Wise's grandson Barton Haxall Wise wrote a biography of the former governor called The Life of Henry A. Wise of Virginia (1899).

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

20 December, 1861: Friday

England
Two troop vessels set sail for Canada, in order to help reinforce England's demands regarding the release of Mason and Slidell.

Virginia
Sixteen old whaling vessels are sunk in the main ship channel off Charleston in an attempt to foil blockade runners.

Virginia
Fighting occurs at Dranesville, Virginia.

Confederacy - Government
President Davis writes a letter to Sterling Price, Missouri commander, who has complained that Davis seems to be neglecting the Trans-Mississippi and Missouri in particular. "The welfare of Missouri is as dear to me as that of other States of the Confederacy." he states.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

19 Dec 1861: Thusday

Union - Government
The British minister to the United States, Lord Lyons, has an informal meeting with Secretary of State Seward, and informs him that the British government will make a formal request (on December 23) for the release of the Southern commissioners Mason and Slidell. The US government is given seven days to comply.

Maryland
There is a skirmish at Point of Rocks, Maryland.

BibliographyThe Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

18 Dec 1861: Wednesday

Government - England and England's Representatives
The British minister in Washington, Lord Lyons, receives instructions from London. He is to make a firm demand for the release of the Confederate commissioners, Mason and Slidell.

Government - Union
President Lincoln and his Cabinet meet to discuss the Trent affair, on an informal basis.

President Lincoln visits General McClellan's home and discusses future activities of his command.

Military
Missouri
Union scoutinmg and reconnaissance takes place at Blackwater Creek, Shawnee Mound/Milforsd, Missouri. Scouting also takes place near Rolla, Missouri.

Virginia
Scouting takes place, by Union soldiers, toward Pohick Church

Kentucky
Union soldiers scout from Somerset to Mill Springs, Kentucky.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

17 December, 2010, Tuesday

Virginia
Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson continues his operations along the Potomac near Harper's Ferry, in particular against Dam No. 5 on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.

South Carolina
--There is a skirmish on Chisholm's Island.
--Confederates evacuate Rockville, as they are menaced by Union soldiers from Hilton Head.

Kentucky
There is action at Rowlett's Station near Woodsonville, Green River.

Georgia
Union soldiers sink several old hulks loaded with stones in Savannah Harbor, in an effort to halt shipping.

General
British newspapers arrive in the United States. Articles of outrage cause consternation with Northern politicians, and give hope to Confederate ones that England might recognize them as a country in their own right.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

16 December, 1861: Moday

Government-Union
Clement Vallandigham of Ohio introduces a resolution in the US House of Representatives commending Captain Charles Wilkes for capturing Confederate commissioners Mason and Slidell. It is referred to committee.

Military - Virginia
Activities continue around Meadow Bluff, western Virginia.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

15 December, 1861: Sunday

Naval action
Two Confederate blockade runners are captured; one off Cape Fear, the other off Cape Hatteras.

Ground Action
Virginia
There is a "minor affair" in Roane County, and activity begins around Meadow Bluff, western Virginia (which will continue until Dec 21.

BibliographyThe Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

14 December, 1861: Saturday

England
His Royal Highness, Prince Albert - husband of Queen Victoria, dies. Two weeks prior to his death, he had drafted some correspondence regarding the Trent affair. He had urged moderation but firmness toward the United States.

Confederacy - Military
Brigadier General HH Sibley assumes command of the Confederate forces on the upper Rio Grande and in New Mexico and Arizona territories.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

13 December, 1861, Friday

Confederacy - Political
President Davis disagrees with Confederate congressmen over the command in Missouri. He writes: "I have, long since, learned, learned to bear hasty censure in the hope that justice if tardy is sure, and in any event to find consolation in the assurance that all my ends have been my country's."

Union - Military
Western Virginia
Brigadier General R.H. Milroy leads his troops from the Cheat Mountain encampment in western Virginia against Confederate troops at Camp Alleghany/Buffalo Mountain. The Federals will eventually fall back with 137 casualties, the Confederates 146. The Federals retreat to Cheat Mountain, the Confederates retreat to Staunton in the Shenandoah Valley.



Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

12 December, 1861: Thursday

South CarolinaFederal Marines and naval forces "operate" on the Ashepoo River in South Carolina - investigating nearby rivers, inlets and communities for Confederates. This is part of their consolidation of their Port Royal Sound victory.

Missouri
There is skirmishing in Charleston.

Kentucky
There is skirmishing in Gradyville, Kentucky.

Western Virginia
There is skirmishing on the Greenbrier River in western Virginia.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

11 December 1861: Wednesday

Confederacy - Civilian
A fire destroys much of the business district of Charleston, South Carolina, east of King Street and near the Cooper River. The city is already suffering from the Union blockade.

Union - government
President Lincoln attends the Senate memorial services for Senator Baker of Oregon, who had been killed at Ball's Bluff. (It is unusual at this time for a President to enter either House.)

Military
Missouri
There is skirmishing near Bertrand, Missouri

Virginia
There is skirmishing at Dam no. 4 on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

10 December 1861, Tuesday

Government - Confederacy
The Confederate Congress in Richmond passes an act admitting the state of Kentucky to the Confederacy. This is the final of the 13 states to join.

Government-Union
The US House of Representatives approves the Senate resolution for the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, passed the day before.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

9 Dec 1861, Monday

Union - government
The U. S. Senate, after discussing the various setbacks suffered by their military, votes 33 to 3 to set up to set up what will become the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. The committee was pressed for mainly by senators who wished an investigation into the "fiasco" at Ball's Bluff.

Confederacy - civilian
Georgia
Cotton planters on the coast of this state burn their cotton so it won't fall into the hands of Federal forces.

South Carolina
Cotton planters on the coast of this state burn their cotton so it won't fall into the hands of Federal forces. The Charleston Courier newspaper reports this, saying the Union forces were deprived of "the extensive spoils with which they have feasted their imagination, and the obtainment of which was one of their chief objects."

Confederacy-military
Missouri
Skirmishing occurs at Union Mills, Missouri.

Indian Territory
Skirmishing occurs at Chusto -Talasah (Bird Creek or High Shoal) not far from Tulsey Town (now Tulsa.) Confederate forces mainly Native Americans, defeated pro-Union Creek Indians, led by Opothleyahola, who were attempting to withdraw into Kansas.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

8 December, 1861: Sunday

Western Virginia
There is a minor skirmish near Romney.
There is a minor skirmish at Dam No. 5 on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal

Kentucky
There is a minor skirmish At Fishing Creek near Somerset, Kentucky.

Confederate Naval Action
Commander Raphael Semmes of the CSS Sumter captures the Federal whaler Eben Dodge in mid-Atlantic.

General - Union
The American Bible Society announces it is distributing seven thousand Bibles a day to Northern soldiers.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

7 December 1861, Saturday

Union Naval Action
Commander Daniel B. Ridgely of the USS Santiago de Cuba stops the British schooner Eugenia Smith near the mouth of the Rio Grande. From this ship he seized J. W. Zacharie, a New Orleans merchant who was also a Confederate purchasing agent.

Missouri
There is a small skirmish near Glasgow, Missouri.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

6 December, 1861, Friday

South Carolina
From Dec 6-7, Federals from Hilton Head Island conduct operations in the vicinity around Port Royal Ferry and Beaufort, South Carolina.

Virginia
Brigadier General George G. Meade leads a foraging expedition to Gunnell's Farm, near Dranesville.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

5 December 1861: Thursday

The Union
Petitions and bills calling for the abolition of slavery are introduced in the Federal Congress.

The Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy give their reports of the strength of the military - there are 682,971 men in the Army and Navy.

The Confederacy
Major General William J. Hardee assumes command of the Confederate Central Army of Kentucky.

Kentucky
A Federal scout takes place around Russellville, Kentucky from December 5-8.

Missouri
A Federal scout takes place from the 5th-9th in the Current Hills.


Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

4 December, 1981: Wednesday

The Union
The Federal Senate votes 36 to 0 to expel Senator John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. After the start of the war he had remained in his seat during the special summer session, working to bring about a compromise for peace, but in November he had entered the Confederate Army.

The Confederacy
Confederate newspapers increase their call for strong military actions in many areas of the South.

Virginia
There is a skirmish near Burke's Station, Virginia.

St. Louis, Missouri
General Halleck orders the arrest of those giving aid to the secessionists.

England
Queen Victoria issues a proclamation that forbids the export of gunpowder, firearms, and materials for manufacturing them.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

Writers of Civil War History: Everette Beach (E.B.) Long

The New York Times Obituary

E. B. Long, Professor and Author; Was a Specialist on the Civil War
Published: April 13, 1981

E. B. Long, a Civil War scholar and author and a professor of American Studies at the University of Wyoming, died March 31 of a heart attack while in Chicago on a speaking engagement. Mr. Long, who lived in Laramie, Wyo., was 61 years old.

After working as an editor for The Associated Press in Chicago and as a freelance, Mr. Long started in 1955 a career of research and writing on the Civil War.

He and his wife, Barbara, spent the next 11 years gathering notes on the war from more than 125 archives and libraries.

The material is now in the Library of Congress. Everette Beach Long was born in Whitehall, Wis. He attended Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, and Northwestern University. His wife survives.

The Cushing Memorial Library and Archives has the E.B. Long Collection and their website has a biography of Long.
Everette Beach Long, one of America's foremost experts on the Civil War, was born on October 24, 1919, in Whitehall, Wisconsin to Cecil Everette and Florence (Beach) Long. He attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio from 1937 to 1939 and Northwestern University from 1939 to 1941. In 1942, E. B. Long married Barbara Conzelman.

E. B. Long began his career working for the Chicago Bureau of the Associated Press for eight years and as an associate editor of American Peoples Encyclopedia. After this time, he decided to devote himself to historical research and teaching. "I got interested in the Civil War as a hobby," he explained. "Then it became an avocation, then a way of life. " Long was the director of research for Doubleday's multi-volume "Centennial History of the Civil War," written by Bruce Catton from 1955 to 1965. He was a member of the advisory council of the National Civil War Centennial Commission. Long was a member of the Chicago Civil War Round Table and served as its president from 1955 to 1956. He was a member of the Friends of the Chicago Public Library and was its president in 1960.

E. B. Long's list of honors and awards includes a D. Litt. from Lincoln College in 1961 and the Harry S. Truman award for Civil War scholarship in 1964. He received the Award of Merit from the Illinois Civil War Centennial Commission in 1963 and 1965, the Award of Commendation from the Oklahoma Civil War Centennial Commission in 1965, and the Centennial Medallion from the U. S. Civil War Centennial Commission in 1966.

The writings of E. B. Long include As Luck Would Have It with Otto Eisenschiml and published by Bobbs in 1948, as well as Volume II of The Civil War, A Picture Chronicle with Ralph Newman and published by Grosset in 1956. He was the editor, with Ralph Newman, of The Civil War Digest which was published by Grosset in 1960 and a contributor to Lincoln for the Ages which was published in 1960 by Doubleday. E. B. Long was the editor and wrote the introduction to Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant and History of the Civil War, 1861-1865 and wrote the introduction to The Post Reader of Civil War Stories. Long wrote the abridgement and the introduction to Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War, by George F. R. Henderson and the introduction to Four Years in Rebel Capitals, by Thomas Cooper De Leon. He was a member of the editorial advisory board of Civil War History and of the bibliographical committee of Lincoln Lore. In 1971, Doubleday published The Civil War Day by Day, Long's chronology of the Civil War.

In his research for "Centennial History of the Civil War," Long compiled over nine million words of notes. Much of this material was obtained from original manuscripts, diaries, and records, and was gathered during trips throughout the country. He visited over 125 libraries, universities, and archives and traveled over 60 thousand miles. In 1966, Doubleday presented his research notes to the Library of Congress. He owned more than five thousand books, most of them about the Civil War or American History.

E. B. Long died on March 31, 1981 in Chicago, Illinois, the day after the publication of his last work, The Saints and the Union: The Utah Territory in the Civil War.

3 December, 1861: Tuesday

The Union - President Lincoln
President Lincoln writes his annual State of the Union message to Congress. The President "covers many fields, foreign and domestic, as well as reporting on the war effort. He claims that 'the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government-the rights of the people.' ...In general he finds the condition of the nation good, despite the war, and calls again for colonization of free Negroes, a plan which was becoming more and more a part of Lincoln's policy.

Missouri
There is an action at Salem, Missouri.

Virginia
There is an action at Vienna, Virginia.

Ship Island
Federal forces reoccupy Ship Island, prepatory to moving against New Orleans or the Gulf Coast.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

2 December, 1861: Monday

The Union
The second session of the 37th Congress of the United States begins. The congressmen discuss the military defeats at Ball's Bluff and First Bull Run, over the inaction of the Army of the Potomac during the fall, and the Trent affair (in which a US ship stopped a neutral British ship and removed the two Confederate ambassadors on their way to Europe.)

President Lincoln authorizes General Halleck in the Department of Missouri to suspend the writ of habeus corpus wherever he found it necessary.

Virginia
A skirmish takes place at Annandale, Virginia.

Union Naval Action
Virginia
Federal gunboats engage the confederate steamer Patrick Henry near Newport News, Virginia. The engagement lasts 2 hours, and the Patrick Henry is damaged.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

1 December, 1861: Sunday

The Union
President Lincoln issues a memorandum to General McClellan. He wishes to know how long it will take McClellan to initiate a forward movement of the Army of the Potomac.

Kentucky
A skirmish takes place near Camp Goggin.
A skirmish takes place at Whippoorwill Creek
Two weeks of "minor" operations begin around Mill Springs and Somerset.

Tennessee
A skirmish takes place near Morristown, Tennessee

Missouri
A skirmish takes place around Shanghai, Missouri

Union Naval Action
Kentucky
Federal gunboats demonstrate near Fort Holt.

South Carolina
US gunboat Penguin captures the blockade-runner Albion of Nassau, off Carleston. The Albion's cargo consists of arms, ammunition, salt, fruit, provisions, oils, tin, copper, saddles, bridles, and cavalry equipment valued at $100,000.

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

30 November, 1861: Saturday

England
British Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell writes Lord Lyons, Minister to the United States. England considers the seizure of Confederate commissioners Mason and Slidell as aggression against Britain and instructs Lyons to inform the US government that the two men be turned over to British authorities, along with an apology. If no apology is made within 7 days, Lyons is to leave Washington with his legation and return to London.

Russell also orders British Navy to to be on the alert, but to refrain from any act of hostility.

Missouri
A skirmish takes place at Grand River, Missouri.

Western Virginia
A skirmish takes place at the mouth of the Little Cacapon River.

Maryland
Baltimore: A female passenger on a steamer at Baltimore is found to have gloves, stockings and letters intended for the South. A small boy is found to be carrying quinine. Both are allowed to proceed after these items are confiscated. This is "just one of numerous such incidents."

Bibliography
The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac 1861-1865. E.B. Long with Barbara Long, De Capo, 1971

Society of Civil War Historians

Here's their website: http://scwh.la.psu.edu/

From their website:
The Society of Civil War Historians encourages scholarly activity and academic exchange among historians, graduate students, and professionals who interpret history in museums, national parks, archives, and other public facilities. The Society sponsors an annual banquet (held during the Southern Historical Association conference) and a newsletter. Membership includes a subscription to the quarterly Journal of the Civil War Era and the opportunity to attend a biennial conference. Annual dues are $50 for regular members, $25 for students, and there are also institutional, life, and founder memberships.

The Society seeks to bring greater coherence to the field by encouraging the integration of social, military, political, and other forms of history and generally promote the study of the Civil War era. The Society also plans to sponsor a “first book” prize to raise the visibility of the next generation of emerging historians. We also will have a regular, meaningful forum for promoting increased, systematic conversations among academic and public historians.

Florida Atlantic University serves as the organizational home for the Society of Civil War Historians and Penn State’s Richards Civil War Era Center will now serve as a co-sponsor to handle the journal and the conference planning.

We welcome questions and comments from members or inquiries about becoming members. The Society remains an organization committed to promoting both scholarship and fellowship among Civil War era historians.

Writers of Civil War History: James McPherson

From Wikipedia:
James M. McPherson (born October 11, 1936) is an American Civil War historian, and is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor Emeritus of United States History at Princeton University. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Battle Cry of Freedom, his most famous book. He was the president of the American Historical Association in 2003, and is a member of the editorial board of Encyclopædia Britannica.

Born in Valley City, North Dakota, he graduated from St. Peter High School, and he received his Bachelor of Arts at Gustavus Adolphus College (St. Peter, Minnesota) in 1958 (from which he graduated magna cum laude), and his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1963. Currently he resides in Princeton, New Jersey, and is married with one child.

Scholarship
McPherson's works include The Struggle for Equality, awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Award. In 1989, he published his Pulitzer-winning book, Battle Cry of Freedom. And in 1998 another book, For Cause and Comrades, received the Lincoln Prize. In 2002 he published both a scholarly book, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam 1862, and a history of the Civil War for children, Fields of Fury.

Unlike many other historians, he has a reputation of trying to make history accessible to the public. Most of his works are marketed to popular audiences and his book Battle Cry of Freedom has long been a popular one-volume general history of the Civil War. In 2009, he was the co-winner of the Lincoln Prize for Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.

McPherson was named the 2000 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities by the National Endowment for the Humanities (replacing the first selection, President Bill Clinton, who declined the honor in the face of criticism from scholars and political conservatives). In making the announcement of McPherson's selection, NEH Chairman William R. Ferris said:

James M. McPherson has helped millions of Americans better understand the meaning and legacy of the American Civil War. By establishing the highest standards for scholarship and public education about the Civil War and by providing leadership in the movement to protect the nation's battlefields, he has made an exceptional contribution to historical awareness in America.

In 2007, he was awarded the $100,000 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military history--the first person to be awarded the prize.

One of his most recent books is This Mighty Scourge, a series of essays about the Civil War. One essay describes the huge difficulty of negotiation when regime change is a war aim on either side of a conflict. “For at least the past two centuries, nations have usually found it harder to end a war than to start one. Americans learned that bitter lesson in Vietnam, and apparently having forgotten it, we’re forced to learn it all over again in Iraq.” One of McPherson’s examples is the Civil War in which both the North and the South sought regime change. It took four years to end that conflict.

Politics and advocacy
McPherson is known for his outspokenness on contemporary issues and his activism, such as his work on behalf of the preservation of Civil War battlefields. As president in 1993-1994 of Protect Historic America, he lobbied against the construction of a commercial theme park at the Manassas battlefield. He has also served on the boards of the Civil War Trust and the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites, and on the Civil War Sites Advisory Committee.

McPherson signed a May 18, 2009 petition asking President Obama not to lay a wreath at the Confederate Monument at Arlington National Cemetery. The petition stated:

The Arlington Confederate Monument is a denial of the wrong committed against African Americans by slave owners, Confederates, and neo-Confederates, through the monument’s denial of slavery as the cause of secession and its holding up of Confederates as heroes. This implies that the humanity of Africans and African Americans is of no significance.

Today, the monument gives encouragement to the modern neo-Confederate movement and provides a rallying point for them. The modern neo-Confederate movement interprets it as vindicating the Confederacy and the principles and ideas of the Confederacy and their neo-Confederate ideas. The presidential wreath enhances the prestige of these neo-Confederate events

.
Democracy Now interview & UDC boycott
McPherson's political views have led to charges of bias against him and at least one boycott of his books. In 1999 McPherson drew the ire of Confederate heritage groups when he and Ed Sebesta had an interview with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on the left wing Pacifica Radio network's Democracy Now! program. The topic of the interview was then-candidate George W. Bush's financial support of the Museum of the Confederacy, and its Lone Star Ball fundraising event, as well as his views of the historical Confederacy. During the interview, guest Ed Sebesta discussed the Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy, which Sebesta argued were created with the motive of celebrating the Confederacy, including the use of slavery in the Confederate economy, and white supremacy. The interview with McPherson followed in another segment, where McPherson stated:

"I think, I agree a 100% with Ed Sebesta about the motives or the hidden agenda, not too, not too deeply hidden I think of such groups as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. They are dedicated to celebrating the Confederacy and rather thinly veiled support for white supremacy. And I think that also is the again not very deeply hidden agenda of the Confederate flag issue in several southern states."

In the same interview, McPherson clarified his position that the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia had changed its orientation, from its original purpose of celebrating the Confederacy:

"[O]ver time, and especially in the last decade or two, it has become a much more professional, research-oriented, professional exhibit-oriented facility."

He continued,

"I think the motives of people who fundraise money for the museum, and who attend balls in period costume and so on, probably range from celebratory to genuinely historical. So there is a dimension to that. But I do think that the Museum of Confederacy is now a research and professional museum in the same category as other highly regarded museums around the country."

McPherson said:"If I implied that all U.D.C. chapters or S.C.V. chapters or anyone who belongs to those is promoting a white-supremacist agenda, that's not what I meant to say," he said. "What I meant to say is that some of these people have a hidden agenda of white supremacy, (which) they might not even recognize they're involved in."

Members of the UDC were similarly offended by these comments. The Virginia UDC responded in their newsletter that "Far from apologizing for his baseless accusations of racism, (McPherson) has now added ignorance to the list of sins that we have committed." The group has not announced an end to their boycott

Writers of Civil War History: Shelby Foote

Shelby Dade Foote, Jr. (November 17, 1916 – June 27, 2005) was an American novelist and a noted historian of the American Civil War, who wrote The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume history of the war.



Early life
Foote was born in Greenville, Mississippi, the son of Shelby Dade Foote and his wife Lillian Rosenstock. Foote's paternal grandfather, a planter, had gambled away most of his fortune and assets. His maternal grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Vienna. Foote was raised in his father's and maternal grandmother's Episcopal religion.

As his father advanced through the executive ranks of Armour and Company, the family lived in Greenville, Jackson, Vicksburg, Pensacola, Florida, and Mobile, Alabama. Foote's father died in Mobile when Foote was five years old; he and his mother moved back to Greenville. Foote was an only child, and his mother never remarried. When Foote was 15 years old, Walker Percy and his brothers LeRoy and Phinize Percy moved to Greenville to live with their uncle - attorney, poet, and novelist William Alexander Percy - after the death of their parents. Foote began a lifelong fraternal and literary relationship with Walker; each had great influence on the other's writing.

Foote edited The Pica, the student newspaper of Greenville High School, and frequently used the paper to lampoon the school's principal. In 1935, he applied to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, hoping to join with the older Percy boys, but was denied admission because of an unfavorable recommendation from his high school principal. He presented himself for admission anyway, and as result of a battery of admissions tests, he was accepted.

In 1936 he was initiated in the Alpha Delta chapter of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. Interested more in the process of learning than in earning an actual degree, Foote was not a model student. He often skipped class to explore the library, and once he even spent the night among the shelves. He also began contributing pieces of fiction to Carolina Magazine, UNC's award-winning literary journal. Foote returned to Greenville in 1937, where he worked in construction and for a local newspaper. Around this time, he began to work on his first novel.

In 1940 Foote joined the Mississippi National Guard and was commissioned as captain of artillery. After being transferred from one stateside base to another, his battalion was deployed to Northern Ireland in 1943. The following year, Foote was charged with falsifying a government document relating to the check-in of a motor pool vehicle he had borrowed to visit a girlfriend in Belfast - later his first wife — who lived two miles beyond the official military limits. He was court-martialed and dismissed from the Army.

He came back to the United States and took a job with the Associated Press in New York City. In January 1945, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, but was discharged as a private in November 1945, never having seen combat. During his training with the Marines, he recalled a fellow Marine asking him "you used to be a[n] Army captain, didn't you?" When Foote said yes, the fellow replied, "You ought to make a pretty good Marine private."

Foote returned to Greenville and took a job with a local radio station, but spent most of his time writing. He sent a section from his first novel to the Saturday Evening Post. "Flood Burial" was published in 1946, and when Foote received a $750 check from the Post as payment, he quit his job to write full time.

Novelist
Foote's first novel, Tournament, was published in 1949. It was inspired by his planter grandfather, who had died two years before Foote's birth. For his next novel, Follow Me Down, (1950) Foote drew heavily from the proceedings of a Greenville murder trial he attended in 1941 for both the plot and characters.

Love in a Dry Season was his attempt to deal with the "so-called upper classes of the Mississippi Delta" around the time of the Great Depression. Foote often expressed great affection for this novel, which was published in 1951. In Shiloh (1952) Foote foreshadows his use of historical narrative as he tells the story of the bloodiest battle in American history to that point from the first-person perspective of seven different characters.

Jordan County: A Landscape in Narrative, was published in 1954 and is a collection of novellas, short stories, and sketches from Foote's mythical Mississippi county. September, September (1978) is the story of three white Southerners who plot and kidnap the 8-year-old son of a wealthy African-American, told against the backdrop of Memphis in September, 1957.

Although he was not one of America's best-known fiction writers, Foote was admired by his peers—among them the aforementioned Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, and his literary hero William Faulkner, who once told a University of Virginia class that Foote "shows promise, if he'll just stop trying to write Faulkner, and will write some Shelby Foote." Foote's fiction was recommended by both The New Yorker and critics from the New York Times book magazine.

Historian
Foote moved to Memphis in 1952. Upon completion of Jordan County: A Landscape in Narrative, he resumed work on what he thought would be his magnum opus, Two Gates to the City, an epic work he'd had in mind for years and in outline form since the spring of 1951.

He had trouble making progress and felt he was plunging toward crisis with the "dark, horrible novel." Unexpectedly, he received a letter from Bennett Cerf of Random House asking him to write a short history of the Civil War to appear for the conflict's centennial. According to Foote, Cerf contacted him based on the factual accuracy and rich detail he found in Shiloh, but Walker Percy's wife Bunt recalled that Walker had contacted Random House to approach Foote. Regardless, though Foote had no formal training as a historian, Cerf offered him a contract for a work of approximately 200,000 words.

Foote worked for several weeks on an outline and decided that his plan couldn't be done to Cerf's specifications. He requested that the project be expanded to three volumes of 500,000 to 600,000 words each, and he estimated that the entire project would be done in nine years.

Upon approval for the new plan, Foote commenced to write the comprehensive three volume, 3000-page history, together entitled The Civil War: A Narrative. The individual volumes are Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958), Fredericksburg to Meridian (1963), and Red River to Appomattox (1974).

Foote supported himself during the twenty years he worked on the narrative with Guggenheim Fellowships (1955–1957), Ford Foundation grants, and loans from Walker Percy.

Foote labored to maintain his objectivity in the narrative despite his Southern upbringing. He deliberately avoided Lost Cause mythologizing in his work. He gained immense respect for such disparate figures as Ulysses Grant, William T. Sherman, Patrick Cleburne, and Edwin Stanton. He grew to despise such figures as Phil Sheridan and Joe Johnston. He considered United States President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest to be two authentic geniuses of the war. He stated this opinion once in conversation with one of General Forrest's granddaughters. She replied, after a pause, "You know, we never thought much of Mr. Lincoln in my family."

The work received generally favorable reviews, though scholars criticized Foote for not including footnotes and for neglecting subjects such as economics and politics of the Civil War era.

Later life
After finishing September, September, Foote resumed work on Two Gates to the City, the novel he had set aside in 1954 to write the Civil War trilogy. The work still gave him trouble and he set it aside once more, in the summer of 1978, to write "Echoes of Shiloh", an article for National Geographic Magazine. By 1981, he had given up on Two Gates altogether, though he told interviewers for years afterward that he continued to work on it.

In the late 1980s, Ken Burns had assembled a group of consultants to interview for his Civil War documentary. Foote was not in this initial group, though Burns had Foote's trilogy on his reading list. A phone call from Robert Penn Warren prompted Burns to contact Foote. Burns and crew traveled to Memphis in 1986 to film an interview with Foote in the anteroom of his study. In November 1986, Foote figured prominently at a meeting of dozens of consultants gathered to critique Burns' script. Burns interviewed Foote on-camera in Memphis and Vicksburg in 1987. In 1987, he became a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

When Burns' documentary aired in September, 1990, Foote appeared in almost ninety segments, about one hour of the eleven-hour series. Foote's drawl, erudition, and quirk of speaking as if the war were still going on made him a favorite. He was described as "the toast of Public TV," "the media's newest darling," and "prime time's newest star," and the result was a burst of book sales. In one week at the end of September, 1990, each volume of the paperback The Civil War: A Narrative sold 1,000 copies per day. By the middle of 1991, Random House sold 400,000 copies of the trilogy. Foote later told Burns, "Ken, you've made me a millionaire."

Foote's commentary in the Burns film made many substantive comments about battles, generals, and issues. He also explained a puzzling question on nomenclature: why does the same battle often have two names? Foote's answer: Northerners are usually from cities, so rivers and streams are noteworthy; whereas Southerners are usually rural, so they find towns noteworthy. Some examples:

First and Second Battle of Bull Run/First and Second Manassas;
Battle of Antietam (Creek)/Sharpsburg.

Foote professed to be a reluctant celebrity. When The Civil War was first broadcast, his telephone number was publicly listed and he received many phone calls from people who had seen him on television. Foote never unlisted his number, and the volume of calls increased each time the series re-aired. Many Memphis natives were known to pay Foote a visit at his East Parkway residence in Midtown Memphis. In 1992, Foote received an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina.

In the early 1990s, Foote was interviewed by journalist Tony Horwitz for the project on American memory of the Civil War which Horwitz eventually published as Confederates In The Attic (1998). Foote was also a member of The Modern Library's editorial board for the re-launch of the series in the mid 1990s. (This series published two books excerpted from his Civil War narrative.

Foote was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994. Also in 1994, Foote joined Protect Historic America and was instrumental in opposing a Disney theme park near battlefield sites in Virginia. Along the way, Burns asked him to return for his upcoming documentary Baseball, and he appeared up to 10th Inning, where he gave an account of his meeting the legendary Babe Ruth.

In one of his last television projects, Foote narrated the three-part series The 1840 Carolina Village, produced by award-winning PBS and Travel Channel producer C. Vincent Shortt in 1997. "Working with Shelby was a genuinely illuminating and humbling experience", said Shortt. "He was the kind of academician who could weave a Civil War story into a discussion about fried green tomatoes -- and do so without an ounce of presumption or arrogance. He was a treasure."

On September 2, 2001 Shelby Foote was the focus of the C-Span Television program In-Depth. In a 3 hour interview, conducted by C-Span founder Brian Lamb, Foote shows off the library of his home, working room, writing desk and details the writing of his books as well as taking on-air calls. The program can be viewed online here: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/165823-1

Foote died at Baptist Hospital in Memphis on June 27, 2005, aged 88. He had had a heart attack after a recent pulmonary embolism. He was interred in Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis. His grave is beside the family plot of General Forrest.

Marriages
Tess Lavery of Belfast, 1944–1946
Marguerite "Peggy" Desommes of Memphis, 1948-1952—one daughter, Margaret, born 1949
Gwyn Rainer of Memphis, 1956 until his death—one son, Huger, born 1961

Bibliography
Fiction
Tournament (1949)
Follow Me Down (1950)
Love in a Dry Season (1951)
Shiloh: A Novel (1952)
Jordan County: A Landscape in Narrative (1954)
September, September (1978)

Non-fiction
The Civil War: A Narrative
The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville
The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian
The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol 3: Red River to Appomattox
[edit] Titles excerpted from The Civil War: A Narrative
Stars in Their Courses: The Gettysburg Campaign, June-July 1863
The Beleaguered City: The Vicksburg Campaign, December 1862-July 1863

Other
Foote edited a modern edition of Chickamauga: And Other Civil War Stories, an anthology of Civil War stories by various authors.

Foote contributed a lengthy introduction to the 1993 Modern Library edition of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (which was published along with "The Veteran", a short story that features the hero of the larger work at the end of his life). In this introduction, Foote recounts the biography of Crane in the same narrative style as his Civil War work.

Writers of Civil War History: Bruce Catton

From Wikipedia
Charles Bruce Catton (October 9, 1899 – August 28, 1978) was an American journalist and notable historian of the American Civil War. He won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia.

Catton was a "narrative historian" who specialized in popular histories that emphasized the colorful characters and vignettes of history, in addition to the simple dates, facts, and analyses. His works, although well researched and supported by footnotes, were generally not presented in a rigorous academic style. In the long line of Civil War historians, Catton is arguably the most prolific and popular of all, with Shelby Foote his only rival. Oliver Jensen, who succeeded him as editor of American Heritage magazine, wrote: "There is a near-magic power of imagination in Catton's work that seemed to project him physically into the battlefields, along the dusty roads and to the campfires of another age."

Life
Catton was born in Petoskey, Michigan, to George R. and Adela M. (Patten) Catton, and raised in Benzonia. His father was a Congregationalist minister, who accepted a teaching position in Benzonia Academy and later became the academy's headmaster. As a boy, Bruce first heard the reminiscences of the aged veterans who had fought in the Civil War. Catton wrote in his memoir, Waiting for the Morning Train (1972), that their stories made a lasting impression upon him, giving:

...a color and a tone not merely to our village life, but to the concept of life with which we grew up ... I think I was always subconsciously driven by an attempt to restate that faith and to show where it was properly grounded, how it grew out of what a great many young men on both sides felt and believed and were brave enough to do.

Catton attended Oberlin College, starting in 1916, but he left without completing a degree because of World War I. After serving briefly in the U.S. Navy during the war, Catton became a reporter and editor for The Cleveland News (as a freelance reporter), the Boston American (1920–24), and the Cleveland Plain Dealer (1925). From then until 1941, he worked for the Newspaper Enterprise Association (a Scripps-Howard syndicate), for which he wrote editorials and book reviews, as well as serving as a Washington, D.C. correspondent. Catton did try twice to finish his studies, but found himself repeatedly pulled away by his newspaper work; Oberlin awarded him an honorary degree in 1956.

At the start of World War II, Catton was too old for military service and, starting in 1941, served as Director of Information for the War Production Board and later held similar posts in the Department of Commerce and the Department of the Interior. This experience as a federal employee prepared him to write his first book, War Lords of Washington, in 1948. Although the book was not a commercial success, it inspired Catton to leave the federal government to become a full-time author.

In 1954, Catton was offered the position as founding editor of the new American Heritage magazine, and took the post, encouraged among others by his friend, the historian Allan Nevins. Catton served initially as a writer, reviewer, and editor. In the first issue, he wrote:

We intend to deal with that great, unfinished and illogically inspiring story of the American people doing, being and becoming. Our American heritage is greater than any one of us. It can express itself in very homely truths; in the end it can lift up our eyes beyond the glow in the sunset skies.

On August 16, 1925, Catton married Hazel H. Cherry. In 1926, they had a son, William Bruce, who taught history at Princeton University and at Middlebury College, Vermont, where he was the first Charles A. Dana Professor of History.

In 1959, Catton was named senior editor of American Heritage, a post he held until his death.

In 1977, the year before his death, Catton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, from President Gerald R. Ford, who noted that the author and historian "made us hear the sounds of battle and cherish peace."

In cooperation with American Heritage Publishing Company, the Society of American Historians established the Bruce Catton Prize Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Writing of History, a biennial award to honor an entire body of work, from 1984-2006. The prize included a certificate and $5,000 (later $2,500). The prize was awarded to David Herbert Donald (2006), David Brion Davis (2004), Gerda Lerner (2002), Bernard Bailyn (2000), Richard N. Current (1998), Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1996), John Hope Franklin (1994), Edmund S. Morgan (1992), Henry Steele Commager (1990), Richard B. Morris (1988), C. Vann Woodward (1986), and Dumas Malone (1984).

Bruce Catton died in hospital near his summer home at Frankfort, Michigan, after a respiratory illness. He was buried in Benzonia's township cemetery.

Major works
Army of the Potomac trilogy
Mr. Lincoln's Army (1951) — The first volume of the history of the Army of the Potomac, from its formation, the command of George B. McClellan, the Peninsula Campaign, the Northern Virginia Campaign, and the Battle of Antietam.
Glory Road (1952) — Continuing under new commanding generals from the Battle of Fredericksburg to the Battle of Gettysburg.
A Stillness at Appomattox (1953) — Catton's first commercially successful work, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history and the National Book Award for excellence in nonfiction in 1954, it described the campaigns of Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia during 1864 to the end of the war in 1865.

These three books have recently been bound into a single volume reprint titled, Bruce Catton's Civil War, which incorrectly implies that it addresses the entire war (as he does in his Centennial History of the Civil War trilogy) rather than just the Army of the Potomac.

Centennial History of the Civil War
The Centennial of the Civil War was memorialized from 1961 to 1965 and the publication of Bruce Catton's trilogy highlighted this era. Unlike his previous trilogy, these books focused not only on military topics, but on social, economic, and political topics as well.

The Coming Fury (1961) — Explores the causes and events leading to the start of the war, culminating in its first major combat, the First Battle of Bull Run.
Terrible Swift Sword (1963) — Both sides mobilize for a massive war effort and the story continues through 1862, ending with the Battle of Fredericksburg.
Never Call Retreat (1965) — The war continues through Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and the bloody struggles of 1864 and 1865 before the final surrender.

Ulysses S. Grant trilogy
Catton wrote the second and third volume of this trilogy, following the publication of Captain Sam Grant in 1950 by historian and biographer Lloyd Lewis, making extensive use of Lewis's historical research, provided by his widow, Kathryn Lewis, who personally selected Catton to continue her husband's work.

Grant Moves South (1960) — Shows the growth of Grant as a military commander, from victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, to Shiloh, and Vicksburg.
Grant Takes Command (1969) — Follows Grant from the Battle of Chattanooga in 1863 through Virginia campaigns against Robert E. Lee and the end of the war.

Other Civil War books
U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition (1954) — There have been over 600 Grant biographies written, and this is considered one of the best short ones (under 200 pages).
Banners at Shenandoah: A Story of Sheridan's Fighting Cavalry (1955) — A book for juveniles about Union cavalry commander Philip Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864.
This Hallowed Ground (1956) — This history, told from the Union perspective, was reviewed as the best single volume history of the war at that time and received a Fletcher Pratt award from the Civil War Round Table of New York in 1957.
America Goes to War (1958) — A study of how the American Civil War became one of the first total wars.
The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War (1960) — Catton wrote the narrative portion of this book, which also included over 800 paintings and period photographs. It received a special Pulitzer citation in 1961.
The American Heritage Short History of the Civil War (1960) — Catton wrote this fast-moving narrative that covers both the military and political aspects of the war.
Two Roads to Sumter (1963) — Written with his son, William, this book recounts the 15 years leading up to the war, seen through the vantage points of the two leading politicians involved in the conflict: Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis.
Gettysburg: The Final Fury (1974) — A slim volume on the Battle of Gettysburg, dominated by photographs and illustrations.

Other books
The War Lords of Washington (1948) — An account of Washington, D.C., in World War II, based on his experiences in the federal government.
Four Days: The Historical Record Of The Death Of President Kennedy (1964) - A 144 page joint work of the American Heritage Magazine and United Press International on the death of the 35th U.S. President.
Waiting for the Morning Train (1972) — Catton's account of Michigan in his boyhood.
Michigan: A Bicentennial History (1976)
The Bold & Magnificent Dream: America's Founding Years, 1492–1815 (1978)

Other honors
Catton received an award for "meritorious service in the field of Civil War history" in 1959, presented by Harry S. Truman. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 from Gerald R. Ford.

Catton received 26 honorary degrees in his career from colleges and universities across the United States, including one in 1956 from Oberlin College.