WILLIAM A. TIDWELL establishes the existence of a Confederate Secret Service and clarifies the Confederate decision making process to show the role played by Jefferson Davis in clandestine operations. While the book focuses on the Confederate Secret Service’s involvement with the Lincoln assassination, the information presented has implications for various other aspects of the Civil War. The most thorough description of the Confederate Secret Service to date, April ’65 provides previously unknown records and traces the development of Confederate doctrine for the conduct of irregular warfare. In addition it describes Confederate motives and activities associated with the development of a major covert effort to promote the creation of a peace party in the North. It shows in detail how the Confederates planned to attack the military command and control in Washington and how they responded to the situation when the wartime attack evolved into a peacetime assassination. One of the most significant pieces of new information is how the Confederates were successful in influencing the history of the assassination.

This exhaustive study chronicles the life of career army officer John C. Tidball, from action in major Civil War battles to postwar service in the West. Beginning with the first Battle of Bull Run, Tidball, saw action in nearly all the major engagements in the Eastern Theater, including Chancellorsville, Yorktown, Williamsburg, Gettysburg, Antietam, and Petersburg. Using previously unpublished wartime letters and memoirs, Eugene C. Tidball captivates the reader with the story of his most famous relative’s years in service to his country. Tidball’s account extends beyond the Civil War, to include recounting his presence at the Supreme Court’s delivery of the Dred Scott decision; his commanding of the military District of Alaska; his traversing the Southwest in 1853 as a member of the 35th Parallel Pacific Railway Survey; and his service as aide-de-camp to General-in-Chief William Tecumseh Sherman.

Curiosity piqued by two poems written by his great-great-grandmother initiated David Thackery’s scholarly exploration into the history of the Sixty-sixth Ohio Volunteer Infantry and the wartime history of Champaign County, Ohio, from which it was recruited. Not only a military history, A Light and Uncertain Hold is also a penetrating and provocative social history which deals with the homefront, morale, reenlistment, and the memory and commemoration of the war. The words and stories of individual soldiers give depth and substance to the regiment’s experience.

Orlando M. Poe chronicles the life of one of the most influential yet underrated and overlooked soldiers during the Civil War. After joining the Union Army in 1861, Poe commanded the 2nd Michigan Infantry in the Peninsula Campaign and led brigades at Second Bull Run and Fredericksburg. He was then sent west and became one of the Union heroes in the defense of Knoxville. Poe served under several of the war’s greatest generals, including George McClellan and William T. Sherman, who appointed him chief engineer to oversee the burning of Atlanta and Sherman’s March to the Sea. Though technically only a captain in the regular army at the war’s end, Poe was one of Sherman’s most valued subordinates, and he was ultimately appointed brevet brigadier general for his bravery and service.

Captain Simon Perkins Jr. and his fellow quartermasters helped make the Union’s victory possible by providing the Federal army with clothing and camp equipment, livestock and forage, wagon and railroad transportation, offices, warehouses, and hospitals, despite bad weather, unserviceable railroads, and lack of transportation. “The Supply for Tomorrow Must Not Fail” examines Perkins’s responsibilities, the difficult situations he encountered and overcame, and the successes he achieved as part of a team of determined and dependable supply officers, whose duties were critical to successful Union military operations.

Phelps, a native of Chardon, Ohio, was a prolific and observant correspondent. His private letters, to his wife, his father, and to political patrons and other naval officers, are among the most compelling and descriptive extant. The heart of Ironclad Captain are these letters, which Jay Slagle has set in context through the judicious use of published documents, memoirs, and scholarly histories of the navy. The result is a small history of the navy and its officer corps for the middle third of the nineteenth century.

General Grant by Matthew Arnold with a Rejoinder by Mark Twain presents conflicting essays and cultures. Matthew Arnold’s 1886 essay on Grant praised the general and his posthumously published Memoirs, but to many Americans its tone seemed patronizing of their hero and country. Grant’s friend and personal benefactor, Mark Twain, delivered a caustic rejoinder to the Army and Navy Club of Connecticut in April 1887. Thus Arnold became a pet prejudice of Twain’s and may have served as an inspiration for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In this volume, Twain’s rejoinder is published in a correct text for the first time since the Hartford Courant printed his speech.

Editor Robert Garth Scott has sifted through what is arguably the largest collection of Civil War-related material to surface in fifty years. From his childhood in Detroit through his cadetship at West Point, his service in the Mexican, Seminole, and Civil Wars, and his post-Civil War experiences in the West, Willcox’s story is published here for the first time.

Fallen Leaves is a collection of Abbott’s wartime letters to his family and friends, the majority published here for the first time. Robert Garth Scott’s introduction contains a biographical sketch of Abbott that offers the most complete account of his life to date and, in his epilogue, recounts the details of Abbott’s final battle and death. Also published with the letters are more than 30 photographs, many of them showing members of the 20th Massachusetts. Abbott’s letters convey an immediacy which gives readers a sense of being part of an inner circle of friends and relatives. This quality lends itself to fresh and compelling reading for Civil War scholars, buffs, and general readers alike.

Perhaps no other Union commander’s reputation has been the subject of as much controversy as George B. McClellan’s. Thomas J. Rowland presents a framework in which early Civil War command can be viewed without direct comparison to that of the final two years. Such comparisons, in his opinion, are both unfair and contextually inaccurate. Only by understanding how very different was the context and nature of the war facing McClellan, as opposed to Grant and Sherman, can one discard the traditional “good general-bad general” approach to command performance. In such a light, McClellan’s career, both his shortcomings and accomplishments, can be viewed with clearer perspective.