Books by "David P. Hatch"
4 books found
Abolitionist of the Most Dangerous Kind
by Todd Mildfelt, David D. Schafer
2023 · University of Oklahoma Press
A controversial character largely known (as depicted in the movie Glory) as a Union colonel who led Black soldiers in the Civil War, James Montgomery (1814–71) waged a far more personal and radical war against slavery than popular history suggests. It is the true story of this militant abolitionist that Todd Mildfelt and David D. Schafer tell in Abolitionist of the Most Dangerous Kind, summoning a life fiercely lived in struggle against the expansion of slavery into the West and during the Civil War. This book follows a harrowing path through the turbulent world of the 1850s and 1860s as Montgomery, with the fervor of an Old Testament prophet, inflicts destructive retribution on Southern slaveholders wherever he finds them, crossing paths with notable abolitionists John Brown and Harriet Tubman along the way. During the tumultuous years of “Bleeding Kansas,” he became a guerilla chieftain of the antislavery vigilantes known as Jayhawkers. When the war broke out in 1861, Montgomery led a regiment of white troops who helped hundreds of enslaved people in Missouri reach freedom in Kansas. Drawing on regimental records in the National Archives, the authors provide new insights into the experiences of African American men who served in Montgomery’s next regiment, the Thirty-Fourth United States Colored Troops (formerly Second South Carolina Infantry). Montgomery helped enslaved men and women escape via one of the least-explored underground railways in the nation, from Arkansas and Missouri through Kansas and Nebraska. With support of abolitionists in Massachusetts, he spearheaded resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act in Kansas. And, when war came, he led Black soldiers in striking at the very heart of the Confederacy. His full story thus illuminates the actions of both militant abolitionists and the enslaved people fighting to destroy the peculiar institution.
In a few short months in the Shenandoah Valley, Stonewall Jackson rewrote military history. Accompanied by George Patton's great-uncle and a staff of able subordinates, the Bible-quoting general used his own unique view of past military doctrine to defeat a series of converging enemy armies. American military strategy has never been the same since. Jackson's aggressive personality enabled him to constantly maintain the initiative. While cloaking his own operations in tight security, he was often able to discern the aims of his opponent. Frequently outnumbered, he managed to keep enemy units separated, and to defeat them in detail. Jackson was able to co-ordinate infantry, cavalry, and artillery operations, and was particularly successful in turning the normally slow-moving infantry into an effective mobile strike force.Jackson's Valley Campaign is supplemented by sidebars on famous units, weapons, incidents, and in-depth personality profiles of Jackson and his opponents. Complete orders of battle and special maps that clearly illustrate Jackson's operational doctrine are enhanced by unique charts that show the distances and rates of march of Jackson's "foot cavalry" between all major points in the Shenandoah Valley.In the long-awaited revision of his out-of-print classic, the author describes Jackson's war of maneuver and the tactical ideas it represented, without losing sight of the individuals and units on both sides who tested military theory with their lives. John C. Frémont, "Napoleon" Banks, Turner Ashby, Belle Boyd, the Louisiana Tigers, Blenker's German Division, and the Stonewall Brigade all live again in this colorful but thoughtfully written account.
Spanning more than one hundred miles across rice fields, salt marshes, and seven rivers and creeks, the Charleston & Savannah Railroad was designed to revolutionize the economy of South Carolina's lowcountry by linking key port cities. This history of the railroad records the story of the C&S and of the men who managed it during wartime.