Autobiography of Samuel S. Hildebrand, the Renowned Missouri Bushwacker and

Hildebrand, Samuel S., 1836-1872Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.6
Word count
402K words
Chapters
41

Tags

English Originals General BiographyMilitary Local ConflictGuerrilla WarfareAntiheroCriminal PsychologyMoral DilemmaFirsthand AccountDocumentary NarrativeAutobiographical NarrativeTurbulent EraAmerican Civil War

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Autobiography of Samuel S. Hildebrand, the Renowned Missouri "Bushwacker" andAuthor: Hildebrand, Samuel S., 1836-1872,Language: English, Class: E456: History: America: Civil War period (1861-1865), Release Date: Nov 5, 2015

Editor's review

This autobiography is the first-person account of Samuel S. Hildebrand, a "bushwhacker" of Civil War–era Missouri, and stands as a primary source in Civil War and local history. Its value lies not in literary polish but in the immediacy of a participant's perspective: the book presents the tangled situation of guerrilla warfare, family feuds, and clashes with Union forces along the Missouri border, and preserves a wealth of colloquial narration and local detail of the period. For researchers, it can be read alongside military histories, local gazetteers, and postwar memoirs; for general readers, it is more like a window onto the everyday violence of the war's edges. Note that the author's stance is pronounced and his narrative self-justifying; read with a critical sense of the source, as tendentious testimony rather than neutral historical conclusion.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with the introduction or editor's note to understand the provenance of the edition and the author's stance before turning to the main text.
  2. Read alongside a map or chronology of the Civil War in Missouri to keep track of people and places.
  3. Mark passages where the author defends himself or blames others, as an exercise in source criticism.
  4. Compare with memoirs by Union soldiers or local civilians of the same period to build a multi-perspective understanding.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41

FAQ

Is this book a complete history of the Civil War? No. It is Samuel S. Hildebrand's memoir from a personal perspective, centered mainly on his experiences in Missouri and marked by evident self-justification; it is no substitute for a systematic history of the Civil War.
What historical background is needed before reading? It helps to know the basic timeline of the U.S. Civil War and the particular situation in Missouri, where Union and Southern forces coexisted during the war. With that background, the names, places, and causes of conflict in the book are easier to follow.
Is the electronic edition suitable for scholarly citation? The Project Gutenberg edition can be used as a public-domain electronic text, but scholarly citation should verify the original publication information and page numbers, and note that this edition is the English original; cite the source of the edition.

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About the author

Hildebrand, Samuel S., 1836-1872 Author · American · 1836–1872

Samuel S. Hildebrand (1836–1872) was an American from Missouri, remembered for his autobiography, Autobiography of Samuel S. Hildebrand, the Renowned Missouri Bushwacker. The book is an autobiographical account centered on guerrilla activities in Missouri during the American Civil War, describing his own experiences in those turbulent years. Written in the first person, it carries a strong regional flavor and the marks of its era, and serves as one of the primary sources for understanding border conflicts and guerrilla warfare in Civil War Missouri. Public information about his life is limited: beyond his birth and death years and his home state, reliable records of his education, occupation, and social activities are scarce. Only one of his works is held in this collection, suggesting that his writings were not widely circulated, yet the autobiography draws attention from readers interested in irregular warfare of the Civil War period because of its distinctive subject matter.