Military Reminiscences of the Civil War, Volume 1: April 1861-November 1863

Cox, Jacob D. (Jacob Dolson), 1828-1900Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.8
Word count
1.1M words
Chapters
109

Tags

English Originals World HistoryMilitary Historical ReappraisalPortrait GalleryHeroismPatriotismTurbulent Era19th Century

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.Military Reminiscences of the Civil War, Volume 1: April 1861-November 1863 by CoxAuthor: Cox, Jacob D. (Jacob Dolson), 1828-1900,Language: English, Class: E456: History: America: Civil War period (1861-1865), Release Date: Nov 1, 2004

Editor's review

This is the first volume of the memoirs of Jacob D. Cox, a Union general in the American Civil War, covering the period from the outbreak of war in April 1861 to November 1863. As both a participant and a senior officer, Cox combines battlefield observations with insights from the command level, offering fairly detailed accounts of military operations such as the West Virginia Campaign and the Battle of Antietam, while also addressing the interaction between army organization, logistics, and the political environment. Its value lies in the immediacy of first-hand historical material: readers can understand, through the participant's perspective, the confusion of the war's early phase, the difficulties of mobilization, and local society's response to the war. The prose is nineteenth-century English, with narration weighted toward facts and itineraries and little literary embellishment, making it suitable as supplementary reading for research or personal interest. In terms of reading context, it is best studied alongside battle maps, chronologies, or related general histories, and is suited to readers with a foundation in the political and military history of the American Civil War for thematic selected reading, rather than casual cover-to-cover reading.

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Reading tips

  1. Read a related general history or chronology first to establish the framework of campaigns and timeline before entering this book.
  2. Use maps to mark march routes and battlefield locations while reading to reduce difficulty in spatial understanding.
  3. Read by campaign chapters as needed rather than strictly in sequence, facilitating thematic reference.
  4. Take simple notes on personal names and unit designations to facilitate continuity with Volume 2.

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
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FAQ

Is this book a novel or historical source material? This is a military memoir written by the author based on personal experience; it is a first-hand historical narrative, not a work of fiction. The content focuses on the course of battles, troop movements, and personal observations, and should be read as historical source material and personal record, cross-checked against other research.
Can I read it without a foundation in the American Civil War? You can, but it will be fairly demanding. The book involves numerous unit designations, place names, and campaign backgrounds, and without basic knowledge it is easy to get lost. It is advisable to first understand the causes of the war, the main theaters, and the timeline, after which the book will read much more smoothly.
What period does Volume 1 cover? Volume 1 begins with the outbreak of war in April 1861 and ends in November 1863, covering military operations of the war's early and middle phases. The subsequent content continues in Volume 2, and together the two volumes constitute the author's recollections of the entire war.
Is the English original difficult to read? The prose is nineteenth-century English with longer sentences and fact-oriented narration, but overall it is not obscure. Readers with college-level English reading ability and familiarity with military and historical vocabulary can complete it with a dictionary; a slower pace and section-by-section progress are recommended.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Cox, Jacob D. (Jacob Dolson), 1828-1900 Author · American · 1828–1900

Jacob D. Cox (1828–1900) was an American statesman and Union Army general who served as Governor of Ohio and as Secretary of the Interior. His representative work is the two-volume Military Reminiscences of the Civil War: the first volume covers April 1861 to November 1863, and the second continues to the end of the war in June 1865. Written from the perspective of a participant, the memoir presents military and political observations and the course of the war, combining historical value with narrative interest. Public information about the details of his life is limited, and only these two works are held in the collection; through this memoir readers may come to know the observations and writing of a Union officer during the American Civil War.