Stonewall S Prussian Mapmaker

Stonewall's Prussian Mapmaker

Prussian-born cartographer Oscar Hinrichs was a key member of Stonewall Jackson’s staff, collaborated on maps with Jedediah Hotchkiss, and worked alongside such prominent Confederate leaders as Joe Johnston, Richard H. Anderson, and Jubal Early. After being smuggled along the Rebel Secret Line in southern Maryland by John Surratt Sr., his wife Mary, and other Confederate sympathizers, Hinrichs saw action in key campaigns from the Shenandoah Valley and Antietam to Gettysburg, Petersburg, and Appomattox. After the Confederate surrender, Hinrichs was arrested alongside his friend Henry Kyd Douglas and imprisoned under suspicion of having played a role in the Booth conspiracy, though the charges were later dropped. Hinrichs’s detailed wartime journals, published here for the first time, shed new light on mapmaking as a tool of war, illuminate Stonewall Jackson’s notoriously superior strategic and tactical use of terrain, and offer unique perspectives on the lives of common soldiers, staff officers, and commanders in Lee’s army. Impressively comprehensive, Hinrichs’s writings constitute a valuable and revelatory primary source from the Civil War era.

Army History

The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (The Annotated Books)

With kaleidoscopic, trenchant, path-breaking insights, Elizabeth D. Samet has produced the most ambitious edition of Ulysses Grant’s Memoirs yet published. One hundred and thirty-three years after its 1885 publication by Mark Twain, Elizabeth Samet has annotated this lavish edition of Grant’s landmark memoir, and expands the Civil War backdrop against which this monumental American life is typically read. No previous edition combines such a sweep of historical and cultural contexts with the literary authority that Samet, an English professor obsessed with Grant for decades, brings to the table. Whether exploring novels Grant read at West Point or presenting majestic images culled from archives, Samet curates a richly annotated, highly collectible edition that will fascinate Civil War buffs. The edition also breaks new ground in its attack on the “Lost Cause” revisionism that still distorts our national conversation about the legacy of the Civil War. Never has Grant’s transformation from tanner’s son to military leader been more insightfully and passionately explained than in this timely edition, appearing on the 150th anniversary of Grant’s 1868 presidential election.