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Rescue by rail : troop transfer and the Civil War in the West, 1863

Between 23 and 25 September, 1863 the Eleventh and Twelfth Corps of the Army of the Potomac were sent across the Appalachians to strengthen Union troops in the struggle for supremacy in Eastern Tennessee. The Battle of Chickamauga - a Confederate victory that just missed being a complete Federal rout - had ended, exhausting both armies and leaving Union troops perilously bottled up in Chattanooga. Upon the prodding of newspaperman Charles Dana, who was on the scene, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton resolved to provide Union commander General William Rosecrans with reinforcements sufficient to hold that key town. After a late-night meeting with Lincoln and other cabinet members, Stanton's proposal to send more than twenty thousand men to Chattanooga by rail within a week was adopted. This is the story of that first great Federal troop movement by rail and of the corresponding Confederate transfer of General James Longstreet's troops a few weeks previously. The contrast between the two operations points up the Union advantages in technology, infrastructure, and mobility that would offset the Confederate advantage of interior lines. An important study of a critical movement, the work also benefits from an assembly of anecdotes and comments from the troops involved. Roger Pickenpaugh is a journalist and teacher in Caldwell, Ohio.

John McKinley and the antebellum Supreme Court : circuit riding in the old Southwest

"John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court presents a portrait of US Supreme Court justice John McKinley (1780-1852) and provides a penetrating analysis of McKinley's time and place, the exigencies of his circuit work, and the contributions he made to both American legal history and Alabama. Steven P. Brown rescues from obscurity John McKinley, one of the three Alabama justices, along with John Archibald Campbell and Hugo Black, who have served on the US Supreme Court. A native Kentuckian who moved in 1819 to northern Alabama as a land speculator and lawyer, McKinley was elected to the state legislature three times and became first a senator and then a representative in the US Congress before being elevated to the Supreme Court in 1837. He spent his first five years on the court presiding over the newly created Ninth Circuit, which covered Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. His was not only the newest circuit, encompassing a region that, because of its recent settlement, included a huge number of legal claims related to property, but it was also the largest, the furthest from Washington, DC, and by far the most difficult to traverse. While this is a thorough biography of McKinley's life, it also details early Alabama state politics and provides one of the most exhaustive accounts available of the internal workings of the antebellum Supreme Court and the very real challenges that accompanied the now-abandoned practice of circuit riding. In providing the first indepth assessment of the life and Supreme Court career of Justice John McKinley, Brown has given us a compelling portrait of a man active in the leading financial, legal, and political circles of his day"--Provided by publisher.

A whole country in commotion : the Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest