Named States Rights Gist by his father, the Harvard Law School graduate went on to become a Confederate general despite his lack of formal military training. This biography fills in the outline of Gist that other historians have left incomplete. His brilliant performance in high command led him to become a militia general at the age of twenty-four. He participated in the first shots at Fort Sumter and lead the charge at Franklin, Tennessee, dying gallantly in the process. In the interim, he was a combat leader at First Manassas, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and the Atlanta campaign.

States Rights Gist: A South Carolina General of the Civil War (First Edition Library)

Biographies & Memoirs

Cisco, Walter Brian

Historical

Ragged Edge Pr

States Rights Gist: A South Carolina General of the Civil War

White Mane Pub

Recounts personal stories of how five Southerners came to their own individual decisions to abandon the Union during the Civil War era. Each story represents a current in the movement that culminated in secession. Their opinions may seem foreign to Americans raised on the permitted conventions of popular history. Those who view the struggle over slavery as a morality play, as well as those who minimize slavery's importance, will both be challenged. Includes b&amp;w portraits. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Taking a Stand: Portraits from the Southern Secession Movement

History

Americas

Stories of how five Southerners came to their own decisions to abandon the Union.

On the eve of the American Civil War, Wade Hampton, one of the wealthiest men in the South and indeed the United States, remained loyal to his native South Carolina as it seceded from the Union. Raising his namesake Hampton Legion of soldiers, he eventually became a lieutenant general of Confederate cavalry after the death of the legendary J. E. B. Stuart. Hampton’s highly capable, but largely unheralded, military leadership has long needed a modern treatment. After the war, Hampton returned to South Carolina, where chaos and violence reigned as Northern carpetbaggers, newly freed slaves, and disenfranchised white Southerners battled for political control of the devastated economy. As Reconstruction collapsed, Hampton was elected governor in the contested election of 1876 in which both the governorship of South Carolina and the American presidency hung in the balance. While aspects of Hampton’s rise to power remain controversial, under his leadership stability returned to state government and rampant corruption was brought under control. Hampton then served in the U.S. Senate from 1879 to 1891, eventually losing his seat to a henchman of notorious South Carolina governor "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, whose blatantly segregationist grassroots politics would supplant Hampton’s genteel paternalism. In Wade Hampton, Walter Brian Cisco provides a comprehensively researched, highly readable, and long-overdue treatment of a man whose military and political careers had a significant impact upon not only South Carolina, but America. Focusing on all aspects of Hampton’s life, Cisco has written the definitive military-political overview of this fascinating man. Winner of the 2006 Douglas Southall Freeman Award.

Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior, Conservative Statesman

POTOMAC BOOKS

On the eve of the American Civil War, Wade Hampton, one of the wealthiest men in the South and indeed the United States, remained loyal to his native South Carolina as it seceded from the Union. Raising his namesake Hampton Legion of soldiers, he eventually became a lieutenant general of Confederate cavalry after the death of the legendary J. E. B. Stuart. Hampton’s highly capable, but largely unheralded, military leadership has long needed a modern treatment. After the war, Hampton returned to South Carolina, where chaos and violence reigned as Northern carpetbaggers, newly freed slaves, and disenfranchised white Southerners battled for political control of the devastated economy. As Reconstruction collapsed, Hampton was elected governor in the contested election of 1876 in which both the governorship of South Carolina and the American presidency hung in the balance. While aspects of Hampton’s rise to power remain controversial, under his leadership stability returned to state government and rampant corruption was brought under control. Hampton then served in the U.S. Senate from 1879 to 1891, eventually losing his seat to a henchman of notorious South Carolina governor "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, whose blatantly segregationist grassroots politics would supplant Hampton’s genteel paternalism. In Wade Hampton, Walter Brian Cisco provides a comprehensively researched, highly readable, and long-overdue treatment of a man whose military and political careers had a significant impact upon not only South Carolina, but America. Focusing on all aspects of Hampton’s life, Cisco has written the definitive military-political overview of this fascinating man. Winner of the 2006 Douglas Southall Freeman Award.

War Crimes Against Southern Civilians

Walter Brian Cisco's War Crimes Against Southern Civilians is the first book-length survey of the Union's "hard war" against the people of the Confederacy--one that included the shelling and burning of cities, systematic destruction of entire districts, mass arrests, forced expulsions, wholesale plundering, and murder. 
In a series of compelling chapters, Cisco chronicles the St. Louis massacre, where Federal authorities proceeded to impose a reign of terror and dictatorship in Missouri. He tells of the events leading to, and the suffering caused by, the Federal decree that forced twenty thousand Missouri civilians into exile. The arrests of civilians, the suppression of civil liberties, theft, and murder to "restore the union" in Tennessee are also examined. 
Women and children were robbed, brutalized, and left homeless in Sherman's infamous raid through Georgia. In South Carolina, homes, farms, churches, and whole towns disappeared in flames. Civilians received no mercy at the hands of the Union invaders. 
Thoroughly researched from sources including letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts of the time, Walter Brian Cisco's exhaustive book notably pays careful attention to the suffering of African-American victims of Federal brutality, revealing that wherever Federal troops encountered Southern blacks, whether free or slave, they were robbed, brutalized, belittled, kidnapped, threatened, tortured, and sometimes raped or killed by their blue-clad "liberators." 
Apologists for Lincoln's hard war continue to downplay the suffering endured and the damage done, blame the victims, or call some of the above incidents "accidents" or "mistakes." Many also cling to the Lincolnian myth that only by the most horrendous of wars could the slaves be freed, ignoring the fact that the rest of the Western world managed to bring an end to the institution without bloodshed. This book serves to set the record straight and to show that the war on Southern civilians was not justified, despite the convictions by many that such a war was necessary to save the union. 
Walter Brian Cisco's first book, States Rights Gist: A South Carolina General of the Civil War, a biography of the little-known general, was a 1992 selection of the History Book Club. He is also the author of Taking a Stand: Portraits from the Southern Secession Movement, Henry Timrod: A Biography, and Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior, Conservative Statesman, considered the definitive biography of Hampton and the 2006 winner of the Douglas Southall Freeman History Award. He lives in Orangeburg, South Carolina.\n"Of all the enormities committed by Americans in the nineteenth century--including slavery and the Indian wars--the worst was the invasion of the South, which destroyed some twenty billion dollars of private and public property and resulted in the deaths of some two million people, most of whom were civilians--both white and black." 
--David Aiken, editor of A City Laid Waste: The Capture, Sack, and Destruction of the City of Columbia

Shotwell Publishing LLC

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cisco, Walter Brian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Cisco, Walter Brian

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cisco, Walter Brian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

States Rights Gist: A South Carolina General of the Civil War (First Edition Library)

States Rights Gist: A South Carolina General of the Civil War

Taking a Stand: Portraits from the Southern Secession Movement

Taking a Stand: Portraits from the Southern Secession Movement

Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior, Conservative Statesman

Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior, Conservative Statesman

War Crimes Against Southern Civilians

War Crimes Against Southern Civilians