Blood, Tears, & Glory: How Ohioans Won the Civil War - Hardcover

Bissland, James H.

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21 ratings by Goodreads

9781933197050: Blood, Tears, & Glory: How Ohioans Won the Civil War

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1933197056 ISBN 13: 9781933197050

Publisher: Orange Frazer Pr Inc, 2007

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It’s the greatest untold story of the Civil War, ...and one of the newest. For 150 years, the battlefields of Virginia, Gettysburg, and Antietam were what Americans thought of first when they thought of the Civil War. Wrong. While Easterners were battling to a bloody stalemate, Midwestern farmers, shopkeepers, and country lawyers fighting elsewhere were shaping the war’s outcome. Dismissed by haughty Easterners as “armed rabble or “drunkards,” these citizen-soldiers, white and black, often were poorly trained and poorly equipped-—but they were tough, confident, and supported by strong women who found their own ways to get into the fight. And the Midwesterners included most of the Union’s top generals. From brilliant, if flawed, commanders to feisty enlisted men who were hard to discipline but hard to scare, Blood, Tears, & Glory tells powerful stories of the war, many for the first time, and all from a new point of view.

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From the Inside Flap:

In April 1862, Private Joseph Diltz wrote his wife in Ohio about the battle he had just survived: I went into the fight in good heart, but I never want to get in another. It was awful, Mary. You can’t form any idea how it was.But Diltz and others kept fighting until the American Civil War was won, the nation restored, and the promise of equality, liberty and justice for all saved. But we, too, find it hard to form an idea of “how it was.” That’s because half of the American Civil War—the most important half—was underappreciated while it was happening, and since then has largely been neglected. Preoccupied with battles in Virginia and the bloody three days at Gettysburg, Americans have failed to realize how the war was decided in the Western Theater by Midwesterners—Ohioans most of all.Scorned by Easterners as “armed rabble” and largely out of sight of the big Eastern media, the Midwest’s tough but poorly trained and supplied farmers, schoolteachers, and country lawyers won battle after battle. In the East, meanwhile, the handsomely prepared Army of the Potomac was humiliated so often by the Confederates that Midwestern generals, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip H. Sheridan (all with Ohio roots) had to come east to finish the war.In leading the Union to victory, they joined other Midwesterners: President Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, both Ohioans..The war did more than save the Union and free the slaves. It preserved the heart of the “American Dream,” the promise that each of us has an equal opportunity to get ahead, choose our government, and obtain equal justice. It is that promise that creates the “optimism that is our oxygen,” as historian Douglas Brinkley puts it.In Blood, Tears, and Glory, Dr. James Bissland shares the amazing stories of one of America’s greatest—and, until now, underappreciated—generations--a generation that saved the American Dream.

About the Author:

James H. Bissland, a New Englander who has lived in Ohio since 1976, has spent most of a lifetime reading and researching American history. He earned a bachelor's degree in history from Cornell University and master's in American history from the University of Massachusetts. He received a Ph.D. in mass communication studies from the University of Iowa after course work there and at Brown University that included work in history. He is the author, co-author, or editor of several books, including Bountiful Ohio: Good Food and Stories from Where the Heartland Begins and Long River Winding: Life, Love, and Death Along the Connecticut.

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