In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1864

by Edward L. Ayers

Overview

Winner of the Bancroft Prize: Through a gripping narrative based on massive new research, a leading historian reshapes our understanding of the Civil War.

Our standard Civil War histories tell a reassuring story of the triumph, in an inevitable conflict, of the dynamic, free-labor North over the traditional, slave-based South, vindicating the freedom principles built into the nation's foundations.

But at the time, on the borderlands of Pennsylvania and Virginia, no one expected war, and no one knew how it would turn out. The one certainty was that any war between the states would be fought in their fields and streets.

Edward L. Ayers gives us a different Civil War, built on an intimate scale. He charts the descent into war in the Great Valley spanning Pennsylvania and Virginia. Connected by strong ties of every kind, including the tendrils of slavery, the people of this borderland sought alternatives to secession and war. When none remained, they took up war with startling intensity. As this book relays with a vivid immediacy, it came to their doorsteps in hunger, disease, and measureless death. Ayers's Civil War emerges from the lives of everyday people as well as those who helped shape history—John Brown and Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Jackson, and Lee. His story ends with the valley ravaged, Lincoln's support fragmenting, and Confederate forces massing for a battle at Gettysburg.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393326017
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/17/2004
Series:	Valley of the Shadow Project
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	702,389
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Edward L. Ayers, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, has won the Bancroft and Lincoln Prizes for his innovative histories of Civil War America. He is president emeritus of the University of Richmond, where he is executive director of New American History.

Editorial Reviews

A movingly human chronicle [of]...the transformation by civil war of two groups of Americans.

Richmond Times-Dispatch

Ayers unfolds this historical process with penetrating analysis and relevant quotations, emphasizing the anxiety, excitement, and misery...the war provoked.

Gilbert Taylor - Booklist

Gives readers a fuller picture than they'd obtain from a more conventional micro-history....engrossing.

Ben Schwarz - Atlantic Monthly