I searched for this book to no avail; but finally, I was able to purchase it. It was well worth the wait. I found two different sets of great great grandparents and a great great granduncle. If you have relatives from Sumter County, Alabama....this book is an excellent source of information.

I had already spent several years trying to get this entry to no avail. I purchased this book and there it was. The marriage took place in 1886 in Sumter County Ala.

In addition I found listings of marriages of the siblings of my great grandmother.

Wonderful work.

Unlike the first reviewer for Amazon.com, I have not had access to any of Dr. Hester's previous books. However, I have purchased and enjoyed utilizing the book she published in 1998, Sumter County Alabama Wills: 1828-1872, Mortality Schedules: 1850-1880. By utilizing this attractively published and well organized presentation of Dr. Hester's research and transcriptions, I have been able to make connections among family members that would have been impossible without going to the Livingston, Alabama courthouse myself and going through the county records there as carefully as Dr. Hester has. Prior to purchasing this book, I had transcribed one Sumter County will from 1850 myself. Working with this original manuscript, it took me several days to transcribe about 8 pages to my satisfaction and I still have questions about my readings of several words in that brief text. It is, therefore, difficult to imagine the hours, probably the years, that Dr. Hester must have invested in her transcriptions of abstracts of so many wills, as well as several Sumter County mortality schedules. Although I might be able to refine some of Dr. Hester's readings from these wills since I know my own family members and some family relationships that she could not possibly know about every name she transcribed, I fully understand the difficulty Dr. Hester must have faced in reading so many manuscipts in several different hands. The sheer quantity of her work and the fine quality of its presentation more than make up for a possible misreading here and there, or perhaps, not her misreading at all, but an original mistake by someone who prepared the will for probate in the first place. The book includes 429 pages of wills and mortality schedules, all labeled with the appropriate page numbers from the original documents and concludes with a 50-page plus comprehensive index that includes the names of testators, all the witnesses, heirs, slaves, and probate officials mentioned. The mortality schedules include not only the names, dates and illnesses of those who died , but also the names of the attending physicians when known. Any genealogist who knows of a relative who lived or died in Sumter County during the years, 1828-1880, should have this book. One may even find relatives mentioned in these documents that one didn't even know existed. I did. Those of us in the community of persons interested in genealogy owe Dr. Hester a great debt of gratitude and, fortunately, we can easily express it. Buy her book!

Gwendolyn Lynette Hester: If this Book is as Great as the first. (Sumter County Freedman and Colored Marriages, 1865-1890) Ms. Hester has a winner. Helpful to all researchers. Very informative.

Like many viewer's of Ken Burns' Civil War, I asked myself "Who is this well-spoken historian named Shelby Foote that offers such interesting and insightful commentary?" Well, I found out he is a well-regarded and prolific Civil War historian and I began with the first part of his magnus opus narrative of the Civil War, on audio cassettes.

25 1/2 hours of pure enjoyment. The highlights for me were the well-described battle of the Monitor and Merrimack ironclads, biographical profiles of Lincoln, Davis, Lee, Sherman, and Grant, and MacClellan, the conflicts between Washington D.C. and Richmond, and the conflicts in the Tennessee and Mississippi valleys.

I can't wait to begin part 2!

Young readers will be surprised to learn how close the Civil War came to beginning while James Buchanan was still President in January of 1861, before Lincoln was inaugurated. South Carolina became the first state to succeed from the Union following Lincoln's election. Told to make his own decision, Major Robert Anderson had moved his troops from Fort Moultrie, where the secessionists would easily have been able to take the command by land, to Fort Sumter in the middle of Charleston Harbor. Buchanan sent a civilian ship, the Star of the West to bring supplies to Anderson's troops, but a secessionist battery opened up on the ship. The Civil War could have begun right then and there, but Anderson refused to return fire and the Star of the West retreated.

Brendan January details how both sides played out the fatal chess game. When President Lincoln ordered a supply ship to reinforce Fort Sumter, he knew the action would lead to war but would force the Confederates to take the first shot. Ironically, Anderson admitted to Confederate messengers that the garrison was on the verge of starvation, but Confederate President Jefferson Davis was unconvinced and ordered the attack. Students will be surprised as how oddly the battle was fought: General Beauregard gave Major Anderson advanced warning and the Federal troops went into the fort's bombproof shelter. Only after having breakfast did Anderson's troops return fire. Out gunned and running out of provisions, Anderson had to surrender. Ironically, the first casualty of the Civil War was a Union solider killed when a shell accidentally exploded during the ceremony to lower the American flag. January follows the story of Fort Sumter to the end of the war, covering the Union's failed attempt to retake the fort in 1863, which reduced it to rubble, and Anderson's triumphant return to the fort in April of 1865, the last month of the war.

"Fort Sumter" is illustrated with photographs, etchings and other illustrations from the time period, although a contemporary color photograph shows that the fort no longer resembles what it was during the war. January has authored several of the Cornerstones of Freedom volumes covering Civil War topics such as The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, The Emancipation Proclamation and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Students and teachers interested in finding out more about a historical topic can usually rely on this series to be an excellent first place to turn.

For those who want an eyewitness account of those first fateful days leading to the Civil War, this is the story of the siege of Fort Sumter as told by the physician in Robert Anderson's regiment who held its ground when South Carolina tried to sieze all federal property. It is a very compelling story of Major Robert Anderson as he struggled with his Southern sympathies and his Union loyalty in a maelstrom of poltical intrigue and military posturing on both of sides of the Mason-Dixon line.

A great breakdown of events leading up to Ft. Sumter, and a great analysis of the early relationship between Lincoln and his cabinet, esp. Secretary of state Seward (who at this early date mistakenly thought Lincoln was a puppet he could manipulate). All in all a fascinating read and a must for good civil war libraries.

This charming book transforms boring history into an entertaining tale of a girl and her family from Boston living in Charleston, SC during the months leading up to the beginning of the Civil War by the attack on Fort Sumter. The reader senses the inhunanity of slavery through Sylvia's experiences. Your child will understand history like never before after reading this book.

In the early 1990s, I saw Ken Burn's CIVIL WAR
series on PBS, and was interested to see as part
of that series commentaries by an easy-going
"propah" Mississippi gentleman named Shelby Foote.

Foote turned out to be something of the godfather
of the series, since Burns had been influenced
by Foote's monumental three-volume history of the
war, titled simply THE CIVIL WAR. I picked up
the three volumes, beginning a ten-year exercise
in writing up notes and going through other

materials to figure out the war. Having completed
this exercise, except for tying up some loose
ends, I figure it's time to reflect on the books
that started it all.

The first thing is that this is basically one of
the essential books to read on the Civil War if
you want to get into the subject in reasonable
detail. It is a work of proverbial grand breadth
and scope, engrossing and inspiring, that gives
the reader a real feel for the conflict.

However, it is important to point out that Foote's
THE CIVIL WAR has some limitations as well. The
biggest is that it is mostly a battlefield history,
minimizing the social and political framing of the
conflict. For example, Frederick Douglass is not
mentioned once, at least as far as the index is
concerned. It also tends to lean somewhat more towards
the rebel point of view, though Foote apologizes for
this, portraying it as "sympathy for the underdog",
and the book is by no means unfair to the Union side.

The other issue is that this is a novelistic and
relatively unstructured work. This is fine in a
sense, since it makes it very entertaining to
read, and it's not like it's haphazard by any
means -- it's just a little like following a
big, slow-moving, meandering river. The problem
is that it can make keeping track of details and
chronology difficult, which is what led me to the
note-taking exercise ... which I never figured
would drag out for ten years.

The biggest complaint about Foote that I can make
is that he occasionally fails to be redundant when
it would make life much easier for the reader.
He will sometimes make references to minor incidents
from hundreds of pages previous as if the reader has
a perfect memory of them, leaving the reader
scrambling through the index, which is a particular
nuisance if the item is in a previous volume.

This is a quibble. This is essential reading
for anyone with a major interest in the war, though
given its limitations I wouldn't say it should be
the only book on the subject to be read.

Why don't they teach American History in public schools? The Civil War was mentioned in the text books of my day, the mid-20th century, but is scarcely referred to today.
To fill this void, those who want to truly be educated must do independent reading. Having just completed the first volume of Shelby Foote's trilogy (Ft. Sumter to Perryville) I have become an avid Civil War history buff. In the past month I drove to Virginia in order to visit the Fredricksburg, Chancellorsville, and Wilderness battlefields. I anticipate I will visit others in the future.
I also discovered that the National Park Service has listings of Union and Confederate soldiers. I have been able to identify 35 Union and 8 Confederate soldiers related to me, and the regiments in which they served.
The detailed accounts of the campaigns and pitched battles in this book surpass anything else I have read about the Civil War. Shelby Foote's narratives bring the war to life.
The most surprising element I found in the book was the account of political infighting among the general officers on both sides.
The only criticism I have of the writing is that the reader sometimes finds he has been reading about the activities of a particular individual for two or three pages in which the person is always referred to as "he" and it is sometimes necessary to backtrack and see who "he" is.

Perhaps the greatest accolade I heard of Shelby Foote's involvement with the PBS mini-series "The Civil War" was the admiring comment that he seemed to have been there. I feel very much the same way about this epic 3-volume set. McPhearson's "Battle Cry of Freedom" may be the standard one-volume history of the Civil War, and a fine work it is, but it offers nowhere near the feeling of proximity to people and events as does this massive labor of love. Foote is so good at so many of the writer/historian's crafts that combine to make this trilogy essential Civil War reading. His skill at bringing a novelist's eye to this material has already been frequently noted. But he also has a wonderful way of giving a reader the feeling for the terrain on which battles were fought, for the ebb and flow of those battles, for the character of the men involved (and what characters! the proud, obstinante Jeff Davis, the rugged, unwashed Grant, the patrician Lee, the moody, tragic Lincoln--who would dare invent them? Yet Foote brings them, and dozens more, to breathing life). He conveys equally well the movement of troops as he does ideas--not to mention the sights, sounds, smells of the era, be they on the battlefield, in the army camp, or the White House. These are books that I will turn to again and again (I just got done re-reading volume 3), because, like no one else, Shelby Foote not only makes me feel like he was there, but that *I* was too.

Almost every literate American is acquainted with the basics of the coming of the War Between the States in the form of Lincoln's election and the firing on Ft. Sumter. Most Civil War students are also acquainted with the military sequence of events of the siege and surrender, followed by Lincoln's call for volunteers to invade the Confederacy and the resulting general hostilities. As far as I know, however, very few lay students of the War have much appreciation for the wide variety of political views on relations between the states at the time, on the possible approaches to the slavery situation (including proposals to guarantee protection for the institution made by some surprising individuals), on the subtle constitutional and other legal aspects of secession, and the actual process by which South Carolina's secession spread to ten other states, some of which were quite reluctant to do so initially. Prof. Klein sets all of this out in a very readable, fast moving text which is guaranteed to hold the reader's interest and attention. From my standpoint, the most interesting aspects involved the (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts by some of the most unlikely individuals to pull the situation back from the brink, and the cynicism of others who are often described in more altruistic and one dimensional terms. At many junctures in Klein's book the reader will get the irresistable urge to play "what if." I "read" this book by a rented audio tape edition during some day long vacation drives and I was extremely pleased with it, in a way that is often not true with well researched histories. The other reviewers who have described this as comparable to a mystery or other novel are not far off the mark and I recommend it very highly.

"Days of Defiance" deserves to rank with "Battle Cry of Freedom," the Pulitzer-winner of a few years back, in its drama, pacing and sense of context. It is among the rare Civil War books that do not wallow in detail, that amplify the poignance of flawed people making decisions the reader knows to be tragic, and that kindle the sense that the story is about America, not about which general charged into which thicket with which regiment. The author picks a tightly circumscribed period in which to tell his story: roughly the five months before the bombardment of Fort Sumter (although he synopsizes the previous half-century to give essential background). The highest praise I can think of for this book is to say that he makes those five months, yes, suspenseful. Follow this book's enigmatic Lincoln into another brilliant Civil War book, "Lincoln at Gettysburg," and you have a window into a period truly lit by fire.

Klein does a superb job making the reader feel as he or she is living in 1859/60 -- not knowing that a murderous sectional war is on the way, suspecting same, and lamenting the situation while hoping that various peace efforts, downplayed by revisionist historians, would succeed. Klein is an excellent writer, in contrast to many Civil War book writers -- good at choosing words, sentence structure, chapter design, thesis statements, etc. So you never feel "lost" in the book. I would place this book in the top 10 or so about the period.

This is a great account of the first days of the civil war. Not only is it a great tale of devotion, courage, and spiritual faith on the part of Com. Robert Anderson. But it provides a more or less nuetral point of view of the opening moments of the war between the states.

A nice very detailed history of the few critical months at the beginning of the War Between the States (as we say in Georgia). Contains interesting details of life in the US Army and in Charleston not found elsewhere to the degree that you feel you are actually there. The author shifts easily back and forth to Washington DC for higher-level decisions. Interesting character sketches of Major Anderson and others involved in these perilous times. I would have given this five stars but for the author's weird tangents (McDonalds likes to fly the American flag? "It takes two to tango, but only one to do the twist"? etc.). He has been hanging around academia too long and occasionally slips in these bizarre little asides. Second only to Winik's April 1865 (describing the other end of the war) in this year's crop of War Between the States books. Buy it and ignore the groan-inducing little cutesies.

Dezter writes so well that you kind of lose yourself and you almost imagine that you don't know how this story is going to end. This is a through examination of Major Robert Anderson, a very underrated Civil War key figure for his bravery, tenacity, and even stupidity during the Sumter/Charleston Harbor crisis. of 1860 and 1861. His writing is simple, like a teacher would speak to a class, not like some stuffy old Ph.D. trying to impress his first year students in some intro level American History class. It flows and follows nicely chronologically, hitting no snags, qualit or substance wise throughout. Excellent, it receives my higest recommendation.