(Carefully assembled from Union and Confederate records an...)
Carefully assembled from Union and Confederate records and memories by a general who commanded troops under Sherman, this is an exciting and detailed account of the campaign to take Atlanta. General Jacob Cox commanded the 23rd Army Corps during the long months to get to and take the great southern city of Atlanta. He describes the battles along the way, the siege of Atlanta, and the fall of the city to Sherman's troops. Later the Governor of Ohio and a congressman from that state, Cox was a prolific writer after the war and had a talent for capturing the gritty details. Every memoir of the American Civil War provides us with another view of the catastrophe that changed the country forever.
(2 works of Jacob Dolson Cox
American lawyer, Union Army g...)
2 works of Jacob Dolson Cox
American lawyer, Union Army general during the American Civil War, and Republican politician from Ohio (1828-1900)
This ebook presents a collection of 2 works of Jacob Dolson Cox. A dynamic table of contents allows you to jump directly to the work selected.
Table of Contents:
Military Reminiscences of the Civil War, Volume I April 1861-November 1863
Military Reminiscences of the Civil War, Volume II November 1863-June 1865
The Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, November 30, 1864: A Monograph
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
The March to the Sea (Abridged, Annotated): Plus Franklin and Nashville
(Carefully assembled from Union and Confederate records an...)
Carefully assembled from Union and Confederate records and memories by a general who commanded troops under Sherman, this is an exciting and detailed account of General William Tecumseh Sherman's historic march to the sea. Jacob Cox knew and served with many of the major figures of the Civil War. He writes of them here as he saw them and spoke with them. Later the Governor of Ohio and a congressman from that state, Cox was a prolific writer after the war and had a talent for capturing the gritty details. Every memoir of the American Civil War provides us with another view of the catastrophe that changed the country forever.
Jacob Dolson Cox was a Canadian-born American soldier, politician, and author. He was the 28th governor of Ohio from 1866 to 1868. He served as a member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Ohio from 1877 to 1879.
Background
Jacob Dolson Cox was descended from one Michael Koch, who came from Hanover and settled in New York City in 1705. Jacob Dolson Cox, Sr., received his middle name from his mother, a member of a Dutch family of New York: his wife, Thedia R. Kenyon, was descended from Elder William Brewster and from the Ally and Kenyons of Connecticut. To them was born on October 27, 1828 at Montreal, Canada, Jacob Dolson Cox, Jr., while the father, a building contractor, was engaged in the construction of the roof of the Church of Notre Dame. Returning to New York City soon after this event, the family suffered business reverses during the crisis of 1837.
Education
Jacob's hope of obtaining a college education was impaired by the misfortune, and, under the state law, the alternative path to a lawyer’s career, to which he aspired, was a seven years’ clerkship in a law office. Entering upon such an apprenticeship in 1842, he changed his mind two years later, and went into the office of a banker and broker, where the shorter hours permitted him, with the aid of a friend, to pursue the study of mathematics and the classical languages. After two years more, through the influence of Reverend Charles G. Finney, then professor of theology at Oberlin College, he was led to enter the preparatory department of that institution. He graduated in 1851.
Career
Cox served for two years at Warren, Ohio, as superintendent of schools and principal of the high school, reading law at the same time, and beginning to practise in 1853. A few years later his party friends, against his protest, nominated and elected him to the state Senate. Entering the Senate in 1859, he found there his friend James A. Garfield, and Governor-Elect Dennison, with whom he soon became intimate, this trio, together with Salmon P. Chase, then governor, forming a radical anti-slavery group.
With the outbreak of war in 1861, Cox’s activity in organizing volunteers brought him a commission as brigadier-general of volunteers. During the summer he had a part in the Kanawha Valley campaign under McClellan, and a year later, in the Army of the Potomac, he participated in the battles of South Mountain and Antietam, commanding the 9th Corps at the former after the fall of General Reno. He was advanced to the rank of major-general on October 6, 1862, but the following April was reduced to his former rank because the number of major-generals permitted by law had been inadvertently exceeded. This bungling, which resulted in the promotion of less deserving officers, was a discouraging episode in his military career; but after repeated urging on the part of his superiors he was at length recommissioned in December 1864.
During the winter of 1861-863 he commanded the forces in West Virginia, and from April to December 1863 was in charge of the Ohio military district. During the Atlanta campaign he led a division of the 23rd Army Corps, and after the fall of Atlanta for a time commanded the entire corps. He took part in the battle of Nashville, and early in 1865 was sent into North Carolina to open communications along the coast with Sherman, who was nearing the end of the march to the sea. On this expedition Cox defeated Bragg’s troops and effected a junction with Sherman at Goldsboro.
After the war, while engaged in superintending the mustering out of the troops in Ohio, Cox was elected governor of the state. During the campaign in response to the inquiries of friends at Oberlin, he expressed himself as opposed to African-American suffrage. He could not assume as they did, he wrote, that the suffrage, while whites and blacks dwelt in the same community, would cure all of the ills of the freedmen. Carrying these ideas further, he declared while governor, that the large groups of whites and blacks in the Southern states could never share political power, and that insistence upon it on the part of the colored people would bring about their ruin. As a remedy, he advocated the forcible segregation of the African Americans, a plan which found little or no support. By such views, and by his indorsement of President Johnson’s reconstruction policy, which he thought essentially the same as Lincoln’s, he lost favor with his party, and was not renominated. He tried in vain to mediate between Johnson and the radical Republicans, and finally himself abandoned the President because of the latter’s obstinacy and pugnacity.
In 1868 Cox declined Johnson’s tender of the post of commissioner of Internal Revenue. Upon Grant’s accession, Cox accepted the office of secretary of the interior. He had become a prominent advocate of the new cause of civil- service reform, and in his own department he put the merit system into operation, resisting the efforts of the party spoilsmen to dictate appointments and to collect campaign assessments. He and Attorney-General Hoar were regarded by the Independent Republicans as the only strong men in Grant’s cabinet. When Grant’s extraordinary Santo Domingo embroglio forced Hoar from the cabinet—the story of which episode Cox gave to the public twenty-five years later —Cox lost hope of maintaining his fight without the support of the President. Already he had clashed with Grant over the fraudulent claims of one McGarrahan to certain mineral lands, as well as over the Dominican situation and on October 5, 1870, he submitted his resignation. “My views of the necessity of reform in the civil service, ” he wrote, "have brought me more or less into collision with the plans of our active political managers, and my sense of duty has obliged me to oppose some of their methods of action”.
The breach with Grant hurt Cox deeply. He held Grant’s military talent in high esteem, and did not allow his judgment thereof to be affected by their difference; but in private conversation he permitted himself to criticize the President’s course severely. Grant on his part, with his military instincts and experience, regarded Cox’s independence of mind as a kind of insubordination. “The trouble was, ” as he put it, “that General Cox thought the Interior Department was the whole government, and that Cox was the Interior Department. I had to point out to him in very plain language that there were three controlling branches of the Government, and that I was the head of one of these and would so like to be considered by the Secretary of the Interior”. Progressive opinion supported Cox, and his political “martyrdom” undoubtedly hastened the triumph of the reform movement. Upon leaving the cabinet the former secretary became conspicuously identified with the Liberal Republican movement, and was much talked of as its probable nominee for the presidency in 1872.
At the Cincinnati convention, however, he was defeated by the more available Greeley. Meantime he had resumed the practise of law, at Cincinnati ; but in 1873 he removed to Toledo to become president of the Wabash Railway. This position he gave up in turn upon being elected to Congress in 1876, from the 6th Ohio District, by an unprecedented majority. He served but one term in Congress. He seems to have hoped to be able to do something to support President Hayes in his reform efforts, and his helplessness under existing political conditions probably discouraged him. At any rate he abandoned politics, even refraining thereafter from comment on political events, with the exception of a single speech during the Garfield campaign.
Resuming his residence at Cincinnati, he became dean of the Cincinnati Law School (1881), a position which he held for the next sixteen years. During part of this time (1885 - 1889) he also served as president of the University of Cincinnati. In addition to high repute as a lawyer, his reputation as a business man was enviable, and brought him in the middle nineties the tender of the post of railroad commissioner in New York City. This offer he declined, preferring to continue his connection with the Law School.
In 1897 he declined President McKinley’s offer of the Spanish mission, but in the same year he presented his library to Oberlin College and retired thither to write his Military Reminiscences. This work was barely completed and still unpublished when his death occurred, after a brief illness, while he was enjoying his customary summer outing along the coast of Maine, in company with a son.
No small part of Cox’s reputation rests upon his work as a writer. From 1874 until his death he was the Nation’s military book critic. In addition to contributions to this and other journals, he wrote several books on military topics, the most important of which are: Atlanta, and The March to the Sea; Franklin and Nashville (volumes IX and X in the Campaigns of the Civil War series, 1882); The Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, November 30, 1864 (1897); and Military Reminiscences of the Civil War (2 vols. , 1900). He also contributed four chapters to M. F. Force’s Life of General Sherman (1899). A work of less consequence is The Second Battle of Bull Run as Connected with the FitzJohn Porter Case (1882). Some critics of these books regard his attitude toward Rosecrans as unjust and not well informed, and his judgment in the FitzJohn Porter case is open to question.
Achievements
Jacob Dolson Cox became a prominent political leader and was distinguished for his service in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He took part in the West Virginia campaign (1861) and in the Atlanta campaign (1864). As a Secretary of Interior Cox implemented the first civil service reform in a federal government department, including examinations for most clerks. He was also recognized as an elegant and forceful writer, of fine critical ability and impartial judgment, one of the foremost military historians of the country.
At the start of his political career Cox was a Whig, but his Oberlin associations, and other influences, combined to make him strongly anti-slavery in principle. He voted for Scott in 1852, but took a prominent part in bringing about the fusion of Whigs and Free-Soilers, and in 1855 was a delegate to the convention at Columbus which organized the Republican party in the state.
As Governor of Ohio, Cox sided for a time with President Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction plan and was against African American suffrage in the South, though he supported it in Ohio. As a Secretary Cox advocated a lasting, honest, and comprehensive Indian policy legislated by Congress after the Piegan Indian massacre.
Membership
In 1881 Cox was elected fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society.
Personality
Cox was tall, graceful, and well-proportioned, with erect, military bearing, and a frame denoting great physical strength. His wide information, conversational gifts, and courteous manners made him an agreeable companion.
Interests
Cox was a man of many interest. He devoted much time in his later years to the study of microscopy, in which field he won international distinction. He was also a student of European cathedrals.
Connections
In 1849 Cox married Helen, the daughter of Charles G. Finney, president of Oberlin College.
