War's Cost

Despite an extraordinary number of Civil War studies, scholars continue to mine new resources to understand how Americans could sustain such vicious combat for four long years. Focusing on the grandsons of Major Isaac Hite, founder of Belle Grove (and brother-in-law of James Madison, author of both the Bill of Rights and the Constitution), Bétit analyzes the motivating factors that led those even of pre-military age to enlist, using a relatively new tool, Ancestry.com, to obtain new data. The book examines Southern education, slavery, the First Families of Virginia and the settlement and development of the Shenandoah Valley to understand the intense combat in that critical theater of operations.