This sweeping Civil War chronicle captures the conflict as it unfolds, from the Peninsula Campaign and Second Manassas to Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and the war's final collapse. Illustrated with portraits, sketches, and vivid firsthand detail, it blends battlefield reporting, military analysis, and eyewitness drama to show how strategy, leadership, and sacrifice shaped a nation in upheaval. The narrative ranges across the Western and Eastern theaters, following Union advances in Tennessee, the Gulf, Georgia, the Carolinas, Arkansas, and Virginia, while also tracing Confederate command and the pressures of a widening war. Along the way, it recounts Forrest's swift strikes at Union City and Paducah, Banks's desperate retreat in the Shenandoah, McClellan's Peninsula struggle, Sherman's destructive march through the South, and the hard engineering triumph of Bailey's Red River dam. It also reaches the home front, where raids, unrest, and the New York Draft Riots reveal the war's growing reach. The book closes with Richmond, Petersburg, Appomattox, Lincoln's assassination, Johnston's surrender, and the transformation left by emancipation and the end of slavery. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

À propos de l'auteur

Stephens, Ann S.

Ann S. Stephens, born Ann Sophia Winterbotham in 1810, was one of the most widely read and commercially successful American writers of the nineteenth century, a woman who helped shape the era’s popular fiction while building a career in journalism and magazine publishing at a time when few women could do so openly. After an early marriage and family life, she turned to writing to support herself and quickly gained a reputation for energetic storytelling, sharp social observation, and a keen sense of what readers wanted. Over the course of her long career, she produced novels, short fiction, serialized tales, and historical and domestic writing, and she also became a notable editor and contributor to influential periodicals. Her work often explored ambition, class, marriage, female independence, moral conflict, and the pressures of modern life, making her fiction both entertaining and revealing about the changing American society she lived in. She is also remembered for her historical and documentary writing, which brought major national events into vivid, accessible prose and helped readers make sense of a turbulent century. Stephens’s legacy lies in her role as a bridge between sensational popular fiction and serious commentary on American life, and her success opened doors for later women writers who wanted both readership and authority. Today, her work remains relevant for readers interested in the roots of mass-market fiction, the history of women in publishing, and the ways literature can capture social change. She will especially appeal to readers who enjoy nineteenth-century American literature, historical writing, and strong, fast-moving narratives shaped by a sharp eye for society.