After 150 years the Civil War still holds a central place in American history and self-understanding. It is our greatest national drama, at once heroic, tragic, and epic—our Iliad, but also our Bible, a story of sin and judgment, suffering and despair, death and resurrection in a “new birth of freedom.” Drawn from letters, diaries, speeches, articles, poems, songs, military reports, legal opinions, and memoirs, The Civil War: The First Year brings together over 120 pieces by more than sixty participants to create a unique firsthand narrative of this great historical crisis. Beginning on the eve of Lincoln’s election in 1860 and ending in January 1862 with the appointment of Edwin M. Stanton as secretary of war, signaling a new energy and determination to the Union war effort, this volume collects writing by figures well-known—Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Mary Chesnut, Frederick Douglass, and Lincoln himself among them—and less familiar, like pro-slavery advocate J.D.B. DeBow, Lieutenants Charles B. Haydon of the 2nd Michigan Infantry and Henry Livermore Abbott of the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, and plantation mistresses Catherine Edmondston of North Carolina and Kate Stone of Mississippi. Together, the selections provide a powerful sense of the immediacy, uncertainty, and urgency of events as the nation was torn asunder. Secessionist appeals by Georgia Governor Joseph E. Brown and Alabama legislator Stephen F. Hale give voice to the intense racial fears that helped drive the South toward disunion; Union corporal Samuel J. English and Confederate surgeon Lunsford P. Yandell evoke the shock, confusion, and horror of battle in Virginia and Missouri; memoirist Sallie Brock candidly records the impact of war on Richmond society; and Sam Mitchell recounts his liberation from slavery when the South Carolina Sea Islands fell to Union soldiers. The Civil War: The First Year includes headnotes, a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory endnotes, endpaper maps, and an index.

The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It brings together letters, speeches, diary entries, newspaper and magazine articles, memoir excerpts, poems, and military reports to provide an unforgettable literary portrait of the crucial period in which the conflict was transformed from a secessionist rebellion into a war of emancipation. This volume opens in January 1862 with Frederick Douglass’s prophetic vision of an end to slavery—“That day is not far off”—and closes with a January 8, 1863, letter in which Abraham Lincoln declares: “broken eggs can not be mended. I have issued the emancipation proclamation, and I can not retract it.” Along the way are 148 pieces—eleven published here for the first time—by more than ninety participants, including Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, George B. McClellan, Robert E. Lee, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edward Porter Alexander, Harriet Jacobs, and George Templeton Strong, as well as soldiers Charles B. Haydon, Ephraim Anderson, Charles B. Labruzan, and Henry Livermore Abbott; civilian diarists Kate Stone, Judith W. McGuire, and John B. Jones; and war correspondents George E. Stephens and George Smalley. The selections include vivid and haunting narratives of famous battles—Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, Shiloh, the Seven Days, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Iuka, Corinth, Perryville, Fredericksburg, Stones River—as well as firsthand accounts of the war on the western rivers and the first clash of the ironclads; of life and death in hospitals in Richmond and Georgetown; of the impact of war on Massachusetts towns and Louisiana plantations; of the mounting fears of slaveholders and the struggles of runaway slaves seeking freedom in contraband camps; and of the inner deliberations of the cabinet in Washington as Lincoln moved toward the revolutionary proclamation of emancipation. The Civil War: The Second Year includes headnotes, a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory endnotes, full-color endpaper maps, and an index.

After 150 years the Civil War still holds a central place in American history and self-understanding. It is our greatest national drama, at once heroic, tragic, and epic—our Iliad, but also our Bible, a story of sin and judg­ment, suffering and despair, death and resurrection in a “new birth of freedom.” The Civil War: The Third Year brings together letters, diary entries, speeches, newspaper and magazine articles, presidential messages, and poems to provide an incomparable literary portrait of a nation at war with itself, illuminating the military and political events that brought the Union closer to victory and slavery closer to destruction. This third volume of a highly acclaimed four-volume series begins with the Army of the Potomac’s dismal “Mud March” in January 1863 and ends with Ulysses S. Grant’s appointment as Union general-in-chief in March 1864. It collects 149 pieces by more than eighty participants and observers, among them Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, William T. Sherman, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Mary Chesnut, Clement Vallandigham, Henry Adams, Charlotte Forten, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, as well as Union officers Robert Gould Shaw, Charles B. Haydon, and Henry Livermore Abbott; Confederate diarists Catherine Edmondston, Kate Stone, and Judith McGuire; and Alabama soldier Samuel Pickens, Iowa housewife Catharine Peirce, and Kentucky preacher George Richard Browder. The selections include vivid and haunting firsthand accounts of some of the war’s most famous battles—Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Fort Wagner, Chickamauga, Chattanooga—as well as the merciless guerrilla war in Missouri and Kansas; the Richmond bread riot and the New York draft riots; and the controversies surrounding the use of black soldiers and the curtailment of civil liberties in wartime. The Civil War: The Third Year includes an introduction, headnotes, a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory endnotes, full-color endpaper maps, and an index. A fourth volume will gather writings from the final year of the conflict.

After 150 years the Civil War still holds a central place in American history and self-understanding. It is our greatest national drama, at once heroic, tragic, and epic—our Iliad, but also our Bible, a story of sin and judgment, suffering and despair, death and resurrection in a “new birth of freedom.” The Civil War: The Final Year brings together letters, diary entries, speeches, articles, messages, and poems to provide an incomparable literary portrait of a nation at war with itself, while illuminating the military and political events that brought the Union to final victory and slavery and secession to their ultimate destruction. The final volume of this highly acclaimed four-volume series begins with the controversial Kilpatrick-Dahlgren raid on Richmond in March 1864 and ends with the proclamation of emancipation in Texas in June 1865. It collects 160 pieces by more than one hundred participants and observers, among them Abraham Lincoln, William T. Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, and Herman Melville, as well as Union officers Charles Harvey Brewster, James A. Connolly, and Stephen Minot Weld; Confederate diarists Catherine Edmondston, Kate Stone, and Judith W. McGuire; freed slaves Spottswood Rice, Garrison Frazier, and Frances Johnson; and Confederate soldiers J.F.J. Caldwell, Samuel T. Foster, and William Pegram. The selections include vivid and haunting firsthand accounts of battles and campaigns—the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Atlanta, the Crater, Franklin, and Sherman’s march through Georgia and the Carolinas—as well as of the Fort Pillow massacre; the struggle to survive inside Andersonville prison; the burning of Columbia and Richmond; the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment; the surrender at Appomattox; and Lincoln’s assassination. The Civil War: The Final Year includes an introduction, headnotes, a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory endnotes, full-color endpaper maps, and an index.