Library of America: The Civil War Collection

Featuring hundreds of first-hand writings from the American Civil War, this final installment of the highly acclaimed four-volume series traces events from March 1864 to June 1865
 
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.

This third volume of the ground-breaking eyewitness narrative that has been called a “masterpiece” traces events from January 1863 to March 1864—a crucial period in the American Civil War

Spanning the crucial months from January 1863 to March 1864, this third volume of The Library of America’s highly acclaimed four volume series presents an incomparable portrait of a nation at war with itself while illuminating the military and political events that brought the Union closer to victory and slavery closer to destruction. It brings together more than 140 contemporary letters, diary entries, speeches, articles, messages, and poems by more than eighty participants and observers, among them Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mary Chesnut, Clement Vallandigham, Henry Adams, Charlotte Forten, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and George Templeton Strong, 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, Kentucky preacher George Richard Browder, and Kansas clergyman Richard Cordley. The selections include vivid and haunting eyewitness narratives of some of the war’s most famous battles—Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Fort Wagner, Chickamauga, Chattanooga—as well as firsthand accounts of the merciless guerrilla war in Missouri and Kansas; the Richmond bread riot and the New York draft riots; the controversies surrounding the use of black soldiers and the Lincoln administration’s curtailment of civil liberties; and the struggles of civilians both black and white to survive increasingly harsh wartime conditions.

Each volume features a detailed chronology of events, biographical notes about the writers, textual and explanatory notes, and original hand-drawn endpaper maps by expert Civil War cartographer Earl McElfresh.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Set between January 1862 and January 1863, this second installment in the ambitious Civil War series paints an unforgettable portrait of the year that turned a secessionist rebellion into a war of emancipation

Including eleven never-before-published pieces, here are more than 140 messages, proclamations, newspaper stories, letters, diary entries, memoir excerpts, and poems by more than eighty participants and observers, among them Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, George B. McClellan, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Clara Barton, Harriet Jacobs, and George Templeton Strong, as well as soldiers Charles B. Haydon and Henry Livermore Abbott; diarists Kate Stone and Judith McGuire; and war correspondents George E. Stephens and George Smalley. The selections include vivid and haunting narratives of battles-Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, the gunboat war on the Western rivers, Shiloh, the Seven Days, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Iuka, Corinth, Perryville, Fredericksburg, Stones River-as well as firsthand accounts of life and death in the military hospitals in Richmond and Georgetown; of the impact of war on Massachusetts towns and Louisiana plantations; of the struggles of runaway slaves and the mounting fears of slaveholders; and of the deliberations of the cabinet in Washington, as Lincoln moved toward what he would call “the central act of my administration and the great event of the nineteenth century”: the revolutionary proclamation of emancipation.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

The first volume in a four-volume series on the American Civil War—featuring first-hand writings from Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, and more

This “mesmerizing and deeply troubling” glimpse into the Civil War era “will forever deepen the way you see this central chapter in our history . . . a masterpiece” (Newsweek).

After 150 years the Civil War is still 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 gathers 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 November 1860 and ending in January 1862 with the appointment of Edwin M. Stanton as secretary of war, this volume presents writing by figures well-known—Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Mary Chesnut, Frederick Douglass, and Lincoln himself among them—and less familiar, like proslavery 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. Includes headnotes, a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory endnotes, full-color hand-drawn endpaper maps, and an index. Companion volumes will gather writings from the second, third, and final years of the conflict.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.