Book Description
American history has never seen a more tumultuous or more
significant year than 1863. During this crucial time the tide
of the Civil War turned inexorably from the Confederacy to
the Union, with momentous consequences that are still being
felt today. It was a year of upheaval unparalleled in our
national experience: twelve months of searing brutality and
ennobling sacrifice, 365 stirring, dramatic days that changed
our country forever.
Integrating the events of this epochal year into a
panoramic narrative, Joseph E. Stevens presents a grand
portrait of the Union and Confederacy at war. He captures two
nations struggling to define the American experiment and
create a new understanding of freedom on the bloody
battlefields of Stones River, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg,
Vicksburg, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga. He also traces the
astonishing political, economic, and social transformations
that marked 1863 as a watershed.
1863 features a remarkable cast of characters:
larger-than-life leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson
Davis; charismatic and controversial military commanders like
Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, James Longstreet, Joseph
Hooker, Stonewall Jackson, George Armstrong Custer, and
Nathan Bedford Forrest; avaricious young capitalists like
Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan;
war-haunted writers like Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott,
and Walt Whitman; war-inspired painters like Winslow Homer
and Conrad Wise Chapman.
Here, too, is a host of less well known but no less
fascinating personalities: soldiers and civilians, slaves and
slave owners, farmers and city dwellers, politicians and
profiteers, artistocrats and refugees. Their
stories--humorous and harrowing, inspiring and
appalling--make 1863 not just a sweeping re-creation of
events but a gripping human tale as well.
1863 is popular history at its best--vivid,
vibrant, and immensely readable. Written with dramatic
intensity and impassioned humanity, it is a thrilling account
of the pivotal year of the war that remains the central
historical event in the life of our nation.
