THE SUNDERED UNION

About This Book

In 1861 a quarrel as old as the republic itself broke into open war, and for four years the United States tore itself apart over the question its founders had refused to answer: whether a nation conceived in liberty could endure half slave and half free.

This is the whole sweep, told in a single volume: the long road to Fort Sumter through compromise and crisis; the great battles — Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg — that made the war the deadliest in American history; the revolution of emancipation and the two hundred thousand Black soldiers who fought for their own freedom; the home fronts North and South; and the long, contested peace of Reconstruction and memory.

Sober, sourced, and sweeping, this is a clear-eyed popular history of how a war to save the Union became a war to destroy slavery — and of the new birth of freedom, imperfect and unfinished, that three quarters of a million Americans paid for with their lives.