The Civil War: The Second Year Told By Those Who Lived It (LOA #221) - Stephen W. Sears

The Library of America's ambitious four-volume series continues with
this volume that traces events from January 1862 to January 1863, an
unforgettable portrait of the crucial 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.

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