This ultimate installment of the hugely acclaimed four-volume sequence lines occasions from March 1864 to June 1865. It presents an incomparable portrait of a state at conflict with itself, whereas illuminating the army and political occasions that introduced the Union to ultimate victory, and slavery and secession to their final destruction. listed here are greater than a hundred and fifty letters, diary entries, memoir excerpts, speeches, articles, messages, and poems by way of over 100 individuals and observers, either well-known and unsung, together with Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. supply, William T. Sherman, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Adams, Elizabeth Keckly, and George Templeton robust, in addition to Union and accomplice squaddies; ladies diarists from North and South; and freed slaves. the choices comprise bright and haunting firsthand bills of mythical battles and campaigns— the wasteland, Spotsylvania, chilly Harbor, the Atlanta crusade, the Crater, Franklin, Sherman’s march via Georgia and the Carolinas—as good as of the determined stipulations inside of Andersonville legal; the sinking of the accomplice raider Alabama; the passage of the 13th modification; and the struggles of either black and white civilians to outlive the cruel and violent downfall of the Confederacy.