The Library of America's formidable four-volume sequence maintains with this quantity that strains occasions from January 1862 to January 1863, an unforgettable portrait of the an important yr that became a secessionist uprising right into a battle of emancipation. together with 11 never-before- released items, listed below are greater than one hundred forty messages, proclamations, newspaper tales, letters, diary entries, memoir excerpts, and poems by means of greater than 80 contributors and observers, between them Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. supply, George B. McClellan, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Clara Barton, Harriet Jacobs, and George Templeton powerful, in addition to squaddies Charles B. Haydon and Henry Livermore Abbott; diarists Kate Stone and Judith McGuire; and struggle correspondents George E. Stephens and George Smalley. the choices contain shiny and haunting narratives of battles-Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, the gunboat struggle at the Western rivers, Shiloh, the Seven Days, moment Bull Run, Antietam, Iuka, Corinth, Perryville, Fredericksburg, Stones River-as good as firsthand bills of existence and loss of life within the army hospitals in Richmond and Georgetown; of the impression of conflict on Massachusetts cities and Louisiana plantations; of the struggles of runaway slaves and the mounting fears of slaveholders; and of the deliberations of the cupboard in Washington, as Lincoln moved towards what he may name "the significant act of my management and the good occasion of the 19th century": the progressive proclamation of emancipation.