BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER

About this book

<b>The complete narrative history of the American Civil War, 1861-1865 — Grant, Lee, Sherman, Antietam, Gettysburg, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the unfinished struggle for a nation torn apart by slavery.</b> <p>At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, a signal gun fired from Fort Johnson, South Carolina. The shell burst above Fort Sumter. Inside, Major Robert Anderson — a Kentuckian who had owned enslaved people and chose Union loyalty — commanded eighty-five soldiers on reduced rations. The bombardment lasted thirty-four hours. Two men died in a surrender ceremony accident: the first fatalities of a war that would kill 620,000 more.</p> <p>This is the story of that war — how it came to be fought, how it was fought, and what it left behind. Historian Robert Calhoun Stoddard traces the full arc of the <b>American Civil War</b> from the Missouri Crisis of 1819 through Appomattox, Reconstruction's promise, and the Lost Cause mythology that followed — centering <b>Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Robert E. Lee, William Tecumseh Sherman, Frederick Douglass, and the 620,000 dead</b>.</p> <h4>Inside this Civil War history:</h4> <ul> <li><b>Bleeding Kansas and the collapse of compromise</b> — 5,000 armed Missourians stuffing ballot boxes, John Brown's Pottawatomie killings, and the destruction of the political center (Chapters 1-2)</li> <li><b>Fort Sumter</b> — Lincoln's calculated decision to send only food, maneuvering Jefferson Davis into firing first (Chapter 4)</li> <li><b>Antietam, Gettysburg, and the turning point</b> — the bloodiest single day in American history and the three days in July 1863 that shattered Confederate offensive power and opened the door to the Emancipation Proclamation (Chapters 9, 12)</li> <li><b>Black Americans in the Civil War</b> — Sergeant William Carney holding the 54th Massachusetts flag at Fort Wagner through multiple wounds; 166 United States Colored Troops regiments; Confederate executions of Black prisoners at Fort Pillow (Chapter 15)</li> <li><b>Grant's Overland Campaign and Petersburg</b> — 52,000 Union casualties in five weeks and a nine-and-a-half-month siege that finally broke Lee's army (Chapters 17-18)</li> <li><b>Sherman's March</b> — 62,000 men, 300 miles, $100 million in Confederate property destroyed (Chapter 18)</li> <li><b>The Lost Cause and its costs</b> — how the mythology was built, what it erased, and why the war's questions were not cleanly answered (Chapters 23-24)</li> </ul> <p>The Civil War settled two things: the United States was indivisible, and slavery would not survive. What it left unsettled — whether Black Americans would be full citizens — the next century would contest. This Civil War narrative gives readers the full reckoning: battles, home fronts, Black soldiers, and the long shadow the war cast.</p> <p><b>For readers of Shelby Foote's THE CIVIL WAR: A NARRATIVE and James McPherson's BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM.</b></p>