The Battle Digest summary includes all the key aspects of the campaign and battle, including maps, images, and lessons learned. In the autumn of 1862, Lincoln’s new commander, Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside, promised swift action by moving south against Fredericksburg to open a route to the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. With Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army divided, Burnside believed he could do it all before Lee could react. But when his pontoon bridges failed to arrive, Burnside’s campaign started unraveling. When the bridges finally arrived, it was too late: Lee had been given the time he needed to prepare his defense. What happened next was arguably the greatest military blunder of the American Civil War. Burnside launched a piecemeal frontal assault into the strength of Lee’s defenses. The result was disastrous.

Get facts, maps, historical significance, strategies, and more in this concise summary of Robert E. Lee’s victory in Virginia. The Confederate victory at the Battle of Chancellorsville is considered the crowning military achievement of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Against the numerically superior Union Army of the Potomac, Lee took a calculated risk by dividing his Army of Northern Virginia in what would become the largest flanking maneuver of the Civil War. The risk paid off with a stunning victory. Learn how “Fighting Joe” Hooker squandered his good strategy with his timid leadership, and how Robert E. Lee took prudent risk to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The Battle Digest summary includes all the key aspects of the campaign and battle, including maps, images, and lessons learned.

Pulitzer Prize–winning author John Matteson illuminates three harrowing months of the Civil War and their enduring legacy for America. December 1862 drove the United States toward a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln’s government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country’s law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American. Guided by patriotism, driven by desire, all five moved toward singular destinies. A young Harvard intellectual steeped in courageous ideals, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. confronted grave challenges to his concept of duty. The one-eyed army chaplain Arthur Fuller pitted his frail body against the evils of slavery. Walt Whitman, a gay Brooklyn poet condemned by the guardians of propriety, and Louisa May Alcott, a struggling writer seeking an authentic voice and her father’s admiration, tended soldiers’ wracked bodies as nurses. On the other side of the national schism, John Pelham, a West Point cadet from Alabama, achieved a unique excellence in artillery tactics as he served a doomed and misbegotten cause. A Worse Place Than Hell brings together the prodigious forces of war with the intimacy of individual lives. Matteson interweaves the historic and the personal in a work as beautiful as it is powerful.