A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil Conflict Battle of Fredericksburg Modified a Nation

Pulitzer Prize–profitable creator John Matteson illuminates three harrowing months of the Civil Conflict and their enduring legacy for America.

December 1862 drove the US towards a breaking level. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln’s authorities threatened to fracture, this essential second additionally examined 5 extraordinary people whose lives mirror the soul of a nation. The modifications they underwent led to profound repercussions within the nation’s regulation, literature, politics, and common mythology. Taken collectively, their tales supply a placing restatement of what it means to be American.

Guided by patriotism, pushed by want, all 5 moved towards singular destinies. A younger Harvard mental steeped in brave beliefs, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. confronted grave challenges to his idea of obligation. The one-eyed military chaplain Arthur Fuller pitted his frail physique in opposition to the evils of slavery. Walt Whitman, a homosexual Brooklyn poet condemned by the guardians of propriety, and Louisa Could Alcott, a struggling author looking for an genuine voice and her father’s admiration, tended troopers’ wracked our bodies as nurses. On the opposite aspect of the nationwide schism, John Pelham, a West Level cadet from Alabama, achieved a singular excellence in artillery ways as he served a doomed and misbegotten trigger.

A Worse Place Than Hell brings collectively the prodigious forces of struggle with the intimacy of particular person lives. Matteson interweaves the historic and the private in a piece as stunning as it’s highly effective.

16 pages of illustrations, 2 maps