They melted like snow on the ground, one officer said wave after wave of Federal soldiers charging uphill across an open muddy plain. Confederates, fortified behind a stone wall along a sunken road, poured a hail of lead into them as they charged . . . and faltered . . . and died. I had never before seen fighting like that, nothing approaching it in terrible uproar and destruction, said one eyewitness to the slaughter. It is only murder now. The battle of Fredericksburg is usually remembered as the most lopsided Union defeat of the Civil War. It is sometimes called Burnside s folly, after...

I intend to fight it out along this line if it takes all summer, Union commander Ulysses S. Grant wrote to Washington after he d opened his Overland Campaign in the spring of 1864.His resolve entirely changed the face of warfare.Promoted to command of all the Federal armies, the new lieutenant general chose to ride shotgun with the Army of the Potomac as it once again threw itself against the wily, audacious Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia. But Grant did something no one else had done before: he threw his army at Lee over and over again.At Spotsylvania Court House, the second...

Hell Itself invites readers of the Emerging Civil War Series to join the author in the Wilderness-one of the most storied battlefields of the entire Civil War.