PDF Virginia County Records; Volume VIII: A Key to Southern Pedigrees by From Brand: Janaway Publishing; Inc. in History

Description

This final installment of the highly acclaimed four-volume series traces events from March 1864 to June 1865. It provides an incomparable portrait of a nation at war with itself; while illuminating the military and political events that brought the Union to final victory; and slavery and secession to their ultimate destruction. Here are more than 150 letters; diary entries; memoir excerpts; speeches; articles; messages; and poems by over a hundred participants and observers; both famous and unsung; including Abraham Lincoln; Jefferson Davis; Ulysses S. Grant; William T. Sherman; Robert E. Lee; Frederick Douglass; Walt Whitman; Herman Melville; Harriet Jacobs; Henry Adams; Elizabeth Keckly; and George Templeton Strong; as well as Union and Confederate soldiers; women diarists from North and South; and freed slaves. The selections include vivid and haunting firsthand accounts of legendary battles and campaigns— the Wilderness; Spotsylvania; Cold Harbor; the Atlanta campaign; the Crater; Franklin; Sherman’s march through Georgia and the Carolinas—as well as of the desperate conditions inside Andersonville prison; the sinking of the Confederate raider Alabama; the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment; and the struggles of both black and white civilians to survive the harsh and violent downfall of the Confederacy.