Representative Americans: The Civil War Generation

The author begins his study with Stephen A. Douglas and Frederick Douglass who provide two different viewpoints on the events leading to the conflict, while Harriet Tubman represents a form of social activism during the same years. Profiles of Stonewall Jackson and William Tecumseh Sherman, as well as infantryman James Anderson, give the reader an insight of the men fighting the war. Risjord then leads the reader inside both the Northern and Southern governments as well as the Reconstruction Era through the eyes of people such as William H. Seward and Thaddeus Stevens. After the war, Risjord examines the social and economic changes the conflict wrought, describing the lives of Clara Barton and Cornelius Vanderbilt. As the nation’s eyes turned westward, Risjord tells the tragic tale of Crazy Horse, and chronicles two of the first scientists to explore the new land.