George Gordon Meade could hardly believe it: only three days earlier, he had been thrust unexpectedly into command of the Army of the Potomac, which was cautiously stalking its long-time foe, the Army of Northern Virginia, as it launc...

Union commander Ulysses S. Grant wrote to Washington after he had 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 ge...

Do not bring on a general engagement, Confederate General Robert E. Lee warned his commanders. The Army of Northern Virginia, slicing its way through south-central Pennsylvania, was too spread out, too vulnerable, for a full-scale eng...

"The former general in chief of the Union armies during the Civil War . . . the two-term president of the United States . . . the beloved ambassador of American goodwill around the globe . . . the respected New York financier-Uly...

Soldiers called it one of the "waste places of nature" and "a region of gloom"―the Wilderness of Virginia, seventy square miles of dense, second-growth forest known as "the dark, close wood.""A mor...

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 ...

"May 1863. The Civil War was in its third spring, and Confederate Lt. Gen. Thomas Jonathan Jackson stood at the peak of his fame. He had arisen from obscurity to become "Old Stonewall," adored across the South and feare...