Even after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, the Civil War continued to be fought, and surrenders negotiated, on different fronts. The most notable of these occurred at Bennett Place, near Durham, North Carolina, when Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered the Army of Tennessee to Union General William T. Sherman. In this first full-length examination of the end of the war in North Carolina, Mark Bradley traces the campaign leading up to Bennett Place. Alternating between Union and Confederate points of view and drawing on his readings of primary sources, including numerous eyewitness accounts and the final muster rolls of the Army of Tennessee, Bradley depicts the action as it was experienced by the troops and the civilians in their path. He offers new information about the morale of the Army of Tennessee during its final confrontation with Sherman's much larger Union army. And he advances a fresh interpretation of Sherman's and Johnston's roles in the final negotiations for the surrender.

In November, 1864, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman led an army of veteran Union troops through the heart of the Confederacy, leaving behind a path of destruction in an area that had known little of the hardships of war, devastating the morale of soldiers and civilians alike, and hastening the end of the war. In this intensively researched and carefully detailed study, chosen by Civil War Magazine as one of the best one hundred books ever written about the Civil War, Joseph T. Glatthaar examines the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns from the perspective of the common soldiers in Sherman's army, seeking, above all, to understand why they did what they did. Glatthaar graphically describes the duties and deprivations of the march, the boredom and frustration of camp life, and the utter confusion and pure chance of battle. Quoting heavily from the letters and diaries of Sherman's men, he reveals the fears, motivations, and aspirations of the Union soldiers and explores their attitudes toward their comrades, toward blacks and southern whites, and toward the war, its destruction, and the forthcoming reconstruction.

Besides his illustrious name, the Union general Jefferson Columbus Davis is best known for two appalling actions: the September 1862 murder of General William "Bull" Nelson -- his former commanding officer -- and the abandonment of hundreds of African American refugees to the mercy of Confederate cavalry at Ebenezer Creek during Sherman's march through Georgia in 1864. Historians have generally dismissed Davis (1828--1879) as a reckless assassin, a racist, a journeyman soldier at best, and an embarrassment to the Lincoln war effort. But Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr., and Gordon D. Whitney shatter the collective memory of "Jef" Davis as a grim, destructive child of war and replace it with a more rounded portrait of a complex military leader. They bring order to the muddle of contradictions that was Davis's life and offer an impartial profile of the soldier and the man, who must be remembered for his splendid contributions as well as his startling failures.