With the help of this book, Civil War sites can be located as in no other state, taking the reader through the beautiful Vermont landscape of hill farms and small towns that looks more like the Civil War era than that of any other state. Years after the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke for his fellow Civil War veterans when he said, "In our youth, our hearts were touched by fire." Today, throughout Vermont, it is possible to identify hundreds and hundreds of Civil War-related sites. Throughout Vermont are soldier homes, halls where war meetings encouraged enlistments, churches where soldier funerals were held and abolitionists spoke, monuments to those who served, hospital sites, and homes where women gathered to make items for the soldiers. The Vermont State House is a virtual Civil War museum. A building survives in Woodstock where the war was administered. Cemeteries hold the gravestones of many of the 34,000 who fought. A field even exists where in 1803 a Quaker preacher heard a voice from above fortell a bloody war over slavery. With the help of this book, Civil War sites can be located as in no other state, taking the reader through the beautiful Vermont landscape of hill farms and small towns that looks more like the Civil War era than that of any other state.

The Civil War generation saw its world in ways startlingly different from our own. In these essays, Glenn W. LaFantasie examines the lives and experiences of several key personalities who gained fame during the war and after. The battle of Gettysburg is the thread that ties these Civil War lives together. Gettysburg was a personal turning point, though each person was affected differently. Largely biographical in its approach, the book captures the human drama of the war and shows how this group of individuals—including Abraham Lincoln, James Longstreet, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, William C. Oates, and others—endured or succumbed to the war and, willingly or unwillingly, influenced its outcome. At the same time, it shows how the war shaped the lives of these individuals, putting them through ordeals they never dreamed they would face or survive.