In 1861 a quarrel as old as the republic broke into open war, and for four years the United States tore itself apart over the question its founders had refused to answer: whether a nation conceived in liberty could endure half slave and half free.

The Sundered Union tells the whole sweep of the American Civil War in a single, compelling volume. It follows the long road to Fort Sumter through decades of compromise and crisis?Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, John Brown, and the election that finally split the country. It then carries the reader through the great campaigns that made this the deadliest war in American history: Bull Run and Shiloh, the bloodiest single day at Antietam, the high tide at Gettysburg, the fall of Vicksburg, Grant and Lee locked together from the Wilderness to Appomattox, and Sherman's march to the sea.

But this is far more than a war of battles. It is the story of the revolution of emancipation and the roughly 200,000 Black soldiers who took up arms for their own freedom; of the home fronts North and South; of the surgeons, nurses, prisoners, and ordinary soldiers who endured it; of a president murdered at the very hour of victory; and of the long, contested peace of Reconstruction and the "Lost Cause" memory that followed.

Clear-eyed and honest, The Sundered Union never loses sight of the war's true measure: the four million people whose freedom hung in the balance. It lets the evidence speak?precise where it can be, candid where the record is not, from the disputed death toll to the causes the Confederacy's own leaders named plainly before later generations muddied them.

Sweeping yet accessible, sober yet gripping, this is the complete history of how a war to save the Union became a war to end slavery?and of the new birth of freedom, imperfect and unfinished, that three quarters of a million Americans paid for with their lives.

Inside you will find:

• The complete story, from Fort Sumter in 1861 to Appomattox and Lincoln's assassination in 1865
• Every major battle and campaign?East and West, on land and at sea
• Emancipation, the Black soldiers of the U.S. Colored Troops, and the home fronts North and South
• Reconstruction, the Lost Cause, and the war's unfinished legacy
• A full timeline, a Who's Who, a glossary, and reference guides to the commanders, the great battles, and the soldier's world

A single-volume history for anyone who wants to understand the war that remade America.