"No student of social evolution can become truly immersed in a specialty without feeling increasingly identified with the people involved, ... experiencing their hopes and fears, living their lives. Eventually most, like myself, develop an overwhelming desire to penetrate deeper, to look through their eyes, ... to think their very thoughts. And in fact, as the work progressed I came to feel very close to the individuals who kept the diaries, wrote the letters, scribbled the hasty notes... Near enough, I felt, to understand what they witnessed as they did, to supply the missing parts as they would have." In these words the author, well-known for his monumental series The Second American Civil War, explains why and how he has assembled the present slim volume. Here we have something very different: the private thoughts and feelings, as events unfolded, of several of the individuals most responsible for the high tech victory of the Western Confederacy, as well as those of several intelligent observers who were intimately involved. The result is, as he says, a highly personal and absorbing account of what many refer to admiringly as 'the first truly civil war.' If we must have others, may they all be the same