John Matteson with A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation

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December 1862 drove the United States toward a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln’s government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., army chaplain Arthur Fuller, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, and John Pelham, a West Point cadet on the other side of the national schism. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country’s law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Don’t miss hearing about their lives and this new work that interweaves the historic and the personal beautifully and powerfully.