40th anniversary edition. Includes photos. — This volume brings us nearly to the end of 1862. A great deal of blood has been shed, both sides have launched invasions and been stopped. The Union's top generals have been replaced. The factories of the North are now on a war footing and beginning to produce the overwhelming war machining that no amount of daring, generalship, morale, or toughness will be able to match.

Lincoln's preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and English reticence have combined to keep Europe from recognizing the Confederacy thus ending their only realistic long-term hope for success (France was prepared to do so but not alone). Lincoln's December address to Congress reveals him for the first time to his contemporaries as the great rhetorical artist that History remembers. With it he charts the course around which the nation will be able to rally to the bitter end of the war.