Notes

• "In the Presence of Mine Enemies is a landmark work of stirring historical narrative and deep scholarship. It gives us the Civil War on an intimate scale, as a story of individuals and families, civilians and soldiers, slaves, free blacks and whites, women and men. It upends what has become the standard view of the Civil War. By taking a ground-level view of the war, Edward L. Ayers shows that this was not an inevitable clash destined to rage for four years at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. The reassuring story of national unification and the destruction of slavery that we have come to embrace does not do justice to the experiences of the people who lived the Civil War." "In recovering the experiences of the people who lived the Civil War, Ayers restores the nuances to events, the mix of emotion, partial knowledge, and belief on which people acted, the possibilities that existed apart from the paths actually taken."–BOOK JACKET