Conceived in Liberty: Joshua Chamberlain, William Oates, and the American Civil War by Mark Perry

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In narrating the lives of Joshua Chamberlain and William Oates, Mark Perry's Conceived in Liberty opens a fascinating window on seventy years of American history, at the center of which is the July 1863 Battle of Little Round Top. This legendary contest decided the Battle of Gettysburg, opened a door to the Northern victory in the Civil War, and sent Chamberlain and Oates on paths to national prominence.

Drawing on a vast mine of documents, including letters, wartime journals, and political speeches, Perry brings their fascinating, uncannily parallel stories vividly to life. Joshua Chamberlain, the son of a Maine farmer, first made his name as an academic at Bowdoin College, then as a brilliant military commander, before establishing a remarkably successful career in politics, including several terms as the governor of Maine. William Oates, an Alabama frontiersman of humble origins, was also a farmer's son, and his valiant service during the war became the platform upon which he built a career as a lawyer who helped revitalize the Democratic party in the South. He was elected to both the U.S. Congress and the governorship of Alabama.

Perry also traces the stories of major figures of this era, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, Edmund Ruffin, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the amazing Fox sisters (whose ability to speak to the dead was legendary in the 1850s), Robert E. Lee, and Ulysses S. Grant. They are also the prism through which Perry chronicles the forces affecting North and South in nineteenth-century America. He explores how the conflicting forces of westward expansion, religious revivalism, the failing cotton economy in the South, and the Abolitionist movement in the North combined to propel the nation toward the Civil War. Conceived in Liberty describes its major battles in heart-stopping and hair-raising detail, but also offers a compelling, often horrifying account of daily life during the long conflict. In the postwar years, Chamberlain and Oates would find themselves playing major roles in America's destiny: Reconstruction policy, the party system, and, not least of all, race relatio ns.

Chamberlain and Oates stand as forceful symbols of how the nation came to blows, as well as, how the nation moved to redefine itself and--in President Abraham Lincoln's words--"bind up the wounds of war." Their story, as eloquently and dramatically told in the pages of Conceived in Liberty creates a portrait of American possibility in a tumultuous century.