Using biographical sketches, this book aims to create a composite portrait of the United States during and immediately after the Civil War. Subjects covered include Stephen A. Douglas, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Stonewall Jackson and Thaddeus Stevens.

Americans in the middle decades of the nineteenth century were a people with boundless energy capable of heroic deeds, monumental achievements, and tragic errors. In The Civil War Generation, his newest volume in The Representative Americans series, noted scholar Norman K. Risjord uses biographical sketches to create a composite portrait of the United States during and immediately after the Civil War.