The Great Task Remaining: The Third Year of Lincoln's War »

WILLIAM MARVEL is the author of Lincoln's Darkest Year, Mr. Lincoln Goes to War, Lee's Last Retreat, Andersonville, and several other acclaimed books on the Civil War. He has won a Lincoln Prize, the Douglas Southall Freeman Award, and the Bell Award.

The Great Task Remaining is a striking, often poignant portrait of people balancing their own values—rather than ours—to determine whether the horrors attending Mr. Lincoln’s war were worth bearing in order to achieve his ultimate goals. 

As 1863 unfolds, we see the useless bloodbath at Fredericksburg, the disaster at Chancellorsville, the battle of Gettysburg, and the end of the siege of Vicksburg. Then, astonishingly, the Confederacy springs vigorously back to life after the Union triumphs of the summer, setting the stage for Lincoln’s now famous speech on the Pennsylvania battlefield. Without abandoning the underlying sympathy for Lincoln, Marvel makes a convincing argument for the Gettysburg Address as being less of a paean to liberty than an appeal to stay the course in the face of rampant antiwar sentiment. 

The Great Task Remaining offers a provocative history of a dramatic year—a year that saw victory and defeat, doubt and riot—as well as a compelling story of a people who clung to the promise of a much-longed-for end.

Publishers Weekly

Civil War historian Marvel (Lincoln's Darkest Year), a winner of the Lincoln Prize, demonstrates his usual command of archival and published sources in this significantly revisionist account of the Civil War's third year from the Union perspective. He challenges conventional triumphalism, demonstrating comprehensively that despite Vicksburg and Gettysburg, by 1863 Northern citizens and soldiers were increasingly and openly wondering whether preserving the union and ending slavery were worth the cost of “Mr. Lincoln's war.” Disillusion and war-weariness had set in: the war's only fruits seemed to be moral and political degradation, dangerous constitutional precedents, tens of thousands dead and maimed. The Battle of Chickamauga appeared to have restored the stalemate. Marvel particularly conveys the looming crisis of the impending expiration of the three-year enlistments that were the Union army's norm. That, combined with the increasing reluctance of Northern men to volunteer or send their sons, could have ended the war by default. “Romance and adventure” or “misery and peril”—which emotions would prevail? As Marvel conclusively demonstrates, the coin remained in the air as 1863 came to an end. 32 b&w photos, 6 maps. (June 22)