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also edited, with Mary Lee Spence, The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont (University of Illinois Press, 1993), a lively collection of correspondence. For John C. Frémont’s life and career, see Tom Chaffin’s fine biography, Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), along with Allan Nevins’s classic Frémont: Pathmarker of the West (University of Nebraska Press, 1992; originally published 1928). Sally Denton’s Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007) is an engaging joint biography.

For California and the Civil War, see Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), as well as Kevin Starr’s compelling Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (Oxford University Press, 1973). Thomas Starr King’s life and career have been covered most recently in Robert A. Monzingo’s Thomas Starr King: Eminent Californian, Civil War Statesman, Unitarian Minister (Pacific Grove, California: Boxwood Press, 1991) and in Richard Peterson’s “Thomas Starr King in California, 1860–64: Forgotten Naturalist of the Civil War Years,” California History, vol. 69, no. 1 (Spring 1990). Among several earlier biographies, Charles W. Wendte’s Thomas Starr King: Patriot and Preacher (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1921) is the most valuable. Some of King’s sermons were published posthumously in volumes of his collected work; hundreds more are preserved as manuscript drafts at the Boston Public Library. His personal correspondence is in the Bancroft Library, University of California.

Adam Arenson’s recent book The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Harvard University Press, 2010) convincingly treats the city as a fulcrum of the national crisis. The most thorough blow-by-blow account of the war there is Louis S. Gerteis’s Civil War St. Louis (University of Kansas Press, 2001). The only modern biography of Nathaniel Lyon is Christopher Phillips’s Damned Yankee: The Life of General Nathaniel Lyon (Louisiana State University, 1996), a book that, as its title suggests, betrays so little sympathy for its subject that one wonders how the author managed to get through writing it. Steven Rowan has done important work bringing to light the early history of the city’s German community, including Germans for a Free Missouri: Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press, 1857–1862 (University of Missouri Press, 1983), coedited with James Neal Primm; and his edited translation of Henry Boernstein’s autobiography, published as Memoirs of a Nobody: The Missouri Years of an Austrian Radical, 1849–1866 (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1997). For the Forty-Eighters, see A. E. Zucker, ed., The Forty-Eighters: Political Refugees of the German Revolution of 1848 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1967) and Carl Wittke, Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-Eighters in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1952). William E. Smith’s The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1933) traces the various schemes of Frank Blair and his ambitious kinsfolk.

Chapter Seven: The Crossing

See chapter 5, above, for sources on Ellsworth and the Fire Zouaves, and chapter 2 for sources on Washington, D.C. The scene of the troops in the Capitol and the general sights of Washington in the first weeks of the war are captured beautifully in Theodore Winthrop’s essay “Washington as a Camp,” published anonymously after his death in The Atlantic Monthly (July 1861). Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) puts Ellsworth’s death into a larger, tragic, context.

Chapter Eight: Freedom’s Fortress

An essential source for the story of the Hampton Roads fugitives is Edward Lillie Pierce’s largely firsthand account, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe,” published anonymously in The Atlantic Monthly (November 1861). Pierce also