An outstanding and welcome examination of a city of immense importance. - Civil War Book Review ""A great read for local Civil War buffs and all of us enchanted by the city's past. Gerteis fills his narrative with vignettes that vividly capture the tone, mood, and values of the time."" - St. Louis Post-Dispatch ""The bloody divisions created by the Civil War were deeper and higher in the Union slave states, where Americans were divided from the beginning and where there were numerous civil wars within the Civil War. Nowhere is this more true than in St. Louis. And no one has told the story of St. Louis' civil wars better than Louis Gerteis.... A triumph."" - Ira Berlin, author of Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America ""The book is replete with gripping and unforgettable images, from the hobnailed boots of the amateur soldiers in the gunpowder room of the arsenal to the appalling refugee camps of the African Americans escaping slavery and war and the prisons for southern sympathizers."" - Mark E. Neely, Jr., author of Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties
