The Greatest Calamity

An essential primer for students of Tennessee history.

The first volume in the revived Three Star Series.

“This is the greatest calamity that could befall us,” wrote Sallie Gannaway Jamison in 1861, echoing the fears of a generation of Tennesseans. Over the next four years, the Civil War would upend the lives of more than a million residents of the Volunteer State—soldiers and civilians, free and enslaved.

The last state to secede and the first to fall to Federal forces, Tennessee played a pivotal role in the war’s political, military, and industrial struggles. Crisscrossed by key rail lines and blanketed by rich farmland, the struggle to control it fueled both Union and Confederate war efforts. More than 450 battles—at Shiloh, Stones River, Chattanooga, and beyond—turned the state’s landscape into hallowed ground.

John D. Fowler argues in his introduction that “one cannot understand the Civil War without understanding the Volunteer State’s role in it.” The Greatest Calamity: Tennessee in the Civil War Era, the first title in the University of Tennessee Press’s revived Three Star Series, offers a fresh, accessible take on this history. Expanding on Thomas Connelly’s Civil War Tennessee: Battles and Leaders (1979), Fowler integrates new perspectives on the home front, Reconstruction, and the struggles of freed people, making this volume essential reading for students, scholars, and history enthusiasts alike.