The Tennessee Campaign of November and December 1864 was the Southern Confederacy's last significant offensive operation of the Civil War. General John Bell Hood of the Confederate Army of Tennessee attempted to capture Nashville, the final realistic chance for a battlefield victory against the Northern juggernaut. Hood's former West Point instructor, Major General George Henry Thomas, led the Union force, fighting those who doubted him in his own army as well as Hood's Confederates. Through the bloody, horrific battles at Spring Hill, Franklin and Nashville and a freezing retreat to the Tennessee River, Hood ultimately failed. Civil War historian James R. Knight chronicles the Confederacy's last real hope at victory and its bitter disappointment.

After months of reverses, the Union army is going on the offensive in the early spring of 1862. In Virginia, Gen. McClellan is preparing for his Peninsula Campaign; in Tennessee, Gen. Grant has just captured Ft. Henry and Ft. Donelson; and in southwestern Missouri, Gen. Samuel R. Curtis has driven Sterling Price and his Missouri State Guard out of the state and into the arms of Gen. Ben McCulloch's Confederate army in northwestern Arkansas. Using the united armies of Price and McCulloch, the new Confederate department commander, Earl Van Dorn, strikes back at Curtis' Federal army which is now outnumbered and two hundred miles from its supply base. For two days in early March 1862, the armies of Van Dorn and Curtis fight in the wilds of the Ozark Mountains at a place called Pea Ridge. Control of northern Arkansas and southern Missouri for the rest of the war hangs on the outcome.

A new contribution to the growing body of serious historical research on the outlaw couple, whose story has taken on near-mythical status but often has been told with little regard for the facts. Includes eyewitness accounts not seen elsewhere."They say the truth hurts, but it will also set you free. All this family has asked, if Clyde and Bonnie are going to be part of history, is that the history be the truth. I think Jim Knight and Jonathan Davis have tried to do justice to both." -- Buddy Williams, son of L.C. Barrow and nephew of Clyde Barrow

This is an engaging account of how a young couple from the hills of middle Tennessee endured the darkest years in our nation's history. Their own words tell how they not only survived, but kept their love for each other and their faith in God alive through the most desperate of circumstances. These were not the wealthy plantation owners of the Southern stereotype, but the son of a cabinetmaker and the daughter of a blacksmith, the kind of hardworking small farmers that actually populated most of the antebellum South. Burton Warfield and his brother-in-law Alonzo (Lonny) Worley both made it home to Isom, TN after the war and a few years later bought a farm together. Burton later decided to move his family west to Arkansas, but the farm has remained in the Worley family, and we still produce grain and cattle there. When I stand on the little rise above Dry Fork Creek where their house once stood, I am reminded of a war-weary veteran who came here to rebuild his life, his family and his community after that great tragedy we know as the Civil War. Stephen G. Worley, Great-grandson of Samuel Alonzo (Lonny) Worley