This book is a fascinating invitation to visit Civil War sites, not at Gettysburg
or Mississippi or Virginia but surprisingly in Chicago!

—Senator Paul Simon

Chicago: The Northern Center of the Civil War

While America's Civil War was fought on Confederate battlefields, Chicago played a crucial role in the Union's struggle toward victory. The Hoofs and Guns of the Storm takes you through a whirlwind of 19th century events that created the foundation for modern-day Chicago. Discover:

• The role Chicago played in Abraham Lincoln's unlikely bid for the Presidency

• Mary Todd Lincoln's trials and tribulations after her husband's assassination

• The hell on earth 6,000 Confederate prisoners went through at Camp Douglas, a P.O.W. prison just south of the city

• The Sanitary Fair and the women behind the war efforts

• How Chicago's Union Blue was streaked with hints of Confederate Gray

• Abolition leaders and the Underground Railroad

• John Wilkes Booth's acclaimed performances at the McVicker's Theater, and what this vainglorious actor and future assassin had to say about Lincoln in 1863

The Hoofs and Guns of the Storm is a lively, intelligent, and comprehensive guide to Civil War and Lincoln sites. Arnie Bernstein's collection is well researched, organized, and written. The result is a useful guidebook that will help Chicagoans and their many guests appreciate more deeply the Windy City's links to an important era in our national history.
—Jean H. Baker, author of Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography

Expertly researched, crisply, even poetically written, Arnie Bernstein's literary tour of Civil War Chicago is historically enlightening and lots of fun for those who seek to rediscover the footsteps of our past in the geography of our present.
—R. Craig Sautter, co-author of Inside the Wigwam: Chicago's Presidential Conventions 1860-1996