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 pivot