This volume covers Ulysses Grant's campaign against Confederate General John Pemberton, leading to the South's crushing loss of the citadel of Vicksburg.

Encouraged by his superiors in Washington to do whatever it takes, Grant launches an overland campaign that avoids a direct frontal assault on the town from the river, and instead, maneuvers his army downstream, crossing from Louisiana into Mississippi where the Confederates are too weak to make an effective stand.

After forty seven days, the Confederate troops, and the beleaguered civilians in the town endure hardships and privations none could have predicted, until, finally, Pemberton must accept the inevitable.

The story is told primarily through the voices of Union General William T. Sherman, and, returning from the first volume (A Blaze of Glory), the young private from Wisconsin, Fritz Bauer.

On the Southern side, the story is told through the eyes of Pemberton himself, as well as a young civilian woman in the town, Lucy Spence, who serves her cause the only way she can, by volunteering for nursing duties in the makeshift hospitals, enduring the kind of horror even the doctors are not prepared for.