psychiatrist Stephen A. Goldman offers a pioneering look into how Union veterans’ obligation to their country did not end when they returned home, but had only begun. Instrumental to saving the Union and destroying slavery, they were bound together by a shared ideological commitment to what the Civil War had set in motion. Irrevocably changed by all they had seen, done, endured, and accomplished, Northern servicemen knew that the nation’s “unfinished work” promised to be as bitter, divisive, and perilous as its armed struggle had been.