The war is over. The harder work is about to begin.

When The Guns Finally Stopped closes An Alternate History of the American Civil War with the most searching and emotionally devastating volume of the series — a story that moves from the last hours of the Petersburg siege, through the recovery of a burned and hollowed Washington, to the long ache of a Reconstruction that promises everything and delivers far less.

Lee surrenders. Longstreet negotiates the peaceful return of the occupied capital with quiet dignity. Lincoln is assassinated. And a nation that survived four years of catastrophic war must now decide what it is — what it was always supposed to be — through the instruments of constitutional amendment, political compromise, and the bitter arithmetic of human freedom measured in legal clauses.

At the center is a man no one remembers: a competent Maine congressman who once corrected a comma in the Fourteenth Amendment — and who spent forty years watching that comma rendered meaningless by a country not yet ready to honor what it said.

When The Guns Finally Stopped is alternate history's rarest achievement: a novel about the aftermath of war that is more devastating than the war itself.