The Last Full Measure resonates with the bloody Battle of the Wilderness, after which rivers ran red for days with the blood of the wounded and dead; the destruction of the Stonewall Brigade at Spotsylvania; the Union Army disaster at Cold Harbor; and the agonizing siege of Petersburg which led to the unmitigated slaughter known as the Battle of the Crater.

The drama ends in April 1865 when Robert E. Lee accepts Ulysses S. Grant's terms of surrender at Appomattox, where college professor-turned-soldier General Joshua Chamberlain, receiving the stacked arms of the ragged Confederate army, gallantly orders his men to salute their returning countrymen.