Download or read book A Southern Soldier s Letters Home written by Samuel Augustus Burney and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel A. Burney, born in April 1840, was the son of Thomas Jefferson Burney and Julia Shields Burney. He graduated from Mercer University (then at Penfield, Georgia) in 1860. He joined the Panola Guards, an infantry component of Thomas R. R. Cobb's Georgia Legion, in July 1861. For the next four years he served in the Army of Northern Virginia both in Virginia and in Tennessee. Burney was wounded at Chancellorsville in May 1863, and as a result of his wound he was placed in disability in March 1864 and served the remainder of the war on commissary duty in southwest Georgia. After the war, Burney returned to Mercer's school of theology, was ordained into the Baptist ministry, and served as pastor of several churches in Morgan County. He was pastor of the Madison Baptist Church until shortly before his death in 1896. These letters of a college graduate written to his wife, Sarah Elizabeth Shepherd Burney are lyrical and beautifully written. Burney describes battles, camp life, theology, and the day-to-day dreariness of life in the army. This is an astounding collection of letters for anyone interested in the Civil War, or the South.
Download or read book In Their Letters in Their Words written by Mark Flotow and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2019-11-04 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vital lifeline to home during the Civil War, the letters of soldiers to their families and friends remain a treasure for those seeking to connect with and understand the most turbulent period of American history. Rather than focus on the experiences of a few witnesses, this impressively researched book documents 165 Illinois Civil War soldiers’ and sailors’ lives through the lens of their personal letters. Editor Mark Flotow chose a variety of letter writers who hailed from counties throughout the state, served in different branches of the military at different ranks, and represented the gamut of social experiences and war outcomes. Flotow provides extensive quotations from the letters. By allowing the soldiers to speak for themselves, he captures what mattered most to them. Illinois soldiers wrote about their reasons for enlisting; the nature of training and duties; necessities like eating, sleeping, marching, and making the best of often harsh and chaotic circumstances; Southern culture; slavery; their opinions of commanding officers and the president; disease, medicine, and hospitals; their prisoner-of-war experiences; and the ways they left the army. Through letters from afar, many soldiers sought to manage their homes and farms, while some single men attempted to woo their sweethearts. Flotow includes brief biographies for each soldier quoted in the book, weaves historical context and analysis with the letters, and organizes them by topic. Thus, intimate details cited in individual letters reveal their significance for those who lived and shaped this tumultuous era. The result is not only insightful history but also compelling reading.
Download or read book Yankee Correspondence written by Nina Silber and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They are grouped by six major themes: the military experience, the meaning of the war, views of the South, politics on the home front, the personal sacrifices of war, and the correspondence of one New England family.
Download or read book Yours Till Death written by John Cotton and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 1951 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "These letters from a yeoman farmer in the Confederate Army to his wife in Coosa County, Alabama, will be of interest to historians not only for the light shed upon the life of the Confederate soldier, but also for frequent allusions to rural life and the operation of the farm in Cotton's absence. He enlisted at Pinckneyville, Alabama, on April 1, 1862, and was paroled at Talladega on May 25, 1865. During the intervening years he saw action in Tennessee and Kentucky, in the Dalton-Atlanta campaign, briefly again in Tennessee, then in Georgia against the forces of Sherman, moving finally into South Carolina.... These letters constitute an authentic record of a typical Confederate soldier's experience," ---Journal of Southern History
Download or read book Remember Me written by Richard L. Beach and published by . This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remember Me is a chronicle of the early months of the Civil War told in letters by Lt. George Robinson and his son, Sgt. James F. Robinson. Original spelling and capitalization has been retained to add another dimension to the lives of these two men. Their story is private in nature as the letters were written to inform and comfort those loved ones at home concerned for their health and safety. "I am well and so is Jim and in good spirits - excitement runs high - we have just recd our arms, fine ones...." As such, these men give the modern reader not only a glimpse of history from a first-hand point of view, but also the inner thoughts of both an officer and an enlisted man in one volume. Father and son began writing letters home from Charleston, South Carolina, on 9 January 1861, describing their daily life while working to build defenses in the harbor. When George's company disbanded, he returned home to manage his business and farm, and James enlisted in the 7th South Carolina Volunteers. James went to Northern Virginia, continuing to write home about his surroundings and life of a Confederate soldier from July, 1861, until August 1862. An introductory chapter gives a brief history of the family.
Download or read book Civil War Letters written by Bob Blaisdell and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2013-01-23 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wartime letters include correspondence of Union and Confederate sympathizers and soldiers of all ranks. Authentic illustrations accompany insightful missives by Lincoln, Grant, Lee, Whitman, Davis, and many of their contemporaries.
Download or read book Germans in the Civil War written by Walter D. Kamphoefner and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: German Americans were one of the largest immigrant groups in the Civil War era, and they comprised nearly 10 percent of all Union troops. Yet little attention has been paid to their daily lives--both on the battlefield and on the home front--during the war. This collection of letters, written by German immigrants to friends and family back home, provides a new angle to our understanding of the Civil War experience and challenges some long-held assumptions about the immigrant experience at this time. Originally published in Germany in 2002, this collection contains more than three hundred letters written by seventy-eight German immigrants--men and women, soldiers and civilians, from the North and South. Their missives tell of battles and boredom, privation and profiteering, motives for enlistment and desertion and for avoiding involvement altogether. Although written by people with a variety of backgrounds, these letters describe the conflict from a distinctly German standpoint, the editors argue, casting doubt on the claim that the Civil War was the great melting pot that eradicated ethnic antagonisms.
Download or read book Far Far From Home written by Dick and Tally Simpson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1994-06-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In April 1861, Dick and Tally Simpson, sons of South Carolina Congressman Richard F. Simpson, enlisted in Company A of the Third South Carolina Volunteers of the Confederate army. Their letters home--published here for the first time--read like a historical novel, complete with plot, romance, character, suspense, and tragedy. In their last year of college when the war broke out, Dick and Tally were hastily handed their diplomas so they could volunteer for military duty. Dick was twenty; Tally was twenty-two. Well educated, intelligent, and thoughtful young men, Dick and Tally cared deeply for their country, their family, and their comrades-in-arms and wrote frequently to their loved ones in Pendleton, South Carolina, offering firsthand accounts of dramatic events from the battle of First Manassas in July 1861 to the battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. Their letters provide a picture of war as it was actually experienced at the time, not as it was remembered some twenty or thirty years later. It is a picture that neither glorifies war nor condemns it, but simply "tells it like it is." Written to a number of different people, the boys' letters home dealt with a number of different subjects. Letters to "Pa" went into great detail about military matters in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia--troop movements, casualties, and how well particular units had fought; letters to "Ma" and sisters Anna and Mary were about camp life and family friends in the army and usually included requests for much-needed food and clothing; letters to Aunt Caroline and her daughter Carrie usually concerned affairs of the heart, for Aunt Caroline continued to be Dick and Tally's trusted confidante, even when they were "far, far from home." The value of these letters lies not so much in the detailed information they provide as in the overall picture they convey--a picture of how one Southern family, for better or for worse, at home and at the front--coped with the experience of war. These are not wartime reminiscences, but wartime letters, written from the camp, the battlefield, the hospital bed, the picket line--wherever the boys happened to be when they found time to write home. It is a poignant picture of war as it was actually experienced in the South as the Civil War unfolded.
Download or read book The Hour of Our Nation s Agony written by William Cowper Nelson and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hour of Our Nation's Agony offers a revealing look into the life of a Confederate soldier as he is transformed by the war. Through these literate, perceptive, and illuminating letters, readers can trace Lt. William Cowper Nelson's evolution from an idealistic young soldier to a battle-hardened veteran. Nelson joined the army at the age of nineteen, leaving behind a close-knit family in Holly Springs, Mississippi. He served for much of the war in the Third Corps of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. By the end of the conflict, Nelson had survived many major battles, including Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness, as well as the long siege of Petersburg. In his correspondence, Nelson discusses in detail the soldier's life, religion in the ranks, his love for and heartbreak at being separated from his family, and Southern identity. Readers will find his reflections on slavery, religion, and the Confederacy particularly revealing. Seeing and participating in the slaughter of other human beings overpowered Nelson's romantic idealism. He had long imagined war as a noble struggle of valor, selflessness, and glory. But the sight of wounded men with "blood streaming from their wounds," dying slow, lonely deaths showed Nelson the true nature of war. Nelson's letters reveal the conflicting emotions that haunted many soldiers. Despite his bitter hatred of the "ruthless invaders of our beloved South," the sight of wounded Union prisoners moved him to compassion. Nelson's ability to write about irreconcilable moments when he felt both kindness and cruelty toward the enemy with introspection, candor, and sensitivity makes The Hour of Our Nation's Agony more than just a collection of missives. Jennifer Ford places Nelson squarely in the middle of the historiographic debate over the degree of disillusionment felt by Civil War soldiers, arguing that Nelson-like many soldiers-was a complex individual who does not fit neatly into one interpretation. Jennifer W. Ford is head of special collections and associate professor at the J. D. Williams Library at the University of Mississippi, where the where the collection containing Lt. Nelson's letters and other family documents is held.
Download or read book The Civil War Letters of Joshua K Callaway written by Joshua K. Callaway and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Kentucky Campaign to Tullahoma, Chickamauga to Missionary Ridge, junior officer Joshua K. Callaway took part in some of the most critical campaigns of the Civil War. His twice-weekly letters home, written between April 1862 and November 1863, chronicle his gradual change from an ardent Confederate soldier to a weary veteran who longs to be at home. Callaway was a schoolteacher, husband, and father of two when he enlisted in the 28th Alabama Infantry Regiment at the age of twenty-seven. Serving with the Army of the Tennessee, he campaigned in Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee, and north Georgia. Along the way this perceptive observer and gifted writer wrote a continuous narrative detailing the activities, concerns, hopes, fears, discomforts, and pleasures of a Confederate soldier in the field. Whether writing about combat, illness, encampments, or homesickness, Callaway makes even the everyday aspects of soldiering interesting. This large collection, seventy-four letters in all, is a valuable historical reference that provides new insights into life behind the front lines of the Civil War.
Download or read book An Uncommon Soldier written by Sarah Rosetta Wakeman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1995 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: Pasadena, Md.: Minerva Center, 1994.
Download or read book Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers written by John M. Sacher and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2021-12-08 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Jules and Frances Landry Award Finalist for the 2022 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize In April 1862, the Confederacy faced a dire military situation. Its forces were badly outnumbered, the Union army was threatening on all sides, and the twelve-month enlistment period for original volunteers would soon expire. In response to these circumstances, the Confederate Congress passed the first national conscription law in United States history. This initiative touched off a struggle for healthy white male bodies—both for the army and on the home front, where they oversaw enslaved laborers and helped produce food and supplies for the front lines—that lasted till the end of the war. John M. Sacher’s history of Confederate conscription serves as the first comprehensive examination of the topic in nearly one hundred years, providing fresh insights into and drawing new conclusions about the southern draft program. Often summarily dismissed as a detested policy that violated states’ rights and forced nonslaveholders to fight for planters, the conscription law elicited strong responses from southerners wanting to devise the best way to guarantee what they perceived as shared sacrifice. Most who bristled at the compulsory draft did so believing it did not align with their vision of the Confederacy. As Sacher reveals, white southerners’ desire to protect their families, support their communities, and ensure the continuation of slavery shaped their reaction to conscription. For three years, Confederates tried to achieve victory on the battlefield while simultaneously promoting their vision of individual liberty for whites and states’ rights. While they failed in that quest, Sacher demonstrates that southerners’ response to the 1862 conscription law did not determine their commitment to the Confederate cause. Instead, the implementation of the draft spurred a debate about sacrifice—both physical and ideological—as the Confederacy’s insatiable demand for soldiers only grew in the face of a grueling war.
Download or read book Letters Home written by Henry Matrau and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1998-03-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume comprises sixty-three previously unpublished letters from a young Civil War soldier to his family in Bainbridge Township, Michigan, written while he served in the Sixth Wisconsin Regiment, one of the units of the acclaimed “Iron Brigade.” Only sixteen when he joined the Union army in 1861, Henry Matrau rose to the rank of captain during his four years of wartime service. He took part in many of the major engagements of the war: Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and the siege of Petersburg. In his letters, Matrau describes camp life—the food, uniforms and equipment, reading materials, and medical care available to him and his comrades. Other incidents recounted include the capture and transfer of "contraband" slaves, the execution of a Union army deserter, friendly exchanges between Union and Confederate soldiers on picket, and tours of Richmond's Libby and Castle Thunder prisons after the war. These letters reflect Matrau's maturing as a soldier, from his youthful enthusiasm early in 1862 when he boasts of becoming proficient with a bayonet, to the combat-weary, veteran fighter who admits in spring 1863 that he has "seen the elephant" and is ready to come home.
Download or read book Brothers in Gray written by Thomas W. Cutrer and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1997-07-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Residents of antebellum northwest Louisiana held strong pro-Union sentiments, and the Pierson family of Bienville Parish, Louisiana, were no exception, opposing secession in 1861. Yet once war began, the region contributed its full share of support to the southern army, and four of William H. Pierson's eight sons enlisted. Ranging from the early battles of the Trans-Mississippi to the epic battles of the Army of Northern Virginia, and from the brutal trenches of Vicksburg to provost guard duty in north Louisiana, this extensive collection of Civil War letters, written by three of the Pierson brothers, offers riveting glimpses of almost every variety of experience faced by Confederate soldiers. Prolific letter writers, the Piersons were educated, observant, and well placed to comment not only on the battles and campaigns of their regiments but also on their commanding officers, the effect of political activity on soldier morale, being taken captive, and, most of all, their entire family's understanding of and commitment to the Confederate cause.
Download or read book Letters Home written by Bishop Asbury Cook and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The news has come that the Rebel Braggs army is whipped and cut to pieces. One whole regiment come over to our side, so I guess Kentucky is sick of fighting against the Union. It is near 12 o'clock and we have been taking up our tents and putting them in line, so we have quite a village. To see the fortifications, forts, and cannons that are planted here is astonishing. There is men enough too. Regiment after Regiment. I am not discontented in the least. I see no hardship but what I can endure for the good of my country..." The 144th Regiment of the New York Volunteer Infantry signed up its first recruit, Bishop Asbury Cook, on August 12, 1862, and Cook remained with the regiment until it mustered out in July, 1865. The letters contained in this volume span Cook's career with the regiment. Letters written by Cook to his wife, Louisa Maria (Alexander) Cook are grouped by month and describe the daily activities and everyday concerns of the average soldier. Each month's section contains a chronology of events for the Civil War nationwide, a chronology of events within the 144th Regiment, and a history of the regiment. Supplemental historical background enhances, and sometimes contrasts with, the contents of Cook's letters.
Download or read book Army at Home written by Judith Giesberg and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing readers to women whose Civil War experiences have long been ignored, Judith Giesberg examines the lives of working-class women in the North, for whom the home front was a battlefield of its own. Black and white working-class women managed farms that had been left without a male head of household, worked in munitions factories, made uniforms, and located and cared for injured or dead soldiers. As they became more active in their new roles, they became visible as political actors, writing letters, signing petitions, moving (or refusing to move) from their homes, and confronting civilian and military officials. At the heart of the book are stories of women who fought the draft in New York and Pennsylvania, protested segregated streetcars in San Francisco and Philadelphia, and demanded a living wage in the needle trades and safer conditions at the Federal arsenals where they labored. Giesberg challenges readers to think about women and children who were caught up in the military conflict but nonetheless refused to become its collateral damage. She offers a dramatic reinterpretation of how America's Civil War reshaped the lived experience of race and gender and brought swift and lasting changes to working-class family life.
Download or read book Letters to Amanda written by Marion Hill Fitzpatrick and published by Civil War Georgia. This book was released on 1998 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He left no doubt of the central role religion played in the lives of countless mid-19th-century Americans, as well as the inestimable importance of home and family. In short, this testimony does more than help us, at a distance of more than a century and a third, understand the day-to-day process by which soldiers went about the business of living and campaigning. It also illuminates the broader context of the world in which the Fitzpatricks and millions of other Civil War-era Americans lived.
