Download or read book The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson written by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes a selection of Higginson's wartime letters, this volume offers a picture of the radical interracial solidarity brought about by the transformative experience of the army camp and of American Civil War life.

Download or read book Fear in North Carolina written by Cornelia Catherine Smith Henry and published by Reminiscing Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cornelia Henrys three journals, written between 1860 and 1868, offer an excellent source for daily information on western North Carolina during the Civil War period.

Download or read book Fallen Leaves written by Henry Livermore Abbott and published by Kent State University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Major Henry Livermore Abbott of the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was the most widely known and highly respected officer of his rank to serve in the Army of the Potomac. This text contains a collection of his wartime letters to family and friends.

Download or read book Alonzo s War written by Mary Searing O'Shaughnessy and published by Fairleigh Dickinson. This book was released on 2012-09-14 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alonzo Bryant Searing, a high school graduate aged 18, enlisted in the 11th New Jersey Volunteer Regiment in Dover, New Jersey in 1862 and served two years and ten months as a Private in the Union Army. His unit served in 27 engagements and he was slightly wounded twice. During that time he wrote 110 letters home to his sister. Twenty-five years later he edited these letters, adding information from his well-kept journals and his memory and had them published in The Morris County Journal newspaper from 1890-1893. The book is this collection of letters, written with a dry humor, which includes graphic descriptions of engagements, including some listings of death, wounding and sickness, opinions of the war, politics, religion, race, alcohol, deserters, camp conditions, hospital life, his own poetry and accounts of meetings with friends and relatives in nearby Army units.

Download or read book Wartime Washington written by Elizabeth Blair Lee and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1999-03-15 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Blair Lee was raised in Washington's political circles, and her husband, Samuel Phillips Lee, third cousin to Robert E. Lee, commanded the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron during the Civil War. When they married, Elizabeth promised to write every day they were apart. Of the hundreds of letters with which she kept her promise, Virginia Jeans Laas has edited a choice selection that illuminates the functioning of a nineteenth-century family and the Mrs. Lee's unique perspective on the political and military affairs of the nation's beleaguered capital.

Download or read book All for the Union written by Elisha Hunt Rhodes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-11-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All for the Union is the eloquent and moving diary of Elisha Hunt Rhodes, featured throughout Ken Burns' PBS documentary The Civil War. Rhodes enlisted into the Union Army as a private in 1861 and left it four years later as a twenty-three-year-old colonel after fighting hard and honorably in battles from Bull Run to Appomattox. Anyone who heard these diaries excerpted in The Civil War will recognize his accounts of those campaigns, which remain outstanding for their clarity and detail. Most of all, Rhodes's words reveal the motivation of a common Yankee foot soldier, an otherwise ordinary young man who endured the rigors of combat and exhausting marches, short rations, fear, and homesickness for a salary of $13 a month and the satisfaction of giving "all for the union."

Download or read book Civil War Nurse written by Hannah Anderson Ropes and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chief nurse of the Union Hospital in Washington, D.C., describes life and stress in the hospital and comments on notable persons of power. Her heretofore unpublished diary and letters comprise a fresh, hightly significan document concerning the medical history of the Civil War and the contributions of women nurses in the Northern military hospitals. This book is edited, with Introduction and Commentary, by John R. Brumgardt. Published by The University of Tennessee. 150 pages

Download or read book A Wisconsin Boy in Dixie written by James King Newton and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Unlike many of his fellows, [James Newton] was knowledgeable, intuitive, and literate; like many of his fellows he was cast into the role of soldier at only eighteen years of age. He was polished enough to write drumhead and firelight letters of fine literary style. It did not take long for this farm boy turned private to discover the grand design of the conflict in which he was engaged, something which many of the officers leading the armies never did discover."--Victor Hicken, Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society "When I wrote to you last I was at Madison with no prospect of leaving very soon, but I got away sooner than I expected to." So wrote James Newton upon leaving Camp Randall for Vicksburg in 1863 with the Fourteenth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. Newton, who had been a rural schoolteacher before he joined the Union army in 1861, wrote to his parents of his experiences at Shiloh, Corinth, Vicksburg, on the Red River, in Missouri, at Nashville, at Mobile, and as a prisoner of war. His letters, selected and edited by noted historian Stephen E. Ambrose, reveal Newton as a young man who matured in the war, rising in rank from private to lieutenant. A Wisconsin Boy in Dixie reveals Newton as a young man who grew to maturity through his Civil War experience, rising in rank from private to lieutenant. Writing soberly about the less attractive aspects of army life, Newton's comments on fraternizing with the Rebs, on officers, and on discipline are touched with a sense of humor--"a soldier's best friend," he claimed. He also became sensitive to the importance of political choices. After giving Lincoln the first vote he had ever cast, Newton wrote: "In doing so I felt that I was doing my country as much service as I have ever done on the field of battle."

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 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 The Granite Farm Letters written by John Rozier and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gathers letters between Edgeworth Byrd, a Confederate soldier, planter, and slave owner, and his wife and daughter

Download or read book The Civil War Letters of Joseph Hopkins Twichell written by Joseph Hopkins Twichell and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1861 young Joseph Twichell cut short his seminary studies to become a Union Army chaplain in New York's Excelsior Brigade. A middle-class New England Protestant, Twichell served for three years in a regiment manned mostly by poor Irish American Catholics. This selection of Twichell's letters to his Connecticut family will rank him alongside the Civil War's most literate and insightful firsthand chroniclers of life on the road, in battle, and in camp. As a noncombatant, he at once observed and participated in the momentous events of the Peninsula and Wilderness Campaigns and at the Second Bull Run, as well as at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Spotsylvania. Twichell writes about politics and slavery and the theological and cultural divide between him and his men. Most movingly, he tells of tending the helpless, burying the dead, and counseling the despondent. Alongside accounts of a run-in with slave hunters, a massive withdrawal of wounded soldiers from Richmond, and other extraordinary events, Twichell offers close-up views of his commanding officer, the "political general" Daniel Sickles, surely one of the most colorful and controversial leaders on either side. Civil War scholars and enthusiasts will welcome this fresh voice from an underrepresented class of soldier, the army chaplain. Readers who know of Twichell's later life as a prominent minister and reformer or as Mark Twain's closest friend will appreciate these insights into his early, transforming experiences.

Download or read book Letters of a Civil War Nurse written by Cornelia Hancock and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022-01-13 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She was called "The Florence Nightingale of America." From the fighting at Gettysburg to the capture of Richmond, this young Quaker nurse worked tirelessly to relieve the suffering of soldiers. She was one of the great heroines of the Union. Cornelia Hancock served in field and evacuating hospitals, in a contraband camp, and (defying authority) on the battlefield. Her letters to family members are witty, unsentimental, and full of indignation about the neglect of wounded soldiers and black refugees. Hancock was fiercely devoted to the welfare of the privates who had "nothing before them but hard marching, poor fare, and terrible fighting."

Download or read book A Journal of the English Civil War written by Sir William Brereton and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2012-11-05 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brereton's journal is a book made up of letters from the English Civil War (1642-1646). A Parliamentary general, Sir William was engaged in the siege of Dudley Castle, Bridgnorth Castle and the fortifield cathedral close at Lichfield. The Letter Book contains copies of letters sent and received by Brereton. There are details of his victory against the last Royalist army in the field, his various sieges, his constant need for money and more troops, and the movements of King Charles I prior to his surrender to the Scots. The Introduction details a history of the civil war, of the battles and skirmishes, up to the writing of the Letter Book. A conclusion relates what happened after: the end of the war, the trial and execution of Charles I, the Interregnum and finally the Restoration and Brereton's retirement from public life.

Download or read book For Cause and Comrades written by James M. McPherson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-04-03 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: General John A. Wickham, commander of the famous 101st Airborne Division in the 1970s and subsequently Army Chief of Staff, once visited Antietam battlefield. Gazing at Bloody Lane where, in 1862, several Union assaults were brutally repulsed before they finally broke through, he marveled, "You couldn't get American soldiers today to make an attack like that." Why did those men risk certain death, over and over again, through countless bloody battles and four long, awful years ? Why did the conventional wisdom -- that soldiers become increasingly cynical and disillusioned as war progresses -- not hold true in the Civil War? It is to this question--why did they fight--that James McPherson, America's preeminent Civil War historian, now turns his attention. He shows that, contrary to what many scholars believe, the soldiers of the Civil War remained powerfully convinced of the ideals for which they fought throughout the conflict. Motivated by duty and honor, and often by religious faith, these men wrote frequently of their firm belief in the cause for which they fought: the principles of liberty, freedom, justice, and patriotism. Soldiers on both sides harkened back to the Founding Fathers, and the ideals of the American Revolution. They fought to defend their country, either the Union--"the best Government ever made"--or the Confederate states, where their very homes and families were under siege. And they fought to defend their honor and manhood. "I should not lik to go home with the name of a couhard," one Massachusetts private wrote, and another private from Ohio said, "My wife would sooner hear of my death than my disgrace." Even after three years of bloody battles, more than half of the Union soldiers reenlisted voluntarily. "While duty calls me here and my country demands my services I should be willing to make the sacrifice," one man wrote to his protesting parents. And another soldier said simply, "I still love my country." McPherson draws on more than 25,000 letters and nearly 250 private diaries from men on both sides. Civil War soldiers were among the most literate soldiers in history, and most of them wrote home frequently, as it was the only way for them to keep in touch with homes that many of them had left for the first time in their lives. Significantly, their letters were also uncensored by military authorities, and are uniquely frank in their criticism and detailed in their reports of marches and battles, relations between officers and men, political debates, and morale. For Cause and Comrades lets these soldiers tell their own stories in their own words to create an account that is both deeply moving and far truer than most books on war. Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Civil War, was a national bestseller that Hugh Brogan, in The New York Times, called "history writing of the highest order." For Cause and Comrades deserves similar accolades, as McPherson's masterful prose and the soldiers' own words combine to create both an important book on an often-overlooked aspect of our bloody Civil War, and a powerfully moving account of the men who fought it.

Download or read book Sherman s Civil War written by Brooks D. Simpson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-07-02 with total page 971 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major modern edition of the wartime correspondence of General William T. Sherman, this volume features more than 400 letters written between the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and the day Sherman bade farewell to his troops in 1865. Together, they trace Sherman's rise from obscurity to become one of the Union's most famous and effective warriors. Arranged chronologically and grouped into chapters that correspond to significant phases in Sherman's life, the letters--many of which have never before been published--reveal Sherman's thoughts on politics, military operations, slavery and emancipation, the South, and daily life in the Union army, as well as his reactions to such important figures as General Ulysses S. Grant and President Lincoln. Lively, frank, opinionated, discerning, and occasionally extremely wrong-headed, these letters mirror the colorful personality and complex mentality of the man who wrote them. They offer the reader an invaluable glimpse of the Civil War as Sherman saw it.

Download or read book A War of the People written by Jeffrey D. Marshall and published by UPNE. This book was released on 1999 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War left no Vermonters untouched, and few families free from pain. More than 140 letters -- carefully selected from some 9000 in several archives -- convey in personal terms the combat experience of Vermonters throughout the war. Vermont raised seventeen infantry regiments, one cavalry regiment, three batteries of light artillery and three companies of sharpshooters -- nearly 35,000 soldiers in all. As a result of this impressive commitment, Vermont suffered one of the highest rates of military deaths of any Union state. A War of the People covers the war chronologically, with editor Jeffrey D. Marshall providing running commentary on both the war overall, and Vermonters' experiences. Supplemented with maps and photographs, it includes many voices -- from privates to colonels, mothers, wives, and best friends, young and old -- writing about battle narratives, camp life, financial advice, family matters, and much more. An African-American soldier from Hinesburgh, a French-Canadian soldier who enlisted in Milton, and dozens of others record their experiences in unforgettable words. Marshall's battlefront/homefront choice of letters provides a deeper understanding of the social and political dimensions that, although secondary to military concerns, were an integral part of Vermont's war years.