Download or read book The Civil War Letters of Alexander McNeill 2nd South Carolina Infantry Regiment written by Alexander McNeill and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than two hundred eloquently written Civil War letters of love and life on the battlefield During the American Civil War, Alexander "Sandy" McNeill, a southern merchant, served in the Secession Guards, Company F, and Second South Carolina Regiment from April 17, 1861, to May 2, 1865. Within three weeks after the war began at Fort Sumter, McNeill wrote his first epistle to his long-time friend, Almirah Haseltine "Tinie" Simmons, in a campaign to win her heart and hand in marriage. The 29-year-old McNeill proclaimed in that letter, "I have always esteemed you as a friend and now I feel stealing over me a feeling which tells me that you are now held in higher estimation than that of a friend." Civil War historian and documentary editor Mac Wyckoff adds context to the correspondence, more than two hundred letters that encompass the entire duration of the war. With the exception of three breaks in communication, McNeill wrote to Tinie four to five times a week and persisted to the last week of April 1865, more than two weeks after General Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. In general, letters written during the final six months of the war are hard to find as are many other primary source materials for the waning war. While this is among the largest and fullest Civil War collections, it is the literary quality of McNeill's letters and wide variety of topics reported that distinguish it from others. In frequent and lengthy missives, McNeill opened his heart and mind to Tinie, his fiancée and then wife. He fulsomely reported his experiences and thoughts on a soldier's life during this war, describing combat, camp life, the building of winter quarters, the marches, company election of officers, weather, food, and morale. McNeill chronicled his experiences at First Manassas (Bull Run), Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and other battles. A man of sophisticated opinions, McNeill voiced his personal views on political, religious and military events, and the names of fellow soldiers he liked and disliked--all illuminating his deep, dynamic character.
Download or read book Him on the One Side and Me on the Other written by Terry A. Johnston and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Great Things are Expected of Us written by Cornelius Irvine Walker and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of letters written by Colonel C. Irvine Walker of the 10th South Carolina Infantry Regiment, C.S.A., to his fiance? during his service in the Civil War includes commentary on the campaigns in Tennessee and Kentucky in which his regiment participated. Among those mentioned in his letters are the battles of Chickamauga, Franklin, Murfreesboro, Nashville, Shiloh and Spring Hill in Tennessee and the Battle of Mundfordville in Kentucky. Included in this volume are postwar corrections and commentary that Walker added when he had his letters transcribed decades after the war.
Download or read book The War for the Common Soldier written by Peter S. Carmichael and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-11-02 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life during the conflict? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael's sweeping new study of men at war. Based on close examination of the letters and records left behind by individual soldiers from both the North and the South, Carmichael explores the totality of the Civil War experience--the marching, the fighting, the boredom, the idealism, the exhaustion, the punishments, and the frustrations of being away from families who often faced their own dire circumstances. Carmichael focuses not on what soldiers thought but rather how they thought. In doing so, he reveals how, to the shock of most men, well-established notions of duty or disobedience, morality or immorality, loyalty or disloyalty, and bravery or cowardice were blurred by war. Digging deeply into his soldiers' writing, Carmichael resists the idea that there was "a common soldier" but looks into their own words to find common threads in soldiers' experiences and ways of understanding what was happening around them. In the end, he argues that a pragmatic philosophy of soldiering emerged, guiding members of the rank and file as they struggled to live with the contradictory elements of their violent and volatile world. Soldiering in the Civil War, as Carmichael argues, was never a state of being but a process of becoming.
Download or read book Longstreet written by Elizabeth Varon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-11-21 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An authoritative biography of the second-highest-ranking and most controversial Confederate general, who rejoined the Union after the Civil War, advising other Confederate soldiers to put that war behind them. After joining an interracial government in New Orleans, Longstreet fought against white supremacists when they attacked these postwar elected officials, for which he was vilified and attacked by other Southerners, and blamed for the South's defeat in the Civil War"--
Download or read book From Arlington to Appomattox written by Charles R. Knight and published by Savas Beatie. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Brilliant . . . really gives one a sense of what it took to both lead and run an army in the Civil War. . . . Superb.” —Chris Kolakowski, author of The Virginia Campaigns: March–August 1862 In From Arlington to Appomattox, Charles Knight does for Robert E. Lee and students of the Civil War what E. B. Long’s Civil War Day by Day did for our understanding of the conflict as a whole. This is not another Lee biography, but it is every bit as valuable as one. We know Lee rode out to meet the survivors of Pickett’s Charge and accept blame for the defeat, that he tried to lead the Texas Brigade in a counterattack to save the day at the Wilderness, and took a tearful ride from Wilmer McLean’s house at Appomattox. But where was Lee and what was he doing when the spotlight of history failed to illuminate him? Focusing on what he was doing day by day offers an entirely different appreciation for Lee. Readers will come away with a fresh sense of his struggles, both personal and professional, and discover many things about Lee for the first time through his own correspondence and papers. From Arlington to Appomattox is a tremendous contribution to the literature of the Civil War. “Knight’s study will become the standard reference work on Lee’s daily wartime experiences.” —R. E. L. Krick, author of Staff Officers in Gray “A staggering work of scholarship.” —Jeffry D. Wert, author of A Glorious Army: Robert E. Lee’s Triumph, 1862–1863 "A pleasure to read.” —Michael C. Hardy, author of General Lee’s Immortals “Keeps the reader engaged.” —Journal of America's Military Past
Download or read book Keep All My Letters written by Richard Henry Brooks and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May 1862, Richard Henry Brooks of Blakely, Georgia, enlisted in the Confederate Army for the duration of the war, serving in Longstreet's Corps. He would see his wife and family only once in the next three years. He would suffer hardship and deprivation, become hospitalized, participate in one of the grandest Confederate victories of the war, and be captured and held prisoner for almost a year. He wrote his wife Telitha regularly. He told her repeatedly to save all his letters, which she did, and they are published in this book. These letters give considerable insight into Confederate homelife in southwest Georgia during the war. Brooks gives Telitha advice on the daily details of running the household. He tells her who to go to for help, how to obtain enough corn and pork for the winter, how to handle their slaves, and what supplies to send him in the field. He advises her on the children and directs the children to behave. These glimpses into the homelife of Confederate Georgia grant us a clearer understanding of how people far from the battlefields were still affected by the war.
Download or read book Far Far From Home written by Dick Simpson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1994-06-09 with total page 347 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 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 Dear Martha written by Alexander Faulkner Fewell and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Letter written by Marsh S. Bryson and published by . This book was released on 1863 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Letter, 25 September 1863, from Confederate soldier Marsh S. Bryson, deployed to Orange County (Virginia), writing to his sister describes activities in his army camp and request supplies from home.
Download or read book My Dear Mother Sisters written by A. B. Mulligan and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The war letters of Alfred B. Mulligan, a Charleston merchant who served in the Carolinas and Virginia until Oct. 1864.
Download or read book The Civil War Letters of Captain Leonard Williams written by Leonard Williams and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 The Civil War Letters of John M Anderson Company K Forty eighth Alabama infantry regiment C S A written by Joshua Glenn Price and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Civil War Letters of Private John M Anderson written by John M. Anderson and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Glorious Army written by Jeffry D. Wert and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “eloquent and judicious”* analysis of Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, from one of leading Civil War historians—now in paperback. From the time Robert E. Lee took command of the Army of Northern Virginia on June 1, 1862, until the Battle of Gettysburg thirteen months later, the Confederate army compiled a record of military achievement almost unparalleled in our nation’s history. How it happened—the relative contributions of Lee, his top command, opposing Union generals, and of course the rebel army itself—is the subject of Civil War historian Jeffry D. Wert’s fascinating new history. Wert shows how the audacity and aggression that fueled Lee’s victories ultimately proved disastrous at Gettysburg. But, as Wert explains, Lee had little choice: outnumbered by an opponent with superior resources, he had to take the fight to the enemy in order to win. When an equally combative Union general—Ulysses S. Grant—took command of northern forces in 1864, Lee was defeated. A Glorious Army draws on the latest scholarship to provide fresh assessments of Lee; his top commanders Longstreet, Jackson, and Stuart; and a shrewd battle strategy that still offers lessons to military commanders today.
