These letters by New England soldiers and their families, many published for the first time, speak of the hardships of the war, especially frustrations with the army, homefront suffering, and government policies. 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.

William R. J. Pegram forged a record as one of the most prominent artillerists in the Army of Northern Virginia. He participated in every major battle in Virginia and rose form sergeant to full colonel by the end of the war. Neither zealot nor fanatic, Pegram shared the values of the South's ruling elite, and Peter S. Carmichael argues that he entered Confederate service to defend a way fo life he believed was ordained but God. Lee's Young Artillerist looks at Pegram as a case study to explore the worldview of slaveholders in the antebellum South.

On the day Fort Sumter surrendered to Confederate authorities, General Braxton Bragg reacted to a newspaper report that might have revealed the position of gun emplacements by placing the correspondent, a Southern loyalist, under arrest. Thus the Confederate army's first detention of a citizen occurred before President Lincoln had even called out troops to suppress the rebellion. During the civil war that followed, not a day would pass when Confederate military prisons did not contain political prisoners.

Based on the discovery of records of over four thousand of these prisoners,...

Expelled from occupied New Orleans by Federal forces after refusing to pledge loyalty to the Union, Henri Garidel remained in exile from his home and family from 1863 to 1865. Lonely, homesick, and alienated, the French-Catholic Garidel, a clerk in the Confederate Bureau of Ordnance, was a complete outsider in the wartime capital of Richmond.

In his faithfully kept diary, Garidel relates the trials and discomforts--physical, emotional, spiritual, and professional--of life in a city entirely foreign to him. Civil War Richmonders were predominantly white, evangelical Protestants in a...

Distinguished from traditional historical narrative by its balanced portrayal of wartime experiences both at home and on the battlefield and flavored by its vivid portrayal of a divided Appalachian community, Ashe County's Civil War: Community and Society in the Appalachian South breaks new ground in Southern social, political, and economic history.

Martin Crawford contends that the experiences of Ashe County's men and women during the Civil War era were shaped as much by their membership in the wider American society as by uniquely local factors. Through a thoughtful blending of...