Often called Lee's greatest triumph, the battle of Chancellorsville decimated the Union Eleventh Corps, composed of large numbers of German-speaking volunteers. Poorly deployed, the unit was routed by "Stonewall" Jackson and became the scapegoat for the Northern defeat, blamed by many on the "flight" of German immigrant troops. The impact on America's large German community was devastating. But there is much more to the story than that. Drawing for the first time on German-language newspapers, soldiers' letters, memoirs, and regimental records, Christian Keller reconstructs the battle and its...

Yours for the Union is a collection of letters that takes us inside the life and mind of a Civil War soldier. John Chase's reports of his service with the Army of the Potomac, reveal what the war was really like for the men who fought it. Chase was a 36 year-old cabinetmaker from Roxbury, a widower with four young children when he enlisted as a private in the First Massachusetts Light Artillery. These well written letters portray a man who is trying to provide for his children, maintain his finances, obtain food and clothing to supplement his meager rations, all while marching in the mud and...