William Winters was unlike most of the young soldiers who answered the Union s appeal for men in 1861 and 1862. He was different from many of his comrades in age and point of view, and his war service was also out of the ordinary.

The last great surge of popular voluntary enlistment swept up Winters, a thirty-two-year-old saddle and harness maker and father of three from Indiana. Like so many others in the Civil War, Winters was a prolific correspondent, and through his letters we have a record of some lesser-known campaigns. Winters served in the siege of Vicksburg and in the Red River...