With the Conscription Act of 1862, the Confederacy enacted the first military draft in American history. Rather than face duty with strangers in an uncertain locale, twenty-eight-year-old Edmund Trent Eggleston of Warren County, Mississippi, took advantage of a thirty-day grace period and joined his neighbors in volunteering for duty in Company G of the 1st Mississippi Light Artillery Regiment. Throughout his service, Eggleston kept a detailed account of his daily activities and those of his unit, a diary that remains one of the very few primary sources from a Confederate artillerist in...