Includes bibliographical references (pages 237-245) and index.
Contents:
Glimpses of many things untold -- The tender lines of war -- Army life and the comforts of home -- Combat, bloodshed and the traces of battle -- The union divided? -- The fading gray -- Bonds broken, bonds restored -- Relics of war.
Summary:
They are all infantrymen; none were commissioned officers. One is a German-speaking artist whose sole record is nineteen stunning watercolors that cover a year's enlistment. Another is a free black from Syracuse, New York. Six are from slave states, one of whom was a Unionist. Drawing from the more than 60,000 documents housed in the privately held Gilder Lehrman Collection, Robert E. Bonner has reconstructed the experiences of sixteen Civil War soldiers, using their own accounts to knit together a ground-level view of the entire conflict. The immediacy of diaries and the intimacy of letters to loved ones accompany the humor of an anonymous cartoonist from Massachusetts, the vivid paintings of Private Henry Berckhoff. All reproduced for the first time in The Soldier's Pen, the documents and images that Bonner weaves together, providing context and explanation as required, re-create the day-to-day lives of the soldiers who fought and died for Union and Confederacy. --From publisher's description.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.