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Author: Samuel Augustus Burney
Publisher: Mercer University Press
ISBN: 9780865548169
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
Samuel A. Burney, born in April 1840, was the son of Thomas Jefferson Burney and Julia Shields Burney. He graduated from Mercer University (then at Penfield, Georgia) in 1860. He joined the Panola Guards, an infantry component of Thomas R. R. Cobb's Georgia Legion, in July 1861. For the next four years he served in the Army of Northern Virginia both in Virginia and in Tennessee. Burney was wounded at Chancellorsville in May 1863, and as a result of his wound he was placed in disability in March 1864 and served the remainder of the war on commissary duty in southwest Georgia. After the war, Burney returned to Mercer's school of theology, was ordained into the Baptist ministry, and served as pastor of several churches in Morgan County. He was pastor of the Madison Baptist Church until shortly before his death in 1896. These letters of a college graduate written to his wife, Sarah Elizabeth Shepherd Burney are lyrical and beautifully written. Burney describes battles, camp life, theology, and the day-to-day dreariness of life in the army. This is an astounding collection of letters for anyone interested in the Civil War, or the South.
Author: Samuel Augustus Burney
Publisher: Mercer University Press
ISBN: 9780865548169
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
Samuel A. Burney, born in April 1840, was the son of Thomas Jefferson Burney and Julia Shields Burney. He graduated from Mercer University (then at Penfield, Georgia) in 1860. He joined the Panola Guards, an infantry component of Thomas R. R. Cobb's Georgia Legion, in July 1861. For the next four years he served in the Army of Northern Virginia both in Virginia and in Tennessee. Burney was wounded at Chancellorsville in May 1863, and as a result of his wound he was placed in disability in March 1864 and served the remainder of the war on commissary duty in southwest Georgia. After the war, Burney returned to Mercer's school of theology, was ordained into the Baptist ministry, and served as pastor of several churches in Morgan County. He was pastor of the Madison Baptist Church until shortly before his death in 1896. These letters of a college graduate written to his wife, Sarah Elizabeth Shepherd Burney are lyrical and beautifully written. Burney describes battles, camp life, theology, and the day-to-day dreariness of life in the army. This is an astounding collection of letters for anyone interested in the Civil War, or the South.
Author: Mark Flotow
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
ISBN: 0809337630
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
WINNER, Russell P. Strange Memorial Book of the Year Award from the Illinois State Historical Society, 2020! A vital lifeline to home during the Civil War, the letters of soldiers to their families and friends remain a treasure for those seeking to connect with and understand the most turbulent period of American history. Rather than focus on the experiences of a few witnesses, this impressively researched book documents 165 Illinois Civil War soldiers’ and sailors’ lives through the lens of their personal letters. Editor Mark Flotow chose a variety of letter writers who hailed from counties throughout the state, served in different branches of the military at different ranks, and represented the gamut of social experiences and war outcomes. Flotow provides extensive quotations from the letters. By allowing the soldiers to speak for themselves, he captures what mattered most to them. Illinois soldiers wrote about their reasons for enlisting; the nature of training and duties; necessities like eating, sleeping, marching, and making the best of often harsh and chaotic circumstances; Southern culture; slavery; their opinions of commanding officers and the president; disease, medicine, and hospitals; their prisoner-of-war experiences; and the ways they left the army. Through letters from afar, many soldiers sought to manage their homes and farms, while some single men attempted to woo their sweethearts. Flotow includes brief biographies for each soldier quoted in the book, weaves historical context and analysis with the letters, and organizes them by topic. Thus, intimate details cited in individual letters reveal their significance for those who lived and shaped this tumultuous era. The result is not only insightful history but also compelling reading.
Author: Frank Anderson Chappell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
Paper back
Author: Christopher Hager
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674981812
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
When North and South went to war, millions of American families endured their first long separation. For men in the armies—and their wives, children, parents, and siblings at home—letter writing was the sole means to communicate. Yet for many of these Union and Confederate families, taking pen to paper was a new and daunting task. I Remain Yours narrates the Civil War from the perspective of ordinary people who had to figure out how to salve the emotional strain of war and sustain their closest relationships using only the written word. Christopher Hager presents an intimate history of the Civil War through the interlaced stories of common soldiers and their families. The previously overlooked words of a carpenter from Indiana, an illiterate teenager from Connecticut, a grieving mother in the mountains of North Carolina, and a blacksmith’s daughter on the Iowa prairie reveal through their awkward script and expression the personal toll of war. Is my son alive or dead? Returning soon or never? Can I find words for the horrors I’ve seen or the loneliness I feel? Fear, loss, and upheaval stalked the lives of Americans straining to connect the battlefront to those they left behind. Hager shows how relatively uneducated men and women made this new means of communication their own, turning writing into an essential medium for sustaining relationships and a sense of belonging. Letter writing changed them and they in turn transformed the culture of letters into a popular, democratic mode of communication.
Author: Carol E. Yorke
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency
ISBN: 1681812851
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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Book Description
Before computers and the internet, letter writing was a labor of love. They could make you laugh or cry, holding untold mysteries within a quaint, many-times-over postmarked envelope. When the letter writer is a strapping lad of twenty-four who is blind in one eye and gets into the Army by faking the eye test, his letters home span the hysterically funny to the downright absurd. Meet Hal, Harold W. Yorke, Jr., a tall young man with coal black hair, a strikingly pale moustache, tanned complexion, and intelligent blue eyes that speak volumes. What started as a lark, turns into an interesting career in the Army spanning twenty years. The military took him all over the United States and to exotic locales like Korea and Puerto Rico. Hal’s journey of sepia-tinted World War II memories relates how he makes do with a not-so-handsome salary, yet his sharp mind and will to succeed has him fixing cars and planes, as well as just about anything broken that needs repairs during wartime. His letter home on how to score a cake from the base kitchen without getting caught is hilarious, while his letter about a terrifying fire will chill hearts. Presented by his daughter in this nostalgic compilation, each day in the military produced something new for Hal, and all those outpourings are captured as if on cellulose.
Author: Dick Simpson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190282169
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347
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Book Description
In April 1861, Dick and Tally Simpson, sons of South Carolina Congressman Richard F. Simpson, enlisted in Company A of the Third South Carolina Volunteers of the Confederate army. Their letters home--published here for the first time--read like a historical novel, complete with plot, romance, character, suspense, and tragedy. In their last year of college when the war broke out, Dick and Tally were hastily handed their diplomas so they could volunteer for military duty. Dick was twenty; Tally was twenty-two. Well educated, intelligent, and thoughtful young men, Dick and Tally cared deeply for their country, their family, and their comrades-in-arms and wrote frequently to their loved ones in Pendleton, South Carolina, offering firsthand accounts of dramatic events from the battle of First Manassas in July 1861 to the battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. Their letters provide a picture of war as it was actually experienced at the time, not as it was remembered some twenty or thirty years later. It is a picture that neither glorifies war nor condemns it, but simply "tells it like it is." Written to a number of different people, the boys' letters home dealt with a number of different subjects. Letters to "Pa" went into great detail about military matters in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia--troop movements, casualties, and how well particular units had fought; letters to "Ma" and sisters Anna and Mary were about camp life and family friends in the army and usually included requests for much-needed food and clothing; letters to Aunt Caroline and her daughter Carrie usually concerned affairs of the heart, for Aunt Caroline continued to be Dick and Tally's trusted confidante, even when they were "far, far from home." The value of these letters lies not so much in the detailed information they provide as in the overall picture they convey--a picture of how one Southern family, for better or for worse, at home and at the front--coped with the experience of war. These are not wartime reminiscences, but wartime letters, written from the camp, the battlefield, the hospital bed, the picket line--wherever the boys happened to be when they found time to write home. It is a poignant picture of war as it was actually experienced in the South as the Civil War unfolded.
Author: James M. McPherson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199741050
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
General John A. Wickham, commander of the famous 101st Airborne Division in the 1970s and subsequently Army Chief of Staff, once visited Antietam battlefield. Gazing at Bloody Lane where, in 1862, several Union assaults were brutally repulsed before they finally broke through, he marveled, "You couldn't get American soldiers today to make an attack like that." Why did those men risk certain death, over and over again, through countless bloody battles and four long, awful years ? Why did the conventional wisdom -- that soldiers become increasingly cynical and disillusioned as war progresses -- not hold true in the Civil War? It is to this question--why did they fight--that James McPherson, America's preeminent Civil War historian, now turns his attention. He shows that, contrary to what many scholars believe, the soldiers of the Civil War remained powerfully convinced of the ideals for which they fought throughout the conflict. Motivated by duty and honor, and often by religious faith, these men wrote frequently of their firm belief in the cause for which they fought: the principles of liberty, freedom, justice, and patriotism. Soldiers on both sides harkened back to the Founding Fathers, and the ideals of the American Revolution. They fought to defend their country, either the Union--"the best Government ever made"--or the Confederate states, where their very homes and families were under siege. And they fought to defend their honor and manhood. "I should not lik to go home with the name of a couhard," one Massachusetts private wrote, and another private from Ohio said, "My wife would sooner hear of my death than my disgrace." Even after three years of bloody battles, more than half of the Union soldiers reenlisted voluntarily. "While duty calls me here and my country demands my services I should be willing to make the sacrifice," one man wrote to his protesting parents. And another soldier said simply, "I still love my country." McPherson draws on more than 25,000 letters and nearly 250 private diaries from men on both sides. Civil War soldiers were among the most literate soldiers in history, and most of them wrote home frequently, as it was the only way for them to keep in touch with homes that many of them had left for the first time in their lives. Significantly, their letters were also uncensored by military authorities, and are uniquely frank in their criticism and detailed in their reports of marches and battles, relations between officers and men, political debates, and morale. For Cause and Comrades lets these soldiers tell their own stories in their own words to create an account that is both deeply moving and far truer than most books on war. Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Civil War, was a national bestseller that Hugh Brogan, in The New York Times, called "history writing of the highest order." For Cause and Comrades deserves similar accolades, as McPherson's masterful prose and the soldiers' own words combine to create both an important book on an often-overlooked aspect of our bloody Civil War, and a powerfully moving account of the men who fought it.
Author: Joseph Hopkins Twichell
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820340871
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
In 1861 young Joseph Twichell cut short his seminary studies to become a Union Army chaplain in New York's Excelsior Brigade. A middle-class New England Protestant, Twichell served for three years in a regiment manned mostly by poor Irish American Catholics. This selection of Twichell's letters to his Connecticut family will rank him alongside the Civil War's most literate and insightful firsthand chroniclers of life on the road, in battle, and in camp. As a noncombatant, he at once observed and participated in the momentous events of the Peninsula and Wilderness Campaigns and at the Second Bull Run, as well as at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Spotsylvania. Twichell writes about politics and slavery and the theological and cultural divide between him and his men. Most movingly, he tells of tending the helpless, burying the dead, and counseling the despondent. Alongside accounts of a run-in with slave hunters, a massive withdrawal of wounded soldiers from Richmond, and other extraordinary events, Twichell offers close-up views of his commanding officer, the "political general" Daniel Sickles, surely one of the most colorful and controversial leaders on either side. Civil War scholars and enthusiasts will welcome this fresh voice from an underrepresented class of soldier, the army chaplain. Readers who know of Twichell's later life as a prominent minister and reformer or as Mark Twain's closest friend will appreciate these insights into his early, transforming experiences.
Author: John C. Oeffinger
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
During his service in the Confederate army, Major General Lafayette McLaws (1821-1897) served under and alongside such famous officers as Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, James Longstreet, and John B. Hood. He played a significant role in some of the most crucial battles of the Civil War, including Harpers Ferry, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Despite this, no biography of McLaws or history of his division has ever been published. A Soldier's General gathers ninety-five letters written by McLaws to his family between 1858 and 1865, making these valuable resources available to a wide audience for the first time. The letters, painstakingly transcribed from McLaws's notoriously poor handwriting, contain a wealth of opinion and information about life and morale in the Confederate army, Civil War-era politics, the Southern press, and the impact of war on the Confederate home front. Among the fascinating threads the letters trace is the story of McLaws's fractured relationship with childhood friend Longstreet, who had McLaws relieved of command in 1863. John Oeffinger's extensive introduction sketches McLaws's life from his beginnings in Augusta, Georgia, through his early experiences in the U.S. Army, his marriage, his Civil War exploits, and his postwar years.
Author: Thomas W. Cutrer
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807130162
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Residents of antebellum northwest Louisiana held strong pro-Union sentiments, and the Pierson family of Bienville Parish, Louisiana, were no exception, opposing secession in 1861. Yet once war began, the region contributed its full share of support to the southern army, and four of William H. Pierson's eight sons enlisted. Ranging from the early battles of the Trans-Mississippi to the epic battles of the Army of Northern Virginia, and from the brutal trenches of Vicksburg to provost guard duty in north Louisiana, this extensive collection of Civil War letters, written by three of the Pierson brothers, offers riveting glimpses of almost every variety of experience faced by Confederate soldiers. Prolific letter writers, the Piersons were educated, observant, and well placed to comment not only on the battles and campaigns of their regiments but also on their commanding officers, the effect of political activity on soldier morale, being taken captive, and, most of all, their entire family's understanding of and commitment to the Confederate cause.
