A Diary Of Battle; The Personal Journals Of Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, 1861-1865 PDF Download

Author: Colonel Charles S. Wainwright
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1786251140
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1075

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Book Description
When Colonel Charles S. Wainwright (1826–1907), later a brevet brigadier general, was commissioned in the First New York Artillery Regiment of the Army of the Potomac in October 1861, he began a journal. As an officer who fought at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Spotsylvania, and Petersburg, and who witnessed the leadership of Generals McClellan, Hooker, Burnside, Meade, Grant, and Sheridan, he brilliantly describes his experiences, views, and emotions. But Wainwright’s entries go beyond military matters to include his political and social observations. Skillfully edited by Allan Nevins, historian and author of the classic multivolume Ordeal of the Union, this journal is Wainwright’s vivid and invaluable gift to posterity.

Author: Janet Elizabeth Croon
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1611213894
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 489

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A remarkable account of the collapse of the Old South and the final years of a young boy’s privileged but afflicted life. LeRoy Wiley Gresham was born in 1847 to an affluent slave-holding family in Macon, Georgia. After a horrific leg injury left him an invalid, the educated, inquisitive, perceptive, and exceptionally witty twelve-year-old began keeping a diary in 1860—just as secession and the Civil War began tearing the country and his world apart. He continued to write even as his health deteriorated until both the war and his life ended in 1865. His unique manuscript of the demise of the Old South is published here for the first time in The War Outside My Window. LeRoy read books, devoured newspapers and magazines, listened to gossip, and discussed and debated important social and military issues with his parents and others. He wrote daily for five years, putting pen to paper with a vim and tongue-in-cheek vigor that impresses even now, more than 150 years later. His practical, philosophical, and occasionally Twain-like hilarious observations cover politics and the secession movement, the long and increasingly destructive Civil War, family pets, a wide variety of hobbies and interests, and what life was like at the center of a socially prominent wealthy family in the important Confederate manufacturing center of Macon. The young scribe often voiced concern about the family’s pair of plantations outside town, and recorded his interactions and relationships with servants as he pondered the fate of human bondage and his family’s declining fortunes. Unbeknownst to LeRoy, he was chronicling his own slow and painful descent toward death in tandem with the demise of the Southern Confederacy. He recorded—often in horrific detail—an increasingly painful and debilitating disease that robbed him of his childhood. The teenager’s declining health is a consistent thread coursing through his fascinating journals. “I feel more discouraged [and] less hopeful about getting well than I ever did before,” he wrote on March 17, 1863. “I am weaker and more helpless than I ever was.” Morphine and a score of other “remedies” did little to ease his suffering. Abscesses developed; nagging coughs and pain consumed him. Alternating between bouts of euphoria and despondency, he often wrote, “Saw off my leg.” The War Outside My Window, edited and annotated by Janet Croon with helpful footnotes and a detailed family biographical chart, captures the spirit and the character of a young privileged white teenager witnessing the demise of his world even as his own body slowly failed him. Just as Anne Frank has come down to us as the adolescent voice of World War II, LeRoy Gresham will now be remembered as the young voice of the Civil War South. Winner, 2018, The Douglas Southall Freeman Award

Author: Charles Shiels Wainwright
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: Charles Cromwell Martin
Publisher: Dundurn
ISBN: 1770700749
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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A fast-paced account by a soldier who was twice decorated. Charlie Martin, company sergeant-major in the Queen’s Own, was with his beloved A Company in all of the significant Normandy actions.

Author: Kristen Brill
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807167436
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Lucy Wood Butler's diary provides a compelling account of an ordinary woman's struggle to come to terms with realities of war on the Confederate home front. Married at the start of the war, she would become a widow by mid-1863; her account of life in the Confederacy explores her life in Virginia, her mourning period for her deceased husband, and her views on the waning prospect of Confederate victory. Now available in book form for the first time, The Diary of a Civil War Bride brings to light a vital archival resource that reveals the mindset of women in the Civil War South.

Author: Elisha Hunt Rhodes
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307772705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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All for the Union is the eloquent and moving diary of Elisha Hunt Rhodes, featured throughout Ken Burns' PBS documentary The Civil War. Rhodes enlisted into the Union Army as a private in 1861 and left it four years later as a twenty-three-year-old colonel after fighting hard and honorably in battles from Bull Run to Appomattox. Anyone who heard these diaries excerpted in The Civil War will recognize his accounts of those campaigns, which remain outstanding for their clarity and detail. Most of all, Rhodes's words reveal the motivation of a common Yankee foot soldier, an otherwise ordinary young man who endured the rigors of combat and exhausting marches, short rations, fear, and homesickness for a salary of $13 a month and the satisfaction of giving "all for the union."

Author: Cornelia Peake McDonald
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299132644
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Cornelia Peake McDonald kept a diary during the Civil War (1861- 1865) at her husband's request, but some entries were written between the lines of printed books due to a shortage of paper and other entries were lost. In 1875, she assembled her scattered notes and records of the war period into a blank book to leave to her children. The diary entries describe civilian life in Winchester, Va., occupation by Confederate troops prior to the 1st Manassas, her husband's war experiences, the Valley campaigns and occupation of Winchester and her home by Union troops, the death of her baby girl, the family's "refugee life" in Lexington, reports of battles elsewhere, and news of family and friends in the army.

Author: Rufus Kinsley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521823340
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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This book offers a meticulous reconstruction of the life of Rufus Kinsley - an ordinary New England soldier who during the Civil War became an officer in one of the nations's first and most famous black regiments - and an expertly edited transcription of Kinsley's hitherto unpublished wartime diary. Kinsley's diary sheds light on a long neglected theater of the war - the battle for the bayou country of southwestern Louisiana - and it illuminates the workaday routines of black and white soldiers stationed behind Union lines but thoroughly immersed in the unprecedented improvisations that accompanied the social revolution that was emancipation. Kinsley's perspective is that of a too often neglected type: the absolutely dedicated evangelical abolitionist soldier who believed that the war and its consequences were divine retribution for the sin of slavery. The introductory biography places Kinsley's civil war experience in the context of his life and his times.

Author: James B. Sheeran
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813228824
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Here is the Civil War diary of Redemptorist priest Rev. James Sheeran, C. Ss. R., who was chaplain to the 14th Louisiana Regiment of the Confederacy. Irish-born Sheeran was one of only two Catholic chaplains commissioned for the Confederacy who kept a journal. From August 1, 1862 through April 24, 1865, the journal tells of all the major events of his life in abundant detail: on the battle field, in the hospitals, and among Catholics and Protestants whom he encountered in local towns, on the trains, and in the course of his ministrations. His ideological sympathies clearly rest with the Confederacy. The tone is forthright, even haughty, but captures in sure and steady fashion, both the personality of the man and the events to which he was a witness, especially the major battles. The journal is arguably the most unique narrative of the war written by a chaplain of any denomination and certainly is the most extensive.

Author: Samuel P. Richards
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820329991
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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This previously unpublished diary is the best-surviving firsthand account of life in Civil War-era Atlanta. Bookseller Samuel Pearce Richards (1824-1910) kept a diary for sixty-seven years. This volume excerpts the diary from October 1860, just before the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, through August 1865, when the Richards family returned to Atlanta after being forced out by Sherman's troops and spending a period of exile in New York City. The Richardses were among the last Confederate loyalists to leave Atlanta. Sam's recollections of the Union bombardment, the evacuation of the city, the looting of his store, and the influx of Yankee forces are riveting. Sam was a Unionist until 1860, when his sentiments shifted in favor of the Confederacy. However, as he wrote in early 1862, he had "no ambition to acquire military renown and glory." Likewise, Sam chafed at financial setbacks caused by the war and at Confederate policies that seemed to limit his freedom. Such conflicted attitudes come through even as Sam writes about civic celebrations, benefit concerts, and the chaotic optimism of life in a strategically critical rebel stronghold. He also reflects with soberness on hospitals filled with wounded soldiers, the threat of epidemics, inflation, and food shortages. A man of deep faith who liked to attend churches all over town, Sam often commments on Atlanta's religious life and grounds his defense of slavery and secession in the Bible. Sam owned and rented slaves, and his diary is a window into race relations at a time when the end of slavery was no longer unthinkable. Perhaps most important, the diary conveys the tenor of Sam's family life. Both Sam and his wife, Sallie, came from families divided politically and geographically by war. They feared for their children's health and mourned for relatives wounded and killed in battle. The figures in Sam Richards's Civil War Diary emerge as real people; the intimate experience of the Civil War home front is conveyed with great power.