WITNESS TO WAR: The Story of the Civil War Told By Those Who Lived It

1-251900

Details the events of the Civil War from those that lived through it. The widespread literacy of the mid-nineteenth century made it possible for an unprecedented number of Americans to record their thoughts, observations, descriptions, and opinions of the war. Contains more than 500 letters, all of them in print for the first time, to reveal life during the Civil War. Presented chronologically from Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 through his assassination in 1865, the letters follow the entire arc of the Civil War as it unfolds in real time through the words of everyday people: military and civilian, Union and Confederate, white and black, men, women, and even a few children.