V

TESTIMONY FROM PARTICIPANTS

Studying the Civil War affords great pleasure in discovering superior testimony written by the generation that experienced it. Very high literacy rates in both the United States and the Confederacy, together with the fact that millions of Americans suffered family separations in the midst of gripping events, contributed to the creation of a vast corpus of letters and diaries. Because the war represented the dramatic high point of their lives, many participants also recorded their actions and opinions in memoirs. This section samples the war’s published primary record in thirteen essays that, as with those in part 4, emerged from a delightful process of revisiting books and authors central to my life’s work. I begin with an essay on soldiers’ letters, a large and continuously growing category of testimony. The next five essays deal with Union sources, including one of the best diaries in all of American history, testimony given before the war’s most famous congressional committee, and an assortment of letters, memoirs, and campaign accounts. Confederates receive their turn in six essays that explore the frequently quoted diary of a Rebel war clerk, letters and diaries written by women and staff officers, a massive history of the war composed while fighting still raged, and a postwar magazine that helped define the Confederate memory of the war. The final piece presents two talented British sketch artists whose images depicted action, people, and places in ways beyond the capacity of mid-nineteenth-century photography.