The Soldier's Pen

the long version

They are all infantrymen; none are commissioned officers. One is a German-speaking artist whose sole record is 19 stunning watercolors that cover a year's enlistment. Another is a free black from Syracuse, New York. Six, one of whom is a Unionist, are from slave states. Drawing from the more than 60,000 documents housed in the privately held Gilder Lehrman Collection, Robert E. Bonner has movingly reconstructed the experiences of 16 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 bring these infantrymen's experiences to vivid life while the humor of an anonymous cartoonist from Massachusetts and the vivid paintings of Private Henry Berckhoff allow us to see their world through their eyes. All published for the first time in The Soldiers Pen, the documents and images that Bonner weaves together powerfully re-create the day-to-day lives of the soldiers who fought and died for Union and Confederacy. - Jacket flap.