The Soldier's Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War

by Robert E. Bonner, James G. Basker (Foreword)

They are all infantrymen; none were commissioned officers. One is a German-speaking artist whose sole record is nineteen stunning watercolors that cover a year's enlistment. Another is a free black from Syracuse, New York. Six are from slave states, one of whom was a Unionist. 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 sixteen 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 accompany the humor of an anonymous cartoonist from Massachusetts, the vivid paintings of Private Henry Berckhoff. All reproduced for the first time in The Soldier's Pen , the documents and images that Bonner weaves together, providing context and explanation as required, powerfully re-create the day-to-day lives of the soldiers who fought and died for Union and Confederacy. Not since the 2000 publication of Robert Sneden's paintings and papers in Eye of the Storm has a collection of original Civil War documents so evocatively captured the war.

Genres: Civil War, History

272 pages, Paperback

First published November 14, 2006

About the author

Robert Bonner earned his A.B. at Princeton University and his PhD at Yale University. He has held teaching positions at the University of Southern Maine, Michigan State University, and Amherst College, and currently teaches at Dartmouth College.

Reviews

[Mrs. Hassig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Totally aweseom book and one I will use with my students! I actually got to spend a week with the Gilder-Lehrman foks at Columbia University and meet the curator of their archives. If you want to know what the war was really like for the soldiers themselves you will find it all in their letters and diaries. Multiple perspectives and no two men the same.