An Artilleryman's Diary

This is not history written from generals' headquarters - it is the war as seen from the saddle of an artillery horse, in the mud of Virginia, in the long hours of tedium between battles. Jenkins Lloyd Jones was nineteen when he left his Wisconsin farm to join the 6th Wisconsin Battery, and his diary captures something history books often lose: the texture of becoming a soldier. We feel his mix of pride and terror as he trains at Camp Randall, his aching homesickness as he travels the Mississippi, his witnesses to the grand movements of armies made comprehensible only through the small lens of a private's daily life. Jones writes with startling immediacy about the Iron Brigade's brutal initiation into combat, the friends who vanished, the routines that kept fear at bay. This is primary source material at its most human - unpolished, specific, and devastating in its simplicity. For anyone who wants to understand what the Civil War actually felt like to the young men who fought it, there is no substitute for a voice like this one.