History of Company K of the 140th Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers (1862-'65)

This is not a historian's account. This is a soldier's memory, preserved forty years after the last shot was fired. Benjamin F. Powelson, former First Sergeant of Company K, writes with the intimate authority of a man who shared a camp with these men, marched with them toward Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, and buried the ones who didn't come home. The 140th Pennsylvania Volunteers, the 'Roundheads' of Puritan stock, were schoolboys and farmers, clerks and mechanics who swapped civilian life for the brutality of a nation's wound. Powelson dedicates his book to both the living and the dead, and that duality haunts every page: the bonds forged in blood, the friends whose names he could not let fade into history. This is local history at its most personal, a company-sized lens on the war that nearly broke America. For readers who want to understand what soldiers actually felt, rather than what generals planned, this memoir offers something rare: the voice of an enlisted man, speaking not of strategy but of comradeship, endurance, and the quiet courage of men who fought not for glory but for each other.