My First Campaign

One of the earliest soldier's memoirs from the Civil War, written in 1863 by a young private who had just lived what he recorded. Joseph W. Grant enlisted with the Twelfth Rhode Island Volunteers and here documents the chaos and excitement of becoming a soldier: the enlistment paperwork, the hastily formed regiment, the train journey through Baltimore (still tense with Confederate sympathy), the camps, the food, the growing bonds with comrades, and the awful anticipation of combat he has not yet seen. This is not a general's retrospective account or a historian's analysis. It is a twenty-year-old's letter to the future, recording what it felt like to trade civilian life for uniform and uncertainty. Grant writes with the urgency of someone who knows his account will be read by people who knew him, in a world where letters from the front carried the weight of possible death. For readers of Civil War history, for those interested in how ordinary people experience war, this memoir offers something invaluable: the unpolished voice of a soldier in the moment, before memory could soften or distort what he felt.