Perry's Saints; Or, The Fighting Parson's Regiment in the War of the Rebellion

In the chaos of Civil War, one man traded his pulpit for a pistol. Colonel James H. Perry, a former preacher, became the unlikely commander of the 48th New York State Volunteers, a regiment that would earn the nickname "Perry's Saints" through four years of brutal combat. James Moses Nichols, writing in 1886, captured something vanishingly rare: not just the maneuvers and battles, but the inner life of Union soldiers, their fears, their faith, their fierce loyalty to a man who had once spoken for God and now led them into hell. This is historical writing before the distance of decades softened anything; Nichols wrote while the smoke had barely cleared, while veterans still remembered the exact weight of their packs and the faces of men who did not come home.