The Story of the Thirty Eighth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers

Written in 1865 by a soldier who served in its ranks, this is the intimate history of the Thirty-Eighth Massachusetts Infantry from its frantic formation in the summer of 1862 through the war's bloody conclusion. George Whitefield Powers documents not grand strategy but the immediate experiences of young volunteers gathering at camp, training under seasoned officers like Colonel Ingraham and Lieutenant Colonel Wardwell, and marching into the unfolding catastrophe of the Civil War. This is history at ground level: the hopes and fears of Massachusetts men answers the Union's call, the daily texture of soldiering, the battles that forged and shattered a regiment. Powers wrote while the smoke still hung over Appomattox, making this not history revised by hindsight but testimony rendered in the heat of memory. For readers seeking the human texture behind the statistics, the voices that inhabited those blue coats, this primary source offers something no later historian can replicate: the war as it was lived, not as it was analyzed.