The Thirty-Ninth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers, 1862-1865

The Thirty-Ninth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers answered Lincoln's call in the summer of 1862, marching from farms and factories into the crucible of war. Alfred S. Roe, writing half a century later, preserves what remained of their story: the recruits who drilled at Camp Stanton, the battles that thinned their ranks, the camaraderie and suffering that bound them together through Antietam, the Wilderness, and the final surrender at Appomattox. This is not broad military history but something more intimate, a portrait of one Massachusetts regiment and the men who served in it. Written in an era when veterans were still living memory rather than history, Roe's account carries an urgency that modern scholarship often lacks. He writes for men he knew, for stories that would otherwise vanish. The result is both memorial and document, preserving the daily realities of Civil War soldiering for readers who want to understand what it actually meant to serve in the Army of the Potomac.