The Twenty-Fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion: History, Reminiscences, Description of Battle of Irish Bend, Carrying of Pay Roll, Roster

Fifty years after the last shot was fired at Port Hudson, veterans of the Twenty-fifth Connecticut Volunteers gathered their memories and committed them to print. What emerges is notdry military chronology but something far rarer: the living voice of men who marched through Louisiana swamps, charged rebel batteries, and carried their regiment's pay roll through war-torn territory. Colonel George P. Bissell and his comrades render the Civil War in intimate detail, from the grit of training camp to the particular terror of battle in the Bayou state. Major Thomas McManus gives a full accounting of Irish Bend, where the regiment earned its reputation. Samuel K. Ellis recalls the private's view, the tedium and brotherhood and terror that defined an enlisted man's experience. This is history from below, preserved before the generation that carried it passed from memory entirely. For readers seeking the human texture behind the grand narratives of 1861-1865, these pages offer something invaluable: the chance to hear Civil War soldiers speak in their own words, half a century after they laid down their muskets.