The first major modern edition of the wartime correspondence of General William T. Sherman, this volume features more than 400 letters written between the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and the day Sherman bade farewell to his troops in 1865. Together, they trace Sherman's rise from obscurity to become one of the Union's most famous and effective warriors. Arranged chronologically and grouped into chapters that correspond to significant phases in Sherman's life, the letters--many of which have never before been published--reveal Sherman's thoughts on politics, military operations, slavery and emancipation, the South, and daily life in the Union army, as well as his reactions to such important figures as General Ulysses S. Grant and President Lincoln. Lively, frank, opinionated, discerning, and occasionally extremely wrong-headed, these letters mirror the colorful personality and complex mentality of the man who wrote them. They offer the reader an invaluable glimpse of the Civil War as Sherman saw it.

Recounts the first experience of women nurses in an American war Although the Civil War was the first major American conflict in which women nurses played a significant role, the dearth of information about these women makes the diary of a Southern medical worker an especially important document. A Confederate Nurse records the daily experiences, hardships, and joys of Ada W. Bacot, a plantation owner and childless widow whose Southern patriotism prompted her to leave her native South Carolina to care for wounded Confederates in Charlottesville, Virginia. Bacot's journal sheds light on her own experiences and also on the themes that dominated the lives of Southern white women throughout the nineteenth century. A Confederate Nurse reveals the Confederate nationalism that motivated some Southern women and the work these women performed to sustain the war effort.

Rumor, gossip, and innuendo are the weapons of the home front, and no one wielded them with quite the aplomb of Maria Lydig Daly. Her richly detailed comments on everything from inept Union generals to Dorothea Dix's appearance provide the liveliest memoir to emerge from a Northern noncombatant. Daly was the wife of a prominent New York City judge whose connections allowed her to meet many major figures involved in Northern military and diplomatic strategy. Despite catty comments about Mrs. Lincoln and less-than-flattering appraisals of Union generalship, Daly could be sympathetic toward the suffering of the soldiers. She noted the fear with which many viewed the draft, seeing it as a terrible incursion on liberty, but she understood that the times called for severe measures.

She was called "The Florence Nightingale of America." From the fighting at Gettysburg to the capture of Richmond, this young Quaker nurse worked tirelessly to relieve the suffering of soldiers. She was one of the great heroines of the Union.

Cornelia Hancock served in field and evacuating hospitals, in a contraband camp, and (defying authority) on the battlefield. Her letters to family members are witty, unsentimental, and full of indignation about the neglect of wounded soldiers and black refugees. Hancock was fiercely devoted to the welfare of the privates who had "nothing before them but hard marching, poor fare, and terrible fighting."

In the fall of 1864 General Sherman and his army cut a ruinous swath across Georgia, and outraged Southerners steeled themselves for defeat. Threatened by the approach of the Union army, young Eliza Frances Andrews and her sister Metta fled from their home in Washington, Georgia, to comparative safety in the southwestern part of the state. The daughter of a prominent judge who disapproved of secession, Eliza kept a diary that fully registers the anger and despair of Confederate citizens during the last months of the Civil War. Traveling across Georgia, Eliza observes Sherman's devastation. A lively social life is maintained at her eldest sister's plantation, where she and Metta take refuge, but Eliza's sense of doom is clear. Rumors are rife--the fall of Richmond, the surrender of General Lee, the imminent approach of the Yankees. On returning to the family home, she sees the Old South crumble before her eyes. "The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl" depicts the chaos and tumult of a period when invaders and freed slaves swarmed in the streets, starved and beaten soldiers asked for food at houses with little or none, and currency was worthless. Eliza's agony is complicated by political differences with her beloved father. Edited and first published nearly a half century after the Civil War, her diary is a passionate firsthand record.

"War seems inevitable," wrote Judith W. McGuire in her diary on 10 May 1861, shortly after the firing on Fort Sumter. Fervently loyal to the South, she was packing up valuables at her home in Alexandria, Virginia, where the Confederate flag already waved. With her family she fled the city, and for the next four years she would be a refugee in her own land. Literate and newsy, shrewdly detailed and extremely moving, Diary of a Southern Refugee during the War is one of the best civilian records of the Civil War. Judith McGuire, the wife of an Episcopal minister, follows the newspapers assiduously, taking heart from good reports out of Bull Run and Shiloh and fighting despair when the tide turns against the Rebels. She sews for the soldiers, nurses them in hospitals, and notes the deaths of friends in battle: "Thus we bury, one by one, the dearest, the brightest." Steeling herself, she sees humor in desperate situations. McGuire shares common hardships, struggling to obtain food and lodging, but her position permits a glimpse of wartime Richmond society and meetings with General and Mrs. Robert E. Lee. Always up and doing, scorning slackers and defeatists, she confides to her diary on a dark day, "I wish I could sleep until the war is over." Introducing this edition is Jean V. Berlin, the editor of A Confederate Nurse: The Diary of Ada W. Bacot, 1860-1863.

The Civil War wrought cataclysmic changes in the lives of American Women on both sides of the conflict. "Women in the Civil War" demonstrates their enterprise, fortitude, and fierceness. In this revealing social history, Massey focuses on many famous women, including nurses Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, and Mother Bickerdyke; spies Pauline Cushman and Belle Boyd; writers Louisa May Alcott, Julia Ward Howe, and Mary Chestnut; pamphleteer and military strategist Anna Ella Carroll; black abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth; feminists Susan B. Anthony and Jane Grey Swisshelm; and political wives Varina Davis and Mary Todd Lincoln. The anonymous women who maintained farms and plantations are described, as are camp followers, businesswomen, entertainers, activists, and socialites in Charleston and Washington.