Writing & Fighting from the Army of Northern Virginia: A Collection of Confederate Soldier Correspondence. Ed. by William Styple. 313 pp., hc, Index.

Writing & Fighting from the Army of Northern Virginia

edited by William Styple

This book is the third in a series of volumes I began in 2000 with the release of Writing & Fighting the Civil War: Soldier Correspondence to the New York Sunday Mercury. At the outbreak of the Civil War the Sunday Morning was the most popular weekly newspaper in the United States. After the firing on Fort Sumter and the interruption of communication between the North and South, the Sunday Mercury lost its Southern readership, a financial blow that nearly forced the paper out of business. Unable to hire professional war journalists and in desperate need of war news, publisher and editor William Cauldwell conceived the idea of asking the departing volunteers to serve as war correspondents, offering a free newspaper to every soldier who supplied a letter. This novel concept generated nearly 3,000 letters written from the battlefront during the course of the conflict, resulting in the Sunday Mercury becoming ìthe soldierís newspaper.î Contrasting itself with other northern journals that had reporters following the army, observing, or interviewing General so-and-so, the Sunday Mercury stated that ìour army of war correspondents are writing and fighting at the same time, and are, therefore, competent to describe the actions in which they bear their parts.î

For me, the Sunday Mercury collection is the only authentic history of the Civil War; it is history written without hindsight, by those qualified to tell us what it was like. Out of this remarkable collection I selected 500 letters that best reflect the story of the Civil War as it was seen through the eyes of the common soldier. Because the Sunday Mercury correspondence is exclusively Union, my thoughts naturally turned to one day creating a Confederate volumeñletters written on the same day, from a different trench.

In 2001, while researching at Columbia University, I discovered the Peter Wellington Alexander Letter Collection. ìP.W.A.î was a war correspondent for the Savannah Republican and several other Georgia newspapers. As the war progressed, Alexanderís fame grew and his dispatches began to appear in almost every paper in the Confederacy; when the war was finished, he had written nearly 800 letters from the front and proposed writing a history of the Confederacy. Unfortunately, Alexander died before completing his project.

In 2002, in recognition of Alexanderís long-forgotten contribution, I published Writing & Fighting the Confederate War: The Letters of Peter Wellington Alexander, a collection of 250 of his wartime letters, providing another fresh insight to the history of the Civil War.

Among the ìP.W.A.î archive (numbering 7,500 letters and documents), I also found a large collection of Confederate soldier correspondence that either appeared in print alongside Alexanderís columns, or had been clipped by himñpossibly for his proposed history. Since Alexander was a Georgian, who primarily wrote for Georgia newspapers, the majority of letters in his collection are by soldiers from that state. After reading these letters, I felt they were a perfect Confederate complement to the Sunday Mercury book, and the third volume in the Writing & Fighting series was underway.

For this volume, as letters from the western theater of operations were scarce, I decided to use letters written exclusively from the foremost fighting organization of the Confederate Statesñthe Army of Northern Virginia.

In existance for a mere 200 weeks, the Army of Northern Virgina, led by General Robert E. Lee and his lieutenants, became no less honored and remembered that the soldiers of Alexander, Caesar or Napoleon. After Appomattox, survivors penned memoirs, poets composed verse and historians wrote countless volumes, albeit always in post-war reflection. The purpose of this volume is to present a real-time documentary of that armyña record written by its soldiers unknowing of the outcome.

After amassing approximately 350 soldier letters for the years 1861-1863, I was disappointed to find only 50 or so for the final fifteen months of the war. Of course, this lack of communication is understandable given the hard campaigning, scarcity of writing materials, loss of territory to Federal occupation, and, above all, the increasing casualties amongst the corps of correspondents. Despite the setback, I selected 300 letters to best tell the story of the Army of Northern Virginia as it was seen through the eyes of the common soldier, basing the letter selection on historical importance, content, descriptive quality, and the ability to guide the reader through the conflict. With few exceptions, I arranged the letters in chronological order as they were written, and not as they were published (some letters, owing to the slowness of the mails, took longer to reach their destination).