Writing and Fighting the Civil War: Soldier Correspondence to the New York Sunday Mercury ed. by William B. Styple. 377 pp., illus., index, hc. Commentary by Brian Pohanka, Ed Bearss, James McPherson and Richard Sommers.

Writing & Fighting the Civil War: Soldier Letters from the Battlefront

edited by William B. Styple

"WAR! WAR! WAR!" thundered the April 21, 1861 headline of the New York Sunday Mercury. Eager for the first-hand news from the battlefront, the editors asked the departing volunteers to write and "inform us of any events of interest."

This simple request for news generated the largest and most impressively detailed collection of journalistic correspondence ever written during the Civil War. For four long and bloody years, hundreds of soldiers wrote thousands of letters to the Sunday Mercury creating a unique history of the great American conflict.

Recently discovered by Historian William B. Styple and now published for the first time, these letters are the authentic voices of the Civil War. The heroic Sunday Mercury soldier-correspondents were truly writing and fighting the Civil War.