Fighting Talk: An Omnibus of US Civil War Military Memoirs

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A collection of US Civil War Memoirs.

Campaigning with Grant
Horace Porter first met Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the autumn of 1863, when he was on the staff of Gen. George H. Thomas, commander of the Army of the Cumberland.

In the November Porter received orders, posting him to Washington and away from the field, but Thomas and his fellow staff officers turned to Grant to assist in his return.

After five months in the capital, Grant’s intercession proved successful and Porter joined his staff in April 1864, setting in motion wheels that would go far beyond the present conflict.

Porter spent the remainder of the war at Grant’s side, uniquely placing him to witness a master of the formidable game from the crossing of the Rapidan to Appomattox Court House.

Encompassing Porter’s fifteen months as an aide to the General-in-Chief, ‘Campaigning with Grant’ recounts the daily acts of the man in the field, his traits, his habits and his motives, bringing the reader an unparalleled familiarity with Grant.

Military Memoirs of a Confederate
Hearing that his home state, Georgia, had declared its secession, with these words 2nd Lieutenant Edward Porter Alexander resigned his commission in the U.S. Army and left to join the Confederates.

Over the four years that followed he would play an important role in many of the important battles of the conflict, notably under Maj. Gen. James Longstreet and Gen. Robert E. Lee.

At the outbreak of hostilities in 1861, although the Confederates had established an army — modelled after that of the Union — its organisation was almost non-existent, as was a wider infrastructure.

Similarly comprised of volunteers, and later conscripts, as the war progressed various reforms and reorganisations were enacted in a gradual development of the Confederacy’s war machine.

Despite its title, Alexander’s work also serves as a critique of each campaign, highlighting the good plays and the bad, the moves that influenced the outcome and a suggestion that might have altered the course of history.

Johnny Reb and Billy Yank
During the Civil War, many soldiers on both sides kept diaries of their daily experiences, but very few of these encompassed the entire four years of conflict. This diary of Alexander Hunter, first published in 1905, is a notable exception. Drawing on notes he made during service, Hunter’s account provides a profoundly honest and memorable narrative of the incidents of camp life.

A soldier in Lee’s army from 1861 to 1865, Hunter recounts in splendid detail his extraordinary experiences from the outbreak of hostilities to the final surrender at Appomattox. Here are his dramatic, first-hand accounts of the fighting at Bull Run, Seven Pines, Second Manassas, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness. Describing the early exchanges of prisoners in the war and the aloof yet mutual respect which existed between soldiers of the Union and the Confederacy, Johnny Reb and Billy Yank provides a thrilling and thorough narrative of this pivotal period.

>b>Advance and Retreat
In the years following the Civil War a new war erupted in America, a war of words, with the men of both sides writing their memoirs and offering opinions on the recent conflict.