| NEW
YORK, NY (NOVEMBER 21, 2006) – Earlier today,
The Soldier’s Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the
Civil War (Hill and Wang), a book by Robert Bonner,
hit bookstores across the country. Presenting firsthand
sources of soldier’s journals, cartoons, letters,
and watercolors––nearly all printed for
the first time in this book––Bonner illustrates
how war appeared from inside the ranks. His sources
are drawn exclusively from the more than 60,000 documents
in the Gilder Lehrman Collection.
Bonner writes: “Posing questions in the collective
cannot help blurring the distinct personalities of each
fighter and obscuring the living, breathing humans who
were inside standardized military uniforms. This book
offers a different approach by emphasizing how most
soldiers stubbornly maintained their individuality in
the face of common hardships and regimentation.”
In featuring the soldiering experiences of sixteen individuals,
the book provides memorable accounts of the enlistment
frenzy of 1861, the horrors of war at Shiloh, Antietam,
Gettysburg, and Missionary Ridge, and the 1865 triumphs
of Sherman's troops in the Deep South and of Grant's
soldiers at Petersburg.
Even the book's most intimate writing makes clear how
morale ebbed and flowed as the costs of war mounted
and as slave society crumbled. The musings of three
Confederate slaveholders appear alongside a diary kept
by a free African-American from New York. Antislavery
letters from a white Kentucky Unionist and an Illinois
laborer alternate with the racist caricatures of an
anonymous Union soldier in coastal North Carolina.
In 2003, Bonner was awarded a Gilder Lehrman Fellowship
to conduct research in the Gilder Lehrman Collection.
He is currently a fellow at the American Antiquarian
Society.
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