Excerpt from A Soldier's Letters to Charming Nellie Such preface as the following pages require is furnished by the first letter. An introduction, however, will not be amiss. The body of troops known in the Army of Northern Virginia as Hood's Texas Brigade, as originally organized, was composed of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Texas regiments, the Eighteenth Georgia Regiment and Hampton's South Carolina Legion. In 1862 the Eighteenth Georgia and Hampton's Legion were transferred to other brigades, the Third Arkansas Regiment taking their place in the Texas Brigade, and continuing a part of it until the close of the war between the States. One and perhaps two companies of the First Texas got to Virginia in time to participate in the first battle of Manassas, or Bull Run, as it is called by the Federals. Its other companies arrived in Virginia after that battle, and the regiment was organized with Louis T. Wigfall as colonel, Hugh McLeod as lieutenant-colonel, and A. T. Rainey as major. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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"One of the most cited collections of letters by a Civil War soldier, A Soldier's Letters to Charming Nellie was originally published in 1908. A unit history of the 4th Texas Infantry in epistolary form, Joseph B. Polley's letters make available the correspondence of a soldier who participated in virtually all military action in the Eastern Theater. Polley was an unusually gifted writer, with a talent for satire and humor unmatched by most Civil War diarists." "In this definitive, annotated edition, Richard B. McCaslin has prepared new transcriptions of the letters and compared variant versions of them, resolving many of the historiographical puzzles that surround this wonderful collection. McCaslin also includes an analysis of when, how, and why Polley wrote the letters." "The volume will aid historians interested in the activities of the Army of Northern Virginia and its commanders, and especially students of Hood's Texas Brigade."--BOOK JACKET.

"Soldier mortals would not survive if they were not blessed with the gift of imagination and the pictures of hope," wrote Confederate Private Henry Graves in the trenches outside Petersburg, Virginia. "The second angel of mercy is the night dream." Providing fresh perspective on the human side of the Civil War, this book explores the dreams and imaginings of those who fought it, as recorded in their letters, journals and memoirs. Sometimes published as poems or songs or printed in newspapers, these rarely acknowledged writings reflect the personalities and experiences of their authors. Some expressions of fear, pain, loss, homesickness and disappointment are related with grim fatalism, some with glimpses of humor.