Diary covers his Navy service from August 1862 to June 1863.

In 1943, Bell Wiley's groundbreaking book Johnny Reb launched a new area of study: the history of the common soldier in the U.S. Civil War. This anthology brings together in one landmark volume over one hundred years of the best writing on the common soldier, from an account of life as a Confederate soldier written in 1882 to selections of Wiley's classic scholarship, and from the story of women who joined the army disguised as men to an essay on the soldier's art of dying.

Architects of Our Fortunes is the first publication of the Civil War letters and journals of Eliza A. W. Otis and her husband, Harrison Gray Otis, who went on to become the publishers of the Los Angeles Times. These intimate letters and journal entries reveal an earlier and simpler chapter in their lives, when he was a printer who joined the Union army and she was a poet and teacher who traveled through the Upper South to stay close to her soldier husband. Their writings reflect their love for each other, the fears aroused by the war, and the shaping of their ambitions and moral purpose by the forces of history in a tumultuous time. The book is divided into three parts. The first documents are letters written from Harrison to Eliza just after their marriage in 1859. Eliza's journal, which she kept from 1860 to 1863, forms the second, much longer, section. The journal draws a highly readable portrait of this young newlywed, whose thoughts and experiences tell us much about the women of her era. Her candid comments on the people around her are especially revealing of her own character and of Victorian sensibility. The final section, a brief Civil War diary written by Harrison in the field from 1862 to 1863, provides a common soldier's view of that great struggle. The three sets of documents shed light not only on the Otis family but also on the experience of ordinary Americans during the Civil War. They also suggest the widespread impact of the war on the development of the West. Harrison and Eliza Otis were but two of the thousands of soldiers and their families who resettled in California after the war to begin a new life. The experience and ideals expressed in the documents in this book were widely shared. The emergence of the Otises as major public leaders in Southern California and the success of the Los Angeles Times grew out of their struggle during the Civil War years and the values they forged as a consequence of that conflict.

Edward Wild, the controversial Union general who headed the all-black African Brigade in the Civil War, was one of the most loved and most hated figures of the 19th century. The man was neither understood nor appreciated by military or civilian, black or white, Northerner or Southerner. After enlisting at the outbreak of the war, Wild was promoted to Brigadier General and placed in charge of the United States Colored Troops. In fulfilling his assignment to free slaves and gain recruits, he took three women as hostages and ordered a great deal of property destruction. He freed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slaves and settled them safely on Roanoke Island. Wild then not only recruited the newly freed blacks but trained them and gave them the opportunity to prove their worth in battle. Nobody, it seems, was happy about serving with them, but the African Brigade performed courageously in several battles. Wild did some inexplicable things. Were his actions typical of the 19th century or did he act outside the norm? Was the criticism he suffered from his fellow Union officers valid--or was it due to personality conflicts? Did he deserve to be arrested, court-martialed, and even wiped from the history books--or was he the victim of discrimination? This work draws its answers from extensive research and includes many rare letters to and from Wild, including one from one of the North Carolinian hostages.