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Tried Men and True, or Union Life in Dixie is the memoir of a Union supporter in south-central Tennessee. In it, he chronicles in vivid and emotional detail the local tensions between Unionists and Confederates during the Civil War South and offers a rare first-person account of the guerrilla war that devastated Western Tennessee. Thomas Jefferson Cypert (1827-1918) was a staunch Union man of Wayne County, Tennessee. In 1863, he helped organize the Second Tennessee Mounted Infantry, a regiment of loyalist Southerners enlisted to combat Confederate cavalry in West Tennessee and Northern Alabama. Tried Men and True is Cypert’s memoir of his time as Captain of Company A, including his capture by Confederate cavalry and subsequent daring escape, in which he was aided by local Union sympathizers and slaves. After the Civil War, Cypert served two terms in the Tennessee State Senate, one of them during the heated first years of Reconstruction, when Tennessee disenfranchised former rebels and attempted to establish Unionist Republican rule in the state. Cypert clearly wrote his memoir to defend Unionism, condemn secession and rebellion, and support loyalists’ claims for post-war power through an account of their wartime sacrifices. Never before published, the manuscript has been preserved in nearly perfect condition by Cypert’s descendants over the generations. This book is a remarkable and engagingly written account of resistance to the Confederacy by a group of southwestern Tennessee loyalists.

In 1863, while living in Clarksville, Tennessee, Martha Ann Haskins, known to friends and family as Nannie, began a diary. The Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams: A Southern Woman’s Story of Rebellion and Reconstruction, 1863–1890 provides valuable insights into the conditions in occupied Middle Tennessee. A young, elite Confederate sympathizer, Nannie was on the cusp of adulthood with the expectation of becoming a mistress in a slaveholding society. The war ended this prospect, and her life was forever changed. Though this is the first time the diaries have been published in full, they are well known among Civil War scholars, and a voice-over from the wartime diary was used repeatedly in Ken Burns’s famous PBS program The Civil War. Sixteen-year-old Nannie had to come to terms with Union occupation very early in the war. Amid school assignments, young friendship, social events, worries about her marital prospects, and tension with her mother, Nannie’s entries also mixed information about battles, neighbors wounded in combat, U.S. Colored troops, and lawlessness in the surrounding countryside. Providing rare detail about daily life in an occupied city, Nannie’s diary poignantly recounts how she and those around her continued to fight long after the war was over—not in battles, but to maintain their lives in a war-torn community. Though numerous women’s Civil War diaries exist, Nannie’s is unique in that she also recounts her postwar life and the unexpected financial struggles she and her family experienced in the post-Reconstruction South. Nannie’s diary may record only one woman’s experience, but she represents a generation of young women born into a society based on slavery but who faced mature adulthood in an entirely new world of decreasing farm values, increasing industrialization, and young women entering the workforce. Civil War scholars and students alike will learn much from this firsthand account of coming-of-age during the Civil War. Minoa D. Uffelman is an associate professor of history at Austin Peay State University. Ellen Kanervo is professor emerita of communications at Austin Peay State University. Phyllis Smith is retired from the U.S. Army and currently teaches high school science in Montgomery County, Tennessee. Eleanor Williams is the Montgomery County, Tennessee, historian.

\"Company H,\" the Classic Civil War Memoir in a New Edition, Completely Annotated for the First Time and Illustrated with Twenty-Four Maps Co.Aytch, or a Side Show of the Big Show is perhaps the finest memoir of an ordinary Confederate soldier.

Offers significant insight into the life, heart, mind, and attitudes of an intelligent, educated, young mid-19th-century white Southerner This book contains the letters of George Knox Miller who served as a line officer in the Confederate cavalry and participated in almost all of the major campaigns of the Army of Tennessee. He was, clearly, a very well-educated young man. Born in 1836 in Talladega, Alabama, he developed a great love for reading and the theater and set his sights upon getting an education that would lead to a career in law or medicine; meanwhile he worked as an apprentice in a painting firm to earn tuition. Miller then enrolled in the University of Virginia, where he excelled in his studies. Eloquent, bordering on the lyrical, the letters provide riveting first-hand accounts of cavalry raids, the monotony of camp life, and the horror of battlefield carnage. Miller gives detailed descriptions of military uniforms, cavalry tactics, and prison conditions. He conveys a deep commitment to the Confederacy, but he was also critical of Confederate policies that he felt hindered the army's efforts. Dispersed among these war-related topics is the story of Miller's budding relationship with Celestine “Cellie” McCann, the love of his life, whom he would eventually marry.

A unique and fascinating collection of letters from a soldier, planter, and journalist The Union states of what is now the Midwest have received far less attention from historians than those of the East, and much of Michigan's Civil War story remains untold. The eloquent letters of James W. King shed light on a Civil War regiment that played important roles in the battles of Stones River, Chickamauga, and Missionary Ridge. King enlisted in the 11th Michigan in 1861 as a private and rose to the rank of quartermaster sergeant. His correspondence continues into the era of Reconstruction, when he tried his hand at raising cotton in Tennessee and Alabama and found himself caught up in the social and political upheavals of the postwar South. King went off to war as an obscure nineteen-year-old farm boy, but he was anything but average. His letters to Sarah Jane Babcock, his future wife, vividly illustrate the plight and perspective of the rank-and-file Union infantryman while revealing the innermost thoughts of an articulate, romantic, and educated young man. King's wartime correspondence explores a myriad of issues faced by the common Federal soldier: the angst, uncertainty, and hope associated with long-distance courtship; the scourge of widespread and often fatal diseases; the rapid evolution of views on race and slavery; the doldrums of camp life punctuated with the horrors of combat and its aftermath; the gnawing anxiety while waiting for mail from home; the incessant gambling, drunkenness, and profanity of his comrades; and the omnipresent risk of death or crippling disability as the cost of performing his duty: to preserve the Union. Through meticulous research and careful editing, Eric R. Faust presents a story that does not cease with King's muster out, or even with Lee's surrender at Appomattox. King's postwar correspondence illuminates the struggles of a soldier disabled by wounds, trying to find his place in a civilian world forever changed by war. Like thousands of other Northern soldiers, King traveled south to raise cotton. The letters he penned on the plantation defy the timeworn stereotype of carpetbaggers as ruthless opportunists who deprived the South of its capital and dignity after the war. A kind twist of fate boosted King to prominence in his home state as editor of Michigan's foremost Republican newspaper and set him on a path to national notoriety. Through King's remarkable rise to the national stage, the reader gains insight into the heated political climate of the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age, and more generally into the deeply complex legacy of the American Civil War.