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Aytch (1952), which offers a comprehensive and personal account of the Atlanta campaign from a Southern participant.

Perhaps the most widely read of all memoirs by a Confederate soldier is Sam Watkins’s Co.

Atlanta CampaignĪ number of diaries and memoirs by local residents capture the drama of the war in Atlanta, including the fall of the city and Union general William T. That trend has been ongoing since, as newly found diaries, collections of letters, and other manuscripts continue to be edited and published in book form.

The centennial of the war, from 1961 to 1965, inspired the publication of another round of wartime chronicles, many of which were reprinted, while others were published for the first time.

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Much of this trend was in response to a strong public interest in the military history of the war, which emerged in the late nineteenth century in both the North and the South, and also to the full flowering of the “ Lost Cause” in the South, in which white southerners sought to interpret the conflict in ways that justified both how and why the war was fought. While some journals and diaries were published almost immediately after the war’s end, it was in the mid-1870s that most memoirs began to be published, at rates that continued unabated until well after the turn of the twentieth century. Firsthand accounts in all these genres were written by soldiers as well as civilians, women as well as men, Blacks as well as whites, collectively offering a remarkably multifaceted view of how the war was perceived and felt by both Georgians and those brought to the state’s battlefronts and home fronts through a wide spectrum of circumstances.Ī significant number of these accounts have made their way into print over the century and a half since the Civil War ended, and in numbers unmatched by any other war in American history. Georgians were certainly among those for whom the war became a “written war,” and their accounts of what they experienced or observed took the form of letters of diaries and journals, with entries made on a fairly regular basis during the war and of memoirs and reminiscences, produced in hindsight, often many years after the war. In Patriotic Gore (1962), his classic study of Civil War (1861-65) literature, the literary critic Edmund Wilson asks, “Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861-1865 in which so many people were so articulate?” Historian Louis Masur later made the same point, stating that “the Civil War was a written war,” one in which hundreds of participants and observers “struggled to capture the texture of the extraordinary and the everyday.”

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