Upcountry South Carolina Goes to War offers readers more than one hundred letters that tell the stories of prominent Spartanburg District families, their lives before the Civil War, and the lives of three of their sons whose education and ambitions are disrupted by the war. These letters are a poignant, personal, and rich narrative history of the Civil War and the Army of Northern Virginia from First Manassas to Petersburg. They capture snapshot-like renditions of the campaigns, the soldiers, and the famous generals who led them, all culminating in a particularly touching letter from Thomas John Moore to his sister, describing the discovery of his slain brother and his battlefield burial at the end of Second Manassas. This is a valuable collection for anyone interested in the history of South Carolina confederates and of the upcountry.

Absorbing and enlightening, this well edited volume is a major contribution to the history of the mid-nineteenth-century South Carolina upcountry. This correspondence among some of the founding upper class families of Spartanburg District provides a unique perspective on their preoccupations just before and during the Civil War; the letters reflect mostly personal concerns with occasional comments on wartime triumphs and despair. In this important respect, the letters reflect the general atmosphere of a Southern community distant from yet intimately involved with the battles that would determine the nature of its future.

Upcountry South Carolina Goes to War introduces readers to three families bound together by kinship; by the social, religious, and economic ties of their rural community before the Civil War; and by losses among their kin during and immediately after the war. Their correspondence chronicles the upheaval and disintegration of a world so different from our own that our best hope of understanding it and the people who lived in it is through letters as true to life—that is, as alternately compelling, mundane, nuanced, and ordinary as everyday life can be—as these.