Four Years With The Iron Brigade: The Civil War Journal Of William Ray, Company F, Seventh Wisconsin Volunteers

The recently discovered journal of William Ray of the Seventh Wisconsin is the most important primary source ever of soldier life in one of the war's most famous fighting organizations. No other collection of letters or diaries comes close to it.Two days before his regiment left Wisconsin in 1861, the twenty-three-year-old blacksmith began, as he described it, "to keep account" of his life in what became the "Iron Brigade of the West." Ray's journal encompasses all aspects of the enlisted m...