Judith N. McArthur is Lecturer in History at the University of Houston-Victoria and co-editor of Citizens at Last: The Woman Suffrage Movement in Texas.

Orville Vernon Burton is Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author or editor of a number of books, including In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina.

This extraordinary collection of 80 previously unpublished Civil War letters is both a penetrating look at the middle ranks from Virginia and South Carolina fronts and an intensely personal drama of the homefront and battlefront. 25 halftones. 8 maps.