Why read Union Must Stand?

Book cover of Union Must Stand: Civil War Diaries John Quincy Adams Campbell

Book description

Only rarely does a Civil War diarist combine detailed observations of events with an intelligent understanding of their significance. John Campbell, a newspaperman before the war, left such a legacy. A politically aware Union soldier with strong moral and abolitionist beliefs, Campbell recorded not only his own reflections on wartime…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Union Must Stand as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Chandra Manning

Author

A soldier in an Iowa infantry regiment, John Quincy Adams Campbell spent the conflict in the war’s western theater, present at, among other things, the fall of Vicksburg on July 4,1863, which even at the time he recognized as a turning point of the war. His diary, interlaced with some letters that he wrote to his hometown during the war, comments incisively on the military progress of war in the Mississippi Valley from the perspective of one infantrymen, offering today’s readers insights into the immediacy and also the limits of the view of one person actually living through the alternating…

From Chandra's list on The best books with accounts of the Civil War from people who were there.