Fighting with the Eighteenth Massachusetts

"In his memoir, written in the late nineteenth century and discovered by his grandsons among family papers a century later, Mann offers a riveting account of his battlefield experiences and paints a vivid portrait of a young man coming of age through a gauntlet of horror and suffering.". "Mann was highly literate, well read, perceptive, and witty - he was headed for Harvard before the war altered his course - and his memoir is an unusually eloquent account of the impact of war in all its forms. Drawing heavily on his wartime letters and on the recollections of his comrades, Mann reconstructs his wartime travels and trials from his enlistment to his capture at the Wilderness - the nightmare of the battlefield, the particulars of camp life, southern civilians struggling amidst shortage and destruction, freed slaves flocking to the army by the hundreds. With a keen editorial eye, John J. Hennessy delicately blends Mann's various writings into a cohesive, captivating narrative."--BOOK JACKET.