Patriot Graves: Discovering a California Town’s Civil War Heritage

Beginning with the epitaphs of Civil War veterans in his California home town’s cemetery, author Jim Gregory traced fifty veterans to the battlefields of their youth–Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Missionary Ridge, The Wilderness and finally to the pursuit that led to the surrender at Appomattox.Using primary as well as secondary sources–including diaries, letters and official reports–Gregory describes the sights and sounds of battle, the leaders and the private soldiers, the excitement young men felt in combat and the profound depression many experienced in adjusting to postwar life in stories from the most destructive conflict in American history.Just as remarkable is the postwar story of the fifty veterans, part of a remarkable, restless, and haunted generation, who would find a sense of renewal and purpose in the farms they established in a beautiful valley near the Pacific coast.This is a new telling of the Civil War from the vantage point of young men from Ohio. Michigan, Iowa, New Jersey or Missouri who lived out their lives as Californians. Here, they left the legacy of their war behind for later generations to discover.