To Live and Die: Collected Stories of the Civil War, 1861-1876

This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.

Even before the first cannonballs were fired at Fort Sumter, American writers were trying to make creative sense of the War between the States. The thirty-one stories in To Live and Die were culled from hundreds that circulated in popular magazines between the beginning of the war in 1861 and the celebration of the American centennial in 1876. Arranged to echo the sequence of the developing drama of the Civil War and Reconstruction, these short stories constitute an inadvertent novel, a collective narrative about a domestic crisis that was still unfolding. The authors, who include Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain, depict the horrors of the battlefield, the suffering in prison camps and field hospitals, and the privations of the homefront. In these pages, bushwhackers carry the war to out-of-the-way homesteads, spies work households from the inside, journeying paymasters rely on the kindness of border women, and soldiers turn out to be girls. The stories are populated with nurses, officers, speculators, preachers, slaves, and black troops, and they take place in cities, along the frontier, and on battlefields like Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, and Spotsylvania. These stories brought the war home to nineteenth-century readers and gave shape to a crisis that continues to haunt the nation.