Mr. Dunn Browne’s Experiences in the Army: The Civil War Letters of Samuel Fiske

Mr. Dunn Browne’s Experiences in the Army, edited by noted Civil War writer Stephen Sears, provides a candid, often witty, behind-the-scenes look at the Civil War. A collection of battlefront letters composed by Browne (pseudonym of Captain Samuel Wheelock Fiske of the 14th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry), this book is unique in the literature of the Civil War. Fiske was at once a fighting infantryman and an experienced newspaper correspondent, and no one in this war, on either side, wrote better accounts of a soldier’s experiences in battle and in camp. From Antietam to the Wilderness, readers of the Springfield Republican had Dunn Browne to explain to them just how it was in the Army of the Potomac. In addition, he was an investigative reporter (before that term was invented) who delved into the follies of the army bureaucracy, the sophistries of the Copperheads, and the abuses of conscription. He delved, too, into the complexities of why men fight.