1491 Days In The Confederate Army

Imagine you spent fourteen hundred and ninety-one days fighting the bloodiest war in your country's history, and while you were fighting in and witnessing the ravages of war, you wrote down what happened each and every day while it was all still fresh in your memory. That's what young William Willitson Heartsill, a store clerk from Marshall, Texas did from April 19, 1861 to May 20, 1865.

In 1874, Heartstill bought a hand-cranked printing press to create copies of his diary for his messmates. He created a hundred copies in this labor intensive way. Time and temperature wore down the type and changed the viscosity of the ink so that no two copies of the book were alike. No copy of this rarest of Civil War books is wholly readable, either, for the same reasons.

This is the first edition of Heartsill's work set with legible type to which is added new details about the printing of the his original edition.