John Camden West could have sat out the Civil war. Jeff Davis appointed the young Waco lawyer District Attorney for the Western District of Texas. But West wanted to see action and resigned his position to enlist as a private in Hood’s Texas Brigade. He saw action at Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and Knoxville.

These are his letters home, as well as the diary he kept in the field. Because the words within these pages were written at the time, and never meant to be published, they have an immediacy and candor seldom seen. He could have cleaned them up in 1901, when he put them in book form, but resisted the urge, stating:

The questions of taste, delicacy and propriety of publishing private matter have been considered and discussed. The conclusion is that it should be printed and issued, word for word, as it was originally written thirty-eight years ago. Otherwise it would not be what the writer wrote and thought in those dark, historic days. It is not fiction. It is fact.