Hard Marching Every Day The Civil War Letters of Private Wilbur Fisk, 1861–1865 Edited by Emil and Ruth Rosenblatt Foreword by Reid Mitchell xvi, 384 pages, 6 x 9 Modern War Studies Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-0529-3, $27.50 Paper ISBN 978-0-7006-0681-8, $15.95 (t) As a war correspondent, Wilbur Fisk was an amateur, yet his letters to the Montpelier Green Mountain Freeman comprise one of the finest collections of Civil War letters in existence. "Literary gems," historian Herman Hattaway calls them. "In fact, they are so good that it would be believable that some expert novelist had created them." But Fisk was no novelist. He was a rural school teacher from Vermont, primarily self-educated, who enlisted in the Union Army simply because he believed he would regret it later if he didn't. Unlike professional war correspondents, Private Fisk had no access to rank or headquarters. Instead, he wrote of life as a private--as one of the foot soldiers who slept in the mud and obeyed orders no matter how incomprehensible. Between December 11, 1861, and July 26, 1865, Fisk wrote nearly 100 letters from the battlefield. At the beginning of the war he was exuberant and eager for contact with the enemy. Two years later, Fisk was disillusioned and war weary. "The rebel dead and ours lay thickly together, their thirst for blood forever quenched. Their bodies were swollen, black, and hideously unnatural. They eyes glared from their sockets, their tongues protruded from their mouths, and in almost every case, clots of blood and mangled flesh showed how they had died, and rendered a sight ghastly beyond description. I thought I had become hardened to almost anything, but I cannot say I ever wish to see another sight like that I saw on the battle-field of Gettysburg." Fisk wrote as eloquently on the moral and political issues behind the war as he did on the everyday hardships of life in the Army of the Potomac. He saw the war as a question of right and wrong and he continued to believe that it had to be fought, even after he was well acquainted with its horror and pointlessness. "For sheer description, these letters are unsurpassed."--Civil War History "An unmatched record of the common Union soldier's life."--Washington Post Book World "A marvelous account of the Civil War, equal or superior to any produced by the common soldier, North or South."--Philadelphia Inquirer "Of the publishing of Civil War letters and memoirs there is no end, but Private Fisk's Civil War has all the earmarks of a classic."-Journal of American History "One of the richest sources on Civil War soldiering in print. An exciting, readable book."--Atlanta History "These letters are remarkably astute, exceedingly detailed, and often brutally honest."--Blue & Gray Magazine "Fisk, shrewd and humorous, combining idealism and patriotism with a healthy dose of common sense, deserves to stand beside Elisha Hunt Rhodes as an archetypical soldier of the Army of the Potomac."--Publishers Weekly "One of the finest records I know of what it was like to fight and win the Civil War."--Geoffrey C. Ward, coauthor of the PBS documentary The Civil War and author of the companion volume, The Civil War: An Illustrated History EMIL AND RUTH ROSENBLATT are educators, librarians, and booksellers in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. REID MITCHELL is author of The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home.   Home | About the Press | Recent Awards | Contact Us | Order New Books: | By Author | By Subject | By Title | By Series Books in Print: | By Author | By Subject | By Title | By Series ©2007 University Press of Kansas 2502 Westbrooke Circle, Lawrence, KS 66045-4444 Phone (785) 864-4155; Fax (785) 864-4586