description: Soft cover, 250 pages, index, more than 50 photos, maps and illustrations and 16 maps. Using richly descriptive letters passed down through generations of the Brandegee family, the author had presented the story of one young man, set on adventure and possessed with an earnest desire to sever his beloved country during its most wrenching conflict. Charlie s Letters follow young Charles Brandegee from his enlistment with the 5th New York Infantry (Duryee Zouaves) and later, service in the 146th New York Infantry, through his entire army experience including his capture at the Wilderness and subsequent imprisonment at Andersonville and Florence. Charlie s story is one of patriotism and hope, cynicism and despair, valuable for its depiction of the common soldier s experience. Excerpt From the Foreword by Brian C. For students of the American Civil War be they researcher, buff or historian the discovery of an extensive set of wartime letters is invariably a cause for celebrating. Sitting down with a huge packet of correspondence, previously unknown to anyone outside the soldier s immediate family or his descendants, evokes an excitement not unlike that of a small child contemplation the beribboned gifts beneath a Christmas tree. I know those were my sentiments when, through a fortuitous chain of events, I found myself reading the Civil War letters of Charles Brandegee. Here was a detailed chronicle of one young man s experience as he endured the tedium of camp life, the irksome imposition of military authority, the fevered delirium of a life-threatening illness, the ordeal of captivity, and the fiery crucible of battle. His words were replete with that depth of humanity that draws us, still, inexorably to that great and tragic time in our nation s history. There was naivete and pride, love of family and of country, apprehension and homesickness in short the literate, honest and very personal record of one private soldier serving with the Army of the Potomac. The letters were all the more intriguing since Brandegee had served in the ranks of two of the war s most colorful the 5th and the 146th New York Volunteer Infantry. Both were Zouave units, garbed in the flamboyant regalia of the French Colonial troops whose deeds of daring had caught the imagination of the American public on the very eve of sectional conflict. In 1860 the charismatic Illinois militiaman Elmer Ellsworth led his superbly drilled United States Zouave Cadets of Chicago on a much-publicized tour that fueled a veritable Zouave craze. At the outbreak of war dozens of volunteer organizations adopted the tasseled fez and baggy pantaloons of their French prototypes. Far from disappearing with the grim realization that the struggle would be a long and bloody one, Zouave regiments continued to serve with honor and distinction through the war s final campaigns. As fate would have it, when Charles Brandegee chose to enlist in January 1862, he joined what was by many accounts the Union s preeminent Zouave unit. The 5th New York had been organized by Colonel Abram Duryee, a veteran of 30 years service in the New York State Militia who for twelve years had commanded Manhattan s elite 7th Regiment. Duryee saw to it that he Zouaves were officered by militia veterans and graduates of the United States Military Academy, ready and willing to enforce strict Regular Army standards of discipline. While Duryee had been promoted to general and left the regiment prior to Brandegee s arrival, his successor in command, Colonel Governor Kemble Warren, was even more rigid, authoritarian and professional, as befitted his West Point education. The teenaged son of a prominent Connecticut physician, like so many volunteers, Charlie Brandegee went to war with a mix of patriotic idealism and . . . .
language: English
title: Charlie's Civil War
titlecomplete: Charlie's Civil War
ratings_count: 1
publisher: Thomas Pubns