{"product_id":"hard-marching-every-day-the-civil-war-letters-of-private-wilbur-fisk-18611865-modern-war-studies-9780700606818","title":"Hard Marching Every Day: The Civil War Letters of Private Wilbur Fisk  1861-1865 (Modern War Studies)","description":"\u003cp\u003eAs 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. \"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 didnt.  Unlike professional war correspondents  Private Fisk had no access to rank or headquarters. Instead  he wrote of life as a privateas one of the foot soldiers who slept in the mud and obeyed orders no matter how incomprehensible. \"As for the plans our superiors are laying out for us to execute \" he wrote  \"we know as little as a horse knows of his driver.\"  Between December 11  1861 and July 26  1865  Fisk wrote nearly 100 letters from the battlefield to the Green Mountain Freeman  all of them signed \"Anti-Rebel.\" At the beginning of the war he was exuberant and eager for contact with the enemy. In his first letter he boasted  \"This regiment would relish a fight now extremely well.\"  Two years later  after the battle of Gettysburg  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. Their 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 battlefield 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 wrongof freedom against slavery and democracy against aristocracyand he continued to believe that the war had to be fought  even after he was well acquainted with its horror and pointlessness. \"When they have done their killing  there remains the question to be settled the same as before. They might as well have settled it before the shooting as afterwards.\"  In this volume editors Ruth and Emil Rosenblatt have included all of Fisks existing letters to the Freeman  along with three speeches from the 1890s in which Fisk looks back on his wartime experiences from the vantage point of an older man.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67600269344821,"sku":"ByrdShop_0700606815","price":23.15,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780700606818.jpg?v=1790967245","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/hard-marching-every-day-the-civil-war-letters-of-private-wilbur-fisk-18611865-modern-war-studies-9780700606818","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}