The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union

About this book

The Life of Billy Yank is a frank intimate and warm study of the Union soldier by one of the most prolific and revered of all Civil War historians. Here through excerpts from wartime letters and diaries and from other carefully documented research Bell Irvin Wiley presents an absorbing account of the small and sometimes moving events that made up the daily life of the common Union soldier a moral but fallible human who could laugh at lewd jokes be stripped of his courage under fire or save an entire company from certain death.