Writing and Fighting The Civil War

Soldier Correspondence to the New York Sunday Mercury

Plot

500 Union Soldier Letters from the Battlefield. Eager for first-hand news from the battlefield, the editors of the New York Sunday Mercury asked the departing volunteers to write and "inform us of any events of interest." This simple request for news generated the largest and most impressively detailed collection of journalist correspondence ever written during the Civil War. For four long and bloody years, hundreds of soldiers wrote thousands of letters to the Sunday Mercury creating a unique history of the great American Conflict.