Writing and Fighting the Civil War

"WAR!, WAR!!, WAR!!!,"

thundered the April 21, 1861 headline of the New York Sunday Mercury. Eager for first-hand news from the battlefront, the editors 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 journalistic 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.

Recently discovered by Historian William B. Styple and now published for the first time, these letters are the authentic voices of the Civil War. The heroic Sunday Mercury soldier correspondents were truly writing and fighting the Civil War.

"The Sunday Mercury's correspondents wrote of contemporary events, scenes, and personalities. They did not write from hindsight, nor are they as prone to exaggerate their personal roles. The practice of the old soldier over-emphasizing his actions and placing himself on center stage has resulted in wags referring to Henry Kyd Douglas' I Rode With Stonewall as 'Stonewall Rode With Me.'

Generals, such as Robert E. Lee and U. S. Grant, made it a practice to read enemy newspapers. It has been said that General Lee, because of the skill of the Confederate spy network in the Maryland counties fronting Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River, would within 24 hours be reading a New York City newspaper. If true, insofar as it applies to the Sunday Mercury, the information reaching Lee from this source would be a spymaster's dream."

-from the foreword by Edwin C. Bearss

William B. Styple is the Historian of the Town of Kearny, N. J., and the author and editor of several books and documentaries on the Civil War.