Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family's Civil War Letters

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On the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War, award-winning author Frye Gaillard reflects on the war-and the way we remember it-through letters written by his family, including his great-great grandfather and his two sons, both of whom were Confederate officers. As Gaillard explains in his introductory essay, he came of age in a Southern generation that viewed the war as a glorious lost cause. But as he read through letters collected by members of his family, he confronted a far more sobering truth. "Oh, this terrible war, " wrote his great-great-grandfather, Thomas Gaillard. "Who can measure the troubles-the affliction-it has brought upon us all?" To this real-time anguish in voices from the past, Gaillard offers a personal remembrance of the shadow of war and its place in the haunted identity of the South. "My own generation, " he writes, "was, perhaps, the last that was raised on stories of gallantry and courage . . . Oddly, mine was also the one of the first generations to view the Civil War through the lens of civil rights-to see . . . connections and flaws in Southern history that earlier generations couldn't bear to face.