Far from Home

Lieutenant William H. Peel was 23 years old when Mississippi seceded from the Union prompting him to join the 11th Mississippi Infantry along with his younger brother Eli. Captured at the culmination of the Pickett-Pettigrew-Trimble Charge at Gettysburg on July 3 1863 Peel spent the remainder of his service at the officers' prison on Johnson's Island in Sandusky Bay. By turns elegiac tragic and often comic Peel's record of those months along with his detailed account of the famous battle that led to his incarceration is one of the gems of personal literature created during that most terrible of conflicts. The diary now in the care of the Mississippi Archives was transcribed by a Peel descendent who brings to this work an understanding of both the history and the family that shaped him giving the modern reader a view inside Peel's world.