No Soap No Pay Diarrhea Dysentery & Desertion

<I>No Soap No Pay Diarrhea Dysentery & Desertion</I> is a groundbreaking study of life during the final sixteen months of the Confederacy.</p><p>Civil War studies normally focus on military battles campaigns generals and politicians with the common Confederate soldier and Southern civilians receiving only token mention. Using personal accounts from more than two hundred seventy soldiers farmers clerks surgeons sailors chaplains farm girls nurses nuns merchants teachers and wives author Jeff Toalson has created a compilation that is remarkable in its simplicity and stunning in its scope.</p><p>These soldiers and civilians wrote remarkable letters and kept astonishing diaries and journals. They discussed disease slavery inflation religion desertion blockade running and their never-ending hope that the war would be over before their loved ones died. As in all wars these are the people who suffer the most-and glory is hard to find amid lice dysentery starvation and death.</p><p>A significant contribution to Civil War literature <I>No Soap No Pay Diarrhea Dysentery & Desertion</I> will open vistas to a side of the war with which most are only mildly familiar. The words of these individuals are an honest powerful and poetic portrayal of the war's effect on their lives.