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A Confederate Chronicle: The Life of a Civil War Survivor. By Pamela Chase Hain. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005. Pp. 273. Cloth, $39.95.)
Hell's Broke Loose in Georgia: Survival in a Civil War Regiment. By Scott Walker. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Pp. 311. Cloth, $39.95.)
Throughout the course of the last decade, historians have produced a plethora of published collections of letters and diaries from soldiers and civilians who lived through the experience of the American Civil War. Both Pamela Hain and Scott Walker place a rich body of primary sources into a narrative in order to shed light on their respective subject's experience during the war.
Pamela Hain's compelling narrative examines the life of Thomas Lowndes Wragg, a son of privilege who joined the 8th Georgia Volunteers in the late spring of 1861. Hain weaves Wragg's letters into a cultural narrative, examining everything from the battlefield and camp conditions of the war to the experience onboard naval ships and within the walls of a prison.
After a year of serving with the infantry, Thomas Wragg joined the Confederate Navy in December 1862, where he served on both the CSS Georgia and the CSS Atlanta. Hain includes Wragg's naval notebook, which provides a wealth of specific details on how a gunboat operated. On June 17, 1863, during the maiden voyage of the Atlanta, the ship failed to escape from a Union gunboat. During his subsequent imprisonment, Wragg continued to write to his father and expressed his feelings of abandonment....