On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter, a Union garrison in the harbor of Charleston, S.C. The bombardment lasted 34 hours, leading to the surrender of the fort and marking the transition from political tension to open warfare.

The story of the Civil War has long been recounted through the eyes of those put on pedestals — the presidents, generals and heroes whose statues dot town squares and battlefields across the eastern United States.

In recent years, starting in part with the war’s 150th anniversary, there have been several efforts to tell the “micro-history” of that cataclysmic struggle, using diaries and letters to illuminate the physical and emotional travails of the unheralded soldiers and civilians on both sides who bore the brunt of the war’s burdens.

The latest entry into this category is “Witness to War: The Story of the Civil War Told by Those Who Lived It,” by J. Mark Powell.

“Witness to War” offers a captivating, eye-level view of the conflict through excerpts from more than 500 never-before-published letters from Powell’s personal collection of Civil War-era correspondence.

(Powell writes the popular “Holy Cow! History” feature for InsideSources.com.)

The missives take readers from Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election and the run-up to war through Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, Lincoln’s assassination, and the surrender of the last Confederate army in June 1865.

The book’s structure makes for compulsive reading. Powell provides historical context before allowing the letter writers to speak for themselves. Powell, whose background includes several decades in journalism, is a fine writer. However, it is the voices echoing down from the 1860s that make “Witness to War” so engrossing.

As Powell notes in his introduction, these letters are time machines. Written in a tent near Gettysburg or on a kitchen table in Iowa, they transport readers back to those times and places, offering an unvarnished, sometimes heartbreaking view of life during a struggle that has been romanticized and sanitized across more than 150 years of mythologizing and pop culture.

The young men who fought in the Civil War did not always enlist out of unwavering support for a higher cause, as revisionism from the North and South might suggest. Many joined out of social pressure, economic necessity or “to see the elephant,” escaping small-town life in search of adventure.

Others went to extreme lengths to avoid service. In one letter, a soldier mentions an acquaintance back home who pulled his two front teeth, making him ineligible for service because he could not bite open a rifle cartridge.

The fighting quickly stripped away romantic notions of war. Soldiers recount deadly dysentery outbreaks, horrific hospital conditions, and the execution of deserters. Letters also describe infidelity by soldiers’ wives and the patronage by Union soldiers of Alabama prostitutes—women likely forced into sex work by the ravages of war.

In the face of these hardships, many soldiers began to question their decisions. Letters between Union soldiers and their families reveal doubt or outright resentment over “fighting for the negro,” including one from a soldier’s wife suggesting a possible plan for his desertion.

In 1863, Smith Clay, a Vermont farmer, was offered $300 (more than $11,000 today) to serve as a substitute for a neighbor in the draft, a legal practice under early American conscription laws. He wrote to his brother for advice. George Clay, who had just survived Gettysburg, responded:

“Now, Smith, let me say one thing to you about enlisting. If I was at home, $1,000 could not entice me to enlist again. There is nothing that there is so much hardship in as there is in being a soldier. … If you had ever seen what I have, you would think that $5,000 might got (sic) to the Devil for all you care.”

George then recounts gruesome wounds and deaths before signing off: “Goodbye, I wish this sheet was longer, then I could write more.”

In December 1864, Frank Hayes of Maine echoed that sentiment to his cousin, comparing life in the trenches at Petersburg, Va., to a “hog pen” and urging his kin to hire a draft substitute.

“There was a report in camp last night that old Jeff Davis was dead,” Hayes wrote. “If that is so, and Old Abe will go do likewise, there may be some prospect of peace. I find soldiers are not so full of fight here as when they are at home.”

“Witness to War” concludes with a powerful juxtaposition that captures the enormity of the war’s human cost.

In August 1865, Iowa war widow Genevieve Byrne Ruskin wrote a grief-stricken letter to her late husband’s brother, concluding, “Now that the cruel war is over, and I look back and see the many lonely homes, I wonder what it all meant.”

Six months later, a formerly enslaved woman — likely living in Canada — wrote to her former enslaver, addressing her as “Dear Mistress.” The brief note expresses concern for the couple and reports that several formerly enslaved people who once worked for them had made their way to Canada.

She signed the letter: “Forever Free, Lizzy.” 

Randall Bloomquist is the head of Bloomquist Media. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.