This book offers a meticulous reconstruction of the life of Rufus Kinsley - an ordinary New England soldier who during the Civil War became an officer in one of the nations's first and most famous black regiments - and an expertly edited transcription of Kinsley's hitherto unpublished wartime diary. Kinsley's diary sheds light on a long neglected theater of the war - the battle for the bayou country of southwestern Louisiana - and it illuminates the workaday routines of black and white soldiers stationed behind Union lines but thoroughly immersed in the unprecedented improvisations that accompanied the social revolution that was emancipation. Kinsley's perspective is that of a too often neglected type: the absolutely dedicated evangelical abolitionist soldier who believed that the war and its consequences were divine retribution for the sin of slavery. The introductory biography places Kinsley's civil war experience in the context of his life and his times.
This book offers a meticulous reconstruction of the life of Rufus Kinsley - an ordinary New England soldier who during the Civil War became an officer in one of the nations's first and most famous black regiments - and an expertly edited transcription of Kinsley's hitherto unpublished wartime diary. Kinsley's diary sheds light on a long neglected theater of the war - the battle for the bayou country of southwestern Louisiana - and it illuminates the workaday routines of black and white soldiers stationed behind Union lines but thoroughly immersed in the unprecedented improvisations that accompanied the social revolution that was emancipation. Kinsley's perspective is that of a too often neglected type: the absolutely dedicated evangelical abolitionist soldier who believed that the war and its consequences were divine retribution for the sin of slavery. The introductory biography places Kinsley's civil war experience in the context of his life and his times.
The epic of American expansion has had many chroniclers. Romance is wedded to heroism and rich achievement crowned high endeavor. In this present volume is woven the golden thread of that romantic and heroic era. Here, on these pages, live again the mighty men of those epoch-making days when the forces of manhood were matched against the forces of nature, valor against villainy, and life itself was ventured on a single hazard of fortune. Nurtured, many of them, in the calm and quiet of the more settled East, they dreamed as youths of those plains and mountains "out where the West begins." They matched their wits against the crafty red man and their strength against the perils and privations of a trackless wilderness. With the might to conquer they triumphed over heat and cold, over foe and famine, over storm and starvation, and made Death Valley a highway to the shores of the Pacific - where the West ends. The record which these pages unfold could be written only by a man who knows the West, and who, though himself an Easterner, feels akin with the spirit of the pioneer. Countless pages have been scanned for an accurate record of those men and times and for verification of the stirring incidents recited here. Numerous interviews and prolonged research have enabled the author to present a stirring, vivid picture of glamorous years and of valorous men who undeterred by danger and unafraid of death wrought mighty deeds and opened vast areas to commerce and civilization.
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