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"Many soldiers of a Civil War brigade tell of their first battle. ""We remember the silent movement of the line through the woods, the ringing cheer for Indiana, the sweep across the field, the odor of resin as the canister burst above us, the sand thrown in our faces by the shot that struck before us, the rush through the thicket, the dash into the redoubt, the breastworks in rear deserted by the flying enemy, the agonizing cry to our men behind to stop firing on us, the determined feeling as we lay on the ground and clung to the captured lunette, while bullets from front and rear, from right and left, pattered like hail on the leaves by our side"" That, from Samuel Merrill, introduces a tapestry woven from tales of the participants-in their own words-from enlistment through hard marches chasing a Confederate army in Kentucky, longing for home and family while enduring nights of fear and cold in lonely outposts guarding a railroad in Tennessee, left out of big battles but learning to depend on each other for survival and comradery, then marching to Chattanooga for sham battles and endless drills until Sherman's three armies started south on the campaign to capture Atlanta, knowing hard battles ahead would be death for some. It came in an assault on a battery at Resaca, Georgia, led by Joseph Hooker's officers coveting gold stars and yearning for glory, a confused assault showing ""how little a sham battle is like a real one."" This book, through their stories, follows the author's great, great grandfather, with the 129th Illinois Infantry, to his end in that assault. Sewn to their caps was the emblem of Hooker's 20th Corps, a cloth star, worn with patriotic valor at Resaca. The story of the 129th Illinois Infantry from enlistment through their first battle, in their own words, compiled from letters, diaries, official records, newspapers, and regimental histories. A tapestry from the yarns they spun about lives of soldiers and ambitions of generals, converging in a long afternoon on a hillside in Georgia."

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9780999454640

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Bob Miller grew up filled with the lore of the Land of Lincoln and the Civil War. So his interest in genealogy led him to follow his great, great grandfather's trail to its end in the Battle of Resaca in ever greater detail, filling this book with his comrades accounts of their experiences. Lessons from a career in computer analysis, especially that every assumption must be found out by feeling for the exceptions and that there is always another bug, trained him to be wary of firsthand accounts of only one participant and especially to search for multiple firsthand accounts behind those often repeated secondhand stories. So the book took four years of research with painstaking scrutiny-and no certainty of knowing the last word on what happened at Resaca.

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