Faces of the Confederacy

Faces of the Confederacy

“The history of the Civil War is the stories of its soldiers,” writes author Ronald S. Coddington in the preface to this unusual and moving compendium of profiles of Confederate troops. Faces of the Confederacy tells the stories of 77 Southern soldiers—young farm boys, wealthy plantation owners, intellectual elites, uneducated poor—who posed for photographic portraits, or cartes de visite, to leave behind with family, friends and sweethearts before going off to war. Coddington, a passionate collector of Civil War-era photography, conducted a monumental search for these previously unpublished portrait cards, then unearthed the personal stories of their subjects, putting a human face on a war rife with inhuman atrocities.

In addition to chronicling their wartime experiences, Coddington follows the exhausted survivors as they return home to occupied cities and towns, ravaged farmlands, a destabilized economy and a social order in the midst of upheaval. Like its companion volume, Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories, Faces of the Confederacy offers a heartfelt tribute to these brave men—and a haunting look at the price the war exacted.

Hardcover: 320 pages

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press ( December 01, 2008 )

Item #: 05-3186

ISBN: 9780801890192

Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 x 0.8 inches

Product Weight: 15.0 ounces