Bridge Building in Wartime: Colonel Wesley Brainerd's Memoir of the 50th New York Volunteer Engineers

Brainerd, Colonel Wesley; Malles, Ed (editor)

ISBN 10: 0870499777 / ISBN 13: 9780870499777

Published by University of Tennesse Press, Knoxville, 1997

About this Item

(1997), stated First Edition, About Fine/About Fine dj, octavo, 415pp., green cloth hardcover, bright silver lettering on backstrip, b&w ill's., excellent unclipped pictorial dj, binding tight, text unmarked, Presented & Signed on half-title page: "Oct 1998 for Charlie & Ginny, True Civil War Believers! With very best wishes, Bill Hencken," (descendant of Brainerd & whose family provided the frontispiece & other material), Voices of the Civil War series edited by Frank Byrne.

Seller Inventory # 15362

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Bridge Building in Wartime: Colonel Wesley Brainerd's Memoir of the 50th New York Volunteer Engineers
• Publisher: University of Tennesse Press, Knoxville
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0870499777
• ISBN 13: 9780870499777
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

This book, containing the detailed recollections of a Union combat engineer, will add immeasurably to our understanding of the logistical complexities of the Civil War campaigns and introduce an important new point of view amid the array of available Civil War diaries and memoirs. Wesley Brainerd was a twenty-eight-year-old businessman living in Rome, New York, when the war erupted in 1861. Enlisting after the first Battle of Bull Run and eventually achieving the rank of colonel, he served as an officer in both regiments of the Volunteer Engineer Brigade of the Army of the Potomac, a unit that distinguished itself throughout the war by building bridges, fortifications, batteries, roads, and temporary shelters. After the war, Brainerd drew on his diaries to recount his experiences in a memoir originally written for his son. As appealing in style as it is informative, Brainerd's account is told with a strong sense of the war's importance and of the part his unit played in the larger scheme of things. Modest and truthful, Brainerd sought to relate the story of his service in a meaningful and straightforward way, ever mindful of the lessons he had learned and that he wanted to impart to his son. Now available with carefully researched annotations and an introduction, this unique document will fill and important gap in the literature of the Civil War.