Faces of the Confederacy: An Album of Southern Soldiers and Their Stories

Faces of the Confederacy: An Album of Southern Soldiers and Their Stories
By Ronald S. Codington
List Price:  $31.95
SHNV/SWR Price:  $23.32 
http://astore.amazon.com/souhernewvie-20/detail/0801890195

The history of the Civil War (sic) is the stories of its soldiers," writes Ronald S. Codington in the preface to Faces of the Confederacy. This book tells the stories of seventy-seven Southern soldiers -- young farm boys, wealthy plantation owners, intellectual elites, uneducated poor -- who posed for photographic portraits, carts de visited, to leave with family, friends, and sweethearts before going off to war. Codington, a passionate collector of Civil War--era photography, conducted a monumental search for these previously unpublished portrait cards, then unearthed the personal stories of their subjects, putting a human face on a war rife with inhuman atrocities.

The Civil War took the lives of 22 of every 100 men who served. Codington 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. This book is a haunting and moving tribute to those brave men.