Customer Reviews

Burning Rails as We Pleased: The Civil War Letters of William Garrigues Bentley, 104th Ohio Volunteer Infantry

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I've always enjoyed fictional time travel books. These letters written by a young Quaker man willing to sacrifice & go to war (in my opinion) for "duty, honor, & country" transported me back in time. I enjoyed the beauty of the language with the thee's & thou's of the Quaker custom & the precise details of the battles that could have been written by a war correspondent.
It also engendered lively discussions between my husband (from Mississippi, whose grandmother was a Lee,as in Robert E.) & myself (from Ohio) on the philosophies of the soldiers on both sides of the "Civil War".
Reading these letters has inspired me to be more diligent in corresponding with my own loved ones near & far. Today we are blessed with e-mail. In 1864 it was letters.
His love for his family, especially his mother, comes through as he keeps writing so they will know he is still alive. It's funny how his tone changes when he writes to his "bro". More like guys describing a football game!
I look forward to reading more collections of letters.

Rarely do we get something truly new in Civil War literature. Too often we get rehashed accounts of great battles such as Gettysburg or biographies of Lee, Jackson etc. "Burning Rails as we Pleased" provides a great first hand account of the Civil War in the Western Theater. It is rare to get these. William Garrigues Bentley provides a great account of soldier life. This book is based on about 140 letters he wrote home. But Bentley also provides astute observations on the strategy and tactics of the North and the political situation at the time. Like most Union men he was for Lincoln and when he was with Sherman's army there is no doubt that the men loved him. They knew he would not waste their lives in vain. This is perhaps one of the best accounts of soldier life since John D. Billings "Hardtack and Coffee." That book was written well after the Civil War. These accounts were written at the time. The time and effort of Barbara Bentley Smith and Nina Bentley Baker have provided us a great insight into the life of a soldier in the Union army.

Darl L. Stephenson, author, Headquarters in the Brush: Blazer's Independent Union Scouts, 2001, Ohio University Press