IFL American History Book Club: All For the Union by Elisha Hunt Rhodes
The IFL American History Book Club meets on the 4th Tuesday of each month to discuss their latest reading in American History. Hard copies of the title for checkout can be found on the Book Club Shelf on the first floor of the library.
This month we are reading: All for the Union: The Civil War Diary & Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes by Robert Hunt Rhodes, Elisha Hunt Rhodes (270 pp)
All for the Union is the eloquent and moving diary of Elisha Hunt Rhodes, who enlisted into the Union Army as a private in 1861 and left it four years later as a 23-year-old lieutenant colonel after fighting hard and honorably in battles from Bull Run to Appomattox. Anyone who heard these diaries excerpted on the PBS-TV series The Civil War will recognize his accounts of those campaigns, which remain outstanding for their clarity and detail. Most of all, Rhodes's words reveal the motivation of a common Yankee foot soldier, an otherwise ordinary young man who endured the rigors of combat and exhausting marches, short rations, fear, and homesickness for a salary of $13 a month and the satisfaction of giving "all for the union."
