Mother, May You Never See the Sights I Have Seen: The Fifty Seventh Massachusetts Veteran Volunteers in the Army of the Potomac 1864-1865 by Warren Wilkinson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The 57th Mass. Volunteers was a Veteran Volunteer infantry unit who participated in the last campaigns of the war, a campaign that differed from every other in the civil war. Grant, now a Lt. General and in command of all the Union forces, orders Mead’s Army of the Potomac to march and unleashes unrelenting and daily combat the likes that no one in either army had ever experienced before. This book draws from personal letters and the war record of this unit as it marched and fought in every battle from the Wilderness to the siege at Petersburg and the final chase of Lee’s forces to Appomattox.
Noteable in this record are the accounts of those taken prisoner and paroled and of thier experience in the exchange sysetm (though prisoner exchanges had largely been halted there was still some activity going on). Overall a very good unit history, written for the modern day (as opposed to a history written for the civil war generation).