Just south of Gettysburg: Carroll County, Maryland, in the Civil War

"These are the accounts of citizens and soldiers who described Civil War events in Carroll County, Md., as they saw them during the war years a century ago. They are eye-witness accounts for the most part, by people who were there at the time and who were the very first to begin recording the history of the war. No other event in American history produced so much documentary material from so many individual sources as did the Civil War. The tremendous emotional impact of this gigantic conflict between Americans, who had lived in a state of comparatively peaceful and romantic isolation from anything so incomprehensible as an ideological war, inspired tens of thousands of both literate and illiterate soldiers and civilians to record the most minute details of their daily experiences, as though they thought posterity would never believe that mankind could produce such vast and terrible chaos"--Preface.