A Politician Goes to War

This last known work of noted historian Bell Irvin Wiley reveals the private mind of John White Geary, a Union general from Pennsylvania, through his Civil War letters to his wife, Mary. Wiley had selected these roughly 200 letters for publication, but the unfinished manuscript lay undiscovered for twelve years after the historian's death. The letters provide a rare glimpse of the two main theaters of war through the eyes of a general officer. Geary saw action at Cedar Mountain and Gettysburg in the Virginia theater and in the major campaigns in the west--from lifting the siege at Chattanooga to marching with William T. Sherman through Georgia and the Carolinas.