Citizen-Soldier, The; Or, Memoirs of a Volunteer (Collector's Library of the Civil War)

NY: Time Life, 1983. reprint. Hardcover. Very Good/None. 401 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Dark blue leather bound with gilt titles to front cover and spine. Embossed decoration on front cover. Gilt text block edges, red ribbon marker. Clean, tight copy. This is one of the more impressive (and unfortunately little known) records of the American Civil War. John Beatty was a lawyer from Ohio who joined the Union Army when the South seceded. He started his service in western Virginia under General George B. McClellan. Although McClellan would later become one of the most well-known generals of the war, it was here that he first achieved the prominence that would lead to Lincoln promoting him to head Union forces on two separate occasions. Beatty, however, was clearly not enamored of McClellan. His journal opens with a description of arriving in one of the local railroad communities and subsequent entries describe the minutiae of camp life. Beatty is relatively unique among memoirists in that his book is largely a transcription of his original diary. As a result, his recollections are of recent events and have a degree of candor not present in many post-bellum narratives. Record # 372370