Free Civil War Diaries and Personal Narratives. No other chapter of American history has been so voluminously recorded as the American Civil War. Even today, more than 130 years after General Robert E. Lee and the remnant of his loyal, starving army bowed to inevitable defeat at Appomattox, the Civil War continues to fascinate people the world over. What draws us to that terrible conflict is not the struggle over slavery or states' rights, but the human drama it unfolds. The real war was experienced every day by those who fought it and by their families at home. The personal source materials for this conflict include letters, diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, and reports published in books that number into the thousands. Today, more than a century later, thanks to these published letters, memoirs, and documents, we can experience the conflict first hand through the words left us by those who lived through it and by some who died in it. This massive array of materials is invaluable to researchers, Civil War scholars, and others interested in this period of American history. Every war generates a large number of official documents, and the Civil War is no exception. In fact, it prompted many more documents than previous American wars. The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, for example, runs to 70 volumes in 127 parts plus general index and atlas. A great number of documents in this series reveal personal accounts of the combatants, often written just after the event. There are also numerous collections of Civil War letters and diaries, many written by prominent officers, men of considerable literacy, who were quite conscious of the historical importance of the conflict. Almost every general seems to have published his "Memoirs" of the events. We have collected, and continue to collect, Civil War Diaries and Personal Narratives from across the web.
** Please Note: All the diaries are freely available. No share requests are needed. Some files are quite large and GoogleDrive will say the file couldn’t be scanned for viruses. They mean the file is too large to scan while downloading. The files have already been scanned on their end.
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