Ohio’s War: The Civil War in Documents

This book was a tough read, mainly for its subject rather than production value or anything. I chose this book as research for a novella I'm working on; I needed to know what the homefront in Ohio was like during the Civil War.

This book, a collection of speeches, articles, and letters to and from the battlefield, did just that. This book, better than any other I've found, focuses on how conflicted Ohio happened to be, despite having volunteered the most soldiers to the Union Army of any Union state. We read about fathers against Lincoln, and sons for Lincoln. We read about men who went to war supporting the Union, but not Lincoln. We read about mothers asking their sons and husbands to be safe, and then read in the footnote the recipient died before the letter got there. We read about the Great Debate of slavery, and how and why Ohioans should or shouldn't care.

By the end of the book, I felt quite anxious, actually. The book begins about a decade before the war, setting up politics and the like, and ends a decade after the war, where we read speeches that show how the American memory is already rewriting history to seem more grand, more noble in motivation, than the actual war was in living it.

All in all, a great resource that I've marked and annotated thoroughly.