“Truth in history is sacred and these things must be said.” So writes Philip Stephenson in this remarkable memoir about his four years of service in the Army of Tennessee. Written in 1865, when he was twenty, Stephenson’s diary relates his observations and reminiscences in painstaking detail. A private who became a veteran infantryman and artilleryman, Stephenson witnessed the death of Leonidas Polk and shared a blanket with a sleeping General Breckinridge.

Ably edited by Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr., Stephenson’s vibrant memoirs indeed stand out, as he had hoped, “as though photographed in letters of fire.”