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by James Keir Baughman (Producer), Alfred B. Wade (Author), Michael P. Downs (Transcribed by)
Hidden from the wider world for 144 years, this Diary is an astonishing historic record...perhaps America's Civil War "discovery" of the century. In 1862, Alfred B. "Alf" Wade of South Bend, Indiana eagerly answered President Abraham Lincoln's call for fighting men. He enlisted not once - but in two - Indiana Infantry Regiments. He served as a 3-month soldier in the first, an infantry officer for all three years of the second. Even before leaving home, as Adjutant of the 73rd Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Alf Wade made up his mind to write a journal of his War years. His own words tell us the discipline of keeping up a daily entry was far from easy. In stress of War it was often that a day was missed, occasionally several. Yet the hundreds of days about which Alf wrote give us one of the most detailed accounts of daily life during America's Civil War ever to appear in American literature. Wade's descriptions of daily events, military and civilian, breathe life once again exactly as it was near a century and a half ago. A loyal, devoted Union soldier, Alf spent many months along the Tennessee River in Alabama. His notes of Southerners whom he knew (with names and dates listed) opens a startling new door to history in the Rebel towns of Athens, Decatur, Huntsville, Stevenson, Triana, Somerville, Gurley's Tank, Larkinsville, Paint Rock, Gillsport, Rome, and others, as well as Washington, D.C.
