Booknotes: A Just and Holy Cause?

New Arrival:
• A Just and Holy Cause?: The Civil War Letters of Marcus Bethune Ely and Martha Frances Ely edited by Linda S. McCardle (Mercer UP, 2016).

Marcus Ely was a lieutenant in Company H of the 54th Georgia infantry regiment, which was organized in May 1862. His later letters cover the Atlanta Campaign (and he appears to have been a hospital patient during the months leading up to the end of the war), but the major interest for me is the correspondence with his wife during the first two years of the war. During this time, his unit was stationed along the South Atlantic coast between Savannah and Georgia. Letter collections from soldiers of long service in that theater are relatively uncommon.