Booknotes: From Antietam to Appomattox with Upton's Regulars

New Arrival:
• From Antietam to Appomattox with Upton's Regulars: A Civil War Memoir from the 121st New York Regiment by Dewitt Clinton Beckwith, ed. by Salvatore G. Cilella, Jr. (McFarland, 2023).

The documented service and historical memory of Emory Upton and the regiment he led for much of the war beginning in late-September 1862 (the 121st New York a.k.a. "Upton's Regulars") owe much to Salvatore Cilella, Jr. A thick tome that was very well received by readers and reviewers, Cilella's 2009 book Upton's Regulars is the standard modern history of the 121st. In addition to editing two volumes of General Upton's correspondence written between 1857 and 1881, Cilella has also edited a collection of Upton's letters to his wife, Emily, who lost her battle with tuberculosis at a very young age. Cilella's latest contribution to this impressive body of work is From Antietam to Appomattox with Upton's Regulars: A Civil War Memoir from the 121st New York Regiment.

From the description: "Thirty years after the Civil War, the 121st New York Volunteers (Upton's Regulars) finally published a history of their regiment. Its stated author was a man who had not served directly with the 121st but had based the book on a memoir written by a survivor who had enlisted at age 15. That boy, Dewitt Clinton Beckwith, published his memoir thirty years after the war in an obscure upstate New York newspaper, The Herkimer Democrat. For years, the "origin story" lay hidden in plain sight, until editor Salvatore Cilella discovered it while researching for a regimental history."

Cilella's introduction to the book recounts Beckwith's life, Civil War service, and history of the regiment. Beckwith could be a "fabulist" writer, and the impact of that trait is also evaluated in the introduction. The Beckwith memoir, written as a series of weekly installments beginning on July 5, 1893, fills over 140 densely detailed pages. Partnering with the memoir text is the editor's voluminous collection of endnotes, the product of Cilella's own exhaustive research surrounding the regiment's history.

More from the description: "The original 53 weekly installments, edited and annotated here, richly detail the horrors and folly of war. They reveal the slow maturation of a boy thrust into almost four years of war. Beckwith was present at nearly all the historic Eastern Theater engagements from Antietam to Appomattox, including an abortive stint with the 91st New York in Florida in 1861. He describes his various Tom Sawyer-like adventures with the VI Corps of the Army of the Potomac, dealing with death, disease, loss and ultimate elation at Lee's surrender, tempered only by Abraham Lincoln's death."