In Letters of Fire

Just as the Thirteenth West Virginia Infantry Volunteers had played an integral part in the defeat and containment of Confederate partisans in the Kanawha Valley in 1862 and '63, keeping the grim-visaged scenes of bitter civil war from her neighbors in States to her north, so in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864, the Thirteenth rendered important service as part of the old Kanawha Division in the fierce fighting of that campaign which, it may be fairly said, decided the fate of the American Civil War itself. This volume presents their experiences marching and fighting in July 1864, in the Great Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where the military and political stakes were very high indeed.