"The generals did not see what the privates saw." So wrote U.S. Civil War veteran Pvt. Oney Foster Sweet, 1st Pennsylvania Light Artillery, 43rd Pennsylvania Volunteers (14th Reserves), Battery F (Ricketts' Battery), 1861-1865. His previously unpublished letters, diaries, and retrospective pieces offer a unique glimpse of the war from the view of a private simply trying to survive a deadly conflagration in which one in five combatants perished. This...