y
rare," was offered for sale by second-hand dealer for $200. Under
these circumstances it is difficult to determine why, amidst the
ever-increasing interest in the irrepressible conflict, this unique
book has had to wait seventy-five years to make its reappearance on
the American historical scene.

My second reason is that, in company with other devotees of the
Confederacy, I consider Kershaw's Brigade ... one of the best
eye-witness accounts of its kind, complete, trustworthy, and intensely
interesting. Beginning with the secession of South Carolina on
December 20, 1860, Dickert describes in detail the formation,
organization, and myriad military activities of his brigade until its
surrender at Durham, N.C., April 28, 1865. During these four years
and four months, as he slowly rose in rank from private to captain,
Dickert leaves precious little untold. In his own earthy fashion he
tells of the merging of the Second, Third, Seventh, Eighth, Fifteenth,
and Twentieth regiments and the Third Battalion of South Carolina
Volunteer Infantry into a brigade under the command of General Joseph
Brevard Kershaw, McLaws' division, Longstreet's corps, Lee's Army of
Northern Virginia. First Manassas was the brigade's, baptism of
fire. Seven Pines, the Seven Days, Second Manassas, Harper's Ferry,
Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg followed.
And when the enemy began knocking at the back door of the Confederacy
in late 1863, it was Longstreet's corps that Lee rushed to the aid of
Bragg's faltering Army of Tennessee. After the victory at Chickamauga
and a winter in Tennessee, the corps was recalled to Virginia--and
to the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and the
Shenandoah Valley. Then, once again, as Sherman's mighty machine
rolled relentlessly over Georgia and into South Carolina in 1865,
Kershaw's Brigade was transferred "back home," as Dickert proudly put
it, "to fight the invader on our own native soil."

But Kershaw's Brigade ... is much more than a recounting of military
movements and the ordeals of battles. It is at once a panorama of the
agonies and the ecstacies of cold-steel war. Few such narratives are
so replete with quiet, meditative asides, bold delineations of daily
life in camp and on the march, descriptions of places and peoples,
and--by no means least--the raucous, all relieving humor of the common
soldier who resolutely makes merry to-day because to-morrow he may
die. T