This is the story of two brothers who fought in the Civil War, Lt. Edmund Halsey for the North and Capt. Joseph Halsey for the South. Editor Bruce Chadwick obtained the recently discovered and never-before-published diaries of Edmund Halsey and the papers and love letters of Ed's older brother, Joseph Halsey. These evocative diary excerpts and letters bring to life, as does no other work, the great and brutal war that tore America asunder.

The lives of the Halsey family members are vividly recreated by Chadwick, who, through his lively annotations, puts into context the events so dramatically described in the correspondences and journal.

The papers of Ed and Joe Halsey illuminate the lives of two brothers, North and South, tossed into a conflict that tore apart an entire nation and split a family. And yet through it all, through the rain of bullets that nearly killed Ed at Spotsylvania and the typhoid fever that nearly killed Joe after Bull Run, there runs a solid, impenetrable love of family and country.