Reddit reviews Civil War Hospital Sketches

I have a few suggestions.

One is a book of short stories written by a journalist and veteran of the civil war, Ambrose Bierce. http://www.amazon.com/Civil-Stories-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486280381 It's an excellent piece of fiction and some of the most gripping stories about the war I've ever read. The short stories in this collection draw on ideas about families on opposite ends of the battlefield and what it was like to fight in your own homeland, as well as others.

The second is titled Civil War Hospital Sketches and is written by a volunteer nurse Louisa May Alcott. http://www.amazon.com/Civil-Hospital-Sketches-Louisa-Alcott/dp/0486449009 It is a short book that contains some of her experiences as a nurse during the war.

The book The Union War by Gary Gallagher set out to explain why the North felt so compelled to fight a war. It draws on primary sources like regimental yearbooks and personal letters to understand the motivation of fighting men of the time. The gist of it is, people believed in the idea that American democracy was an exceptional experiment and if the country was allowed to tear itself in two, the experiment and democracy would be a failure. http://www.amazon.com/Union-War-Gary-W-Gallagher/dp/0674066081/

The Confederate Home Guard is an interesting concept I haven't seen represented in anything except the film Cold Mountain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_Home_Guard Essentially militias made up of the men who did not/were not able to serve in the Confederate army. The had a significant amount of authority over the civilian population and sometimes dealt harshly with deserters they came across. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_Home_Guard

On the Union side, Contraband was the term applied to the newly freed slaves who were either employed by the Union army or who followed the Union army in hope of some kind of assistance. The often set up camps around Union forts and once the Emancipation Proclamation was passed, the families of black soldiers were often located there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraband_(American_Civil_War)