Charles Wills

" (p.38) But, after Wills and his troop encountered fighting, he had to report that A couple of men killed over a plank road, a couple of much more wounded?" (p. 77)

If war changes people, Wills' letters undoubtedly prove that. "For myself, I know it is a large factor we now have on our heads, but I believe I'd rather see the whole country red with blood, and ruined together than have this 7,000,000 of invalids (these Southerners are practically nothing else like a people) conquer, or effectively resist the power of the North." (p.121) A former clerk and minor "official" in Southern Illinois, owning experienced the horrors of war, his close friends wounded and dying, now turns over a enemy: "I hate them now, as they hate us. I have no concept that we'll ever be a single nation, even if we conquer their armies." (p. 121) And yet, as well the ordinary Union solider feels this sort of frustration, Wills reports over a officers: "Many from the officers have given up all hope of our conquering them and very wish for peace." (p. 121) There is perhaps no much more telling view of what it must had been like to fight the South, and to deal with some officers who seemed to have lost their desire for your quick victory. Years of deprivation of rest and decent accommodations, far within the comforts of home, the seeming hopeless struggle to win, has caused these kinds of rift in between the officers (which Wills eventually became) and the favorite soldier.

War usually turns basically honorable and upstanding men into some thing else. Wills condemns his individual Union fellow solders up to the enemy: "This smaller squad of 500 men within the 2 months they've been mounted have committed much more devilment than 2 divisions of normal cavalry could in five years. Everything you are able to think of from shooting 5 Negroes?to snatching a brass ring off the finger in the woman who handed a drink of water." (p. 209)

Surely, like most who survive wars, there had been visible and invisible scars. But, the even-handed tone of the letters as well as the information Wills conveyed made him a worthy chronicler on the events from the Civil War . He, and hundreds of thousands of others had the job to maintain the union, and did so.

The end of the war stirred up both small emotion, and yet over a other hand, a sense of pride at his accomplishments. "Heasrd of Davis' capture. Did not excite an emotion." (p. 381 he wrote upon hearing from the capture of Jefferson Davis, the President on the Confederacy. Yet, at the very concliusion of his letters he remarks that he and his soldiers "participasted inside Grand Review from the Grandest Army that ever was created," (p. 383) Of course, that was the talk of both an individual over a winning side, and as well someone who survived, and thus in a position to return household and pursue a life, interrupted by some four many years of service. Wills not merely matured, he grew, and despite his hatred of the enemy (obviously for beneficial reason) he was one from the lucky ones to obtain survived without having bitterness.

Wills, C.W. (1996): Army Life of an Illinois Soldiere depth of Wills' emotions continue within the exact same letter once he writes: "The feeling is too deep on both sides, for some thing but extermination of 1 or the other in the two parties to cure, and on the two, think the globe and civilization will lose the least by losing the South and slavery." (p. 121)

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