The Thirty-Ninth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers, 1862-1865

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Thirty-Ninth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers, 1862-1865, by Alfred S. (Alfred Seelye) Roe
Colonel P. Stearns Davis
By ALFRED S. ROE A VETERAN OF THE CIVIL WAR
Regimental Committee on History
Published by the REGIMENTAL VETERAN ASSOCIATION WORCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS 1914
Copyright, 1914, by Thirty-Ninth Regiment Veteran Association
THE COMMONWEALTH PRESS WORCESTER, MASS.

More than fifty years after the organization of the Thirty-ninth Regiment and its departure for the seat of war, its printed history makes its appearance. The long delay has not arisen from any lack of desire for its preparation, nor on account of want of material. For many long years it was supposed that the recital was in preparation, but the comrade to whom the task was intrusted went away into the other world before its completion, and survivors of the Regiment began to wonder if their story of long marches, fierce fighting and unspeakable suffering in Rebel prisons ever would be told. At the annual reunion of the Veteran Association in 1911 it was voted to proceed with the long cherished proposition, and a committee was appointed to carry out the proposal; after two years and a half the survivors of that committee present this volume to the patient waiters among the living veterans and to the families and descendants of those who have made the final crossing.
Readers of the book should bear in mind that it is very far from being a history of the war, nor does it discuss campaigns and battles in their entirety; on the contrary every effort has been made to describe the part borne by the Regiment in said campaigns and engagements. Long shelves in the large libraries of the country are already laden with great volumes descriptive of the War of the Rebellion as a whole and of detached portions thereof; as many more have been written of eminent individual experience, like the recollections of Grant, Sherman, Sheridan on the Union side and of Beauregard, Johnston and Longstreet among the Confederates, but the story of the great struggle will not be fully told until that of every regiment finds its way into print. Regimental histories occupy a golden mean between the comprehensiveness of the general history and the minuteness of individual records.