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Cloer Ancestral Civil War Letters: Appalachian Husband and Wife Conversations During the Civil War
Paperback
Historical FiguresCivil War Period (1850-1877)Regional: South
Publisher Price: $14.99
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Published: Sep 8 2026
Pages: 90
Weight: 0.29
Height: 0.22 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Intimate Civil War letters from Appalachia, hidden for 150 years.
You have read the history of the Civil War in textbooks, documentaries, and sweeping narratives of generals and battles. But you have never heard the war told like this: in the raw, tender, anxious words of a mountain husband writing home to the wife he called his best friend and lover until death. These are the voices history forgot, the men and women of Macon County, North Carolina, whose rugged Appalachian dialect and fierce devotion leap off every handwritten page.
Cloer Ancestral Civil War Letters presents the original wartime correspondence of William Marcus Cloer and his wife, Susan Ann Ledford Cloer, painstakingly transcribed by their descendant, Carl T. Cloer, Jr. Through these letters, you will witness the private anguish of a Confederate soldier and his family, the social pressures that drove mountain farmers with no personal stake in slavery into a brutal conflict, and the powerful bonds of kinship that sustained them. Cloer places each letter in rich historical context, drawing on the work of the Macon County Historical Society to illuminate the forces of peer influence, ostracism, and slaveholder power that shaped a community's march to war.
Inside these pages, you will discover:
- Authentic Appalachian Mountain dialect preserved exactly as it was written in the 1860s
- The personal, emotional reality behind a family's Confederate service, spanning nine generations of descendants
- A deeply researched exploration of why mountain communities with few slaveholders still joined the Southern cause
Part family treasure, part social history, this collection offers an unforgettable window into love, loyalty, and survival on the Southern home front.
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