Love and Valor : Intimate Civil War Letters Between Captain Jacob and Emeline Ritner

Throughout the Civil War, Captain Jacob Ritner and his wife exchanged an extraordinary series of letters vividly depicting both life on the battlefield and at the home front.

Jacob recounts in compelling detail most of the major military events of the Western Theater: Wilson's Creek, Vicksburg, Chattanooga and Lookout Mountain, the Atlanta Campaign including the Battle of Atlanta, Sherman's March to the Sea, the Occupation of Savannah, and the Carolina's Campaign. Emeline movingly records the lives of those left behind.

Theirs is also the story of a family of Iowa abolitionists whose patriarch wrote on the day of the Emancipation Proclamation: "... if we as a nation refuse to acknowledge the rights of the black man then it may cost us our national existence."

Here is an unforgettable saga, a part of our national legacy.