On August 15, 1862, 36-year-old James Jasper Hartley enlisted in the Union army in Guernsey County, Ohio. While serving nearly two years with Union troops as they fought their way toward Richmond, 36-year-old James Jasper Hartley wrote 89 letters to his wife Melissa back on the family farm. The poignancy of the letters -- unpublished until now -- comes from the fact that Hartley was an alert observer and a compassionate man with a sense of humor. He worried about worn out boots as well as the bullets of rebel sharpshooters; he was concerned about the state of his crops back on the farm and whether wife Melissa could get a good price for their old horse Bill. The letters provide direct glimpses of Hartley's life as a Union soldier, from his induction into the army to his brutal death in the disastrous battle of Cold Harbor, eight miles short of Richmond. Hartley's epistolary accounts make war not the abstract contest of debatable causes but the day-by-grubby-day coping of ordinary men caught in national chaos that destroyed homes, towns, farms, cities, industries, families, and the men themselves.