The Plymouth Pilgrims: A History of the Eighty-Fifth New York Infantry in the Civil War [85th]

xiii, 355 pp. Includes 15 maps and over 100 illustrations. On October 29, 1861, a young farmer named Wyman Johnson placed his scythe in the crotch of a small poplar tree near Waterloo, New York, and went off to war... Johnson enlisted in what would become the Eighty-Fifth New York Infantry at Geneva, and went on to fight for his country near Richmond and in the swamps of North Carolina, where he was mortally wounded in April 1864. This is but one of the many stories of the men of the Eighty-Fifth New York Infantry. ...numerous diaries, letters, and other unpublished sources [to] tell the regiment's story from its formation through the darkest days at Andersonville, where almost 200 of its members died of disease.--jacket