When the Great Rebellion had subsided and the power and authority of the U. S. government were settled into States, Charles Coffin, Army Correspondent for four years during the Civil War, wrote of his eyewitness experiences from the first battle at Bull Run to the fall of Richmond. The events he discusses include Fort Donelson, Pittsburg Landing, Corinth, Island No. 10, Fort Pillow, Memphis, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Fort Sumter, Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Five Forks. He was in Savannah soon after its occupation by Sherman on his great march to the sea, and watched his movement northward with the sun. He walked the streets of Charleston in the hour of her deepest humiliation, and rode into Richmond on the day that the stars of the Union were thrown in triumph to the breeze above the Confederate Capitol . It was Coffin s aim to reproduce some of those scenes, giving truthful narratives of events, descriptions of battles, incidents of life in camp, hospital and on the march, in the hour of battle on land and sea."