Over a decade since its original release, Nine Months to Gettysburg is now available in paperback. Coffin draws on scores of soldiers' letters to relate how and why young recruits from isolated hill farms flocked to the Union colors in response to Lincoln's call in 1862. And in the nine months leading up to Gettysburg, they recorded, in extraordinary detail, foraging for food, enduring homesickness, monotony, and often fatal diseases. This book movingly captures their myriad anxieties as they are thrust suddenly into the most important infantry maneuver directed against the Confederate assault.