Thousands of books and articles have been written about the battles----both great and small----and the major personalities of the American Civil War. The vast majority of these books and articles have concentrated on the battles and personalities of the famous "household names"----the generals and political figures that first caused, and then directed, the tragic conflict to its bloody conclusion. The literature of the Civil War abounds with biographies of the heroes of the South such as Robert E. Lee, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, James Longstreet and Jefferson Davis as well as those of the North like Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, George Custer, and Phil Sheridan to name but a few. There are also myriad descriptions of the battles, both great, like Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg to mention three of the most important; and small that dotted the Union and the Confederate territory during the four long years that the war seesawed back and forth across the landscape. Little, however, has been published about the thousands of everyday men and women who contributed----sometimes losing their lives in the process----to the Union and Confederate argument over which political entity was supreme; the individual governments of the States or the central government of the Federal Republic.