NF The One Book that Breaks Your Heart

Non-Fiction

Gary Morgan

First Sergeant
Forum Host
Joined
Aug 2, 2019
What's the one non-fiction CW Book that really breaks your heart and makes you want to cry?

I was reading Samuel Melvin's Civil War diary yesterday. He was a soldier with the 1st Massachusetts Heavy Artillery, who ended up at Andersonville. He was educated, ambitious (he was using batteries to electric plate metal objects to make money on the side while in the army), and one of four brothers to join the Union army. As 1864 begins, one of his brothers and his mother have both died of illness within the past year, and Samuel vows to be better about writing in his diary.

I have not put many things down, but next year I shall be very punctilious and note [everything] in my new diary, which was a Christmas present from Dow. It is a good idea…Perhaps in some future day, after I shall have passed to the spirit life, some one may take as much pleasure in looking over this. Who can tell?

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He is captured while helping a wounded comrade near Spotsylvania, and ends up at Andersonville, where he learns that a second brother has been shot in the heart and killed during the battle of Petersburg a few weeks after Samuel's capture. He records the slow decline and deaths of his comrades, frequently with their last words or requests. He finally gets to leave in September 13, 1864, but his train crashes about 4 miles north of Andersonville and he is sent back to the stockade. When it's time to leave again the next day a friend carries his belongings, but Samuel's too weak to make it to the train, and he's sent to the prison hospital, where he writes in his diary that he's lying between an insensible Irishman and a Dutchman with scurby, both of whom are half dead. He writes

As things look now, I stand a good chance to lay my bones in old Ga., but I'd hate to as bad as one can, for I want to go home.

They are the last words in the diary, and he died ten days later, on Sept 24, 1864 of diarrhea.

I was reading it while the class was taking an ecology test, trying not to cry. Of the four Melvin brothers who went to war, only the 16 year old, James, survived. He had a large memorial to his brothers erected at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, with a relief sculpture done by his friend, Daniel Chester French, who also did the Lincoln Memorial. French reportedly said that the Melvin brothers' monument was the one work that he was the proudest of.

The NPS put together a small video on Samuel that is well worth watching : https://www.nps.gov/media/video/view.htm?id=C2A3AF5A-1DD8-B71C-0710B88B792143A7

His diary is published in a booklet that was distributed at the dedication on the monument and can be read at https://archive.org/details/melvinmemorial00roearich

The diary starts on page 77. His time in captivity begins on p. 99.

I've read a LOT of POW diaries, but this one just hit me in the gut.

What books have you read that broke your heart?
 
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