As a war correspondent, Wilbur Fisk was an amateur, yet his letters to the Montpelier Green Mountain Freeman comprise one of the finest collections of Civil War letters in existence. Fisk wrote as eloquently on the moral and political issues behind the war as he did on the everyday hardships of life in the Army of the Potomac. He saw the war as a question of right and wrong - of freedom against slavery and democracy against aristocracy - and he continued to believe that the war had to be fought, even after he was well acquainted with its horror and pointlessness. When they have done their killing, there remains the question to be settled the same as before. They might as well have settled it before the shooting as afterwards. In this volume editors Emil and Ruth Rosenblatt have included all of Fisk's existing letters to the Freeman, along with three speeches from the 1890s in which Fisk looks back on his wartime experiences from the vantage point of an older man.