Civil War for the day

Rico says that Tryst Williams of the Western Mail has an article in Wales Online about the Welsh in the Civil War:

Nearly 10,000 pages of Welsh-language writing penned during the American Civil War have survived to this day. Written on the battlefield, the graphic writings detail the abhorrence with which Welsh emigrants viewed the slave trade, the terror with which they faced battle, and, sometimes, the glee with which they killed their enemies.
Now a new book by an American academic, launched at the Eisteddfod, reveals these works in English for the first time in the largest collection of its kind. In Sons of Arthur, Children of Lincoln, Dr. Jerry Hunter has used diaries, letters, and poetry to capture the reactions of Welshmen to one of the most defining wars in history.
Thousands of first, second, and third generation Welsh-Americans fought for Abraham Lincoln’s Union of the North against the Confederate forces of the South, among whom Welshmen were rare.
Dr. Hunter said that although the conflict was not initially a war against the slave trade, it was viewed as such by Welshmen from the start. Congressional minister Iorthryn Gwynedd said in 1861, for example, that the war would be “the destruction of the economy, ambition, pride, and success of the South, for their hypocrisy and their hardness, their deceit, and their cruelties in the long oppression of the black negro”.
Meanwhile, soldiers wrote in vivid detail of their battlefield experiences with a mixture of impending fear and gruesome violence. John Rowlands wrote, in a letter to his friend Jane Parry dated 6 December 1862: “Behold Fredericksburg, there I will be lying in my blood, or there I will be marching through the blood of others, shortly enough. Oh horrible thought. Will I be spared? God alone knows. Pray for me.” Seven days later, nearly 13,000 Union soldiers died in one day at the Battle of Fredericksburg.
A fellow soldier, Evan Davis, to whom battle was a foreign concept before 1862, wrote, “After discharging our guns the first time, our hearts grew light as well. Our fingers worked quickly, our arms without shaking, and our eyes aimed without swerving at the army of the thieves of freedom and life. The work appeared pleasant, and looking at the body kicking as it bade farewell to the soul was sweet. We shouted with joy at seeing the line of the enemy flinch before the fire of our guns and flee in disorder into their friends.”
Dr. Hunter, an American who learned Welsh after becoming captivated by its medieval literature as a student in Ohio, said he had found it difficult to believe how much writing in the Welsh language had been produced during the Civil War. “In four years, more than 10,000 pages in Welsh were published,” he said. “But there is also the unpublished writing, letters, diaries, and poems, and stuff I haven’t seen; the amount is huge.” Dr. Hunter said the volume of Welsh literature did not mean the soldiers were recent arrivals in the United States, as settlements spoke Welsh for several generations before English took over. “There were lively Welsh communities in the US who felt they could keep the language forever,” he said. “There were grandchildren of immigrants speaking Welsh and the language lasted a long time. People born and raised there still spoke Welsh and I would say many of them only learnt English when they enlisted.” Dr. Hunter said most Welsh soldiers fought with the Union against slavery but there were exceptions, most notably the Confederacy’s leader, Jefferson Davis (whose grandfather emigrated from Wales). “There are people who fought for the Confederacy but they are a handful compared to thousands and thousands in the Union,” he said. “I did a lot of work to find Welsh-speaking Confederates, but there just weren’t that many. Even some Welsh-speaking people in the South supported the Union, mostly from anti-slavery sentiments. The Civil War was not a battle against slavery from the start, but that is how Welsh people saw it. Some of the poets and bards saw it as their job to make sure the war was remembered forever.”

Rico says there are a lot of people named Jones in his family tree, and he's proud of his Welsh heritage.