As the Mockingbird Sang: Civil War Diary of Pvt. Robert Caldwell Dunlap, C.S.A.

As the Mockingbird Sang is the diary of nineteen-year-old Robert Caldwell Dunlap, who left his plow, saddled his horse, and rode off at sundown on June 10, 1861, to find General Sterling Price’s army. During the next three years, Caldwell logged his personal experiences in the Missouri State Guard and then as a private in the Confederate States Army. Caldwell’s entries describe Missouri’s first major Battle of Wilson’s Creek; the Battle of Lexington and its unique hemp bale charge; the Battle of Pea Ridge; his travels south and east across a land foreign, but connected to him politically, where he witnessed some of the South’s fiercest fighting. In June 1864, Caldwell became separated from his personal diary, and it would be 27 years before it was returned to him. Author and researcher Suzanne Staker Lehr brings together the diary with an overview of border state Missouri’s history leading up to the war, the saga of the diary while out of Caldwell’s hands, the summary of his wounding during the Atlanta Campaign, and her historical annotations in As the Mockingbird Sang.