"Bearing aloft the flag of his country in the final charge" by Company A, 103rd New York Volunteers at the Battle of Antietam, Captain Henry Augustus Sand fell wounded. He penned a letter to his family in Brooklyn Heights while lying on the battlefield, and then three more before dying of his wounds six weeks later. His complete correspondence from the field, covering the first 18 months of the Civil War, paints a vivid picture of combat and life in a 19th-century German-Irish immigrant family.

Captain Sand helped raise the 103rd--known as "the German Grenadiers" and "Seward''s Infantry"--at the beginning of the war. The unit joined General Ambrose Burnside''s 1862 campaigns in North Carolina and Virginia. His letters were collected and transcribed by his sister, Emily Isabella Rossire nee Sand, and illustrated with her own watercolors of the Antietam battlefield and sketches by their younger brother, Maximilian Edward Sand.