Abstract:
Jacob Edwin Keiger left his parent's Stokes County farm and enlisted as a private in Company D of the 53rd North Carolina Regiment during the Civil War. Within three years dozens of Company D's 120 men were wounded, over forty were captured and held as prisoners, twenty-one deserted, and thirty-five died, mostly from disease. Keiger and his parents exchanged over one hundred letters before his death, at 24, in Raleigh from disease in July 1863. Excerpts his letters, interspersed with narrative of the company's movements, create a picture of one soldier's life during the Civil War.