Material for this volume was taken from W. W. Holden's Raleigh newspaper, the North Carolina Standard. These articles from the year 1861, written by soldiers and citizens who sent letters and telegrams for publication, are the raw material of history, presented without an historian's comments or revisions. During this period newspapers, both, Southern and Northern, relied heavily on citizens to submit first-hand accounts of the conflict. Unfortunately, Southern newspapers were far behind the Northern ones in employing professional war correspondents to record the conflict. This made Southern citizen journalists extremely critical to the spreading the war news across the Southern states.