“Pennsylvania has burning homesteads and desolate wives.  The beautiful town of Chambersburg is a black, charred mass.  There is retribution at last….All will yet be well… Every advance is peril to Sherman; our head men will yet devise a plan to crush him.”

-Captain William Edgeworth Bird, 15th Georgia Infantry, Summer 1864

Sources
An important primary source is John Rozier’s The Granite Farm Letters: The Civil War Correspondence of Edgeworth and Sallie Bird (1988). In addition, a letter from a chaplain who served in the 15th Georgia Infantry, Atticus G. Haygood, is in John Wesley Brinsfield’s The Spirit Divided: Memoirs of Civil War Chaplains: The Confederacy (2006). Important secondary sources include Dave Dameron’s Benning’s Brigade: A History and Roster of the Fifteenth Georgia (1997) and John Rigdon’s The Fighting Fifteenth: A Regimental History, Georgia Fifteenth Infantry Regiment (1998).

Places to Visit
William Bird participated in the Gettysburg campaign in the summer of 1863. While in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania you can visit the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center. Bird is buried in Oconee Hill Cemetery, which is located in Athens, Georgia.

Artifacts
The Georgia Archives has the 15th Georgia Infantry Regiment flag.