The material has been gathered mostly from letters, journals, orderly books, and diaries of the officers and privates, written while in camp. The difficulty confronted has been to get the diaries of the private soldier. They have either not been published or if they have been published they have been edited in such a way as to make them useless for a study of social conditions in camp, the emphasis having been placed on the military operations and tactics rather than the every day incidents in the soldier's life. The soldier has been studied after he went into camp. Little has been said about the conditions which led to the war or the conditions as they were before the struggle began except as they are used to explain existing facts. It has been the plan in most of the chapters to give a brief resume of the plans made by congress or the commander-in-chief for the working out of that particular part of the organization, then to describe the conditions as they really were. There has been no attempt made, for it would be an almost impossible task, to give a picture of the life in all the camps but rather the more representative phases have been described or conditions in general have been discussed. The first phase of camp life considered is that of the housing conditions, the difficulties encountered, the description of the huts, the method of construction, and the furnishing. This is followed in the second chapter with a study of the food and clothing, the supply and scarcity of those necessities. The third chapter will have to do with the health and sanitation of the soldier while encamped, the hospital system, the number sick, the diseases most prevalent and the means of prevention. The soldier's leisure time will be the subject of the fourth chapter, the sort of recreation he had been in the habit of at home and the ways he found of amusing himself in camp conditions. The soldier's religion forms the subject matter of the fifth chapter, the influence of the minister before the war, his place in the army, the religious exercises in camp and their effect upon the individual and the war in general. The last chapter will in a way be a recapitulation of all that has gone before by drawing a picture of a day with a soldier in camp emphasizing the discipline and duties of camp life. [Footnote 1: Bolton, _The Private Soldier Under Washington_.] Chapter I HOUSING CONDITIONS