Sam Richards's Civil War Diary: A Chronicle of the Atlanta Home FrontThis previously unpublished diary is the best surviving firsthand account of life in Civil War era Atlanta. Bookseller Samuel Pearce Richards (1824 1910) kept a diary for sixty seven years. This volume excerpts the diary from October 1860, just before the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, through August 1865, when the Richards family returned to Atlanta after being forced out by Sherman's troops and spending a period of exile in New York City.