author

William B. Arnold

Best remembered for helping preserve a vivid first-person account of the Civil War’s closing days, this veteran writer focused on the Fourth Massachusetts Cavalry’s march from Richmond to Appomattox. His surviving work offers readers a direct, ground-level view of courage, chaos, and the war’s end.

1 Audiobook

The Fourth Massachusetts Cavalry in the Closing Scenes of the War for the Maintenance of the Union, from Richmond to Appomatox

The Fourth Massachusetts Cavalry in the Closing Scenes of the War for the Maintenance of the Union, from Richmond to Appomatox

by William B. Arnold, Edward T. (Edward Tracey) Bouvé, La Salle Corbell Pickett

About the author

Little biographical information about William B. Arnold is easy to confirm online, but he is credited as an author of The Fourth Massachusetts Cavalry in the Closing Scenes of the War for the Maintenance of the Union, from Richmond to Appomatox, a historical account centered on the regiment’s role in the final days of the American Civil War.

The book follows the Fourth Massachusetts Cavalry through the dramatic stretch from the fall of Richmond to Appomattox, highlighting battlefield action, the confusion of the Confederate collapse, and the emotions surrounding Union victory. Because the work draws so closely on military events and personal experience, Arnold is most meaningfully remembered as a voice preserving the memory of soldiers who served in that campaign.

Publicly available sources found here do not provide enough reliable detail to sketch a fuller life story, so the safest portrait of Arnold is through his writing: a careful recorder of wartime experience whose contribution helps keep an important chapter of Civil War history accessible to modern readers.