Wiley Sword

Wiley Sword (1937–2015) was an award-winning author and historian. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Sword spent six decades amassing one of the nation’s most extensive private collections of Civil War memorabilia. He wrote many books on the subject, including The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah: Spring Hill,Franklin, andNashville (1992), which won the Fletcher Pratt Award for best work of nonfiction about the Civil War, Mountains Touched with Fire: Chattanooga Besieged, 1863 (1995), and Southern Invincibility: A History of the Confederate Heart (1999). President Washington’s Indian War: The Struggle for the Old Northwest, 1790–1795 (1985) was nominated for the Pulitzer, Parkman, Bancroft, and Western Heritage Prizes. In 2015, Sword’s collection of more than one thousand soldiers’ letters and other artifacts was acquired by the Pamplin Historical Park and National Museum of the Civil War Soldier in Petersburg, Virginia.