Back From Battle: The Forgotten Story of Pennsylvania’s Camp Discharge and the Weary Civil War Soldiers It Served

by Jim Remsen, Brad Upp

In the final year of the American Civil War, a special Union Army post was constructed just outside Philadelphia to handle a jumble of returning citizen-soldiers.

Many soldiers bore bullet wounds, broken bones, and other scars of combat. Some had lost limbs. Some were laid low by illness. Hundreds arrived half-dead as survivors of wretched prison camps. Others were blessedly unscathed—but all grappled with the fresh, ferocious memories of their time at war.

The post, known as Camp Discharge, did its best to move the young Union veterans on to their next assignment or, more often, back to civilian life. During its brief existence, it sat on a bluff overlooking what is today one of the nation’s busiest highways, the Schuylkill Expressway. The post was quickly dismantled, its story forgotten. The authors reclaim that remarkable history and trace the often tumultuous lives of the Pennsylvania volunteer soldiers who passed through Camp Discharge’s gates.

485 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 9, 2021

About the author

Jim Remsen is a HarperCollins-published author who's currently at work on two historical-fiction projects. One, a Middles Grades novel titled Visions of Teaoga, will be published by Sunbury Press later in 2014 in both e-book and paperback form. It’s a richly researched historical novel primarily for middle-schoolers that Jim, an avid student of history, spent nearly two years researching and writing.
Jim spent most of his award-winning career in daily journalism at one of the country’s most distinguished newspapers, The Philadelphia Inquirer. There he worked initially as a copy editor and copy-desk chief, then became the founding editor of the Inquirer’s FaithLife religion pages, was a religion writer, and ultimately served as the newspaper’s Religion Editor.
Visions of Teaoga comes after a long pause since his successful first book. In the 1980s, soon after becoming a father, Jim saw the need for a hands-on guidebook about interfaith marriage – at which point he got a leave from his newspaper job, blocked out a straightforward outline with a journalist friend, and in an action-packed year they researched and wrote The Intermarriage Handbook: A Guide for Jews and Christians. Nearly a quarter-century later, the book remains in print as a successful bible for mixed-faith couples.