This project uses digital tools to highlight the writing of a different kind of Civil War soldier than historians have often portrayed as Billy Yank. William Standard, of Lewistown, Illinois was a "Copperhead" soldier, a Union man who bitterly resented the Union cause. The material for the project is letters Standard wrote while a sergeant in the 103rd Illinois U.S. Infantry Regiment, in the Army of the Tennessee, to his wife Jane, at their home in Lewistown, Illinois. Standard served from 1862 to 1865. In his correspondence his complaints went beyond his capricious treatment by the military, the soldier's common grudge. He routinely condemned the Union antislavery war policy . And, with Jane's encouragement, he wrote sporadically about the pros and cons of deserting the ranks. The project seeks to explore whether a user's acquaintance with an historical document not only by reading it, but by visualizing it in its rhetorical and geographic contexts, enhances or changes what the document says.