The diaries of an Iowa soldier ceremonially donated to Vicksburg National Military Park on Wednesday highlight his faith in God and country despite being surrounded by death, disease and destruction.

The diaries contain detailed entries about the horrors Fifth Sgt. John Hughes Jr.’s and the men of Company G of the 28th Iowa Volunteer Infantry faced during the Civil War.

“They are truly worth their weight in gold,” Vicksburg National Military Park Superintendent Mike Madell said during the transfer ceremony.

Before they were donated to the military park, the diaries were stored in a safe in Bruce Davidson’s garage in California. Davidson, who is the great-grandson of Hughes, visited VNMP about a year ago, asking if they were interested in his ancestor’s diaries.

“The whole family is ecstatic about your reception of the diaries,” Davidson told VNMP officials.

Park officials said first-hand accounts are an important resource in studying the war.

“To be able to read his diary and experience his emotion is pretty amazing,” said Elizabeth Joyner, curator of the USS Cairo Museum.

From the beginning of the diaries, Hughes seems to know he’s in for a rough several years.

“War looms up on the distance, a long, bloody and disastrous war,” Hughes wrote on April 19, 1861, seven days after the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, S.C.

During the Vicksburg Campaign, Hughes spent most of his time as a clerk for Brig. Gen. Alvin P. Hovey, though he saw more than his share of death.

“The carnage about this battery is truly awful. Men and horses piled upon each other indiscriminately blent,” he wrote after the Battle of Champion’s Hill.

Hughes also writes frequently about the Sabbath and at one point while encamped around Vicksburg he writes he prayed, “God grant the speedy fall of this wicked city.”

“Firing to be heard in the direction of Vicksburg. This is the Holy Sabbath. Many are the prayers that will be offered up today in behalf of the soldier in our home Churches, Sabbath Schools and around the family alters,” Hughes wrote near the Big Black River Bridge on May 24, 1863.

During the siege, Hughes contracted dysentery and wrote of being ill for weeks before the surrender of the city on July 4, 1863.

On the day of the surrender, Hughes details the joy of the Union soldiers and the despair of the Confederates and civilians in the city.

“I paid the city a visit this afternoon. It did my heart good to see the stars and stripes floating over the court house,” he writes.

The people in the city, he describes simply.

“A hungrier set, I never saw,” he says of the Confederates.

A separate diary tells of Hughes’s second trip to Vicksburg in 1906 as a member of the delegation that dedicated the Iowa State Memorial. In that diary, Hughes writes that his position during the siege was about a quarter mile from the monument but during the dedication he didn’t have time to visit it.

“This is the perfect location to do what we’re doing,” Davidson said of using the Iowa monument as a backdrop for the transfer.

In 1864, Hughes was transferred to the War Department in Washington where he lived in the Petersen House across the street from Ford’s Theater. In a letter that was stolen from the family’s collection, Hughes wrote of hearing the gunshot that killed Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865.

In a later letter to his family, which was included in the donation Wednesday, Hughes writes to his father about the assassination.

“Had any other people on earth met with such a calamity, it would have been the signal for anarchy and ruin. But we have too great a Christian element for such terrible developments as marked as the French Revaluation. I have greater faith in the American people today than ever before,” he wrote on April 26, 1865.

The diaries are expected to be sent to a conservator who will work to preserve them for the VNMP collection.