A View from the Ranks
Soldiers’ Experiences and Civil War Historiography
New Ideas in American History features essays by historians about some of the most interesting recent books in the field.
Teaching the American Civil War is harder than it looks. It seems easy since we can line up familiar events in the “antebellum” period that point toward war and emancipation. Teachers can start as far back as they wish to suggest the inevitability of war and emancipation, from the Constitution to the Missouri Compromise, from the rise of abolitionism to the emergence of Frederick Douglass, from the Fugitive Slave Act to Bleeding Kansas, from the Dred Scot decision to John Brown. Each of these events seems to foretell the impending crisis. We can forget that years passed between these occurrences and that people had no idea that the vast system of American slavery could end by 1865.
It is easy, too, to imagine that the Civil War came as a result of the inevitable conflict between an industrial North and an agrarian South, forgetting that three-fourths of white northerners were farmers and that “agrarian” meant massive agribusinesses far more important to the world economy than anything the North produced.
It is easy, finally, to forget the actual soldiers who fought a war they had no hand in starting. Most were in their early twenties and thus might not even have voted in the 1860 election. We know the generals’ names, but what do our students know about the soldiers themselves? Millions fought, but we tell our students little about them.
Ours is not the first generation that has tried to understand the Civil War without accounting for the lived experience of soldiers. But historians and others have also been pushing against heroic grand narratives almost since the war ended.
In the aftermath of the war, veterans set right to work documenting their experiences, and their memoirs, battle narratives, and regimental histories quickly filled publishers’ catalogues. Among the most popular were Century Magazine’s Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, published in a four-volume set in 1888. Battles and Leaders and other leadership memoirs, most notably those of upper-echelon commanders like Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, emphasized campaigns, strategy, and tactics. But these stories did little to illuminate the experiences of the millions of soldiers fighting a war that claimed upwards of 850,000 lives.
That changed in 1887 when Union veteran John D. Billings published Hardtack and Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life. This volume, along with a handful of others, described the day-to-day goings-on of a “typical” soldier. Billings wrote of his time in the Union army as “a trifling piece of personal experience” described by “facts too commonplace for the general histories of the war.” Billings, like Sam Watkins of “Company Aytch” in the Confederacy, portrayed a soldier’s life as a combination of boredom, camaraderie, absurdity, and sacrifice. Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage imagined the terrifying perspective of a common soldier, written in a tone far different from the heroic notes of Battles and Leaders.
The First World War created skepticism about the value of war in resolving conflict and helped foster a revisionist school about the causes and consequences of the Civil War. The Second World War pushed that concern aside, but heightened appreciation for the common experience of soldiers, as tens-of-thousands of veterans returned from Europe and Japan. Many had served bravely and selflessly even as they witnessed the mindless routine of bureaucracies and the vanities of would-be leaders.
Bell Irvin Wiley’s The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy and The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union, published in 1943 and 1952 respectively, were among the first scholarly approaches to this topic and for years they reigned as the literary mainstays on Civil War soldiery. Seeking to understand what moved men of the 1860s to fight for each side, Wiley’s two studies concluded that political issues had little influence on the men in the ranks. Instead, he argued, personal motivations drove the rush to arms, including a desire for adventure and an apolitical esprit-de-corps.
These stories remained popular until another war — this time in Vietnam — shaped how Americans understood previous wars. Historians became more skeptical about assertions of military glory and higher purpose. In the 1980s, historians such as Gerald F. Linderman and Reid Mitchell once again emphasized the personal, apolitical motivations of Civil War soldiers, but focused more on values of courage, loyalty to one another, and devotion to family.
Others pushed back, arguing that soldiers were indeed motivated by the war’s larger goals. James McPherson’s 1997 publication, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought the Civil War, took previous studies to task through a careful examination of wartime letters, which revealed clear commitments to national ideology. In The Confederate War (1999), Gary Gallagher showed that Robert E. Lee and the Confederate army were the anchors of southern soldiers’ loyalty.
Starting in the 1950s and extending to the present day, scholars such as Benjamin Quarles, Dudley Taylor Cornish, Noah Trudeau, and Joseph T. Glatthaar focused on the experience of Black soldiers, demonstrating how profoundly different their experience of army life was from that of their white counterparts. Black soldiers received only a fraction of the pay that white soldiers received, they were often assigned demeaning fatigue duty, and they faced the prospect of slavery or execution if captured by Confederates. And yet the soldiers of the United States Colored Troops devoted themselves to the highest ideals of preserving the United States and ending slavery.
More recently, historians have attempted to re-imagine how the realities of war affected soldiers physically and psychologically. Their work dovetails with developments in the study of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and focuses on disabilities from battle wounds, psychological trauma, addiction to alcohol and narcotics, and the impacts of war-related incapacitation on veterans’ senses of masculinity. This “dark turn” in Civil War history is exemplified by the work of historians such as Megan Kate Nelson, Sarah Handley-Cousins, Brian Matthew Jordan, Jonathan S. Jones, and Diane Miller Sommerville.
But debate continues. Overemphasizing the dark subjects, as historians Gary W. Gallagher and Katherine Shively Meier suggest, might lead readers to believe that “atypical experiences were in fact normative ones.” They argue that most soldiers embraced the larger reasons for fighting, remained loyal to their causes through the conflict, returned to productive lives afterwards, and were proud of their service.
The effort to bridge personal motivations of soldiers with the ideologies and aims of the Union and Confederacy find a powerful new statement in Elizabeth R. Varon’s most recent book, Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War. Varon’s work frames the Union war effort as one that its soldiers understood as a “holy crusade” to save the misguided southern masses from slavery, slave power, and disunion.
She notes that the theme of “deliverance,” so often invoked by Union civilians, soldiers, and political leaders, reflected a real commitment to save the nation from the tyranny of malicious, domestic forces. Varon sees redemption as a core component of a belief system that included moral perfectibility and material progress. And she reminds us that Confederates also saw themselves as God’s chosen people, liberating the white South and their “oppressed brethren” in the border states from Yankee despotism.
Armies of Deliverance, then, unites the two great currents of interpretation that have dominated our understanding of the Civil War since the war itself: the personal and the public. Varon demonstrates that soldiers’ self-understanding and the larger purposes for which they fought must be understood together. Exceptionalism, redemption, and forgiveness were woven into the fabric of soldiers’ psychology as well as ideology.
In the classroom, we might tackle any number of political, economic, and social topics to better understand America’s most turbulent era. But teachers would serve their students well to emphasize the lived experiences of the men in the ranks. Among the most enlightening ways to make sense of a war is by consulting the men who fought it.
