NEW ADDITIONS TO THE REENACTOR'S BOOKSHELF:
Beyond Bell Wiley...Understanding the "Inner" Soldier
by C. A. Graham
Civil War reenactors
have become fine students of the material culture of Civil War soldiers.
Combining diverse resources of the material culturalist, and the appreciation
for detail and aesthetics of the antiquarian, many reenactors have attained
an astonishing collective of historical information. While interpreting
the experiences of Civil War soldiers, reenactors often take advantage
of living history's strengths: the use of uniforms, weapons, camps, and
battles in appealing to the audio, visual, and tactile senses of observers
to convey historical information that cannot be obtained through the printed
word.(footnote 1)
Yet reenactors
often fail to recognize the primary principle of interpreting material
culture by not using the available text, the material, to explain culture.
The effective interpreter must use uniforms, food, equipment, and battle
tactics to explain the motivations, influences, and reactions of Civil
War soldiers. Religion, honor, family, and death were cultural influences
that dominated the lives of the soldiers of 1861-1865. Yet these forces
are often overlooked by reenactors. Why? Because this type of intangible
information cannot be found in standard reenactor resources: artifacts
and reproductions. The soldiers themselves in letters, diaries, and personal
histories often referred to by reenactors, while very specific about issues
concerning them, were unable, as individuals, to articulate broad explanations
for actions with detached historical perspective. Academic historians are
best equipped to read and analyze the messages and meaningsof what the
soldiers left behind. It is the resources offered by academic historians
to which reenactors must avail themselves in order to add to the cultural
and material environment of the Civil War experience.(footnote
2)
In the
last twenty years, social historians have produced a great number of very
important studies of the Civil War soldier. Unfortunately, these works
are unknown, or at best overlooked, by the reenacting community.(footnote
3) While individual works may be familiar to some, the greater body
of knowledge, and conclusions are not at present a source of information
for reenactors. Incorporating the information from these sources into interpretive
tableaux, and for personal satisfaction, will produce a more powerful and
profound understanding of the experiences of Civil War soldiers. The following
essay seeks to provide an introduction to these works in the form of a
brief bibliographic review.(footnote
4)
In 1982, the
late Marvin Cain called for "face of battle" studies for the American Civil
War. Professor Cain, inspired by John Keegan's groundbreaking Face of
Battle, desired an analysis of the "motives and attitudes" of common
soldiers. Such investigations would bring the scholarship on the Civil
War soldier to par with the sociological and psychological studies by Samuel
A. Stouffer and S.L.A. Marshall of World War Two veterans(footnote
5). Historians have responded to Cain's call with over a dozen books
and articles. This body of work represents a radical new understanding
of the nature of the Civil War, the men who fought, and the effect war
had on their ideological foundations. Yet outside social history circles,
these works remain unknown and unused.
Bell I.
Wiley's two best known books, produced in the 1940s, remained virtually
the only studies on the life of the common soldier for over 40 years. The
Life of Johnny Reb and The Life of Billy Yank were groundbreaking,
both in their focus on the common soldier and in methodology. Mining libraries
and archives for thousands of letters, diaries, and memoirs, Wiley described
the soldiers, daily routines and activities. While some of his conclusions
have failed the test of time, other observations remain the most original
and insightful to date.(footnote
6)
Historians
presently exploring the world of the Civil War soldier have not ventured
far from Wiley's methodology, but have become increasingly sophisticated
in investigating and criticizing primary materials. Thousands of manuscripts
left by men of all ranks remain in archives, libraries, and private homes;
a "great reservoir...," writes James I. Robertson, that "has been but lightly
tapped.,"(footnote 7).
Scholars in recent years have been careful to distinguish between letters
and diaries written privately during the war, and publications, memoirs,
and regimental histories produced for an audience after the war.
The newer
works on Civil War soldiers can be divided into three rough, and sometimes
overlapping categories; a description of soldier life, studies
of ideology and motivation, and analysis of the effects of combat and other
wartime experiences.
Remaining close
to Wiley's tradition, James Robertson and Larry J. Daniel have contributed
further descriptions of soldier life. Robertson's Soldiers Blue and
Gray rightfully claims kinship to his mentor's works. Using manuscripts
untouched by Wiley, Robertson describes the daily routines and experiences
of Union and Confederate soldiers ranging from fun and frolic to discipline
and punishment. While well written and readable, Soldiers Blue and Gray
is not analytical and makes no new assertions. In fact, Robertson's decision
to pay "no attention... to the thousands of young men who avoided service
by dubious means," and overlook "comments by those troops who continually
bemoaned their plight ... " serves to create a work more celebratory than
useful to scholars and those seeking a comprehensive description of the
soldier's experience(footnote
8).
Soldiering
in the Army of Tennessee by Larry J. Daniel follows the same format
as Wiley and Robertson, yet is unique in its description of soldiers in
a single army. Daniel argues that the unity of the Confederate Army of
Tennessee was not attributable to leadership and victory, as with the Army
of Northern Virginia, but arose from a sense of comradeship due to shared
sacrifice. Daniells' anecdotes and description of daily life is informed,
interesting, and should be of use to reenactors.(footnote
9)
While these
studies provide the best detail of the minutiae of soldier life, they fail
to offer analysis of less tangible issues like ideology, motivation, and
psychological transformation, a task assumed by social historians.
Gerald
Linderman's Embattled Courage is the first of several studies to
explore the forces that drove Northerners and Southerners into the military
and maintained their unity through four years of combat.(footnote10)
The author carefully describes the complex web of values and morals that
influenced mid-nineteenth century men, and identified courage (as opposed
to honor) as the central concept. Emboldened by a need to prove one's courage
to kin and community, men rushed into the army with romantic expectations,
only to endure the hardships of camp life and horrors of the battlefield.
Having identified this central motivation, Linderman states his thesis:
because of combat, in the second half of the war, callousness infected
the soldier, and a desire to survive became more important than demonstrations
of courage and patriotism. Soldiers felt alienated from those on the homefront,
to whom they could not convey an understanding of combat, and became increasingly
dependent upon comrades for emotional support. This small-unit cohesion
maintained the soldier's will to fight until the close of the war.
Linderman's
book has two weaknesses. First is his reliance on a small sample of soldier's
writings, primarily memoirs and regimental histories, causing his evidence
to lack the candidness and immediacy of letters and diaries. Second, Linderman
concludes with admittedly speculative and weak theses concerning motives
for the mass re-enlistment of Union soldiers in 1864, and the return to
a courageous ideal following the war. These dampen the effect of an otherwise
strongly argued statement about a powerful ideological transformation.
James McPherson's
What They Fought For, 1861-1865 and its recently published successor,
For Cause and Comrades, argues not for the centrality of ethical
and demonstrative motivations, but instead, patriotic convictions.(footnote
11) North and south both maintained the view they were fighting for
the legacy of 1776. The belligerents each cherished its own interpretation
of the Revolution, the Constitution, the meaning of government, and the
future of the nation. The culture of the antebellum United States cultivated
citizens who deemed it a moral obligation to defend the nation inherited
from veteran fathers of the Revolution. McPherson disputes Linderman's
thesis about the demise of moralistic motivations, and maintains that soldiers
were continuously motivated by patriotic ideals through the close of the
war.
McPherson
is careful to be critical of his sources, relying primarily on letters
and diaries not intended for an audience. Through this method, McPherson
uses a high number of very literate, middle-class volunteers; the very
men who make the best exhortations, and the class that suffers the highest
number of casualties. McPherson, like Robertson, then can claim to discount
the motives and influence of skulkers, conscripts, and illiterates.
In The
Vacant Chair, Reid Mitchell examines the cultural motivations for boys
and men to fight for the Union cause.(footnote
12) "Boys" are emphasized because Mitchell asserts that the war was
attractive to young men for the potential of coming of age experiences.
The author's greater thesis is that the Union was a metaphor for an extended
family, in which the masculine north, as sons and soldiers, must retrieve
and scold the wayward sister, the south. And in a more immediate sense
family served as a motivator: the best way to preserve the future success
of the family (i.e.- community and nation) against the perceived slave
power conspiracy was as a soldier in the army. Keeping the soldier in the
army for four years was also a function of the immediate family, as close
communication between home and the army readily assured the soldier's best
behavior.
The third
category concerns the transformative experience of war. Gerald Linderman's
soldiers undergo an extreme transformation, forsaking courage and honorific
ideals in favor of reliance on comrades and survival. While Linderman's
conclusions are similar for northern and southern soldiers, the studies
and conclusions in this section make critical distinctions between the
warring armies.
Joseph
Allan Frank and George A. Reeves' "Seeing the Elephant": Raw Recruits
at the Battle of Shiloh explores the attitudes of soldiers on the Shiloh
campaign.(footnote13)
Frank and Reeves examine briefly the motivations for the men at Shiloh
to enlist and make no new assertions beyond Linderman's, McPherson's, and
Mitchell's statements. Their primary questions relate to the expectations
of soldiers on the eve of their first battle, their experiences in that
battle, and how that effected their expectations afterwards. The authors
conclude the experience of combat at Shiloh did not significantly transform
the soldiers, but sobered their enthusiasm for combat, and caused them
to reevaluate their expectations of officers as combat leaders.
Joseph
Glatthaar's The March to the Sea and Beyond features the soldiers
of General William T. Sherman's post-Atlanta campaign through Georgia and
the Carolinas.(footnote
14) Glatthaar makes critical distinctions between the Westerners of
Sherman's army and those of the Army of the Potomac, counter-balancing
Wiley's and Robertson's emphasis on the latter. Sherman's army, because
of its social background, its longer marches and higher number of victories,
assumed a more egalitarian and leveling appearance and behavior than its
eastern counterpart, making it possible to assume the torch of total war
in Georgia and the Carolinas.
Reid Mitchell's
first book, Civil War Soldiers establishes pre-war expectations
and their subsequent transformations.(footnote
15) Both Northerners and Southerners cultivated images of their enemies
as savage destroyers of democratic American civilization. The wartime experience
of prisoner of war camps, invasion and destruction of property, and behavior
of women, served to confirm that imagery for both sides. As war progressed,
northern soldiers became increasingly committed, not only the destruction
of Confederate property as a means to ending the war, but to the annihilation
of southern society. Mitchell postulates, based on actions during the Gettysburg
campaign, that Southerners would likewise have nurtured a similar desire
for destruction of enemy society had they remained north of the Mason-Dixon
line longer.
Mitchell's
Southerners, however, were increasingly concerned with the deteriorating
home front. The simultaneous pull of duty and domesticity forced the southern
soldier to make a decision between the immediate needs of a desperate family,
suffering at the hands of speculators and incompetent government, and staying
in the army and supporting the very cause of the family's suffering. Mitchell's
thesis is stated well and significantly considers the culture of middle
period America. His most important contribution with this book is to establish
the exclusive experience of northern and southern soldiers and to introduce
domesticity as a critical problem for Confederates.
Drew Gilpin
Faust has investigated one particular aspect of the Confederate experience.(footnote
16) In Christian Soldiers: The Meaning of Revivals in the Confederate
Army, Faust explores the many-layered implications of the religious
revivals that swept the Confederate armies in the Autumn and Winter of
1863. Revivals, a dying institution in the old south, sprung up again in
the southern armies as a reaction to the stress of years of bloody combat
and increasing Confederate defeats. Faust diagnoses the physical and emotional
exhortations associated with revivalism as similar to symptoms of the post-traumatic
stress syndrome suffered by soldiers of later American wars. She further
argues that Confederates used the emotional discipline Evangelicalism provided
as a means of accepting, not only the unfamiliar military discipline of
soldier life, but of the mechanical demands required by time in the new
industrial world the war was introducing to the south.
The works
discussed here are thorough and important, but leave room for further study.
To begin, historians may investigate the influence of those who left no
written record and were not included in previous studies; illiterates,
conscripts, skulkers, and deserters. Building on the framework provided
by McPherson, Linderman, Mitchell and others, an even more complete understand
of the Civil War soldier may be achieved.
In interpretive
settings, the resources provided by academic historians can give greater
meaning and depth to descriptions of soldier life. The details of the soldiers'
psychological transformations, or of the frustrating experience of Confederates,
provide drama to a story, a tangible "hook" to understanding the soldiers,
experience, and may elicit an emotional response from observers.
One minor difficulty
exists in using these works in first-person interpretation. Historians
ask questions, and extract answers of soldiers about influences of which
they were unaware. The first-person interpreter, therefore cannot repeat
a grand theory, but must use coded statements and exclamations. Proper
use of a third-person "translator" will make these messages clear to spectators. (footnote
17) In battles and non-spectator situations, the works presented here
may aid in setting an appropriate tone for date specific scenarios. The
pomp and bravado of an 1861 event may give way to the sullen determination
of an 1864 scenario. The resulting contrast will provide a more nuanced
and rewarding understanding of the experiences of Civil War soldiers.
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