The War for the Common Soldier

This is a brand new book from Professor Peter Carmichael, the Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College and the Robert Fluhrer Professor of History at Gettysburg College.

If you’re interested in the soldier experience of the war, and who isn’t, this is a book you need to read. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this book will change perceptions of the common soldier experience in the Civil War. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m proud to say Peter is a friend of mine, but I’ve tried to be as objective as possible in this review.

In his Introduction, Professor Carmichael hits on the dominant theme of the book. “In The War for the Common Soldier I argue that Union and Confederate soldiers navigated the war with a spontaneous philosophy that can best be described as a hard-nosed pragmatism. Louis Menand was among the first historians to show the importance of pragmatism in his exceedingly important study of Union officer and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. According to Menand, Holmes’s pragmatism overshadowed his idealism by 1864, when Holmes came to distrust ideology and to value duty, experience, and professionalism above all else. Plenty of soldiers on both sides shared Holmes’s veteran outlook, but their pragmatism did not compete with their idealism as Menand’s argument would suggest. Rather, I believe that pragmatism gave them the flexibility to act in ways that actually helped them preserve their faith in ideas. Adaptability, the hallmark of pragmatism, empowered soldiers to shape themselves to the ground conditions of war, thus the ideas themselves could bend. As Joseph Glatthaar has shown in his pioneering study of Sherman’s army, the reworking of codes of appropriate conduct did not drain Union soldiers of their idealism. In fact, the rampant foraging and destruction of Southern property rarely descended into plundering. The men saw themselves as acting out of military necessity and legitimate retribution in order to restore the Union. Sherman’s men might have been the most pragmatic in their approach to war, but they were far from alone.” [pp. 7-8]

In speaking specifically of the effect of ideas on the soldiers, Dr. Carmichael writes, “We know that the defense of slavery mattered to Confederate soldiers; we have discovered that antislavery sentiments gained strength in Northern armies without submerging the primary commitment to Union; and we have reconstructed the dialogue between soldiers and the home front, with all of its tensions, contradictions, and expressions of mutual support. Virtually all historians agree that Civil War soldiers were not apolitical defenders of home and hearth, but complicated political beings who were deeply ideological, articulate, and driven to fight and die for high ideals. We also know how Civil War soldiers could act with incredible political solidarity at one moment and, in the next instance, turn against their government, the people back home, and each other. Both North and South, goes the established argument, also shared a political culture of republicanism, a similar national history, a deep faith in Christianity, and a universal commitment to manly honor and duty, which instilled in Northern and Southern soldiers the fortitude to endure incredible suffering as they strove to live out their sentimental ideals about manliness, religion, and national duty. Much of this scholarship pivots around an immensely important question: What motivated Union and Confederate soldiers? We have, as a result, a deeper appreciation and understanding of the reasons why men fought and why their reasons for fighting changed over time.” [p. 10]

In the early days of the war, as the volunteers were getting into camp, according to Professor Carmichael, “Everyone wanted to return home as a conquering hero, his bayonet and sword crimsoned with the enemy’s blood. The initiation into the military was the beginning of the transformation in how citizen-soldiers saw themselves as men.” [p. 10] He tells us, “In letter after letter, soldiers on both sides described themselves as dutiful sons to family and to country, an idea that never lost its emotional and political resonance even among hard-bitten veterans. Evan as soldiers proclaimed that they personally felt morally rejuvenated upon entering the ranks, they quickly discovered that the army could transform an innocent choirboy into a debauched and slovenly soldier overnight. A North Carolina soldier revealed to his cousin on January 1, 1862, that ‘camp is any thing but a place to improve a man’s moral & religious feelings. It seems as if most men soon forget in camp that they have to be accountable for their words at least & a great many for their actions.’ Such complaints were understandable, but soldiers and civilians drew comfort in knowing that the moral conscience of the community followed every enlistee into his company. Those at home kept close tabs on their companies through newspaper reports, letters received from the ranks, and stories from soldiers returning home on furlough. The seeds of the communication grapevine sprouted from the company, the smallest but most important unit in Civil War armies. The company was composed of men who were brothers, fathers, cousins, and childhood friends, typically from the same hometown or surrounding area. Enlisted men served under familiar and respected figures of authority. The lawyer in town, the neighboring planter, and the local businessman usually organized companies, composed of a hundred men who came from all social classes. Ten companies made up a regiment that almost always reflected a broad cross section of a particular region, town, or city. Class and social tensions did not immediately disappear once units were mustered into service, but at the same time soldiers did not divide themselves into competing factions based on economic status, but archaeology surveys of Civil War camps reveal that officers enjoyed more luxury items and possessed more physical comforts in their quarters than enlisted men did.” [pp. 10-11]

The camp slave was ubiquitous in the confederate armies. Dr. Carmichael tells us the typical reaction of confederate soldiers was to reduce “the ‘camp servant’ to a tireless instrument of labor to be exploited for the comfort of the mess without regard to the fact that their slave had also been removed from his loved ones back in the slave quarters. Confederate slaves were in the unusual and remarkable position of watching their masters submit to a higher authority, a truly shocking display of humility that they must have secretly and thoroughly enjoyed watching. The constraints on white supervision, moreover, allowed slaves to become roving entrepreneurs in camp–to build their own customer base and cook, clean, and sew for a profit. In some instances, they were allowed to retain a portion of their earnings. Such an arrangement enriched Confederate General William Dorsey Pender’s slave for a while, but the good times came to an abrupt end when he walked into camp wearing clothing that was the envy of every white soldier. ‘The rascal seems to have plenty of money,’ Pender informed his wife, ‘but I have ordered him to allow me to be his treasurer. He has managed to dress himself in a nice gray uniform, French bosom linen shirt–for which he paid $4–has two pairs [of] new shoes.’ The presence of slaves in camp could remind men of all classes that their struggle would decide the fate of white liberty, and at the same time it could foster deep resentment between Confederate officers and private soldiers. It could not have been easy for a poor white soldier to watch a slave leave a marching column and forage for his master or to see slaves strip the Union dead of shoes, blankets, and equipment while having to remain in the ranks and under fire during the midst of a battle. A Louisiana soldier, forced to clean up the ‘entrails of fowls’ covered with maggots and left in his captain’s tent, could barely contain his range while the ‘buck negroes of [the] officers stood around and grinned.’ ” [p. 42]

We also learn “In confiding to their wives Northern and Southern men showed their emotional vulnerability. Such admissions would have been unthinkable before the war, but the duress of soldiering forced men to adjust how they related to the women. In other words, they became emotional pragmatists out of necessity to cope with a military world that at times left them feeling lonesome and isolated. Yet no man wanted to appear weak and utterly helpless to those at home, especially to his wife. The language of ‘poor soldier’ offered soldiers a way to preserve their sense of manliness by stressing how the everyday miseries of life were borne with heroic suffering while also acknowledging that there were uncontrollable forces of war that acted on them.” [p. 45]

What we find with the soldiers profiled in the first chapter is, “All of these men endured a process of military professionalization backed by physical violence and aimed at transforming the individual into obedient soldiers for their nation. They all resented and resisted the authoritarian ways of their officers; they all felt abandoned at some point by their army and their governments for leaving them broke, hungry, and half starved; they all were trapped in a predatory economy; and they all were inextricably connected, both financially and emotionally, to loved ones behind the lines. These overlapping experiences would seem to argue for a common soldier identity, but such a sweeping claim is unsustainable when one considers race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Other critical differences emerge when accounting for the very specific circumstances in which men soldiered. The intersection between the physical demands of soldiering and the landscape, where fierce collisions between soldiers and military authorities occurred, varied based on a soldier’s background and place in the ranks.” [p. 61]

Soldier pragmatism is the recurring theme of the book. Civil War soldiers adopted a pragmatic approach to the events in their lives and in the decisions they made. This is not to say they didn’t have ideologies. They did. But they approached their lives in a flexible manner, and they could act in ways that would surprise someone steeped in their ideology and thinking only in terms of that ideology.

In this book, Professor Carmichael gives us case studies of soldiers who wrote about and experienced a number of different situations, from camp life to desertion, from battle to executions. He has chapters that explore how soldiers confronted victory, how they confronted defeat, and how they reacted after the confederate surrenders. He talks about cowardice in battle as well as courage in battle. As you can see, he covers subjects other scholars of common soldiers have covered, but he also cover subjects other scholars haven’t covered because of the extensive mining of archives he’s done, finding letters and reconstructing the experiences of soldiers we don’t normally read about. He melds this with a deep understanding of previous scholarship. While some readers may not agree with all of his interpretations [after all, very few people agree with 100% of any particular scholar’s interpretations], I think it’s safe to say readers will agree his interpretations are logical and reasonable based on the evidence, and will agree with the vast majority of his interpretations of the soldiers’ experiences. I see this book as an important contribution to our understanding of Civil War soldiers and I can highly recommend it to all students of the war.