The Soldier's Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War - Hardcover

Robert E. Bonner is the author of two previous books on the Civil War. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Introduction:
 
“Glimpses of Many Things Untold”
 
The most lasting image of the Civil War soldier emerged during the last third of the nineteenth century, when Americans in the North and the South assured that posterity would remember some three and a half million ordinary fighters. As the ranks of actual Civil War veterans thinned, these men’s younger selves rose atop monuments and gained immortality in stone and bronze. Tributes subsequently showered down on the common soldier focused on the hundreds of solitary statues that held vigil over town squares and busy intersections. Praise for the military service of these men has furnished themes for countless civic ceremonies, in spite of the fact that they went to war against one another. Pride in what each risked and lost has been expressed with particular intensity on Memorial Day, an annual commemoration begun in the wake of the Civil War.
 
            The lavish attention devoted to the infantry private of the 1860s may not seem all that surprising in retrospect. For communities to honor defenders of their commonly shared values seems an obvious response. Yet in the context of the late nineteenth century, the elevation of the lowliest citizen-soldier over the statesman, the general, or the military conqueror was a strikingly novel gesture. Standing in uniform at parade rest with rifle at hand, this idealized soldier represented a new archetype, which proved to be a resilient part of the American culture of remembrance. By paying homage to this iconic soldier, the world’s leading democracy found a way to celebrate all who bore the greatest sacrifices of war by entering the lines of battle.
 
            Americans created three distinctive types in their postbellum efforts to valorize the citizen-soldier, and these have remained prevalent down to the present day. “Billy Yank” and “Johnny Reb” are the best known, and at times these are separated by little more than the fact that the first wore blue and the second was dressed in gray. Tributes to the African-American soldier introduced a third idealized infantryman, who would rarely receive as much attention as his white counterparts. It was not a nickname, a uniform, or any of those handful of striking monuments to black troops that elevated the archetypal African-American private to public prominence. This work was done by the words of Abraham Lincoln, whose tribute to a black fighter with “silent tongue and clenched teeth, and steady eye and well-poised bayonet” matched an imagined face and a warlike figure to the 170,000 enlisted men of the United States Colored Troops (USCT).
 
            Distilling the mass of individuals into a trio of familiar characters reflected an important truth about the commonalities of army life during the American Civil War. Military service did have a way of grinding down differences and making members of large, seemingly undifferentiated groups into the human equivalent of a machine’s interchangeable parts. The common soldier marched and ate en masse; he slept and bathed in shared quarters; his conduct was governed by standardized rules in force across thousands of miles; he formed the bottom of a chain of command organized by the nineteenth century’s most intricate hierarchies. Perhaps most important, death and lasting injury were doled out randomly for all who engaged in combat or exposed themselves to the filth of the army camp. One of the earliest and most important lessons that soldiers learned was that the fates of military life respected rank even less than did the ordinary workings of fortune.
 
            One of the central aims of The Soldier’s Pen is to restore soldiers’ individuality, which is often lost in the familiar triumvirate of Union, Confederate, and African-American troops. Collective portraits resonate not just in public culture but also in the development of a superb body of scholarship devoted to the common soldier. Historians over the last half century have produced enormously rich social histories of military life by discerning patterns, identifying leading tendencies, and establishing the basic parameters of the soldiering experience of the 1860s. This constantly growing body of writing, which draws from the same kind of firsthand testimonials sampled throughout The Soldier’s Pen, has produced valuable insights into what it was like to serve during America’s most costly war. In the details of such work one can find ample appreciation for soldier distinctiveness, though individuality is rarely a sustained theme.
 
            There have been unintended consequences in even the best overviews of soldier experiences, and these reinforce the tendencies of public memorialization. Most historians have framed their studies by asking how and why “the soldiers” joined the armies and how “they” then made the fight and returned home. Posing questions in collective cannot help blurring the distinct personalities of each fighter and obscuring the living, breathing humans who were inside standardized military uniforms. This book offers a different approach by emphasizing how most soldiers stubbornly maintained their individuality in the face of common hardships and regimentation. Its point of departure is the basic fact that American armies of the 1860s were largely composed of citizens with no earlier military aspirations, who took up soldiering for a specific period of time and then returned to civilian life. It should not be surprising that the experiences of these men (and the cluster of women who surreptitiously entered the armies) should be complex or that they would sustain their civilian perspectives by maintaining regular ties with home. Such variety resulted from the simple fact that fighting forces were a broad cross section of a multivaried American society, which during the 1860s was more thoroughly mobilized for war than at any other time in U.S. history.
 
            The documents collected in this book serve to remind general readers and scholars alike of the enormous diversity that prevailed within Civil War America and the armies that it raised. The strategy I have chosen is better suited to suggesting this truth than to establishing it definitively. The book focuses on the vivid lives of sixteen figures, all of whose wartime writing is located within a single archive. The resulting fine-grained portraits of distinct individuals have been gathered and introduced from a relatively manageable larger group. Such a limiting strategy allows for the development of characters across a number of thematic topics. Across a series of chapters, readers will learn how the same men faced soldiering and fighting, how they confronted the political questions that their military service sought to resolve, and how they used their pens to grapple with it all. The breadth of expression achieved by each of these individuals is a means of recovering the human dimensions of what too often seems a dehumanizing, even impersonal war.
 
            In putting together this collection and situating documents within chapters, I have sometimes allowed myself to imagine the impossible, if only to understand what might—and what might not—be gained by extended interaction with long-dead soldiers. What would it be like, I have occasionally wondered, to invite the hundreds of sculpted privates down from their pedestals and listen to individual voices that were magically brought back to life? This thought experiment has allowed me to understand what the poet Walt Whitman meant when he offered his own evocative description of what it meant to talk with Civil War troops and hear them out firsthand.
 
            I have concluded that Whitman was not only eloquent in his account of “talks with soldiers,” which he first described in the fall of 1863 and then revisited in articles and books published during the 1870s and 1880s, but in most respects also right. The lessons he drew have informed my own sense of which documents should be included in The Soldier’s Pen. Whitman emphasized, as I have in selecting documents and choosing images, those parts of soldiers’ testimony that provide “glimpses of many things untold in any official reports or journal.” Individual writing featured below conveys intricate stories, deeply felt emotions, passionate political commitments, and images in words and in pictures that still stir the imagination and leave readers with a lasting impression of what happened nearly a century and a half ago. Such material is, by its very nature, unavailable in the utterances of politicians or the reports of commanders.
 
            It seems to me that Whitman was also correct in explaining how opening oneself to soldiers’ words could lead to a heightened appreciation of the country’s collective experience. “I now doubt,” the poet confided after several months among the troops, “whether one can get a fair idea of what this war practically is, or what genuine America is, and her character, without some such experience as this I am having.” This was a keen insight, and it suggests a crucially important point that I have also tried to keep in mind within each of the following chapters. Emphasizing individual voices need not keep readers from appreciating the larger picture, especially when there is enough context provided to understand each soldier’s distinctive circumstances...