Baring the Iron Hand: Discipline in the Union Army (review)

Historians of Civil War soldiers have often touched on the issue of discipline, or the lack thereof, in the ranks. Bell Wiley addressed it in several chapters of The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (1952) and The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (1943), as did veteran John D. Billings in Hard Tack and Coffee: Soldier's Life in the Civil War (1888). Robert Utley and Edward M. Coffman examined the issue in their broader studies of the U.S. Army, but no one has granted it the sustained attention that Steven J. Ramold has in Baring the Iron Hand: Discipline in the Union Army.

Ramold explains that there are two definitions of discipline. One relates to combat efficiency, but the focus of this work is the other, which involves the "willingness to obey orders, subordinate oneself to military practice and custom, and accommodate the needs of the group over the wishes of the individual" (3). The inevitable challenge during the Civil War, he argues, was that volunteers' cultural influences caused them to cling to their "bachelor manhood" in the midst of a Victorian-influenced military. In short, "The army expected discipline, but the citizen-soldiers expected freedom" (122).

Ramold begins his account with a history of the military justice system before the Civil War and then details the historic tensions between officers and enlisted men, as well as regulars and volunteers. The next several chapters examine how the Union army dealt with specific problems such as drinking, insubordination, and petty crimes. If Ramold finds a trend linking these issues, it is a military force so inundated with stubborn volunteers that the army had to modify its policies; enforcement of the old order proved impossible.

As the war dragged on, though, the volunteers changed, too. Ramold details how, as Gerald Linderman argued in Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (1987), "confronted by a war that defied any military attempt to achieve victory and surrounded by defiant civilians that openly supported the enemy, Union soldiers gave in to some of the baser behaviors," including pillaging private property, desecrating corpses, and sexual assault, particularly on African-American women (301). Charting these violations, Ramold reveals once again that an overwhelmed military court system and frustrated provost marshals responded with flexible enforcement of army regulations. "This may not be the ideal example of pure justice," he admits, "but if military law existed to maintain order and create an effective fighting force, then the Union army's legal system worked well enough" (313).

Weaknesses in the final chapter on soldiers' responses to punishments highlight the larger weaknesses of the entire work. Ramold tries to claim too much at times, while at others he fails to find any meaningful trends. In the epilogue, he insists that the postwar army's reforms "occurred because soldiers of the Union army forced these changes" (395). The army's postwar reforms may have been inspired by the frustrations of the Civil War years, and it is true that veteran officers like Emory Upton recognized the value of citizen-soldiers as a result of his Civil War service. But Upton was interested in using volunteers to their full effectiveness, not changing the army to be more like them. Similar flaws surface in Ramold's portrayal of the regulars as an eminently professional force fundamentally different from volunteers. There are differences, but as Robert Utley demonstrated in Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848–1865 (1967) and Edward M. Coffman confirmed in The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898 (1986), regulars had plenty of their own problems with alcoholism, desertion, disobedience, and injustice that often drove their best men, just as imbued with masculinity and citizenship rights as any volunteer, out of the army.

Ramold admits in the introduction that "there is no easy way to...