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  • New Men: Reconstructing the Image of the Veteran in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture. by John A. Casey Jr.
  • Lesley J. Gordon (bio)
New Men: Reconstructing the Image of the Veteran in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture. By John A. Casey Jr. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Pp. 234. Cloth, $65.00.)

John A. Casey Jr.'s New Men offers a fresh and compelling portrait that challenges many traditional assumptions about Civil War veterans. The term "veteran," Casey notes, has not always held the same meaning in American culture. Before the Civil War, serving in the military was an experience, but not an identity. That changed, however, when millions of men returned home and increasingly perceived their service as life-changing. Veterans from both the North and South were mindful that they stood apart from the rest of civilian society and that only they could speak authoritatively about the realities of war. And this transformation, Casey argues, marks a watershed moment in American history: "it created a new way of thinking and writing about war and its survivors" (165).

Veteran studies, to which this important book contributes, has blossomed and grown over the last thirty years. Seminal works by Stuart McConnell, Gaines Foster, and David Blight explore Civil War veterans' political efforts, the significance of their fraternal organizations, and their active role in creating a lasting memory of the war. Recently, there has been new attention paid to veterans' homes and soldiers' postwar lives and families, notably by Jeffrey McClurken, James Marten, Barbara Gannon, and Brian Jordan. Gerald Linderman was one of the first to suggest the disillusionment and alienation between veterans and civilians in Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (1987). However, Casey, in a carefully nuanced approach, builds and expands on this scholarship, by exploring the cultural framework veterans utilized to find meaning in their service. Instilled to believe that "war makes men," veterans, north and south, black and white, struggled to understand just what kind of men they were once the fighting stopped (129).

Casey finds a shift in public perceptions of veterans, initially centered on the ideal of the citizen-soldier, which dated from the nation's founding. Veterans had been "suffering" and sacrificing, but once this civil war ended, they became "wounded warriors" (17–18). This image, however, was not one veterans entirely embraced; they resented the implication that they were disabled victims, dependent on civilians for assistance. And with an economy rapidly expanding, they clung to prewar ideals of "artisanal manhood" (54). By the turn of the century, however, resentment increased, as a "rising generation of middle-class white males" looked to figures in business and industry as role models rather than to soldiers (129). [End Page 348]

Casey's sources are mainly printed ones, including fiction and nonfiction, much of it by familiar authors. He provides close readings of works by Ambrose Bierce, Albion Tourgée, Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, John Esten Cooke, Sam Watkins, John William De Forest, Stephen Crane, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, among others. He further analyzes visual images, including those by Winslow Homer and illustrations in popular magazines and newspapers. There are black and white voices included here, but Casey argues that black veterans' voices "faded" (15). They did so not merely as a result of white racism, which disallowed black voices from being heard, published, and accepted; black veterans and their children and grandchildren believed that any achievements gained by the war in terms of equality and citizenship were lost in the brutal violence and terrorism of the postwar South. Thus narratives of black soldiers were deliberately and purposefully left out of the larger popular narrative of the war.

This is an ambitious book and seeks to do a good deal in challenging current historiography. It is mostly successful, particularly in arguing that the relationship between soldiers and civilians was complex, with both groups trying to navigate the postwar world they each inhabited. He further suggests that veterans' memories served as a comfort and an identifier, allowing veterans to heal from the war's traumas yet also setting them apart and, at times, leaving...

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