Army Life: From a Soldier's Journal

Series Editors’ Preface

Series Editors’ Preface The Civil War in the West has a single goal: to promote historical writing about the war in the western states and territories. It focuses most particularly on the Trans-Mississippi theater, which consisted of Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, most of Louisiana (west of the Mississippi River), Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), and Arizona Territory (two-fifths of modern-day Arizona and New Mexico), but encompasses adjacent states, such as Kansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi, that directly influenced the trans-Mississippi war. It is a wide swath, to be sure, but one too often ignored by historians and, consequently, too little understood and appreciated. Topically, the series embraces all aspects of the wartime story. Military history in its many guises, from the strategies of generals to the daily lives of common soldiers, forms an important part of that story, but so, too, do the numerous and complex political, economic, social, and diplomatic dimensions of the war. The series also provides a variety of perspectives on these topics. Most importantly, it offers the best in modern scholarship, with thoughtful, challenging monographs. Secondly, it presents new editions of important books that have gone out of print. And thirdly, it premieres expertly edited correspondence , diaries, reminiscences, and other writings by participants in the war. It is a formidable challenge, but by focusing on some of the least familiar dimensions of the conflict, The Civil War in the West significantly broadens our understanding of the nation’s most pivotal and dramatic story. Even among Civil War historians, Albert O. Marshall’s Army Life is an extremely rare and little-known work, which makes Arkansas’s annotated edition all the more welcome in the literature. Army Life is a richly detailed and lively memoir by a Union soldier who served from 1861 through 1864 throughout the Mississippi Valley, southern Louisiana, and along the lower Texas coast. Marshall describes his service in the Thirty-third Illinois Infantry, vii illuminating that unit’s crucial contributions to important campaigns in Missouri and Arkansas, the siege of Vicksburg, the invasion of the Teche country in Louisiana, and subsequent attempts to invade Texas at Brownsville and Matagorda Bay. Marshall includes a wide range of interesting comments and candid evaluations of soldier life. He criticizes his commanding officers, evaluates Yankee strategy and politics, and describes several interesting encounters with Confederate civilians of various classes and conditions. He also delineates quite candidly the invading Union army’s destruction of property and seizure of cotton, and he gives vivid pen pictures of the dangerous and difficult plight of runaway slaves who flocked by the thousands to the safety of Union lines. Marshall also makes it clear that the great majority of Union soldiers viewed emancipation primarily as a military policy meant to win a war to save and restore the Union and to ensure that slaveholders would no longer control the national government. Based substantially upon information gleaned from original diaries and letters written during the war, Marshall’s Army Life provides an extremely valuable primary account by an intelligent and insightful Civil War soldier. Robert G. Schultz, the volume editor, has done a commendable job of introducing and editing the text and of adding a variety of maps, portraits, and other illustrative material that enriches the memoir. As such, it is an excellent addition to the Civil War in the West series. T. Michael Parrish Daniel E. Sutherland Series Editors Series Editors’ Preface viii ...