Yankee Rebel: The Civil War Journal of Edmund DeWitt Patterson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS277 fine paper, good binding and interesting ülustrations. (There are even references to the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry which had several companies from IlUnois.) Certainly it is an important contribution to the epic of the Civü War. Wayne C. Temple Springfield, Illinois Yankee Rebel: The Civil War Journal of Edmund DeWitt Patterson. Edited by John G. Barrett. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966. Pp. xix, 207. $6.00.) Yankee Rebel is the finest personal narrative of Confederate experiences since Henrv Kvd Douglas' / Rode with Stonewall. It glows with its warm accounts of Confederate soldier Ufe, shines in its vivid descriptions of important battles, and sparkles—despite the hardships of camp and prison —with a bright touch of humor. Edmund DeWitt Patterson was an Ohioan who moved to northern Alabama as a teenager. He espoused the cause of the South with the fervor of a convert and enthusiasticaUy joined die Ninth Alabama Infantry in the spring of 1861. He served without special distinction as soldier and Ueutenant (except as wounds are a distinction prized beyond medals by die veteran) through BuU Run, the Peninsular Campaign, the Seven Days, Fredericksburg, ChanceUorsvflle, and Gettysburg. At Gettysburg he was captured and spent from mid-1863 to March, 1865, in Federal prisons at Fort Delaware and at Johnson's Island. With only a rudimentary formal education, Patterson learned to write in a Uterate, forthright style—fuU of natural good humor and emotion and only occasionally burdened by lapses into excesses of Victorian romantic locutions. He wrote pointedly and directly of camp life, excitingly of müitary actions, and with remarkable good spirit and restraint of prison days. This is a diary to savor and remember; Patterson is a Civil War soldier the reader can count as a friend. Most of aU his diary is one easy to quote, and future students of the war will doubtless rum to him for appropriate quotations almost as often as to Douglas, Mrs. Mary Boykin Chesnut, Mrs. Roger Pryor, John Beauchamp Jones, and the other standby Confederate diarists. So much of ill preparation for war does his entry of July 16, 1861 (only three days before First BuU Run), tell: "... I begin to feel tonight the reaUty of war to a certain extent. In the first place, it looks as if someone is to be hurt, by their issuing ammunition to the men. These are the first 'Cartridges' that I have ever seen, and is it possible that we are acruaUy to km men? Human Beings? That these cartridges were made purposelv for one poor mortal to shoot at another? Yes, this is war, and how hardened men must become." So much of the soldier's attitude does he reveal in saying on April 4, 1862: "I am pretty tired and am anxious that folks should quit diis land of 278CIVIL WAR HISTORY foolishness, and go home." And on May 9: 'The rations have joined us, and I am glad enough, for I am tired of stealing corn from the horses when I know that they can't weU do without it" And when he writes of letters from home on November 23: "If any one who has a friend or relative in the company could have seen the faces and heard the remarks of the boys as I distributed die letters I had brought, I am sure that such a one would not faü to embrace the next opportunity of sending a letter. Letters from home or the immediate neighborhood of home have more to do widi keeping up die spirits and morale of the army dian is generaUy supposed . . . . Give the boys letters written in a cheerful honest spirit and they are more conducive to health dian medicine and more potent to prevent desertion that the articles of war which pronounces the sentence of deaui." Quotable passages abound throughout the book. Readers must discover for themselves the sharp images of men in battie, the glimpses of such personages as Jefferson Davis, Alexander H. Stephens, William Lowndes Yancey, Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, Jeb Stuart, and A. P. HiU. War was not aU fun and games, not aU fraternizing and snow-balling, even to...