The Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader (review)

The Grand Review of three victorious Union armies through the humid May streets of Washington signaled the end of the American Civil War. However for the over two million northern and southern former combatants spread across the recently fractured nation, the struggle to return and readjust to civilian life had just begun. In The Civil War Veteran, Larry Logue and Michael Barton attempt to summarize and detail the veterans’ experiences through a collection of thirty-one previously published, scholarly essays. The result is an impressive demonstration of “the rich variety of attitudes, circumstances, and behaviors that historians and other scholars have found among the Civil War veterans” (2).

Logue and Barton organize their collected essays into five roughly chronological categories, which they have identified as components of nineteenth-century demobilization and readjustment. The first—“Transitions to Peace”—unfortunately appears as the weakest of the book. Unlike the subsequent four, the initial section has little general cohesiveness. Dixon Wecter’s and William B. Holberton’s respective depictions of Union and Confederate soldiers’ journeys home connect appropriately to the greater theme, but Barton’s examination of the war’s psychological effects on southern veterans and Gaines Foster’s look at early Confederate veterans’ organizations both seem badly misplaced. Indeed, their inclusion here is all the more puzzling considering Logue and Barton’s separate later sections that deal specifically with physical and mental maladies and participation in veterans’ associations.

In contrast, the following two sections demonstrate the strength and possibilities of recent veteran studies, as well as Logue and Barton’s strong understanding of the subject matter. “The Problems of Readjustment” focuses on the all-too-familiar issues of criminality, alcoholism and drug addiction, and mental disorders, such as Eric Dean’s impressive and thoroughly researched essay on the occurrence of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which plagued many Civil War veterans for the remainder of their lives. The next section, “Governments Provide Aid,” details how state and federal authorities reacted to alleviate and provide for ailing veterans through the creation of various Soldiers’ Homes and the retooling of the Pension Bureau. However, notable essays from Richard Reid, Donald Shaffer, and Peter Blanck and Chen Song also complicate matters by revealing that endemic racism, nativism, and nineteenth-century bureaucracy undermined the system and often prohibited African American and foreign-born veterans from receiving their due.

From governmental assistance, Logue and Barton in the final two sections turn their attentions toward veterans’ activism. In “Veterans Fight Their Own Battles,” the essays focus predominantly upon the actions and interests of Union and Confederate veterans’ organizations during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. While Union associations, as Mary Dearing, Stuart McConnell, and Larry Logue argue, sought to secure Republican election victories, increase veteran benefits, and encourage camaraderie, Confederate groups concentrated on ensuring a continuation of the Old South’s honor and “traditions”—most notably that of white supremacy.

Similarly, the concluding “Veterans Shape the Collective Memory” explores the ways in which veterans North and South hoped to preserve their actions for future generations. The old soldiers utilized remembrances, monuments, and school curriculums to enshrine their version of history—be it a war for nationalism or the Lost Cause—for posterity. Yet by the dawn of the new century, Logue and Barton argue, through the essays of Gaines Foster, Carol Reardon, and David Blight, the nation and many of its veterans had embraced the spirit of reconciliation. “The war,” Blight concluded, “was remembered primarily as a tragedy that led to greater unity and national cohesion . . . not as the crisis of a nation deeply divided over slavery, race, [and] competing definitions of labor” (413).

The Civil War Veteran provides an indelible resource for both scholars and general readers, who all too often conclude their studies of the war at Appomattox. Logue and Barton aptly demonstrate not only the broad possibilities for veteran studies, but, more important, the diversity of the veteran’s experience...