Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia: A Statistical Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee (review)

Glatthaar’s publication of Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia is designed to provide the underlying statistical analyses behind his well-received narrative, General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse (New York, 2008). Glaatthar is one of an unfortunately small cadre of historians who incorporate quantitative work into their practices. In the process of writing General Lee’s Army, he created a dataset of 600 randomly selected soldiers and proceeded to establish their socioeconomic and demographic profiles. The dataset itself is an impressive feat.¹ The results of his data analyses in Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia often confirm received wisdom, but they also offer correctives to consensus views that the Confederacy’s Civil War was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” and that slaveholding among Confederate soldiers was actually not predominant.

In separate chapters, Glatthaar examines the composition of the three main branches of service—the infantry, the cavalry, and the artillery. Not surprisingly, he finds that the infantry was comprised predominantly of farmers and suffered the highest casualty rates, whereas wealthier planters gravitated to the cavalry. Artillery troopers, who were generally more urban, tended to be the poorest of the three. What Glatthaar does, however, is to place his subjects into their socioeconomic context, yielding more definition to their characteristics. Young men might not have owned any property by themselves, but their families often did. Classifying such soldiers as without assets thus misses the wealth of their households.

Similarly, in other chapters, Glatthaar reveals that although only 37 percent of all soldiers owned slaves personally, 42 percent of infantrymen and 54 percent of cavalrymen lived in households with slaves. Furthermore, he states, “Other soldiers worked for slaveowners, had clients and customers who were slaveowners, had family members with whom they did not reside who were slaveowners, or had other strong bonds to the peculiar institution” (154). Only careful data collection and analysis could have made such an important discovery. Glatthaar’s data also illuminate other traits based on patterns of age and marital status and class, but his more interesting comparison is between officers and enlisted men. Not surprisingly, officers were usually older, wealthier, and more established professionally than enlisted men were. Strangely, however, officers sustained significantly higher death rates than rank-and-file soldiers. This text is full of such fine-grained data on every facet of the soldiering population.

Although the publication of quantitative data is to be applauded, their presentation has some problems. Specifically, Glatthaar, in his desire to make the findings accessible, decided to format his findings in summary form, expressed exclusively in bar charts and as percentages in the text. Seeing the actual data in tabular form would have been helpful; in particular, the total number for each variable would have offered a better sense of sample sizes. Furthermore, Glatthaar reports an endless variety of characteristics as percentages with little explanation about the historical significance of the correlations between data points. At the very least, posting his data on a website would make his arduous work available to other scholars.