"I Hope To Do My Country Service": The Civil War Letters of John Bennitt, M.D., Surgeon, 19th Michigan Infantry (review)

In 1992, the Civil War–era letters of Dr. John Bennitt were donated to the library of Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. Senior Librarian Robert Beasecker has now edited them and had them published. There are over two hundred letters in the collection, including more than a score that were written before Bennitt joined the army.

The picture of Bennitt that emerges from his letters is that of a man who desperately misses his wife and daughters, a man for whom religion is of great importance and who sees slavery as a scourge on America, and a man who seems unable to decide what to do when the war is over.

Such collections of letters often contain interesting vignettes of battles or camp life, but these letters are barren of that. Dr. Bennitt spent most of his army time away from his regiment in brigade or division hospitals and was seldom even within hearing distance of the fighting. He and most of his regiment were captured in Tennessee on 25 March 1863, and, according to Beasecker, Dr. Bennitt was sent to Libby Prison in Richmond, from which he was exchanged at the end of May. Bennitt barely mentions this. Furthermore, his letters indicate that although he was not exchanged until the end of May, he was paroled and on his way north fully six weeks before that.

The editor has done an able job in chronicling Bennitt's life both before and after the war, but the letters themselves do not contain much of real interest.