Ohio Volunteer: The Childhood and Civil War Memoirs of Captain John Hartzell, OVI, and: The Civil War Letters of Joseph Hopkins Twichell: A Chaplain's Story (review)

In the 1890s, relatives of John Calvin Hartzell signed a round-robin petition asking him to write down his recollections of boyhood and the Civil War. Alice MacGowan cited the e manuscript he produced as the source for several wartime incidents in her 1910 novel The Sword in the Mountains, but Hartzell's own words were lost for decades until the late Charles Switzer, a professor of English who was researching MacGowan's work, obtained a typed copy of the memoir from one of Hartzell's descendants. The first half of the book that resulted is devoted to a nostalgic re-creation of Hartzell's youth in rural Ohio, a golden age unsullied by telephones, electricity, or modern sanitation, a time "before the microbes came," when a boy could still enjoy sneaking into the springhouse for a drink of unpasteurized milk (73). The stories Hartzell tells are quaint, but their selection can be frustrating; for example, when he devotes many pages to the making of maple sugar, but barely a paragraph to his parents' operation of an Underground Railroad station in their home.

Hartzell's style is pleasant and often gently humorous, but his descriptions of food, chores, and domestic incidents are so uniformly glowing as to cast doubt on their reliability. The problem is compounded when Hartzell recalls his war years with the 105th Ohio, which he joined in August 1862. Writing with his admiring family members in mind, "Uncle Cal" took care to keep the tone light and to focus on amusing or edifying incidents. When he could not avoid serious topics, like his service on a burial detail after the battle of Perryville, he censored himself. "What to tell, what to leave untold," he confessed, "is hard to decide" (99). Mediated by the thirty years that elapsed between the war and the writing of the memoir, the loss of the original manuscript, and Hartzell's awareness of the sensibilities of his audience, the memories he relates constitute an entertaining but highly selective retelling of his wartime experience.

It is unfortunate that the editor's evident enthusiasm for the project was not matched by his familiarity with the subject. The endnotes rely heavily on a few secondary sources (particularly my own monograph on the Army of the Ohio) but rarely explain the context of Hartzell's stories. Readers of this journal will likely have the background knowledge necessary to appreciate the accounts of Perryville, Chickamauga, and Missionary Ridge, but general readers may be left with many questions. The endnotes also contain numerous factual errors, such as mistaking a statue of Andrew Jackson for Stone-wall Jackson; citing further examples would be pointless and uncharitable. Despite this, the book can be read for amusement by anyone interested in the past and can be used (with care) by historians of the Western theater.

The letters of Joseph Twichell, in contrast, can be recommended without reservation. Twichell, a young Congregationalist chaplain in Dan Sickles's "Excelsior" Brigade from 1861 to 1864, participated in campaigns from the Peninsula to the Wilderness, and after the war became a public figure as a clergyman and close friend of Mark Twain. His letters (mostly to his father) are literary but unselfconscious. He comes across as an extraordinarily appealing and earnest young man, deeply concerned about his ability to save the souls of his regiment (the 71st New York), which was largely made up of immigrant Irish Catholics. Although he regarded Catholicism as full of superstition and "conscience-lulling errors," he was sympathetic toward his fellow soldiers and tried to win them to his views by focusing on the Christian beliefs they shared, a...