Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War by Brian Matthew Jordan (review)

Thousands of Civil War veterans survived well into the twentieth century: the last, a Minnesota Yankee, Albert Woolson, died in 1956. Newsreel films capture them, ghostly reminders of an age of heroes, at reunions, Memorial Day marches, and mass “encampments” that were held as late as 1938 at Gettysburg, where they served as quaint props for a lavishly staged celebration of reconciliation between North and South. All too typically, during that final “grand reunion,” a Yankee veteran of Custer’s cavalry division (who had been present at Appomattox in the last moments before Lee’s surrender) was in the midst of telling an NBC radio reporter that “we were about to charge, we had our sabers drawn, when a flag of truce appeared . . .” when the reporter abruptly cut him off, saying, “We don’t have time for all that.”

In this groundbreaking book, Brian Matthew Jordan makes abundantly clear that most civilians even of the veterans’ own generation wanted to know as little as possible about what Civil War soldiers had really endured. Masterfully constructed, exhaustively researched, and deeply moving, Marching Home delivers a revelatory account of what life was like for Union veterans after the guns fell silent in the spring of 1865. In writing this book, Jordan explored caches of veterans’ letters from Massachusetts to Nebraska, the scattered archives of the Grand Army of the Republic, not to mention offbeat collections such as submissions to a competition sponsored by the Daily National Intelligencer showcasing the writings of amputees who had retrained themselves to write with their left hands, and first-person memoirs submitted to Century Magazine in the mid-1880s. (Jordan found that the recollections submitted by private soldiers were often much grittier than those by elite officers, though they were almost always rejected by Century’s editors.)

At its core, Marching Home is a history of ex-soldiers’ suffering and dislocation. As such, it is an essential companion to the far more familiar history of wartime strategy and battlefield drama. Jordan takes us from demobilization through the phases of ex-soldiers’ painful attempts to readjust to civilian life, their long and often unsuccessful struggles to cope with physical and mental wounds, and finally into their old age as pensioners and invalids. Like much of James McPherson’s best work, Marching Home is mainly woven from the well-chosen and skillfully stitched-together voices of hundreds of veterans. His subject is the “old soldiers [who] lived somewhere between the past and the present, between the dead and the living, between innocence and guilt” (103). These are the soldiers of the Civil War as we have seldom heard them: querulous, angry, frustrated, despairing, and pleading for help.

Jordan decisively demolishes the notion that veterans simply settled back into lives that had been interrupted by four years of carnage. For countless men, “wartime” did not really end at all. In the weeks and months immediately after fighting ceased, Jordan tells us, rioting ex-soldiers terrified civilians in northern towns, such as Davenport, Iowa, where soldiers “‘maddened by liquor’ . . . smashed windows, ransacked houses, and ‘destroyed everything generally’” (46). So common was violence wrought by demobilized soldiers that as one exasperated New England editor put it, “We must wait, impatiently, for the awful scourge to pass by” (52). And that was just the beginning.

Returning veterans found that inflation was soaring and jobs were scarce. Many were no longer fitted for civilian work and were unable to support families who barely even recognized them. For those with crippling injuries, the prospects were even worse. There was no Veterans Administration, no Social Security, no public welfare network of any kind. Destitute soldiers struggled to survive on monthly pensions of $4 or $8 at a time when ordinary laborers earned about $44 per month and skilled workers about twice that. (Pensions were eventually increased somewhat.) To make matters worse, civilians often blamed difficulties on veterans’ own supposed...