The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies by Peter S. Carmichael (review)

Peter S. Carmichael's new monograph, The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies, investigates what happened to ideas and cultural values on the proving ground of war and how soldiers negotiated their deeply held beliefs through the shattering experience that the conflict became for many of them. The book consists of seven chapters whose themes overlap to provide a penetrative look into the mental arena of the Civil War soldier. Through a learned and compassionate close reading of his source material, Carmichael demonstrates how both Confederate and US soldiers developed a distinctive pragmatism of thought and action without ever fully abandoning their more traditionally lauded moral and cultural ideals.

Methodologically, Carmichael advocates for a holistic approach to understanding the various "pressure points" that bore down on Civil War soldiers physically but more especially psychologically, and how they coped with them (16). Without ever directly attempting to contradict the findings of historians who have previously written on the experience of the common soldier, he consistently seeks to complicate their conclusions. He utilizes a small number of case studies, which he argues resolves the issue of cherry-picking endemic to works that attempt to draw out any single facet of a large number of soldiers' thinking and extricates scholars, he contends, from the "historio-graphical cul-de-sac of representativeness" (134). Carmichael makes clear early on his position that "there was no common soldier" but records a number of insightful and broadly applicable observations that offer to sophisticate historians' treatment of the experience of soldiering (12).

What happened, Carmichael asks, when ideas cultivated in peacetime about the nature of war and how it ought to be conducted clashed with the realities of life in the field? Binary ways of thinking about what constituted brave, loyal, or dutiful service, he finds, quickly evaporated. Providential outlooks on battle and war gave way to fatalistic ones that more closely adhered to soldiers' experiences. Soldiers did not, however, discard their ideals or the notion of Providence. Qualities like bravery, loyalty, and patriotism continued to matter, argues Carmichael, but they came to be expressed and measured in unexpected ways, usually unthinkable before the war—transformed yet ultimately undiminished. The harsh lessons learned at Fredericksburg and countless other places, that bravery alone could not win battles, for example, did not diminish bravery as a virtue for Civil War soldiers, who continued to observe and comment upon it with reverence. Throughout his book, Carmichael concerns himself less with "what" Civil War soldiers thought about than "how they thought" and especially how their ideological commitments bent without breaking in response to the various pressures they endured (11).

The longest and strongest chapter concerns desertion: a perfect example of a seemingly straightforward situation in theory (an enlisted man is either AWOL or not) that Civil War soldiers found to be anything but in practice. Carmichael's deft analysis of the complexity of attitudes toward desertion evinced by soldiers over the course of the war reveals the ambiguity that lay at the heart of their experience. One Union officer even employed the term semi-deserters to describe some of those under his authority (202). That such a phrase could find use reflects the messy experience of the soldier, rather than the neat categorization of the civilian, and conveys an important aspect of how soldiers' thinking transformed in the crucible of war.

Carmichael's discussion of desertion also allows him to underscore the centrality of soldiers' "desire to survive," a crucial element of every participant's experience but one that few scholars comment on directly (25). He does well to illustrate the ways that the simple calculus of one's chances for survival fit into the constantly shifting hierarchy of pressures acting on soldiers as they made their...