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

In eloquent and elegant prose, Peter S. Carmichael examines the experience of war for the enlisted soldiers of the Union and Confederate armies. Focusing on a small sample of men to understand how they processed the war, he finds that soldiers were adaptable to the circumstances of army life. They had to be to survive the filth, frustration, crushing boredom, and mortal terror that characterized their lives. Indeed, the author argues, “soldiers navigated the war with a spontaneous philosophy that can best be described as a hard-nosed pragmatism” (p. 7). Ideology frequently clashed with reality, and soldiers made practical choices that may not have always meshed with the ideals of duty, honor, or patriotism that they had espoused previously. Carmichael adeptly investigates the “cultural and ideological boundaries” of the war, how soldiers responded when they experienced the grim actuality of war, and how soldiers “intellectually and practically navigate[d] moments of doubt” (p. 11).

Carmichael chooses to explore case studies of a few dozen soldiers rather than survey thousands of letters from a sample of hundreds of troops. By doing so, he asserts that he “minimizes the cherry-picking” of quotations that lead scholars to argue that soldiers were “men of duty who acted on a set of beliefs in predictable and unchanging ways” (p. 12). After all, what a soldier wrote in July 1861 upon his enlistment may have no longer matched what he believed in July 1864 after three years of service, sickness, and battles. Carmichael adroitly explores that change over the life of a soldier’s experience.

The power and beauty of Carmichael’s writing come from his ability to build drama, reveal pathos, and provide texture to the war experience of his disparate group of soldiers. There was Indiana’s David Beem, a newlywed lawyer who wrote flowery letters to his wife expecting her to buttress his view of his selfless role. Instead, while Beem was having his romantic illusions of war violently shattered in the battle of Antietam, his wife continued to complain about her separation from him and urged him to come home; she did not share his desire to suffer for the war effort. There was the nonslaveholding Virginia conscript William P. Allen, who challenges our understanding of loyalty. Carmichael reveals that Allen never wanted to join, expressed no patriotic sentiments, and hated army life. He desperately longed to go home, accepted the desertion of his comrades, and contemplated it many times himself, but he never absconded, and he proved a dependable soldier in battle. Finally, there was the slaveholding Citadel cadet John Crawford Anderson, who opened the war with sentimental letters of heroic bravery and the superiority of southern manhood. As the war progressed, however, Anderson dispensed with these romantic notions in favor of a more pragmatic description of the reality of army life—the sobering execution of deserters, winter quarters, battlefield defeats, and loss of material goods. In the end, Anderson granted his continued existence simply to the inscrutable “‘hand of God’” (p. 128).

These are just a few of the patches in the evocative quilt that Carmichael has put together. He challenges the black-and-white views people have of Civil War service. In the maelstrom of war, he argues, “soldiers came to see the necessity of being adaptive in thought and action” (p. 303). This work offers a counterpoint to the scholarship on soldier motivations and experience by numerous historians, most notably, James M. McPherson. Carmichael’s case study approach may not be satisfying to everyone, especially those who prefer rigid themes with definitive assertions backed by three congruent quotations. He requires the reader to follow the thread of complexity and nuance and the malleability of soldiers over time, but the joy is in that...