Among the Enemy: A Michigan Soldier’s Civil War Journal

Introduction

Introduction + In September 1861, eighteen-year-old laborer William Horton Kimball left his family’s farm near Sandstone, Michigan, and enlisted in the Union army. Over the next thirty-eight months he served in one of the most important regiments Michigan offered to the Union cause—the First Michigan Engineers and Mechanics. Because it was not a combat unit, however, much of the daily life of the engineers has been overlooked by postwar historians. Fortunately, Kimball left behind a journal of his experiences that has been carefully preserved by the staff of the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library. The journal actually encompasses two different books,a memorandum volume and a bound ledger book.Both are in excellent condition,and the clear handwriting in ink has been well preserved. The first volume also includes a short biographical sketch prepared at the time by Kimball. I first became aware of the Kimball journal more than twenty years ago while researching his regiment. The journal formed an important part of the story I told in My Brave Mechanics:The First Michigan Engineers and Their Civil War (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007). I always felt, however, that the Kimball journal needed to stand alone to be fully appreciated. During a lifetime of research,I have read scores of Civil War diaries and journals, both published and in their original form, yet I still consider Kimball’s to be among the most interesting and valuable due to its rich content on the relations—both friendly and hostile—between Union soldiers and Southern civilians in occupied regions. 2 introduction As military engineers,Kimball and his comrades were often assigned to work in the rear areas of the army. This isolation from the rest of the army left them open to hit-and-run raids by Confederate cavalry, semiregular partisans, and civilian guerillas. While Kimball’s journal is a helpful account of the service of the Michigan Engineers, I believe its greatest importance lies in his description of the many encounters between soldiers in his company and the civilians in the countryside they were serving in.Though other units,such as infantry regiments,were also assigned duty in the rear, few spent as much of their war in areas where they were in direct contact—and often conflict—with enemy civilians. This makes the experience of the men in the Michigan Engineers particularly well suited to explore the occupier-occupied relationship. In 1879, Kimball sat down to record his daily wartime activities. Several comments included in the journal clearly indicate this postwar composition, but the abundant detail makes it evident that he was working from some kind of daily account of his service written at the time. Furthermore, there is a large enough collection of wartime diaries and letters by men in Kimball’s regiment and company to verify that This is one of two bound volumes that Kimball used to record his service in the Michigan Engineers during the Civil War.The label was added when it was donated to the Burton Historical Collection. (Tom Sherry) introduction 3 Kimball was basing his account on facts. On the rare occasion he gets his facts wrong, it is consistent with the limited perspective soldiers had of the war, usually reflecting a reliance on rumor or hope. Undoubtedly, Kimball may have chosen to omit some of the items that he recorded in his wartime notes, but the candor with which he assesses the abilities and service of his comrades and officers suggests that he held little back in the analysis and commentary found in the journal. Kimball was very active in veterans’groups and a prominent elected public official in postwar Ludington, Michigan, yet there is nothing to indicate that he had any intention of preparing the journal for publication . Nor is there anything in his papers to suggest he ever shared the record of his service with anyone outside his family. In many ways, this journal could be compared with the letter books many veterans and their families gathered together after the war, composed in an effort to organize and retain a firsthand account of their experiences. Although only a single part of the continuing flood of new Civil War material being published in the sesquicentennial of this seminal event, Kimball’s journal helps fill one of the largest remaining holes in the modern Civil War narrative—the relationship between occupiers and...