Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (review)

Those of us enthralled by the lives of Civil War soldiers must often remind ourselves that the men we study had lives of their own before 1861, and for those who survived the gauntlet of disease and battle, after 1865. It is the latter story James Marten of Marquette University explores in Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America. In this ambitious and thoroughly researched work, Marten examines the challenges former soldiers of the blue and gray faced as they readjusted to peacetime lives in a postwar America.

Sing Not War considers "how the nineteenth century's 'Greatest Generation' blended—or failed to blend—back into their lives and communities and how their nonveteran countrymen and -women perceived those experiences" (p. 5). Marten wisely does not try to shoehorn his answers to such broad questions into a pat, single-sentence thesis but instead identifies key themes revealed by his research. Central to the book is the tension between conflicting public perceptions of veterans as selfless patriots to whom their countrymen were eternally indebted or as shiftless and possibly dangerous derelicts who threatened to drain government coffers. Marten further argues northerners were far more likely to display such mixed reactions to Union veterans, whereas southerners tended to rally around their own Confederate veterans with greater solidarity. Explanations for this discrepancy include the greater percentage of southerners than northerners who fought, the South's shared culture of defeat, and that federally funded pensions for Union veterans became a divisively partisan political issue whereas state pensions for ex-Confederates in the Democrat-dominated South did not. Still another theme running through the book concerns conceptions of manhood, particularly for disabled veterans who lost much of their self-sufficiency when they moved into federal and state soldier homes.

Thematically organized chapters in Sing Not War cover a wide spectrum of the Civil War veteran experience, ranging from soldiers' actual homecomings to struggles with disability to the soldier homes and other programs established to alleviate their suffering. The chapter on the pension system controversy reveals how the issue developed into "a kind of Gilded Age culture war . . . over whether gratitude should flow from the nation toward the saviors of the Union or from those disabled and helpless veterans toward a beneficent government" (pp. 200-01). A look at the commercialization of "veteranhood" chronicles how renewed Civil War interest in the 1880s and 1890s prompted veterans to pour forth memoirs, essays, and speeches, businesses to cash in on demand for military memorabilia and relics, and city boosters to compete to host veterans' reunions. The book's final chapter considers veterans' battles over identity and historical memory, largely concurring with David Blight's landmark Race and Reunion that there was greater emphasis on reconciliation as time wore on, although Marten perceives better how doggedly many former Union and Confederate soldiers maintained that their own side had been in the right.

Marten's research draws on a variety of sources, including veterans' correspondence, the magazine Confederate Veteran, publications from the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), and mostly untouched "soldiers' newspapers" and soldier home newsletters from across the country. The author also skillfully utilizes novels, short stories, and verse, taking the book's title and chapter titles from the Walt Whitman poem "A Carol of Harvest, for 1867." Furthermore, Marten's own engaging and pithy prose makes this work highly readable.

A project as broad and ambitious as this one comes with certain limitations. Marten explains his work does not address directly the African-American veteran experience, in part because these ex-soldiers were excluded or absent from many of the sources on which he focused. Just as in the war itself, Union veterans tend to outnumber Confederates in the text, in part because they simply left a greater paper trail. Perhaps most challenging...