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

Too many books have ended with a stacking of arms and a stillness at Appomattox. Too few have followed their soldiers home through the remainder of their postbellum lives. “Upon returning home from the war,” noted one veteran typically, “I found myself broke in every sense of the word, broke pecuniarily, flat broke, and if I was not broke physically and mentally, I was wonderfully bent” (William Dugat Williams Letters, Co. F., 5th Texas, History Research Center, Hill College, Hillsboro, Texas [I am indebted to Susannah Ural for the quotation.]). Despite a flourishing thirty-year historiography in Civil War soldiers’ studies, only a handful of titles have focused on the bent worlds of the Civil War veteran. James Marten admits in his introduction that when he began researching twelve years ago, he had hoped to write “a general history of Civil War veterans, North and South, black and white” (3). But the subject proved too vast, and the historiography too thin, to make a synthetic treatment possible. Instead, Marten has effectively produced a series of well-connected essays, each a kind of core sample designed to show us what a rich and layered historiography might look like, if we were ever to produce one.

Marten gives his essays a chronological frame by opening with a chapter on veterans’ homecomings and closing with one on their fading significance at the turn of the century. But it is the portrait within the frame that proves the most arresting. “Maimed Darlings” (on veterans’ heartbreaking attempts to soldier on despite their disabilities) is a tour de force. The author is a master at accumulating and deploying his ample evidence; where other historians tend to follow a lockstep formula—statement, examples, conclusion . . . repeat—Marten artfully allows form to follow function. He is especially effective at compounding sadness in staccato bursts. “These are simply isolated examples,” he will typically say after a pass-and-review of devastating human tragedies, but by then he has already driven his emotional point home. His section on veterans and alcohol is particularly groundbreaking. (How exactly is it that no one has written a book on Leslie Keeley or the “Keeley Cure”—a forerunner to Alcoholics Anonymous that rose up to make millions for a man who claimed he could “self-help” a generation of “self-medicating” alcoholics with a tincture of gold?) Marten’s chapters on how veterans were marketed to, made a government-supported industry of, and finally awarded pensions (to the greater gross earnings of the pension agents and their lobbyists) are all disturbingly familiar depictions of how quickly the best of intentions run afoul of human greed and selfishness.

Marten’s thematic strategy, then, pays big dividends—each chapter is rich and complex and bulging with the kind of quotations one loves to plunder for lectures— but it is also a strategy that necessitates that he lay out first what his study is not. It is not a book about the “interior lives of veterans”; it is not a book about the “tens of thousands of African American soldiers who survived the war” to face such peculiar challenges that they need a book of their own; it is not a book about the well-adjusted majority of veterans who reentered their lives and celebrated their service without a mental hiccup; and it is not a book about veterans and their families, especially their sons, for whom their fathers’ service must have inspired great Oedipal minefields of envy and awe (73, 3). Instead it is a book haunted by those men “who fit less easily back into their prewar lives, who suffered from disabilities and poverty, from mental handicaps and institutionalization” (2). And it is a book about the Gilded Age culture that largely failed those men, especially in the North, where every effort to honor them was...