American Soldiers' Lives: The Civil War (review)

With Bell I. Wiley's classics The Life of Johnny Reb and The Life of Billy Yank, James I. Robertson's Soldiers Blue and Gray, Reid Mitchell's Civil War Soldiers, James McPherson's For Cause and Comrades, Gerald F. Linderman's Embattled Courage, and a half a dozen similar books already on every Civil War scholar's bookshelf, another treatment of the life of the common soldier in America's Civil War would seem to be superfluous. Why must anyone again ask the questions, "Who were these men?" and "Why did they fight?" In his Preface to Soldiers Blue and Gray, James I. Robertson answers, "This is a work that could be written a dozen different times without repetition."

In common with his predecessors who have sought to write the collective biography of the officers and men of the Union and Confederate armies, Paul A. Cimbala, a professor of history at Fordham University and author of several fine books on Civil War America, follows the familiar formula of presenting chapters on why men volunteered, the training they underwent, camp life, combat and its aftermath, the transition to peace, and how the war lived on in the memories of its survivors. And like his predecessors, Cimbala has endeavored "to allow these extraordinary individuals to tell their stories in their own words." Nevertheless, although his volume in the "American Soldiers' Lives" subset of Greenwood Press's "Daily Life through History" series does, indeed, cover much of the ground broken by those scholars who went before, his book is not entirely derivative or redundant. The reason is the extraordinary volume and richness of the primary literature of the Civil War.

With scores of new journals, letters, and memoirs being published every year, this subject is constantly being refreshed if not reinterpreted. Cimbala's contribution to this genre is the result of a remarkable amount of fresh research, largely from primary materials unavailable to scholars only five years ago. Robertson estimated in 1988 that two Civil War memoirs were being published weekly. Since then, the pace has only quickened. A scan of Cimbala's bibliography shows that of the more than three-hundred published volumes of correspondence, diaries, and memoirs that the author has cited, fewer than thirty were published before the Centennial. Overwhelmingly published since 1990 and in a large majority since 2000, these are books to which Wiley and his immediate followers had no access. This bibliography, although extensive, is far from exhaustive. As Cimbala writes, it "only hints at the firsthand accounts available" to those who would better understand the participants in America's Iliad, and at that he has chosen to consult no collections of less than book-length, ignoring those abundant and often rich letter collections published in journals, and, unlike Wiley, he has eschewed manuscript sources altogether.

So although the outlines of this book are as familiar as any oft repeated tale, the details are as fresh and vivid as when Wiley published Johnny Reb in 1943. Cimbala has a deft eye for the apposite quotation and a fluid writing style that makes this book both a gateway to the subject for readers new to Civil War studies and at the same time worth the while of the most knowledgeable specialist in the field.