The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies (Littlefield History of the Civil War Era)

Product Description

How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life during the conflict? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael’s sweeping new study of men at war. Based on close examination of the letters and records left behind by individual soldiers from both the North and the South, Carmichael explores the totality of the Civil War experience–the marching, the fighting, the boredom, the idealism, the exhaustion, the punishments, and the frustrations of being away from families who often faced their own dire circumstances. Carmichael focuses not on
what soldiers thought but rather
how they thought. In doing so, he reveals how, to the shock of most men, well-established notions of duty or disobedience, morality or immorality, loyalty or disloyalty, and bravery or cowardice were blurred by war.

Digging deeply into his soldiers’ writing, Carmichael resists the idea that there was “a common soldier” but looks into their own words to find common threads in soldiers’ experiences and ways of understanding what was happening around them. In the end, he argues that a pragmatic philosophy of soldiering emerged, guiding members of the rank and file as they struggled to live with the contradictory elements of their violent and volatile world. Soldiering in the Civil War, as Carmichael argues, was never a state of being but a process of becoming.

Review

Fundamentally alters the trajectory of the literature.–
Civil War Times Illustrated

A much-needed update of the experience of the Civil War’s fighting men on both sides. . . . He illustrates his main points with extensive quotations from primary sources plus a variety of contemporary illustrations that significantly add to the context. Carmichael is both an experienced author and a versatile presenter, and it shows; though the main text is just over 300 pages, his presentation has both breadth and depth. It is, in all, a major achievement.–
Choice

Carmichael’s work goes a long way toward helping those who might support, or participate in, future conflicts to understand how their predecessors met and overcame significant challenges when called to face their own iterations of injustice.–
H-Net Reviews

Impressive, if not impeccable . . . .
The War for the Common Soldier is a serious and important work.–
Civil War News

It is nor possible to expect anyone to write the last word on either the dark side of Civil War soldiering or the persistence model for understanding the combat experience in the Civil War, but Carmichael has given us an important new way to look at both that will serve to bridge the gap between two lines of scholarly inquiry that too often are seen as contradictory or antagonistic.–Earl J. Hess,
ARMY Magazine

Carmichael goes deeply into his sources. . . His search for authentic voices is successful. . . . [and points] his readers in interesting, sensitive directions. . . a powerful addition to getting to the ‘real story.’–
Civil War Book Review

Carmichael’s deep description of these individuals’ experiences . . . complicate[s] in compelling ways our ideas about American men at arms during the Civil War. . . . Truly eye-opening.–
Journal of the Civil War Era

In eloquent and elegant prose, Peter S. Carmichael examines the experience of war for the enlisted soldiers of the Union and Confederate armies. . . . 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.–
Journal of Southern History

Review

In Carmichael’s glorious book, Civil War soldiers find themselves, if they are lucky, in the eye of a storm, a pragmatic ‘come-what-may’ mental state that lasts until they are ‘played out’ or the war is over, and their former selves come flooding back in a process of unbecoming every bit as fraught as the process of becoming a soldier had been. This is a smart, beautiful