New and Noteworthy: Fighting Means Killing: Soldiers View Their Work

Fighting Means Killing: Civil War Soldiers and the Nature of Combat, Jonathan M. Steplyk, University of Kansas Press, 294 pp., 14 illustrations, bibliographic notes, bibliography, index, 2018, $29.95

Fighting Means Killing: Civil War Soldiers and the Nature of Combat is quite possibly the first book-length study of soldiers' attitudes toward killing on the battlefields of the war. Others, such as Brent Nosworthy , Earl Hess, Gerald Linderman and others have addressed the topic within chapters. David Grossman's On Killing (1995) is offered by Steplyk as his model. Psychological conditions and mental health outcomes held and owned by battlefield soldiers are compared and contrasted with both the civilian and military training they received.

The author notes that the average soldier struggled to sublimate learned civilian resistance to provoking enemies' death on the battlefield. American society's culture and religious practices, generally speaking, provided barriers to combat effectiveness.

Like other historians, the author notes that hand-to-hand fighting was rare. Death by bayonet was more rare than death by sharpshooters which was less likely that death by massed muskets and artillery.  Steplyk believes that sharpshooters were somewhat tolerated and not hated outcasts on the battlefield.
He argues soldiers, at times, went to demanding lengths to limit, even avoid, killing, even to the point of putting themselves in jeopardy. 

Steplyk thoroughly considers the mortal and moral problems of race related massacres of surrendering troops. Participants, who justified these massacres, he concludes had their reasons and motives, which were both ideological and racial.

Throughout the book, firsthand sources are relied upon by the author. He provides the foci of when, how and why soldiers withheld their fire and at other times directed the fire of their immediate comrades in arms. Informal structures of parley, truce, and accepting surrenders are described as the soldiers experienced them. He author balances primary and secondary sources as he considers the wartime motivations and post-war justifications by the veterans. Readers who have thorough knowledge of the war's troops and battles, along with readers who are less immersed in American Civil War history, will find the text accessible and intriguing.  

New and Noteworthy--Chaplains, Missionaries and Soldiers On Campaign

In God's Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries and Religious Space During the American Civil War, Benjamin Miller, University of Kansas Press, 256 pages, illustrations, bibliographic notes, bibliography, index. $39.95

Benjamin Miller sheds light  on how wartime clergy interacted with soldiers, both blue and gray. Could soldiers and pastors construct roles and a spaces for religious faith in the midst of winter encampments, campaigns, battles, hospitals, prisons and graveyards? To do so successfully, some practices had to be jettisoned and new practises had to be created.

The author compares and contrasts our current notions of religious space with the notions that mid-19th century individuals held. He defines religious space as the place where one confers with the divine, a physical site that offers spiritual guidance and fulfillment. It is a space both inside a building or tent or outside of any structure and located in the natural environment. Religious spaces may in the midst of profane space where gambling, profanity and drunkenness competes with the presence of the sacred.

In God's Presence offers detailed evidence from soldiers' and chaplains' diaries, letters and recollections. During the pre-war era, there were substantial differences in religious practices of the North and the South, in the enthusiastic or emotional, and reflective or meditative worship practices.
With few exceptions, the author finds that chaplains and missionaries ministered to men regardless of religious beliefs, racial identities or army affiliations.

The  environment of encampments, marches and prison camps fostered the abandonment of denominations and  sectarian differences.  Ecumenicism fostered by the limited resources of chaplains who lived and traveled along side soldiers. The antebellum lives of clergy, their worldviews and practices are examined. The changes that occurred among the clergy is discussed, as is the worldviews, patriotism, and near-death experiences of the soldiers.

Soldiers as worshipers are thoroughly presented: antebellum religious beliefs and practices, wartime adaptations in the roles and work of pastors, and the creation of literature devoted to soldiers' considerations of the role of providence during wartime.Throughout In God's Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries and Religious Space During the American Civil War, Benjamin Miller offers the words of the soldiers as they describe their inner conflicts, psychological changes, and their sense of loss and even abandonment of previously held understanding of their faith. What is remarkable is that Miller includes the a consideration of the creation, development and change over four years of war and during the post-war years of the soldiers' beliefs regarding American civil religion.  In God's Presence is a balanced work of both personal and public histories, both individual and denominational confessions of faith, and the experience of personal grief and societal shock at the loss of lives on battlefields and prison camps.



From the publisher: When thousands of young men in the North and South marched off to fight in the Civil War, another army of men accompanied them to care for these soldiers spiritual needs. In God’s Presence explores how these two cohorts of men, Northern and Southern and mostly Christian, navigated the challenges of the Civil War on battlefields and in military camps, hospitals, and prisons.
In wartime, military clergy—chaplains and missionaries—initially attempted to replicate the idyllic world of the antebellum church. Instead they found themselves constructing a new religious world—one in which static spaces customarily invested with religious meaning, such as houses and churches, gave way to dynamic sacred spaces defined by clergy to suit changing wartime circumstances.

At the same time, the religious beliefs that soldiers brought from home differed from the religious practices that allowed them to endure during wartime. With reference to Civil War soldiers’ diaries, letters, and memoirs, this book asks how clergy shaped these practices; how they might have differed from camp to battlefield, hospital, or prison; and how this experience affected postbellum religious belief and practice.
 
Religion and war have always been at the center of the human condition, with warfare often leading to heightened religiosity. The Civil War cannot be fully explained without understanding religions role in the conflict. In God’s Presence advances this understanding by offering critical insight into the course and consequences of America’s epochal fratricidal war

New and Noteworthy: Common Soldiers As Common Men: Thinking, Fighting and Surviving

  War For The Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies, Peter S. Carmichael, University of North Carolina Press, 408 pp., illustrations, bibliographic notes, bibliography, index, 2019,  $34.95

Review Source: H-Civil War, Christopher Rein, Combat Studies Institute, The Army Press

Reviewed by Christopher Rein (Combat Studies Institute, The Army Press)

Peter S. Carmichael’s The War for the Common Soldier is, above all else, a pragmatic book. In highlighting the defining characteristics of the men who fought and suffered through the Civil War, Carmichael seeks to bridge a widening rift between more popular celebratory and heroic accounts of soldiers that began shortly after the end of the war—and, advanced most notably by Bell Wiley, continue, in some form to the present day—and an increasingly critical view of the rank and file as unfortunate pawns who, misled by the nationalism that sparked a misguided rush to the colors, found themselves trapped in an unforgiving machine that resulted in misery and death for far too many, a view that seems to have some appeal to those interested in the “darker” aspects of the sectional conflict.

Thus, the author joins with Union soldier Amos Judson in pushing back against a “sentimental culture with its enshrinement of extreme courage and its sanitation of the war’s most grotesque elements” (p. 230), while still revealing the laudable conduct and mental agility of soldiers in both armies. As the double entendre in his title suggests, Carmichael seeks to both explore the experience for the common soldier as well as weigh in on the historiographical debate over how he should be remembered. In doing so, the author provides a very useful theoretical construct for understanding how Civil War soldiers conceptualized, endured, and remembered their wartime experiences.

In arguing for a defining sense of pragmatism among the soldiers of both armies, Carmichael suggests that they were neither the ideologues suggested by works such as James McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades and Gary Gallagher's The Union War, nor the helpless victims of a wasteful and destructive conflict.  Instead, they adapted to their conditions, rationalized both the incredible losses around them and their own, at times remorseful survival, and pragmatically faced the numerous challenges, be they mental, physical, or emotional. 

Though their idealism often eroded, the author argues that a pragmatic philosophy “never left Northern or Southern soldiers standing on the barren ground of nihilism” (p. 99). Well grounded in the relevant secondary literature, but relying extensively on soldiers’ letters, Carmichael counters the usual technique of using short snippets to support an argument by developing longer case studies, or “microhistories” of certain soldiers to place their evolving thoughts in context, resulting, in a nod to Clifford Geertz, in a “thick description approach” (p. 175). Most of the seven chapters (though several deviate from this format) rely on from three to six of these case studies to provide soldiers’ conceptions of the war, from resisting the temptation to desert to staying connected with the home front to rationalizing the hand of providence’s role in victory or defeat.

While the examples (apparently despite the best efforts of Earl Hess) skew heavily toward the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia, the larger numbers serving in the eastern theater probably justify the greater emphasis. In an acknowledgement of the growing importance of the subfield of guerrilla studies, Carmichael feels compelled to include a full paragraph on why he chose to exclude this group, despite “some of the most exciting and engaging scholarship coming out of the field of Civil War history,” as “its inclusion would have diverted attention away from my primary focus on conventional armies” (p. 13). The result is a fairly comprehensive cultural and intellectual history of the common soldier that largely overcomes concerns about representativeness, though Carmichael accepts that “no single individual can possibly represent the 2.7 million men who served in the Union forces and the 1.2 to 1.4 million men who stood in the ranks of the Confederate military. There was no common soldier in the Civil War” (p. 12). But the wealth of resources available on those soldiers who ran afoul of the military’s justice system results in a slight over representation of that demographic.                             This review is continued at H-Net.

CWL:  Indeed, Carmichaels' work is splendid and opens to readers the lives and letters of Civil War soldiers, in the midst of the war.