The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies

Authors

Peter S. Carmichael, Gettysburg CollegeFollow

Document Type

Book

Files

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.

ISBN

978-1-4696-4309-0

Publication Date

12-2018

Publisher

The University of North Carolina Press

City

Chapel Hill, NC

Department 1

History

Department 2

Civil War Institute

Comments

The Introduction is available to download here.

Please see the author's website for additional content at https://www.peterscarmichael.com/

Copyright Note

This is the publisher's version of the work. This publication appears in Gettysburg College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution.

Recommended Citation

Carmichael, Peter. The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

Required Publisher's Statement

From The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies by Peter S. Carmichael. Copyright © 2018 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.org