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Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War
Many Americans, argues Michael C. C. Adams, tend to think of the Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. Millions of tourists flock to battlefields each year as vacation destinations, their perceptions of the war often shaped by reenactors who work hard for verisimilitude but who cannot ultimately simulate mutilation, madness, chronic disease, advanced physical decay. In Living Hell, Adams tries a different tack, clustering the voices of myriad actual participants on the firing line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical reenactment.
Perhaps because the United States has not seen conventional war on its own soil since 1865, the collective memory of its horror has faded, so that we have sanitized and romanticized even the experience of the Civil War. Neither film nor reenactment can fully capture the hard truth of the four-year conflict. Living Hell presents a stark portrait of the human costs of the Civil War and gives readers a more accurate appreciation of its profound and lasting consequences.
Adams examines the sharp contrast between the expectations of recruits versus the realities of communal living, the enormous problems of dirt and exposure, poor diet, malnutrition, and disease. He describes the slaughter produced by close-order combat, the difficulties of cleaning up the battlefields—where tens of thousands of dead and wounded often lay in an area of only a few square miles—and the resulting psychological damage survivors experienced.
Drawing extensively on letters and memoirs of individual soldiers, Adams assembles vivid accounts of the distress Confederate and Union soldiers faced daily: sickness, exhaustion, hunger, devastating injuries, and makeshift hospitals where saws were often the medical instrument of choice.
Inverting Robert E. Lee’s famous line about war, Adams suggests that too many Americans become fond of war out of ignorance of its terrors. Providing a powerful counterpoint to Civil War glorification, Living Hell echoes William Tecumseh Sherman’s comment that war is cruelty and cannot be refined.
Praise for Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861–1865
"This excellent and provocative work concludes with a chapter suggesting how the image of Southern military superiority endured in spite of defeat."— Civil War History
"Adams's imaginative connections between culture and combat provide a forceful reminder that Civil War military history belongs not in an encapsulated realm, with its own categories and arcane language, but at the center of the study of the intellectual, social, and psychological currents that prevailed in the mid-nineteenth century."— Journal of American History
Praise for The Best War Ever: America and World War II
"Adams has a real gift for efficiently explaining complex historical problems."— Reviews in American History
"Not only is this mythologizing bad history, says Adams, it is dangerous as well. Surrounding the war with an aura of nostalgia both fosters the delusion that war can cure our social ills and makes us strong again, and weakens confidence in our ability to act effectively in our own time."— Journal of Military History
Perhaps because the United States has not seen conventional war on its own soil since 1865, the collective memory of its horror has faded, so that we have sanitized and romanticized even the experience of the Civil War. Neither film nor reenactment can fully capture the hard truth of the four-year conflict. Living Hell presents a stark portrait of the human costs of the Civil War and gives readers a more accurate appreciation of its profound and lasting consequences.
Adams examines the sharp contrast between the expectations of recruits versus the realities of communal living, the enormous problems of dirt and exposure, poor diet, malnutrition, and disease. He describes the slaughter produced by close-order combat, the difficulties of cleaning up the battlefields—where tens of thousands of dead and wounded often lay in an area of only a few square miles—and the resulting psychological damage survivors experienced.
Drawing extensively on letters and memoirs of individual soldiers, Adams assembles vivid accounts of the distress Confederate and Union soldiers faced daily: sickness, exhaustion, hunger, devastating injuries, and makeshift hospitals where saws were often the medical instrument of choice.
Inverting Robert E. Lee’s famous line about war, Adams suggests that too many Americans become fond of war out of ignorance of its terrors. Providing a powerful counterpoint to Civil War glorification, Living Hell echoes William Tecumseh Sherman’s comment that war is cruelty and cannot be refined.
Praise for Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861–1865
"This excellent and provocative work concludes with a chapter suggesting how the image of Southern military superiority endured in spite of defeat."— Civil War History
"Adams's imaginative connections between culture and combat provide a forceful reminder that Civil War military history belongs not in an encapsulated realm, with its own categories and arcane language, but at the center of the study of the intellectual, social, and psychological currents that prevailed in the mid-nineteenth century."— Journal of American History
Praise for The Best War Ever: America and World War II
"Adams has a real gift for efficiently explaining complex historical problems."— Reviews in American History
"Not only is this mythologizing bad history, says Adams, it is dangerous as well. Surrounding the war with an aura of nostalgia both fosters the delusion that war can cure our social ills and makes us strong again, and weakens confidence in our ability to act effectively in our own time."— Journal of Military History
292 pages, Hardcover
First published February 28, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
September 12, 2021
War is hell; there is no argument there, but Adams sets out and succeeds greatly to show just how hellacious the American Civil War was on its people, whether those people were civilian, soldier, slave, or shirker.
Adams goes a long way to dispel any myth about the 'good' or 'just' war. Unfortunately, there is no such thing. He does an excellent job of examining the North's shortcomings post-war, especially regarding the failure of racial relations among freed slaves and their Northern "allies".
Adams goes a long way to dispel any myth about the 'good' or 'just' war. Unfortunately, there is no such thing. He does an excellent job of examining the North's shortcomings post-war, especially regarding the failure of racial relations among freed slaves and their Northern "allies".
July 28, 2017
I'm using this as my book about war for the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge, but I primarily read it as research for a short story I'm planning to write. Living Hell is a wonderful piece of historical writing, with a balance between scholarly and literary tone. I wish I could make everyone I've ever heard espouse "the South's gonna rise again" ideology read this book, because I don't know how you could be a rational person and still think that or want that while knowing the facts of what military and civilian life was like during the Civil War. I already knew that the historical education I received in school was flawed and biased, but I didn't realize how much my teachers omitted regarding the Civil War, and I didn't realize how quickly after the conflict that the public' perception of the war began to change and to become romanticized.
Arguably more sickening than reading about the physical effects of grape shot was reading the trajectory of newly-freed black people, of women, and of the poor after the war ended. The next-to-last chapter follows these threads through Jim Crow, Robber Barons, the denial of women's service during the war effort, and more, and it's hard to read without feeling cynical.
I highly recommend this book, with the caveat that it's one of the most disturbing books that I've ever read.
Arguably more sickening than reading about the physical effects of grape shot was reading the trajectory of newly-freed black people, of women, and of the poor after the war ended. The next-to-last chapter follows these threads through Jim Crow, Robber Barons, the denial of women's service during the war effort, and more, and it's hard to read without feeling cynical.
I highly recommend this book, with the caveat that it's one of the most disturbing books that I've ever read.
March 17, 2015
Yep, war is bad. Civil War is really bad. I get it. Nothing astonishing here I've read much this information in most histories of the Civil War. This book just packs it all in 218 pages (the rest is notes, index, etc...).
July 17, 2015
Historian Michael C. C. Adams’ stated purpose in writing Living Hell is to remove from the American Civil War the romance and mythology of The Lost Cause (if you favor the South) as well as the Great Crusade to end slavery (if you favor the North), and from both sides the view of the war as a grand and glorious affair, one that would elevate and ennoble the participants. Adams destroys these illusions with page after page of first-hand accounts of the people—both combatants and civilians—who suffered so profoundly from the effects of the war. From recruitment and training and daily military life (with deaths from exposure, malnutrition, and disease), to actual combat (with deaths and wounds from massed artillery fire and rifle bullets over a half inch in diameter), to the aftermath of the bloodiest battles ever waged up until that time (and the problems of caring for the thousands of wounded and the disposal of thousands of corpses, both human and equine), and on to the aftermath of the war itself (and the way it changed American society forever), Adams illustrates just how unprepared and unaware leaders were to wage the first technological war that precipitated death and injuries on a heretofore unprecedented scale.
One criticism I have is that Adams is proving a point that really needs no further proving. He states that his first knowledge of the American Civil War came when he was a boy, from the centennial commemorations that romanticized the war, and his book is an attempt to refute that romantization. But the imaginings of a boy forty years ago, are not the same views that educated, thoughtful adults now hold of the Civil War. In the final chapter, Adams concludes his discussion by pointing out that the revulsion and disillusionment that was almost universally felt after the war’s end had evaporated by the time the U.S. became embroiled in the war with Spain thirty years later, and he suggests that the real lessons of the Civil War didn’t “stick”; hence his book. But the collective amnesia and romantic patina that colors people’s attitudes towards the Civil War aren’t restricted to just this one war—the revising of a society’s attitude towards past wars is present in all wars. Take as an example the Vietnam War. When the U.S. finally cut its loses and pulled out of Vietnam, everyone pretty much agreed that the whole war had been a Really Bad Idea. But within the next twenty years, the Vietnam War morphed into a Terrible War That Was Nonetheless Necessary, to hold back the creeping spread of Communism and help eventually bankrupt the Soviet Union. I get the impression that Adams thinks this revision of our national consciousness is somehow unique to the Civil War, but it really isn’t. (By the way, for anyone interested in reading an interesting theory as to why this revision happens, I recommend Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War.)
One criticism I have is that Adams is proving a point that really needs no further proving. He states that his first knowledge of the American Civil War came when he was a boy, from the centennial commemorations that romanticized the war, and his book is an attempt to refute that romantization. But the imaginings of a boy forty years ago, are not the same views that educated, thoughtful adults now hold of the Civil War. In the final chapter, Adams concludes his discussion by pointing out that the revulsion and disillusionment that was almost universally felt after the war’s end had evaporated by the time the U.S. became embroiled in the war with Spain thirty years later, and he suggests that the real lessons of the Civil War didn’t “stick”; hence his book. But the collective amnesia and romantic patina that colors people’s attitudes towards the Civil War aren’t restricted to just this one war—the revising of a society’s attitude towards past wars is present in all wars. Take as an example the Vietnam War. When the U.S. finally cut its loses and pulled out of Vietnam, everyone pretty much agreed that the whole war had been a Really Bad Idea. But within the next twenty years, the Vietnam War morphed into a Terrible War That Was Nonetheless Necessary, to hold back the creeping spread of Communism and help eventually bankrupt the Soviet Union. I get the impression that Adams thinks this revision of our national consciousness is somehow unique to the Civil War, but it really isn’t. (By the way, for anyone interested in reading an interesting theory as to why this revision happens, I recommend Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War.)
June 13, 2017
Extremely interesting & well researched telling of the horrors of the Civil War using letters and memoirs of individual soldiers as well as historic documentation. The author, feeling Americans have come to think of the war as glorious, sanitized & romanticized thanks to films and reenactments, decided to write about the realities of what happened during those hellish years.
The beginning chapter starts with the young, naive men heading off to fight for their cause then we follow them through the years of combat, the clearing of the battlefields, the rampant disease & lack of food and water. The wounds unable to be properly cared for due to lack of supplies. The mental anguish suffered by those unable to cope but tossed aside due to ignorance. We are walked through the devastation felt by civilians who had lost everything, the soldiers unable to adjust to normal life turning to a life of stimulants & criminal behavior. How African Americans were treated no better in the north and left to their own resources. Finally, the author reminds us of how short memories can be when decades later the same soldiers who lived through the war longed for those days as if it were times of happiness instead of times of hell.
If graphic depictions of death and war wounds isn't for you then this book is one you will want to skip. Otherwise I highly recommend it to those interested in reading about the dark, ugly side of the Civil War.
July 23, 2014
The Dark side of the Civil War is exactly what you get with this book. Not the battles, unless you want to read about the blood, brains, and guts of the battle, not the "moonlight and magnolias of the Old South unless you want the destructions, murders and rapes and not the camp life with men singing the songs unless you want the disease ridden hardships. How do you go about the burials of ten thousands of men? How did the communities of Gettysburg, Fredericksburg and other cities and towns deal with the aftermath of a horrific battle? How did so many disabled men stand the years after the war begin shunned by friends and family. The women, who were left with nothing after the death of their husbands.
A different view of the civil war, that few write about, both interesting and horrifying. If you are interested in our not so civil war this book is a must.
A different view of the civil war, that few write about, both interesting and horrifying. If you are interested in our not so civil war this book is a must.
October 1, 2022
Michael Adams' work Living Hell seeks to reassess the way the average American views the war. He attempts to show the truly ugly side of the civil war and the parts that many Americans do not focus on today.
There are a lot of interesting things in this work. The most surprising to me was the way the author dealt at the beginning with the cause of the war. Clearly not pro-southern, he does though show some of the complexity and problems with both sides on this point. He shortly tries to explain how each side's reasoning has some merits but both have some hypocrisy as well. In a world where everyone hates southerners, Adams seems to be a little more open to the discussion.
In the main portion of this book, Adams tells of the experiences of the soldier before, during, and after battles. He gives very graphic details of the gruesomeness of war life and how truly violent, evil, and disgusting it is. Much of this information is not new. This is not a groundbreaking work of research. A lot of it I read in The Life of Johnny Reb. But, Adams does give the best-compiled work of all the horrors of this war and does not shy away from the details that, in other periods of America, would be socially inappropriate to show. He devotes a chapter to how civilians were treated and the horrors of it. He also gives a book that discusses the implications of the war. This last part of the book seems to stray slightly off course and goes into 20th-century politics for a few pages. This part of the book is really simplified and is not the best. He ends with a discussion on how many of the veterans transformed the true evilness of the war and tried to romanticize it and make it into something that it was not. This was the big problem of this work.
***
The main issue I had with this work is the overall thesis, which is basically that the romantic ideas of the civil war are false. They were created years after the war was over. The true war was not romantic in the slightest. It was ugly and evil.
I think that there is definitely some truth in this. Many people do not understand how evil the civil war and all wars are. But, here is the dilemma. Don't the trials add to the romantic side? Isn't, in some way, a romantic viewing of this war inevitable? I believe that there is some truth in the romantic view of the war but there is also some truth in what Adams is trying to say.
my second issue with this work is that it's way too short. 218 pages of text are far too short for this type of issue and discussion.
Overall, this work would be a good primer on the graphic side of the war but, I believe that Bell Wiley's The Life of Johnny Reb and The Life of Yankee Doodle would be a better choice to fully understand the common soldier of the war if that is what the reader is interested in.
There are a lot of interesting things in this work. The most surprising to me was the way the author dealt at the beginning with the cause of the war. Clearly not pro-southern, he does though show some of the complexity and problems with both sides on this point. He shortly tries to explain how each side's reasoning has some merits but both have some hypocrisy as well. In a world where everyone hates southerners, Adams seems to be a little more open to the discussion.
In the main portion of this book, Adams tells of the experiences of the soldier before, during, and after battles. He gives very graphic details of the gruesomeness of war life and how truly violent, evil, and disgusting it is. Much of this information is not new. This is not a groundbreaking work of research. A lot of it I read in The Life of Johnny Reb. But, Adams does give the best-compiled work of all the horrors of this war and does not shy away from the details that, in other periods of America, would be socially inappropriate to show. He devotes a chapter to how civilians were treated and the horrors of it. He also gives a book that discusses the implications of the war. This last part of the book seems to stray slightly off course and goes into 20th-century politics for a few pages. This part of the book is really simplified and is not the best. He ends with a discussion on how many of the veterans transformed the true evilness of the war and tried to romanticize it and make it into something that it was not. This was the big problem of this work.
***
The main issue I had with this work is the overall thesis, which is basically that the romantic ideas of the civil war are false. They were created years after the war was over. The true war was not romantic in the slightest. It was ugly and evil.
I think that there is definitely some truth in this. Many people do not understand how evil the civil war and all wars are. But, here is the dilemma. Don't the trials add to the romantic side? Isn't, in some way, a romantic viewing of this war inevitable? I believe that there is some truth in the romantic view of the war but there is also some truth in what Adams is trying to say.
my second issue with this work is that it's way too short. 218 pages of text are far too short for this type of issue and discussion.
Overall, this work would be a good primer on the graphic side of the war but, I believe that Bell Wiley's The Life of Johnny Reb and The Life of Yankee Doodle would be a better choice to fully understand the common soldier of the war if that is what the reader is interested in.
May 13, 2015
This is the Civil War history we need, and it's the Civil War history we deserve. It's one of the most apt titles I've ever come across in a book.
The American Civil War is arguably the most romanticized event in American history, maybe secondly only to the Revolution. The narrative is well known. Johhny Reb, Billy Yank, the almost god-like Robert E Lee (as an aside, see Lee Considered for more on this) and the great struggle for states rights or to free the slaves. Epic movies depicting the glory and romance of Gettysburg, the 20th Maine's valiant defense at Little Round Top and the futile, reveling the glory of an entire division's destruction at Pickett's Charge. The narrative is glory, romance and it's powerful. Adams' book infuses a much needed dose of reality. These histories are more fit to the first days of the war with battlefield picnics, brass bands and clean uniforms. Adam's book is the bloody, muddy uniform with one pants leg pinned up. It's the one vacant chair, the endless array of white tombstones and the bloody, sanity shattering horror of the military hospital.
Adams gives us what we need to appreciate the Civil War. A portrait painted in blood, gore, feces and madness. The Civil War was an epic event and of fundamental importance to the American identity. It is right and proper to study it, but it involved real people, real costs, real suffering. This book reminds you of that reality reality. Our Civil War narrative is much like the Iliad, stark heroes carved in marble who did Great Things with clean hands. The deaths are spoken of only as part of the narrative. However, Achilles had to go to the privy too. Adams makes the Civil War real.
Drawing from primary sources - the letters, the diaries, medical records. It's the closest to a firsthand account that time will allow us.
Adams takes on a tour of the battlefields, from the first recruits off to see the elephant in what was sure to be a short war with an easy victory. We tour the camps with their teeming masses of men in ill fitting clothes, unwashed and unbathed, living in the field with the thousands of horses and cattle that made up their logistics train. The ground, alive with a crawling mat of lice when it isn't tramped into a soup of mud. The latrines overflowing with the inevitable result of tens of thousands concentrated in one place. The indoctrination required to make men operate as a cohesive unit, to obey commands, and the brutal discipline attendant. The foul smell of dysentery, cholera, decay and livestock that permeates everything and the unbearable summer heat.
As the war drags on we learn of the foul, corpse tainted taste of water drawn from wells too close from the mass graves of last year's battle. Disease, always every present, is rampant. Lice, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition rob soldiers of their health, their dignity and their sanity.
The human cost of the war, the rapid advancements of technology leading men to march into heavy fire in tight, Napoleonic formations is spelled out in terrible, bloody detail. Minie balls shatter limbs, rupture intestines, smash skulls. Men in line are showered with blood, gore brains and bone. Artillery bursts men asunder like blood-filled balloons, throwing men and horses dozens of yards away from where they stood and scattering them across the fields. These are not isolated events. These soldiers endured this for days, weeks, months sometimes, day in and day out. Men in trenches, stricken with dysentery or cholera, their bowels so loose as to make any effort at sanitary evacuation futile, living, fighting and dying in pools of their own filth.
After the battle the wounded lie screaming in their own blood, dying slowly of thirst or quickly at the hands of looters who have no patience for their screams. Soldiers sleep at night hearing the begs and cries of their friends, close but unreachable. The inevitable fires roasted the wounded as they lay dying, one of the greatest fears of soldiers on either side.
We go on medical rounds in the hospitals. In the field hospitals massive pits are dug just for amputated limbs. The ground is a hellish mud of blood and dirt. The air is thick with the rot of gangrene, either in limbs where the patient has a chance or in the their bowels guaranteeing a slow, painful death. Anesthesia is limited to chloroform, whisky and morphine, all in short supply. Ambulances are unsprung wagons with the wounded inside begging for death rather than having to endure the shock of another bump in the road.
Part of the mythology is that people were somehow mentally tougher, more resilient than they are now. Soldiers then didn't get PTSD. Adams writes detailed accounts of the psychiatric cost of the war, men simply stripped of their senses, reliving the moments when their brother or their father was killed next to them, locked in waking nightmares. Some slip into catatonia. Psychiatry as a medical field did not exist and these men were condemned as physically damaged, one patient with terrors and flashbacks was written off as having insufficient blood to the brain after suffering a lung shot, or as simply lacking in moral character. We know differently of course. Nobody walks away from having their comrade's brains, scattered by a shell, dumped on their breakfast plate.
We learn of the constant problem of deserters, stragglers, men who did not sign up for the living hell the book describes. They numbered tens, hundreds of thousands. From simply straggling in line, letting others in front soak up the fury of lead and fire that they could no longer take to men who simply left. Some returned, some didn't. Some were shot, going quietly to their deaths. They sat on their own coffins for hours, watching their own grave being dug, waiting to be shot. This was easier than getting back in line, easier than going once more unto the breach.
After the war we learn of the cost to the wounded. Mentally, thousands were shattered. Physically they endured torments that are inconceivable to us. It's hard to say that people weren't tougher then than they are now when we live in the age of antibiotics, sterile surgery, anesthesia and a dizzying array of medications and technology that spares us much of the pain and suffering that the wounded then dealt with. Joshua Chamberlain, of the 20th Maine, lived until 1914 with terrible woulds that would be challenging to treat even today. Every day for the rest of his life he had to catheterize with a primitive, rigid catheter just to pass urine. Men with bowel wounds, if they survived, leaked and spilled. One officer had to run silk thread through an abdominal abscess for the rest of his life to drain it of the accumulated pus. This is not comprehensible to most of us, even those in the medical field, but they lived, even prospered, for many years after despite the daily torment of their wounds.
This is a hard book. It's the Civil War As It Is, or Was. It is the closest thing to the actual experience we can get; the only thing Adams could do more would be to include a scratch and sniff card. It is an absolutely essential companion to any history of the Civil War
The American Civil War is arguably the most romanticized event in American history, maybe secondly only to the Revolution. The narrative is well known. Johhny Reb, Billy Yank, the almost god-like Robert E Lee (as an aside, see Lee Considered for more on this) and the great struggle for states rights or to free the slaves. Epic movies depicting the glory and romance of Gettysburg, the 20th Maine's valiant defense at Little Round Top and the futile, reveling the glory of an entire division's destruction at Pickett's Charge. The narrative is glory, romance and it's powerful. Adams' book infuses a much needed dose of reality. These histories are more fit to the first days of the war with battlefield picnics, brass bands and clean uniforms. Adam's book is the bloody, muddy uniform with one pants leg pinned up. It's the one vacant chair, the endless array of white tombstones and the bloody, sanity shattering horror of the military hospital.
Adams gives us what we need to appreciate the Civil War. A portrait painted in blood, gore, feces and madness. The Civil War was an epic event and of fundamental importance to the American identity. It is right and proper to study it, but it involved real people, real costs, real suffering. This book reminds you of that reality reality. Our Civil War narrative is much like the Iliad, stark heroes carved in marble who did Great Things with clean hands. The deaths are spoken of only as part of the narrative. However, Achilles had to go to the privy too. Adams makes the Civil War real.
Drawing from primary sources - the letters, the diaries, medical records. It's the closest to a firsthand account that time will allow us.
Adams takes on a tour of the battlefields, from the first recruits off to see the elephant in what was sure to be a short war with an easy victory. We tour the camps with their teeming masses of men in ill fitting clothes, unwashed and unbathed, living in the field with the thousands of horses and cattle that made up their logistics train. The ground, alive with a crawling mat of lice when it isn't tramped into a soup of mud. The latrines overflowing with the inevitable result of tens of thousands concentrated in one place. The indoctrination required to make men operate as a cohesive unit, to obey commands, and the brutal discipline attendant. The foul smell of dysentery, cholera, decay and livestock that permeates everything and the unbearable summer heat.
As the war drags on we learn of the foul, corpse tainted taste of water drawn from wells too close from the mass graves of last year's battle. Disease, always every present, is rampant. Lice, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition rob soldiers of their health, their dignity and their sanity.
The human cost of the war, the rapid advancements of technology leading men to march into heavy fire in tight, Napoleonic formations is spelled out in terrible, bloody detail. Minie balls shatter limbs, rupture intestines, smash skulls. Men in line are showered with blood, gore brains and bone. Artillery bursts men asunder like blood-filled balloons, throwing men and horses dozens of yards away from where they stood and scattering them across the fields. These are not isolated events. These soldiers endured this for days, weeks, months sometimes, day in and day out. Men in trenches, stricken with dysentery or cholera, their bowels so loose as to make any effort at sanitary evacuation futile, living, fighting and dying in pools of their own filth.
After the battle the wounded lie screaming in their own blood, dying slowly of thirst or quickly at the hands of looters who have no patience for their screams. Soldiers sleep at night hearing the begs and cries of their friends, close but unreachable. The inevitable fires roasted the wounded as they lay dying, one of the greatest fears of soldiers on either side.
We go on medical rounds in the hospitals. In the field hospitals massive pits are dug just for amputated limbs. The ground is a hellish mud of blood and dirt. The air is thick with the rot of gangrene, either in limbs where the patient has a chance or in the their bowels guaranteeing a slow, painful death. Anesthesia is limited to chloroform, whisky and morphine, all in short supply. Ambulances are unsprung wagons with the wounded inside begging for death rather than having to endure the shock of another bump in the road.
Part of the mythology is that people were somehow mentally tougher, more resilient than they are now. Soldiers then didn't get PTSD. Adams writes detailed accounts of the psychiatric cost of the war, men simply stripped of their senses, reliving the moments when their brother or their father was killed next to them, locked in waking nightmares. Some slip into catatonia. Psychiatry as a medical field did not exist and these men were condemned as physically damaged, one patient with terrors and flashbacks was written off as having insufficient blood to the brain after suffering a lung shot, or as simply lacking in moral character. We know differently of course. Nobody walks away from having their comrade's brains, scattered by a shell, dumped on their breakfast plate.
We learn of the constant problem of deserters, stragglers, men who did not sign up for the living hell the book describes. They numbered tens, hundreds of thousands. From simply straggling in line, letting others in front soak up the fury of lead and fire that they could no longer take to men who simply left. Some returned, some didn't. Some were shot, going quietly to their deaths. They sat on their own coffins for hours, watching their own grave being dug, waiting to be shot. This was easier than getting back in line, easier than going once more unto the breach.
After the war we learn of the cost to the wounded. Mentally, thousands were shattered. Physically they endured torments that are inconceivable to us. It's hard to say that people weren't tougher then than they are now when we live in the age of antibiotics, sterile surgery, anesthesia and a dizzying array of medications and technology that spares us much of the pain and suffering that the wounded then dealt with. Joshua Chamberlain, of the 20th Maine, lived until 1914 with terrible woulds that would be challenging to treat even today. Every day for the rest of his life he had to catheterize with a primitive, rigid catheter just to pass urine. Men with bowel wounds, if they survived, leaked and spilled. One officer had to run silk thread through an abdominal abscess for the rest of his life to drain it of the accumulated pus. This is not comprehensible to most of us, even those in the medical field, but they lived, even prospered, for many years after despite the daily torment of their wounds.
This is a hard book. It's the Civil War As It Is, or Was. It is the closest thing to the actual experience we can get; the only thing Adams could do more would be to include a scratch and sniff card. It is an absolutely essential companion to any history of the Civil War
August 3, 2025
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `
➕ What an eye-opening book. It took me right into the reality of what war meant to American Civil War soldiers, to their families, to the enslaved people on the home front, etc. (Mostly it’s about the soldiers.) Usually American Civil War books talk mass movements or nostalgia. This one details the daily terror for everyday people, the terrible living conditions both on and off the battlefield, the ptsd, starvation, maggots, and gruesome waiting.
The final chapters took me into the twentieth century to see what the aftermath of all this carnage looked like in America. It also detailed the growth of a political agenda in the aftermath of the war to 1) continue to silence and violently suppress black Americans 2) silence white American women who had proven themselves capable of working outside the home and worthy of the vote 3) create a narrative of male honor around the American Civil War in order to justify further American military agendas going into the future, such as the genocide of Native American communities.
There’s so much more to this book — a ton of detail and reference to the actual words of Americans of the period. far too much to share in a note here. but I’m really glad I read it & walk away with a fuller picture of the war that split my nation in two + continues to echo. I found this book fascinating & relevant to our own era — both in what happened, and how it was turned into a mythological tale that still resonates throughout families and popular culture on both sides.
➕ What an eye-opening book. It took me right into the reality of what war meant to American Civil War soldiers, to their families, to the enslaved people on the home front, etc. (Mostly it’s about the soldiers.) Usually American Civil War books talk mass movements or nostalgia. This one details the daily terror for everyday people, the terrible living conditions both on and off the battlefield, the ptsd, starvation, maggots, and gruesome waiting.
The final chapters took me into the twentieth century to see what the aftermath of all this carnage looked like in America. It also detailed the growth of a political agenda in the aftermath of the war to 1) continue to silence and violently suppress black Americans 2) silence white American women who had proven themselves capable of working outside the home and worthy of the vote 3) create a narrative of male honor around the American Civil War in order to justify further American military agendas going into the future, such as the genocide of Native American communities.
There’s so much more to this book — a ton of detail and reference to the actual words of Americans of the period. far too much to share in a note here. but I’m really glad I read it & walk away with a fuller picture of the war that split my nation in two + continues to echo. I found this book fascinating & relevant to our own era — both in what happened, and how it was turned into a mythological tale that still resonates throughout families and popular culture on both sides.
December 6, 2024
Everything the history books don't tell you.
This book should be a must read for any student of the Civil War. Adams presents the war how it actually was, a brutal, bloody hateful conflict that left hundreds of thousands dead and maimed in it's wake.
In most Civil War books, combat will be described and at the end there will be a roundup of casualty numbers. The Civil War is over 160 years old and we have reduced it's horrors down to numbers. This book corrects that. I found the chapter about wounds and deaths in combat to be extremely interesting. Veterans were not shy to describe these horrors in journals and letters home and the author does a fantastic job in presenting the utter horror these people witnessed. Other topics covered include disease, the various atrocities of both armies and desertion. All in all a fantastic look at the Civil War as it really was.
This book should be a must read for any student of the Civil War. Adams presents the war how it actually was, a brutal, bloody hateful conflict that left hundreds of thousands dead and maimed in it's wake.
In most Civil War books, combat will be described and at the end there will be a roundup of casualty numbers. The Civil War is over 160 years old and we have reduced it's horrors down to numbers. This book corrects that. I found the chapter about wounds and deaths in combat to be extremely interesting. Veterans were not shy to describe these horrors in journals and letters home and the author does a fantastic job in presenting the utter horror these people witnessed. Other topics covered include disease, the various atrocities of both armies and desertion. All in all a fantastic look at the Civil War as it really was.
February 14, 2021
Adams offers an eye-opening account of human tragedy lurking behind flowery tributes and endless debates of strategy.
Examples are well-researched and laid bare to relate the macabre horror. This book carefully documents its sources and offers sources for additional study.
While many accounts describe the dangers of combat with weapons more accurate than those that dictated tactics, Adams explores and explains. He takes an unflinching look at disease, as organizing a camp out for tens of thousands of gentlemen at a time in the 1860s proved unsanitary.
Finally, Adams' strength here is to put quotes and sources into context. This provides a deeper understanding of his subtopics.
Examples are well-researched and laid bare to relate the macabre horror. This book carefully documents its sources and offers sources for additional study.
While many accounts describe the dangers of combat with weapons more accurate than those that dictated tactics, Adams explores and explains. He takes an unflinching look at disease, as organizing a camp out for tens of thousands of gentlemen at a time in the 1860s proved unsanitary.
Finally, Adams' strength here is to put quotes and sources into context. This provides a deeper understanding of his subtopics.
April 8, 2020
A very well written book. Adams is an academic historian, but he writes likes the best popular historians. He knows how to grab your attention and keep it. After all, history is a story. In this case, his story reveals the bloody and sordid reality behind martial glory.
At the book’s end, Adams is puzzled by how so many of those who survived the horrors of the war could support later military actions (the Spanish-American War) or praise their experience as character building. But as Robert E. Lee famously said, “It is well that war is so terrible – or we should grow too fond of it.”
At the book’s end, Adams is puzzled by how so many of those who survived the horrors of the war could support later military actions (the Spanish-American War) or praise their experience as character building. But as Robert E. Lee famously said, “It is well that war is so terrible – or we should grow too fond of it.”
December 2, 2017
This is a very well written book that thoroughly explores the lasting consequences of the American Civil War on the soldiers involved and the civilians of both the North and South. It clearly states the devastating effects of war and seeks to dispel any notion of war as a "Glorious Adventure". Michael Adams succeeds in fully illustrating General Sherman's comment that war is hell.
February 28, 2018
Odd to think that there could be a "dark side" (I guess "darker" is more accurate) to a war but this book really puts into perspective just what levels of hell the people living in America went through during the Civil War.
July 12, 2019
Grim But Informative
An intensive look at the dark side of war in general and the Civil War in particular. Not for the queasy but it should be required reading for all high school students to demythologize and deromanticize war.
An intensive look at the dark side of war in general and the Civil War in particular. Not for the queasy but it should be required reading for all high school students to demythologize and deromanticize war.
June 1, 2018
Excellent look at the devistation caused by the Civil war.
Read
March 14, 2014Mention the Civil War and most people will envision sweeping battle scenes, cavalry charges, the Rebel yell, and the theme song to Gone With the Wind. What they generally do not think of is the extreme hardships faced by soldier and civilian, North and South alike, the lasting damage done to the countryside, local economies, and to an entire generation’s psyche. Therein lies the importance of Michael C. C. Adams’ Living Hell.
It is a human trait to romanticize the most extreme tragedies. It is how humans recover from experiencing the worst we can inflict on each other. It was done after World War I and World War II and especially after the Civil War. We know war is awful, but we gloss over the true extent of its terribleness and focus instead on an idealized image of soldiers marching off to glory and returning, battered and filthy but alive, to a hero’s welcome. With its use of actual letters and first-person accounts of eyewitnesses, Living Hell walks readers through a soldier’s evolution from excited and eager recruit to physically disfigured and mentally damaged soldier and the lasting trauma for soldier and family members alike. It is a brutal picture of the disgusting chaos of the soldiers’ camps, the absolute horror wrought by new battle techniques and weaponry, the complete abandonment of any wartime conventions and the psychological impact of total war. He covers the unimaginable scenes in Army hospitals, the gruesome sites of the countryside after a battle, and much, much worse. It is as realistic a picture of what the Civil War was like as one can get, and it is not pretty.
To be fair, most people understand that war is never pretty, and the Civil War was as bad as it could get. However, what sets Living Hell apart is that Adams puts aside the rose-tinted glasses that comes with the passage of time to show the true hardships by using eyewitness documentation. He lets the soldiers and civilians speak for themselves, and it is a stark picture indeed.
Separated into sections such as camp life, battles, post-battle details, the challenges facing the injured, civilian life, and the mental damage from total war, Living Hell delves into the details of each main topic and does so without obscuring anything. This means that this book is most definitely not for the faint-of-heart or easily disturbed. Readers should be careful about eating before, during, or after reading any section because it is as gruesome as gruesome can get.
Every aspect of Living Hell is horrifying and yet so utterly fascinating. Adams’ use of soldiers’ own words is particularly effective, as they leave nothing to the imagination in their correspondence or diary entries. War is not sexy, and war is not kind. Anyone who thinks so needs to read Living Hell for an excellent look at the hellishness of modern warfare before, during, and long after the war’s end.
It is a human trait to romanticize the most extreme tragedies. It is how humans recover from experiencing the worst we can inflict on each other. It was done after World War I and World War II and especially after the Civil War. We know war is awful, but we gloss over the true extent of its terribleness and focus instead on an idealized image of soldiers marching off to glory and returning, battered and filthy but alive, to a hero’s welcome. With its use of actual letters and first-person accounts of eyewitnesses, Living Hell walks readers through a soldier’s evolution from excited and eager recruit to physically disfigured and mentally damaged soldier and the lasting trauma for soldier and family members alike. It is a brutal picture of the disgusting chaos of the soldiers’ camps, the absolute horror wrought by new battle techniques and weaponry, the complete abandonment of any wartime conventions and the psychological impact of total war. He covers the unimaginable scenes in Army hospitals, the gruesome sites of the countryside after a battle, and much, much worse. It is as realistic a picture of what the Civil War was like as one can get, and it is not pretty.
To be fair, most people understand that war is never pretty, and the Civil War was as bad as it could get. However, what sets Living Hell apart is that Adams puts aside the rose-tinted glasses that comes with the passage of time to show the true hardships by using eyewitness documentation. He lets the soldiers and civilians speak for themselves, and it is a stark picture indeed.
Separated into sections such as camp life, battles, post-battle details, the challenges facing the injured, civilian life, and the mental damage from total war, Living Hell delves into the details of each main topic and does so without obscuring anything. This means that this book is most definitely not for the faint-of-heart or easily disturbed. Readers should be careful about eating before, during, or after reading any section because it is as gruesome as gruesome can get.
Every aspect of Living Hell is horrifying and yet so utterly fascinating. Adams’ use of soldiers’ own words is particularly effective, as they leave nothing to the imagination in their correspondence or diary entries. War is not sexy, and war is not kind. Anyone who thinks so needs to read Living Hell for an excellent look at the hellishness of modern warfare before, during, and long after the war’s end.
August 6, 2014
If you read the review of this helpful book in the New York Review of Books, you'll discover that the author plays fast and loose with some of the facts, but it is true, true to the reality that "there is no good war, and there is no bad peace." Perhaps Adams has willfully maneuvered some facts about the battlefronts and the realities of the massive killing grounds that befouled our country. Perhaps some of the conclusions that are reached such as an implication that slavery would have somehow been gotten rid of without massive bloodshed. The argument that France, England, and other countries rid themselves of the "peculiar institution" without killing each other exclusively for that reason is a bit disingenuous. Americans are too blood thirsty and too willing to make people with different color skin "others" to have ever gotten rid of the convenient engine of our economy for almost half our nation's life. However, the people that we meet, the willingness of the author to depict the destruction of General Longstreet by a simple wound and terrific battles to the extent that he wandered aimlessly for several war years, and his unflinching depiction of the rape and murder of civilians by both sides make us realize that we should avoid war, particularly when one of our presidents tells us that the war we are about to make is for Democracy, freedom or safety. Generally, wars are made to keep someone in power. They destroy the common man and woman and leave nothing but blood, mood, and tears. I've opposed every war we've fought in my lifetime. I'm glad that I did based on this book.
October 26, 2014
One knows, of course, that there must have been psychological trauma in addition to the physical trauma of the Civil War (and indeed of any war--all our European ancestors, combatants and civilians, had intimate knowledge of such through plagues, frequent wars etc. And indeed until the Napoleonic Wars there was no real conception of civilian non-combatants). Adams' book, though short, gives a good overall view of these traumas, with chapters on the march, face-t0-face combat, clearing the battlefield of dead and wounded, etc, He makes these events vivid by fixing on one soldier's experience before detailing the general picture and frequent reference to The Red Badge of Courage, noting how it does expose "classic" examples of battle trauma. The closing vignette of the Rough Riders traveling via train to embark for Cuba is all the more poignant for our greater understanding of how hellish war is; the younger people, born after the Civil War, greet and cheer the soldiers; but behind them are the grey-haired ladies, who had seen it all during the Civil War and had lost their men-folk to disease, wounds, or psychological trauma. They watched silently. A necessary book to read. There are families today that still feel the effect of the Civil War and given the latest research on the epigenetic effect of WW2 on the Netherlands, "still" should be cut from this sentence.
January 26, 2015
An excellent no holds barred view of the darkest aspects of the civil war. Adams piles it on with a trowel, all to prove the point that war is hell. Particularly damning are the chapters that mentiion medical aspects, especially pyschiatric ones. Victorian society had no means to even grasp the concept of Combat Fatigue let alone PTSD and so many many thousand were cruely left without anything close to level care.
Adams is quick to excoriate those in the 1890's who so quickly forgot the unending maelstrom of blood that was the Civil war,and turned into a patriotic rallying cry for more bloodshed. 150 years later and the casualty records of the conflict are still MORE than all other wars this country has been involved in COMBINED.
If you know of anyone who thinks that war is the answer to any current political situation, please have them read this book.
Adams is quick to excoriate those in the 1890's who so quickly forgot the unending maelstrom of blood that was the Civil war,and turned into a patriotic rallying cry for more bloodshed. 150 years later and the casualty records of the conflict are still MORE than all other wars this country has been involved in COMBINED.
If you know of anyone who thinks that war is the answer to any current political situation, please have them read this book.
November 10, 2015
This book tells of the dark side of the Civil War. The effects of the battlefield on the soldiers, disease, wounds, lack of supplies, water and food. It also goes into the effects on the mental state of the soldiers as well. PTSD being unknown and little knowledge of mental illness. It deals with the absolute horror of war on civilians, and the effects on the countryside on which it was fought. Even the conduct of the soldiers is discussed. The book concludes with the impact of the war on the country after the war , and the reconstruction. It covers the topic it sets out to discuss very well. A lot of things not covered in popular histories are brought to light in this book. It does a good job explaining just how tragic, and horrible this war was.
July 18, 2014
"Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War" by Michael C. C. Adams assesses the costs of the Civil War, America's bloodiest war.
Michael C. C. Adams is an experienced and knowledgeable historian and a lifetime student of the American Civil War. "Living Hell" covers the cost of the Civil War, to the participant, to his family, to his generation, and to the nation. It is perspective too often lacking in discussions on the Civil War.
I found the book well written, thoughtful and well considered. The author, so knowledgeable on the topic, also knows how to tell the story. In the case the story is about the horrors that war entails.
I would recommend this book to anyone exploring the topic of war. And for many of those who are not.
Michael C. C. Adams is an experienced and knowledgeable historian and a lifetime student of the American Civil War. "Living Hell" covers the cost of the Civil War, to the participant, to his family, to his generation, and to the nation. It is perspective too often lacking in discussions on the Civil War.
I found the book well written, thoughtful and well considered. The author, so knowledgeable on the topic, also knows how to tell the story. In the case the story is about the horrors that war entails.
I would recommend this book to anyone exploring the topic of war. And for many of those who are not.
June 24, 2016
William Tecumseh Sherman states "War is hell. You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it." This book goes into detail the horrors the Civil War caused. I found many of the details very interesting, but disturbing at the same time. The reason I give the book 3 stars is that it starts to lose focus on its main subject in the last few chapters. The topics discussed in these chapters would be better suited in a book that covers Reconstruction or an overview of the conflict. I was also put off by the author's tendency to walk us through a scene of a situation that is being cover. He breaks the 4th wall a bit too often and takes me out of period. Overall good book, but could have been better.
July 6, 2014
Gripping, horrific, dirty, chaotic. Mr Adams delves into the little discussed reality of the War Between the States. I throughly enjoyed his use of the lens following a Soldier or unit into camp or battle. it was a refreshing change from other texts that list dates, places, facts, and figures to describe that time. His examination of shirkers, cowards, and peculiar behavior through modern Combat Stress definitions brings another fresh aspect of the era I had not seen before. there is not a 5th star because there are times he describes a participant without the context in needs. But I will tell you, get the book and read it. You won't regret it.
dnf
March 2, 2015Can't give this a fair rating as I did not finish the book. It was very well written but not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. About halfway through I just couldn't take any more limbs being blown off or descriptions of people starving, dying from wounds or disease, being broiled or frozen by the weather, laid low by terrible, rotten food - well, you get the picture. I may revisit this one day - as I said above, it was very well written and if you have any illusions about the horrors of war, this book will set you straight.
November 24, 2014
An unflinching look at the pain and suffering endured by soldiers and civilians both North and South during the Civil War. At times downright gruesome, at times touching, definitely a worthwhile read.
Only minor complaint is the author identifying Confederate general Edward Porter Alexander as Porter E. Alexander and Union soldier Amos Humiston, whose body was found on the Gettysburg battlefield clutching a photo of his children, as Amos Hurriston.
Only minor complaint is the author identifying Confederate general Edward Porter Alexander as Porter E. Alexander and Union soldier Amos Humiston, whose body was found on the Gettysburg battlefield clutching a photo of his children, as Amos Hurriston.
April 19, 2015
The best book I've read to date about the Civil War
I give it the highest rating. As a RN I was appalled at the lack of medical care. Troops didn't start recovering from wounds until WW2.
I was a Navy Nurse during Viet Nam. Yes I was that young and that dumb. But the way I saw it was my country needed me.
Aside from keeping the country together What was the Bright Side of the Civil War?
I give it the highest rating. As a RN I was appalled at the lack of medical care. Troops didn't start recovering from wounds until WW2.
I was a Navy Nurse during Viet Nam. Yes I was that young and that dumb. But the way I saw it was my country needed me.
Aside from keeping the country together What was the Bright Side of the Civil War?
February 8, 2017
Fantastic book! In-depth research, and I like the way Adams presented the material. Definitely recommend!
June 2, 2014
Certainly address the " dark side" of the war. Deals with multiple topics, most prominently the catastrophic effects of disease and wounds and the inability of the medical community to keep pace. Also speaks to other areas often overlooked such as the widespread sexual exploitation of civilians - both white and black. Well worth adding to your Civil War reading list.
December 7, 2015
Ive seen Ken Burns Civil War and read a few books on the war and thought I had a good understand of the horrors of it, but this account is so stark its first person narrative style is gripping. Some paragraphs I jumped over as the subjects accounts graphic descriptions so detailed of the wounded. If your into history Adams book is I hate the term" Must Read".
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