The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War

by Mark M. Smith

Historical accounts of major events have almost always relied upon what those who were there witnessed. Nowhere is this truer than in the nerve-shattering chaos of warfare, where sight seems to confer objective truth and acts as the basis of reconstruction. In The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege , historian Mark M. Smith considers how all five senses, including sight, shaped the experience of the Civil War and thus its memory, exploring its full sensory impact on everyone from the soldiers on the field to the civilians waiting at home.

From the eardrum-shattering barrage of shells announcing the outbreak of war at Fort Sumter; to the stench produced by the corpses lying in the mid-summer sun at Gettysburg; to the siege of Vicksburg, once a center of Southern culinary aesthetics and starved into submission, Smith recreates how Civil War was felt and lived. Relying on first-hand accounts, Smith focuses on specific senses, one for each event, offering a wholly new perspective. At Bull Run, the similarities between the colors of the Union and Confederate uniforms created concern over what later would be called "friendly fire" and helped decide the outcome of the first major battle, simply because no one was quite sure they could believe their eyes. He evokes what it might have felt like to be in the HL Hunley submarine, in which eight men worked cheek by jowl in near-total darkness in a space 48 inches high, 42 inches wide. Often argued to be the first "total war," the Civil War overwhelmed the senses because of its
unprecedented nature and scope, rendering sight less reliable and, Smith shows, forcefully engaging the nonvisual senses. Sherman's March was little less than a full-blown assault on Southern sense and sensibility, leaving nothing untouched and no one unaffected.

Unique, compelling, and fascinating, The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege , offers readers way to experience the Civil War with fresh eyes.

Genres: History, Civil War, Nonfiction, Grad School, Academic, Military History

197 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye-opening, no pun intended. A fascinating and largely neglected way of understanding the Civil War. Smith has produced a wonderful volume here, one that should be read by any self-respecting student of the era.

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege offers a perspective on the Civil War that is often overlooked by students or casual history buffs—the sensory experience of the war’s participants. To this end the author, Mark Smith of the University of South Carolina, offers chapter-length case studies highlighting the way some aspect or event of the war affected the senses of those present.

“We know about Gettysburg,” Smith writes, “the movements, deployments, tactics, charges, defenses. We also accept the significance; this was a battle for a unified country, for nation, for liberty, for freedom. . . . But what was it like to experience Gettysburg, to be immersed in it?” (70). The attention given to sensory experiences of history—especially military history—has become more common since at least the 1970s, when John Keegan published The Face of Battle, and is welcome in a field that can sometimes lose touch with the harsh reality of war for its participants. But Smith’s book is a limited success, for a couple of reasons.

Smith offers as case studies the bombardment of Fort Sumter (sound), the First Battle of Manassas (sight), the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg (smell), the siege of Vicksburg (taste, or more specifically, hunger), and the first and only attack by the Confederate submarine HL Hunley (touch). An epilogue on Sherman’s March brings all five back together. The chapters in question do not limit themselves solely to these events but range further afield, drawing in relevant stories and information to more fully realize the events in question. The chapters are full of vivid details, particularly the chapter on the corpse-glutted field at Gettysburg, which stank for weeks after the fighting ended.

In one of book’s strongest sections, Smith evokes a number of the war’s unpleasant senses by way of some trenchant commentary on historical reenacting: “only certain aspects of the war are ever re-enacted. There is a reason re-enactors do not attempt to recapture the air-gulping desperation of Civil War sailors drowning in doomed submarines or attempt to reexperience the lice-ridden, stomach-churning ordeals of Civil War prisoners. There is a good reason they use blanks and not real bullets and never bayonet-charge one another to the point of slitting skin.” (4).

Even brief asides have evocative detail: in describing pre-war Charleston, Smith notes that slaveholders’ anxieties about servile revolt were worse at night, when the “dark, never truly conquered with streetlights, camouflaged movement, and this fear accounted for the police presence and nightly curfews” (16). In passages like these, Smith invites the reader to realize how different this world is in even minor details of the landscape, where the absence of technologies we don’t even notice anymore—streetlights—influences society, law, and human emotion.

All this counts in the book’s favor, but Smith sometimes seems to make too much of things. Drawing on science and magazines from the time, to cite a single example, he notes that popular theories of intellect and taste were tied to the senses—and race, with the northern European races given to visual examination and “lower” races tied more to appetite-oriented senses like smell and taste. To be confronted with an offensive smell, then—the stink of musket-fire smoke, putrefied wounds, rotting corpses—was to challenge a racial and social self-conception. There’s certainly something to this, but to what extent this was the case with anyone other than the magazine- or science-reading class of 19th century America—say, a private from Appalachian Georgia, a drummer boy from the Minnesota frontier, or an Irish immigrant who enlisted in Manhattan—is left unexamined.

Sometimes this social rank/privilege/power theorizing expands what could be written as truism to lengthy passages. Each chapter, in fact, could be briefly summarized: the Civil War was loud, surprisingly so for people unused to machinery; battle in an age before satellites and aircraft was visually confusing and chaotic; the Civil War stank, and people were upset by the smell of corpses; people under siege had to settle for food they didn’t prefer. The only chapter that defeats easy summary is that on the Hunley, which is ostensibly about touch (protocols about which Smith alludes to repeatedly earlier in the book, without much elaboration), but mostly explores the irony of white men crammed into an ocean-going vessel the way slaves had been transported decades before.

The book is also overwritten. The introductory passages of each chapter, which are written in a fiction-like style, are loaded with purple prose, much of which relies on cliché or just doesn’t work. Vividness is an asset for writers of history, but the over-the-top verbs Smith chooses sometimes sound more like NFL commentary than history: “Without missing a beat, Sherman initiated his campaign to eviscerate the Carolinas” (135). There are also “I see what you did there” moments of attempted cleverness: “From [Atlanta], Sherman’s giant raiding party split up into two phalanxes, machinelike columns designed to destroy Palladian ones” (134). Or, with relish, describing the hungry refugees leaving Vicksburg: “The ‘savage horde’—as the Confederates called the federals—would capitalize on their victory and proceed to work their way into the entrails of the Confederacy. If there was one meal left to eat, federals would soon enough be spooning it down the South’s throat. Humble pie would be plentiful” (114). Entrails, meals, force-feeding humble pie—because they’re starving. Get it? Get it???

I could go on. The book’s treatment of the political context of the Civil War is oversimplified, but that is not aim of the book. The book’s flaws are ultimately more distractions from the good content than weaknesses, and so the book is worth reading. What Smith does best is marshal detail, explain revealing episodes, and force the modern reader to consider the sensory experience of living in an alien time and place—sometime key to good historical writing. If only it characterized the whole book.

Recommended for beginners who have not yet considered what it was like to experience the Civil War.

[Alexandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sequel is about the sixth sense of spiritualism postwar

[Sarah Gardner]

4.5. Spritely, energetic prose. Provocative and compelling argument. Suggestive rather than definitive.

[Brianna McLaughlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read for class

This approach just isn't for me.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for a graduate level Civil War course. I’ve never heard of sensory history. For me, this came off as contrived. There may be some who this resonates with, I am not that person. There are basic accounts of well covered Civil War events laced with an excess amount of adjectives. Give it a try, you might like it or you might not.

[Amber Kirkpatrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

War isn't fought with guns or canon or swords alone...it physically assaults the senses, which can have a powerful effect on soldiers. This was a fantastic reference book for both history lovers AND those who write battle scenes. Highly recommend.

[Dkettmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent, but lacking the detail I thought it would have at the onset. Still a good work of review, just not what I had hoped. I can recall a single instance of how something tasted.

[Mike Cross · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a very hard subject to convey in writing, the author does an excellent job. I only wish there was more to read and experience. Recommended for history buffs.

[Fresno Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting, but missing something, thinner on the analysis side than I was expecting

[Maggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very vivid description.

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclaimer: I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher and I am writing an honest review.

I think this quote from the author sums up the book pretty well “Indeed, as far as the senses are concerned, all war is total war, pushing them to their limits and beyond, dulling and then overwhelming; and then dulling them again” (page 7, I think). Being a history major, I have read several books about the Civil War. But this is the first I've read that focuses on the senses (to be honest, I didn't even know a “sensory historian” existed, and it sounds like a really interesting field). I didn't know this much information was available on what the people in the Civil War experienced; the tastes, smells, sights, etc. don’t always take precedence in books on this subject and tend to get lost in the facts. One of the main reasons I enjoyed this book was because it felt like it was written more like a novel. Facts weren't just spewed onto the page, which made this book a lot easier to read and follow. The maps and pictures used in this book reminded me that I was reading a work of non-fiction. It was very enjoyable.

However, my love of this book seemed to waver. I did find the book hard to read at first. The introduction and the first chapter felt more like an essay. But by the second chapter, the book was much easier to read and more enjoyable because it became more like a novel. Then I felt the third chapter was kind of weird, with the long description of someone’s nose in the beginning of the chapter, but then this person didn't show up again until much later in the chapter. It just seemed out of place. But as weird as it was, I loved the chapter because of all the details (it was a little gross, which made me like it more). Then the book was a little boring again, and then the final chapter and epilogue were really interesting. But despite the confusion and my lack of interest for some of the chapters, I really enjoyed the book. I learned some things about the Civil War that I’m really interested in learning more about. I wish I had read this book while I was at my university because it would have made class a lot better.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short, elegantly written book uses five events from the Civil War to consider Americans' interpretations of the senses during wartime. Mark M. Smith draws from a fine array of primary sources, such as weather reports, letters, memoirs, and newspaper reports, to understand how Americans in the 1800s understood the senses within their culture. Smith wants to establish sensory history as a new subfield, and he makes an interesting case that one can talk about abstract sensory experience through written accounts. Ultimately, I am not sure the narrative gives us a genuinely new understanding of the Civil War, as Smith hoped to do. It seemed more like he told some compelling stories from the war and highlighted the place of the senses in those stories. A fast read, it's entirely pleasant but not likely to inspire a whole field of sensory histories.

[Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating book. The description of the submariners in the Hunley, as well as the description of civilian hunger during the siege of Vicksburg, were both shocking and moving. But the most provocative insight, I think, was his argument that the photographs from Gettysburg acquired their power for contemporary viewers because of the viewers' memory of the smell of the battlefield, rank and steamy in July, littered with thousands of corpses-- of humans, horses, mules. The memory and imagining of smell, in a sense, fills the empty gray sky & field that dominates these photos.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellant discussion of the myriad ways the Civil War impacted and altered the lives of citizens, soldiers and sailors. The way these sensory challanges changed and impacted the social order southern upon which the south depended for survival intrigued me. One can see the lingering effects in today's south.

The sensory decsriptions were brought to life by quotes from the nedia of the day and diaries and letters written by participants.

[Blaine Welgraven · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable sensory history. You won't think about the Civil War--or the study of war period--in the same way after you've read Smith's work.