The Bonds of War: A Story of Immigrants and Esprit de Corps in Company C, 96th Illinois Volunteer Infantry

Engaging the Civil War

by Diana Dretske

The bond of citizenship earned during the Civil War
 
When curator Diana L. Dretske discovered that the five long-gone Union soldiers in a treasured photograph in the Bess Bower Dunn Museum were not fully identified, it compelled her into a project of recovery and reinterpretation. Utilizing an impressive array of local and national archives, as well as private papers, the author’s microhistorical approach records events that often go unnoticed, such as a farmer enlisting in the middle of a crop field, a sister searching her brother’s face for signs of war, and an immigrant dying in an effort to become a good American citizen.
 
This book, the most intensive examination of the 96th Illinois Volunteer Infantry since the regiment’s history was published in 1887 centers on immigrants from the British Isles who wished to be citizens of a country at war with itself. Far removed from their native homelands, they found new promise in rural Illinois. These men, neighbors along the quiet Stateline Road in Lake County, decide to join the fighting at its most dangerous hour. The bonds of war become then the bonds of their new national identity.
 
The Bonds of War uncovers the common soldier from the cataclysm that is the American Civil War by offering a collective biography of five soldiers of the 96th in the Western Theater. The human drama of their lives unfolds before the reader on battlefields such as Chickamauga and within the high pine stockades of Andersonville. Their lives argue that those who seem to matter least in military history are the very ones who can tell us the most about the experience of war and the reasons for remembering.
 

276 pages, Paperback

Published May 4, 2021

Reviews

[Richard Becker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very informative book about a group of immigrant soldiers in the civil war who lived in the county that I call home. The soldiers' lives are described in detail, giving us information on their pasts and their relationships with their families and each other. There are some wonderful and some heartbreaking stories included in the pages. Just about anything that could have happened to a soldier did occur to at least one of the group of 5. I also enjoyed reading about what happened after the war in the lives of the soldiers who survived . I have a couple of civil war soldiers in my family tree and this helped me understand even more than before what they went through in the war. I plan to encourage my friends and family to read this book.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dretske does a great job following five 1862 volunteers who joined the 96th Illinois Infantry and fought through the Civil War. They took a group photograph at Camp Fuller in Rockford, IL when they were first being trained. They joined the four companies raised in Lake County, IL which were then combined with six other companies from Jo Davies County to form the 96th. Their service started slowly with their first significant battle being Chickamauga where the 96th lost 54% of those engaged. The other regiments in its brigade, the 40th Ohio and the 22nd Michigan lost 63% and 85% respectively. It includes a QR code that provides access to a number of the primary documents used to develop the book and an interview with the author.