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Littlefield History of the Civil War Era
The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies
MP3 CD Format 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.
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.
1 pages, Audio CD
First published November 19, 2018
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229 people want to read
About the author
Peter S. Carmichael
20 books12 followersPeter S. Carmichael was Robert C. Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies and Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
April 24, 2019
This is an exceptionally good book written by one of the giants in Civil War historiography. Carmichael considers many of the trends in common soldier historiography from Bell I. Wiley to James McPherson. In engaging with a different set of evidence (case studies rather than letter collections), Carmichael comes away with an interpretation based on soldier pragmatism (against McPherson's idealism). It's compelling and well supported throughout the book.
This book will become a standard reading in the field. As a scholar of Civil War common soldiers myself, I will definitely own this book and reference it often. I recommend it for a history reading group, any Civil War scholar certainly, and find that it could work from an advanced undergrad class (maybe a 400 level readings course) as well as becoming a new standard at the Master's level.
This book will become a standard reading in the field. As a scholar of Civil War common soldiers myself, I will definitely own this book and reference it often. I recommend it for a history reading group, any Civil War scholar certainly, and find that it could work from an advanced undergrad class (maybe a 400 level readings course) as well as becoming a new standard at the Master's level.
May 27, 2019
Review of: The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought
and Survived in Civil War Armies, by Peter S. Carmichael
by Stan Prager (5-27-19)
A few years ago, I had the honor of being selected for a key role on a team engaged in scanning, transcribing and digitizing a trove of recently rediscovered letters, diaries and narratives of the Massachusetts 31st Infantry, which turned up more than a century after these were compiled by their regimental historian but left unpublished. In a lifetime of studying the American Civil War, soldiers’ letters were hardly new to me, of course, but I found myself surprisingly emotional as I became one of the very first in so many decades to get a glimpse at the sometimes-hidden hearts of these long-dead souls. And there was something else: rather than the random excerpt, often highlighted for its dramatic impact, that makes a familiar appearance in the pages of history books, these materials represent continuous strands of communication by nearly two dozen individuals, some of which stretched over a three-year period. The stories they tell run the gamut from the mundane to the comedic to the horrific, but collectively the nature and the personalities of the storytellers emerge to reveal authenticity in their experience too frequently lost in grand narratives about the war. A careful read of a man’s letters home over several years often unexpectedly expose truths that are omitted or deliberately distorted by the correspondent.
This overarching point is subtly but expertly made again and again in historian Peter S. Carmichael’s magnificent work, The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought and Survived in Civil War Armies, certainly one of the most significant recent contributions to the historiography. As primary sources, surviving letters from the front are critical and invaluable, but even more critical may be interpretation, which can be misled by taking these at face value, or plucking them out of context, or being seduced by the words of a man who wants his wife or mother—or especially himself—to believe that he is courageous or confident or committed to his cause when only some or none of those may be true.
In a dense, but highly readable account that brings a surprisingly fresh perspective to a frequently overlooked aspect of Civil War studies, Carmichael defies often prevailing generalizations of soldiers north and south that tend to predominate in the literature, reminding the reader that a tendency to oversimplification distorts the reality on the ground. Something like a total of 2.75 million men fought on both sides in the Civil War. These were living, breathing human beings, not simply the statistical figures fed into databases to produce the broad generalities pervasive in many narratives. At the same time, he does not fail to locate and identify the commonalities in the rank and file that exist in multiple arenas, but his skillful approach to this end is guided by the nuance and complexity that is the mark of a great historian.
Carmichael’s well-written chronicle explores almost all aspects of a soldier’s life in camp, on the march and in battle, but that nuance is made most manifest in the chapter entitled “Desertion and Military Justice.” The accepted wisdom has long argued that bounty jumpers constituted the majority of those shot for desertion over the course of the war, and perhaps with some justification. But while the numbers underscore that there were plenty who likely fit that profile, Carmichael’s research demonstrates that such a broad brush obscures a reality that saw men on both sides leaving the lines and returning, frequently more than once, and typically with little or no penalty. This was especially common among Confederates, who usually fled not out of cowardice or convenience but rather to aid starving families back home desperate for survival. And there was, in many cases, a fine line between AWOL and desertion. It is surprising how often luck or simply the vagaries of enforcement separated men made to sit on their own coffins with eyes bandaged while the firing squad formed up from those docked a month’s pay instead. It does seem that Lincoln’s moral compass was more finely oriented to the circumstances of the soldier missing from his company—even if this found friction among the Union brass—than was the case on the other side, for the reality was that by percentage far more men clad in gray were put to death than those in blue, and some of these were mass executions before the lines. What is clear is that on both sides, the common soldier—even the veteran accustomed to the gore and slaughter of battle—was deeply disturbed when compelled to witness the cold-blooded murder of a fellow soldier, even if he thought the man got his just deserts.
A review such as this cannot possibly touch upon all of the themes Carmichael surveys in this outstanding study, but I was especially drawn to his treatment of the phenomenon of malingering, which instantly found a familiar face in Cpl. Joshua W. Hawkes, one of my men from the 31st, who bragged in letters to his mother about his health while he served away from the cannon fire as part of the occupation army in New Orleans, even taking swipes at those pretending to be ill to avoid duty. Yet later, on the very eve of combat, he fell victim first to “diarrhoea” and then to a bewildering set of ever-shifting complaints that kept him confined to a hospital bed for months until he was eventually discharged for disability. I read this man’s letters in isolation, of course, but Carmichael’s impressive research demonstrates not only that this soldier’s manufactured symptoms put him in the company of thousands of other “shirkers,” but also underscores how difficult it was for doctors equipped with the primitive diagnostic tools of mid-nineteenth century medicine to distinguish the truly afflicted from those talented at feigning illness to avoid combat or earn a discharge. As such, there were men who genuinely suffered sent back to come under enemy fire, while others who were quite healthy succeeded in dodging the same.
Some years after my project with the 31st, I was given access to a private collection of unpublished letters from George W. Gould, a Massachusetts private killed at the bloody battle of Cold Harbor in 1864. I transcribed his correspondence and created a website for public access to honor him, and I visit his grave in Paxton MA several times a year. When I placed a flag on his grave to commemorate Memorial Day 2019, I found myself in somber reflection of not only the sacrifice of Private Gould, but also of the vast territory covered in The War for the Common Soldier, because although his name appears nowhere in the narrative this book is surely about George W. Gould and every man who marched alongside him, as well as every man he marched against in opposition with musket held high. Pvt. George W. Gould and Cpl. Joshua W. Hawkes are just two of the millions who either gasped their last breaths on Civil War battlefields or drank beer at memorials in the decades that followed. If you want to understand that terrible war, you should indeed visit battlefields and explore the latest historiography, but you should also pause to read Carmichael’s superlative work. The truth is that you will never comprehend the Civil War until you come to understand the Civil War soldier. Some books should be required reading. This is one of them.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[REVIEW ADDENDUM: Some years back, I had the great honor of being selected for a key role on a team engaged in scanning, transcribing and digitizing a trove of recently rediscovered letters, diaries and narratives of the Massachusetts 31st Infantry—a regiment that first served with Benjamin Butler as an occupying force in New Orleans, and later as part of the Red River campaign under Nathaniel Banks—which turned up in the archives of the Lyman & Merrie Wood Museum of Springfield History more than a century after they were compiled by their regimental historian but left unpublished due to his untimely death. These materials can be accessed at: https://31massinf.wordpress.com
I found Carmichael’s treatment of malingerers especially fascinating, because it related to my own work with the Massachusetts 31st and Cpl. Joshua W. Hawkes, who in letters to his mother made dozens of references to his generally good health during the first portion of his service, where he thrived as part of the occupying force under Benjamin Butler in New Orleans. In one missive from the autumn of 1862 [letter 10/18/62], he even bragged about how quickly he recovered from the “ague” while taking a swipe at those who pretended to be ill, noting that while he was “back to duty now there is so much playing off sick I do not wish any such name.” Ironically then, in April 1863, on the eve of what would have been his first foray into combat, [letter 04/17/63] Hawkes was beset with “diarrhoea" [SIC] which eventually led to his return to New Orleans, this time to the St. James Hospital, where a bewildering set of ever-shifting complaints kept him confined—but not incapable of eating fairly well, such as “an egg in the morning, a piece of toasted bread each meal and a little claret wine,” [letter 6/4/63] and occasionally exploring the city when granted a pass—until he eventually succeeded in gaining a discharge for disability in July 1863. In one of his more histrionic letters to mother, he proclaims:
“I am perhaps disposed to magnify my ails, but when I have seen men brought in here who had been forced to march with diarrhoea [SIC] … coming here too weak to walk and living but a week or two, then I have thought it was not best to beg to be sent away to the exposures of an army on active duty in the field. They can call me a coward, a shirk, what they choose, but I think it a duty to take care of my health not only for myself but on my mother's account, what do you think of this logic?” [letter 06/04/63]
Apparently, this “logic” served Hawkes’ well, since he was sent home without ever coming under enemy fire and lived on until 1890!
Some years after my project with the 31st, I was given access to a private collection of the unpublished letters of Pvt. George W. Gould, who was killed at the bloody battle of Cold Harbor in 1864. He has come to serve as my “adopted” Civil War soldier, so by honoring him I likewise honor all of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. I scanned and transcribed his letters and created a website to honor him, which can be accessed at: https://resurrectinglostvoices.com
I have attached this addendum not because these particular soldiers who fell or survived have a greater or lesser import than any of the other hundreds of thousands who served in the American Civil War, but rather to add meaningful context, and to underscore the essential point of Carmichael’s wonderful book, which is that you must read far more deeply into what these men had to say in their letters home if you really want to try to understand the war at all.]
Review of: The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought and Survived in Civil War Armies, by Peter S. Carmichael https://regarp.com/2019/05/27/review-...
and Survived in Civil War Armies, by Peter S. Carmichael
by Stan Prager (5-27-19)
A few years ago, I had the honor of being selected for a key role on a team engaged in scanning, transcribing and digitizing a trove of recently rediscovered letters, diaries and narratives of the Massachusetts 31st Infantry, which turned up more than a century after these were compiled by their regimental historian but left unpublished. In a lifetime of studying the American Civil War, soldiers’ letters were hardly new to me, of course, but I found myself surprisingly emotional as I became one of the very first in so many decades to get a glimpse at the sometimes-hidden hearts of these long-dead souls. And there was something else: rather than the random excerpt, often highlighted for its dramatic impact, that makes a familiar appearance in the pages of history books, these materials represent continuous strands of communication by nearly two dozen individuals, some of which stretched over a three-year period. The stories they tell run the gamut from the mundane to the comedic to the horrific, but collectively the nature and the personalities of the storytellers emerge to reveal authenticity in their experience too frequently lost in grand narratives about the war. A careful read of a man’s letters home over several years often unexpectedly expose truths that are omitted or deliberately distorted by the correspondent.
This overarching point is subtly but expertly made again and again in historian Peter S. Carmichael’s magnificent work, The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought and Survived in Civil War Armies, certainly one of the most significant recent contributions to the historiography. As primary sources, surviving letters from the front are critical and invaluable, but even more critical may be interpretation, which can be misled by taking these at face value, or plucking them out of context, or being seduced by the words of a man who wants his wife or mother—or especially himself—to believe that he is courageous or confident or committed to his cause when only some or none of those may be true.
In a dense, but highly readable account that brings a surprisingly fresh perspective to a frequently overlooked aspect of Civil War studies, Carmichael defies often prevailing generalizations of soldiers north and south that tend to predominate in the literature, reminding the reader that a tendency to oversimplification distorts the reality on the ground. Something like a total of 2.75 million men fought on both sides in the Civil War. These were living, breathing human beings, not simply the statistical figures fed into databases to produce the broad generalities pervasive in many narratives. At the same time, he does not fail to locate and identify the commonalities in the rank and file that exist in multiple arenas, but his skillful approach to this end is guided by the nuance and complexity that is the mark of a great historian.
Carmichael’s well-written chronicle explores almost all aspects of a soldier’s life in camp, on the march and in battle, but that nuance is made most manifest in the chapter entitled “Desertion and Military Justice.” The accepted wisdom has long argued that bounty jumpers constituted the majority of those shot for desertion over the course of the war, and perhaps with some justification. But while the numbers underscore that there were plenty who likely fit that profile, Carmichael’s research demonstrates that such a broad brush obscures a reality that saw men on both sides leaving the lines and returning, frequently more than once, and typically with little or no penalty. This was especially common among Confederates, who usually fled not out of cowardice or convenience but rather to aid starving families back home desperate for survival. And there was, in many cases, a fine line between AWOL and desertion. It is surprising how often luck or simply the vagaries of enforcement separated men made to sit on their own coffins with eyes bandaged while the firing squad formed up from those docked a month’s pay instead. It does seem that Lincoln’s moral compass was more finely oriented to the circumstances of the soldier missing from his company—even if this found friction among the Union brass—than was the case on the other side, for the reality was that by percentage far more men clad in gray were put to death than those in blue, and some of these were mass executions before the lines. What is clear is that on both sides, the common soldier—even the veteran accustomed to the gore and slaughter of battle—was deeply disturbed when compelled to witness the cold-blooded murder of a fellow soldier, even if he thought the man got his just deserts.
A review such as this cannot possibly touch upon all of the themes Carmichael surveys in this outstanding study, but I was especially drawn to his treatment of the phenomenon of malingering, which instantly found a familiar face in Cpl. Joshua W. Hawkes, one of my men from the 31st, who bragged in letters to his mother about his health while he served away from the cannon fire as part of the occupation army in New Orleans, even taking swipes at those pretending to be ill to avoid duty. Yet later, on the very eve of combat, he fell victim first to “diarrhoea” and then to a bewildering set of ever-shifting complaints that kept him confined to a hospital bed for months until he was eventually discharged for disability. I read this man’s letters in isolation, of course, but Carmichael’s impressive research demonstrates not only that this soldier’s manufactured symptoms put him in the company of thousands of other “shirkers,” but also underscores how difficult it was for doctors equipped with the primitive diagnostic tools of mid-nineteenth century medicine to distinguish the truly afflicted from those talented at feigning illness to avoid combat or earn a discharge. As such, there were men who genuinely suffered sent back to come under enemy fire, while others who were quite healthy succeeded in dodging the same.
Some years after my project with the 31st, I was given access to a private collection of unpublished letters from George W. Gould, a Massachusetts private killed at the bloody battle of Cold Harbor in 1864. I transcribed his correspondence and created a website for public access to honor him, and I visit his grave in Paxton MA several times a year. When I placed a flag on his grave to commemorate Memorial Day 2019, I found myself in somber reflection of not only the sacrifice of Private Gould, but also of the vast territory covered in The War for the Common Soldier, because although his name appears nowhere in the narrative this book is surely about George W. Gould and every man who marched alongside him, as well as every man he marched against in opposition with musket held high. Pvt. George W. Gould and Cpl. Joshua W. Hawkes are just two of the millions who either gasped their last breaths on Civil War battlefields or drank beer at memorials in the decades that followed. If you want to understand that terrible war, you should indeed visit battlefields and explore the latest historiography, but you should also pause to read Carmichael’s superlative work. The truth is that you will never comprehend the Civil War until you come to understand the Civil War soldier. Some books should be required reading. This is one of them.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[REVIEW ADDENDUM: Some years back, I had the great honor of being selected for a key role on a team engaged in scanning, transcribing and digitizing a trove of recently rediscovered letters, diaries and narratives of the Massachusetts 31st Infantry—a regiment that first served with Benjamin Butler as an occupying force in New Orleans, and later as part of the Red River campaign under Nathaniel Banks—which turned up in the archives of the Lyman & Merrie Wood Museum of Springfield History more than a century after they were compiled by their regimental historian but left unpublished due to his untimely death. These materials can be accessed at: https://31massinf.wordpress.com
I found Carmichael’s treatment of malingerers especially fascinating, because it related to my own work with the Massachusetts 31st and Cpl. Joshua W. Hawkes, who in letters to his mother made dozens of references to his generally good health during the first portion of his service, where he thrived as part of the occupying force under Benjamin Butler in New Orleans. In one missive from the autumn of 1862 [letter 10/18/62], he even bragged about how quickly he recovered from the “ague” while taking a swipe at those who pretended to be ill, noting that while he was “back to duty now there is so much playing off sick I do not wish any such name.” Ironically then, in April 1863, on the eve of what would have been his first foray into combat, [letter 04/17/63] Hawkes was beset with “diarrhoea" [SIC] which eventually led to his return to New Orleans, this time to the St. James Hospital, where a bewildering set of ever-shifting complaints kept him confined—but not incapable of eating fairly well, such as “an egg in the morning, a piece of toasted bread each meal and a little claret wine,” [letter 6/4/63] and occasionally exploring the city when granted a pass—until he eventually succeeded in gaining a discharge for disability in July 1863. In one of his more histrionic letters to mother, he proclaims:
“I am perhaps disposed to magnify my ails, but when I have seen men brought in here who had been forced to march with diarrhoea [SIC] … coming here too weak to walk and living but a week or two, then I have thought it was not best to beg to be sent away to the exposures of an army on active duty in the field. They can call me a coward, a shirk, what they choose, but I think it a duty to take care of my health not only for myself but on my mother's account, what do you think of this logic?” [letter 06/04/63]
Apparently, this “logic” served Hawkes’ well, since he was sent home without ever coming under enemy fire and lived on until 1890!
Some years after my project with the 31st, I was given access to a private collection of the unpublished letters of Pvt. George W. Gould, who was killed at the bloody battle of Cold Harbor in 1864. He has come to serve as my “adopted” Civil War soldier, so by honoring him I likewise honor all of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. I scanned and transcribed his letters and created a website to honor him, which can be accessed at: https://resurrectinglostvoices.com
I have attached this addendum not because these particular soldiers who fell or survived have a greater or lesser import than any of the other hundreds of thousands who served in the American Civil War, but rather to add meaningful context, and to underscore the essential point of Carmichael’s wonderful book, which is that you must read far more deeply into what these men had to say in their letters home if you really want to try to understand the war at all.]
Review of: The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought and Survived in Civil War Armies, by Peter S. Carmichael https://regarp.com/2019/05/27/review-...
January 7, 2023
The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies by Peter S. Carmichael is a very detailed glimpse into the lives of the Civil War soldiers. Both Confederate and Union soldier experiences are covered with both sides sharing so many of the issues such as health, finance, clean water, lack of food, lack of clothing, etc. Hearing their stories in their voices really gave me a different perspective of their lives - i really can't imagine how either side won with so much chaos and the lack of clear communication options that we have today.
One of the things Peter Carmichael covered that i had not seen before was the difference in attitude between the sides. The Northern soldiers often could see the Southern soldiers in their suffering as they were and they would express the empathy they felt toward them. When reading the points of view of the Southern soldiers, however, the author did not see this empathy and often the Union soldiers were described as devils or evil in the individual soldier's letters.
There were instances of the men laying down their arms and having a truce, sharing stories and helping each other and sharing things they lacked. After these experiences, men would yell across and tell the men to stay down since they had orders to shoot and showed how getting to know someone often (but certainly not always) gave some men a hesitation. This only occurred a few times and reminded me of the Christmas Eve event during WWI. It make me wonder, what if the men (the officers didn't seem as eager to do this) had the ability to just sit and talk - would it have been a shorter war and would it have been easier to negotiate peace? The suffering by 1864 was real and most men actually fighting were more than ready to have it end.
Another thing that was clear (which I knew, but just haven't heard a lot of in other books) was these men had families back home that their farm or business or lives were suffering because they were not there. The families back home were often living day to day without basic necessities and the women had to take over the work load. Often the men would be absent without leave for months at a time from their fighting divisions to get the family back up on their feet - and then they would return to their unit (how they found them again is so amazing to me with no phones/internet/gps).
Carmichael covered in depth how both the Union and the Confederate men and families felt about slavery. I appreciated this detail as so much of that time frame in books has been explained from a tactical and high level perspective and not from the individual perspective.
Something I can't imagine working was the practice of a man having the option to pay for someone to take their place in the war for $300. So many poor men signed up for this duty so they could help their families, but they did not realize how long this war would go on or how heavy the burden would be placed on their families. Men would often then go AWOL (as noted above) or even desert their unit when life was impossible for those at home.
Carmichael covered the execution of soldiers for desertion and his numbers don't match what I've read other places but either way it was a very small number. Who was executed really seemed to be a decision by the commanding officer and most did not have proper counsel. Executions were not consistently applied and often the men chosen had not committed a crime as serious as most that were let go.
This was a hard but great read. I'm glad that i had a chance to learn more about this time period.
One of the things Peter Carmichael covered that i had not seen before was the difference in attitude between the sides. The Northern soldiers often could see the Southern soldiers in their suffering as they were and they would express the empathy they felt toward them. When reading the points of view of the Southern soldiers, however, the author did not see this empathy and often the Union soldiers were described as devils or evil in the individual soldier's letters.
There were instances of the men laying down their arms and having a truce, sharing stories and helping each other and sharing things they lacked. After these experiences, men would yell across and tell the men to stay down since they had orders to shoot and showed how getting to know someone often (but certainly not always) gave some men a hesitation. This only occurred a few times and reminded me of the Christmas Eve event during WWI. It make me wonder, what if the men (the officers didn't seem as eager to do this) had the ability to just sit and talk - would it have been a shorter war and would it have been easier to negotiate peace? The suffering by 1864 was real and most men actually fighting were more than ready to have it end.
Another thing that was clear (which I knew, but just haven't heard a lot of in other books) was these men had families back home that their farm or business or lives were suffering because they were not there. The families back home were often living day to day without basic necessities and the women had to take over the work load. Often the men would be absent without leave for months at a time from their fighting divisions to get the family back up on their feet - and then they would return to their unit (how they found them again is so amazing to me with no phones/internet/gps).
Carmichael covered in depth how both the Union and the Confederate men and families felt about slavery. I appreciated this detail as so much of that time frame in books has been explained from a tactical and high level perspective and not from the individual perspective.
Something I can't imagine working was the practice of a man having the option to pay for someone to take their place in the war for $300. So many poor men signed up for this duty so they could help their families, but they did not realize how long this war would go on or how heavy the burden would be placed on their families. Men would often then go AWOL (as noted above) or even desert their unit when life was impossible for those at home.
Carmichael covered the execution of soldiers for desertion and his numbers don't match what I've read other places but either way it was a very small number. Who was executed really seemed to be a decision by the commanding officer and most did not have proper counsel. Executions were not consistently applied and often the men chosen had not committed a crime as serious as most that were let go.
This was a hard but great read. I'm glad that i had a chance to learn more about this time period.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 8, 2019
The vast body of Civil War genre focus on battles, leaders, politics, strategies and tactics. These macrocosms ignore the rank and file individuals who bore the fight. Personal memoirs written after the fact often present skewed perspectives from selective remembrances and post war agendas.
The War for the Common Soldier is unique in its analysis of how men on both sides thought, fought, and survived in Civil War armies. Despite the title, the author declares upfront that there was no such thing as a “common soldier” per se. Each individual was unique in personality, background, and war experience. The general theme is that each needed to live pragmatically in order to survive.
The book presents a balanced sampling of soldiers on both sides. Astute analyses cut through Victorian letter writing veneer to expose real thoughts and intents of real men in the worst of times. Whether entering the military as idealistic volunteer, dutiful citizen, or reluctant conscript, those who became veterans developed both mutual dependency and individual survival skills.
Contrary to the Shakespearean quip, discretion was not the better part of valor, but, clearly, the realities of the Civil War made it an important component.
Impeccable scholarship and skillful writing places the reader in the soldiers’ shoes.
The War for the Common Soldier is unique in its analysis of how men on both sides thought, fought, and survived in Civil War armies. Despite the title, the author declares upfront that there was no such thing as a “common soldier” per se. Each individual was unique in personality, background, and war experience. The general theme is that each needed to live pragmatically in order to survive.
The book presents a balanced sampling of soldiers on both sides. Astute analyses cut through Victorian letter writing veneer to expose real thoughts and intents of real men in the worst of times. Whether entering the military as idealistic volunteer, dutiful citizen, or reluctant conscript, those who became veterans developed both mutual dependency and individual survival skills.
Contrary to the Shakespearean quip, discretion was not the better part of valor, but, clearly, the realities of the Civil War made it an important component.
Impeccable scholarship and skillful writing places the reader in the soldiers’ shoes.
March 11, 2019
Carmichael's book has very little to do with how soldiers fought, but is almost entirely devoted to how they thought, an interesting topic in itself. His conclusions aren't surprising - soldiers North & South were largely pragmatists without totally surrendering their ideals or the sentimentalism of 19th century culture. He uses case studies to explore various facets of the lives of the troops - morale, courage, cowardice, etc. His language is , for want of a better term, academic and freighted with terms like irony, sentimentalism, situational, ideology, etc. and this occasionally makes reading The War for the Common Soldier a bit of a slog. Nevertheless, I believe his conclusions are valid and some chapters, especially the ones on military justice and facing defeat, are quite interesting in that they are topics that within my experience have only been dealt with superficially.
July 16, 2019
Brilliant account of the Civil War from the perspective of the common soldier. Balancing theory with the hundreds of letters left by the soldiers themselves, Carmichael finds a thread of pragmatism running through many soldiers. He also finds that this perspective allowed a flexibility of attitude toward their own battlefield behavior and that of comrades. His discussion of the Confederate experience lays bare the many reason why Reconstruction as it was constructed was doomed.
May 18, 2024
I’m learning more and more about the Civil War, and this book is phenomenal in the sphere that I enjoy best: soldiers. I’m not so interested in the battles and the movements and the strategy and the ground won and lost, but rather the terrible cost of human sacrifice and the blood spilled. This book has a treasure trove of letters and journal entries and looks at all aspects of the soldiers’ lives while in the army, from shirking, to “cowardice” and how it changed throughout the war, with soldiers who distinguished themselves in battle previously finally having enough and deserting only to be caught again and executed. There’s the illness and disease and the soldiers coming face-to-face with corpses a year or so after the battles, poking up from the ground or left to rot unburied. There were men hunting relics to remind them of their time spent fighting, and tales of the Confederates attacking and harming black people in a rage after the war.
It’s great to be able to get a sense of the people and to see overarching themes. It was interesting to see how the Confederacy and the Union were different in terms of senses of humour, with the Union able to blame themselves and to be ironical and the Confederates staunchly unwilling to do so. Also curious to learn how the Union empathised with the Confederates and extended mercy and stayed any violence or retribution in the end of the war, while the Confederates still viewed the Yankees as beasts and attacked and murdered black men and raped black women while giving rise to the Ku Klux Klan.
Great book—and with the words of those men passing over the ages, I could see many descriptions of sorrow and privation in my mind’s eye. I liked the narrator putting on accents for the letters also; that helped with the grounding of the text.
It’s great to be able to get a sense of the people and to see overarching themes. It was interesting to see how the Confederacy and the Union were different in terms of senses of humour, with the Union able to blame themselves and to be ironical and the Confederates staunchly unwilling to do so. Also curious to learn how the Union empathised with the Confederates and extended mercy and stayed any violence or retribution in the end of the war, while the Confederates still viewed the Yankees as beasts and attacked and murdered black men and raped black women while giving rise to the Ku Klux Klan.
Great book—and with the words of those men passing over the ages, I could see many descriptions of sorrow and privation in my mind’s eye. I liked the narrator putting on accents for the letters also; that helped with the grounding of the text.
May 28, 2020
This is a highly intimate look at the Civil War. You feel the soldiers’ misery from cold and hunger and horror at the endless sight of the dead. You are there for the sad end of a semi-literate soldier as he dies of smallpox while clutching his wife’s photo. You see the internal battles of men like Cpl. John H. Pardington of the 24th Michigan Infantry as he tries to live up to the soldier-husband-man he feels he should be. This book brings together a vast array of fighting men from the Union and Confederacy. I listened to the audio version of this book as I was working on a Civil-War related writing project, and reading “The War for the Common Soldier” was a sound investment in time! But beyond that, I simply enjoyed this as a history huff. For those considering this book, I offer this tip: I plan on ordering the print version as well, but an audio version is a great option. The book is a mix of soldiers’ writings from letters and diaries but also with insight and background from the author. Peter Carmichael provides excellent information and this is an impressive work. But it is written in an academic style at times. This is not a criticism but an observation.
June 16, 2023
This was a surprisingly academic treatment of the subject. I found the abstract consideration of themes such as the nature of letter-writing, sentimentality, cheerfulness, religious faith, etc. to be interesting. Letter-writing, for instance, was no mere objective record of events but rather an interrelatedness between the soldier and how he wished to be perceived on the home front. Primary sources are extensively used, lending nuance to subject such as "desertion." Most "deserters" were temporary, intending to come back to the battlefield, especially in the South, where the battles were often temptingly close to home. The book also extensively shows the economic hardship foisted upon soldiers (the poor pay, etc.) that distracted them on the front and further tempted them to desert, in order to support their families. It was intriguing to see how notions such as sentimentality, masculinity, bravery, etc. motivated soldiers to fight. Notable in this book is the quotation of illiterate or semi-literate soldiers, in letters often dictated to comrades. This gives a glimpse of a social class different than the typical war letter writer.
June 20, 2024
The Civil War period is my favorite topic to read about and study. After reading scores of books on the topic, I think this is the book that I would recommend someone to read over any other. Beyond the battles and military tactics, the key to understanding the impact of the war is the study of the individual soldiers’ experience. We often think these men were motivated by highly idealistic notions. Through the study of thousands of soldier letters, Carmichael uncovers that the experiences of army life and combat lead to a set of highly pragmatic motivations. The grand ideals of men disappeared once they began facing death on a daily basis, thus pragmatic thinking drove their yearning for survival. Duty must be adaptive if soldiers were going to survive, and armies were to succeed.
January 12, 2020
This is an excellent book on the emotions of civil war veterans. I was intrigued with the chapter that dealt with why soldiers left their units and how the punishment was dealt. The last chapter on Appomattox was also a good one. In it, Carmichael looks at the way the victors reacted to their foes when the surrender was signed. There is an exceptionally valuable bibliography that furnishes many good suggestions for additional reading.
June 3, 2019
I found this book to be well worth the time. The author does a good job of weaving the narrative with personal accounts from common soldiers in the field. The writing is very crisp, although there are some religious undertones scattered among the text. Overall, this book did a good job in filling a gap in Civil War historiography.
July 27, 2023
Interesting topic but difficult to read through. Gets repetitive and wordy in parts. Learned a lot but took quite awhile to get through this book.
September 19, 2019
I really like this book, it gives a very indepth analysis of each soldiers stories and what happened and what went on behind the lines of the different armies.
January 16, 2022
I can’t wait to have this book in the hands of my students! Peter Carmichael presents a diverse range of perspectives that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, perfectly capturing the complicated experience of the Civil War. Poignant and captivating, this book is a reminder of the importance of empathy as a tool for making sense of history. The canvas of voices, the skillful integration of material culture, and Carmichael’s interpretation, significantly reframes our understanding of Civil War soldiers, enabling us to connect with a sometimes two-dimensional view of the Civil War. By presenting the unique and the universal, Carmichael’s book does what any great book should do. In the face of the real stories of soldiers from the North and the South, we are able to imagine the immense realities of the Civil War.
June 13, 2024
Most historians write about wars as if tallying goals in a hockey game or as if it’s all just a game of Risk; Carmichael writes as if it’s your brother on the field
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