Dearest Father: The Civil War Letters of Lt. Frank Dickerson, a Son of Belfast, Maine , and: "Dear Friend Anna": The Civil War Letters of a Common Soldier from Maine , and: "Unspoiled Heart": The Journal of Charles Mattocks of the 17th Maine (review)

Abstract

330CIVIL WAR HISTORY Union sergeant Ben Hirst of the 14th Connecticut Infantry did not die at Gettysburg and was hardly a leader. He did write a letter to his wife, Sarah, in the immediate aftermath of the fight and another one three months afterward. Robert Bee analyzed the letters and found that Hirst's missives differed over time and that his latter account reflected the values of the Connecticut community the sergeant grew up in. His first letter revealed his fear and indicated a questionable behavior under fire. But in the revised account, Hirst portrayed himself in courageous, respectable, manly terms that reflected community values. Bee's study affirms historian Reid Mitchell's conclusions that soldiers worried qreatly over their reputations and tried to behave in ways that would satisfy the home folk. Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, and George Gordon Meade also had reputations to uphold. William Garrett Piston explores Longstreet's culpability in the defeat and concluded that Lee's loose command style caused many lost opportunities. Piston warns that "one must avoid the double standard implicit in criticizing Ewell for his failure to take initiative and responsibility on the afternoon of July 1 while faulting Longstreet for showing initiative during the night of July 2 and morning of July 3" (45). Still, Piston faults Longstreet for not having Pickett's men in position on time. Gallagher shows that Lee, his soldiers, and civilians did not view the battle as a defeat. Some writers criticizes a lost opportunity, but few Americans had any sense that the battle marked the turning point or the "High Tide" of the war. That analysis would come from the pens of Lost Cause writers and later historians. Lee's contemporaries saw it as a "temporary setback" ( 1 ) unlike the disaster at Vicksburg. Lee believed the campaign successful in its original objectives. In the final essay, A. Wilson Greene wades into the controversy over Meade's actions from July 3 to July 14. He concludes that Meade acted cautiously but correctly in not counterattacking Lee, not pursuing Lee closely, and not attacking Lee along the swollen Potomac River. These essays help to uncover the true story of Gettysburg beyond the constructed reality of wartime memory makers and later historians. With approximately 2,000 studies published on the 1863 battle, this collection proves that new scholarship surrounding the battle is not only possible but exciting. Russell Duncan John Carroll University Dearest Father: The Civil War Letters ofLt. Frank Dickerson, a Son ofBelfast, Maine. Edited by H. Draper Hunt. (Unity, Maine: North Country Press, 1992. Pp. 216. $14.95) "Dear Friend Anna" : The Civil War Letters ofa Common Soldierfrom Maine. Edited by Beverly Hayes Kallgren and James L. Crouthamel. (Orono, Maine: University of Maine Press, 1992. Pp. 161. $21.95.) BOOK REVIEWS331 "UnspoiledHeart" : The Journal ofCharles Mattocks ofthe ijth Maine. Edited by Philip N. Racine. Voices of the Civil War Series. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. Pp. 446. $36.00.) Men who fought in the Civil War all had unique stories, and many were bent on recording them in diaries or writing letters telling them to people at home. Many of those stories have found their way into print, to satisfy a seemingly insatiable curiousity about it. These books are part of that tide of stories. Although each was written by a soldier from Maine, they share little else: both the experiences of the men and the skill with which their words are presented to the modern reader vary enormously. Separately, they offer views of the war's impact on three men. Together, they help us to understand it in all of its diversity and complexity. Charles Mattocks was a graduate of Bowdoin College and an ambitious young officer who kept a diary in which he recorded the details of regimental politics, his own and others' jockeying for advancement, and his efforts to discipline his men, most of whom were older and more experienced than he was. Mattocks's circumstances changed dramatically after he was taken as a prisoner of war and held in camps in Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina. He describes his desire for exchange and the multitude of efforts he made to...