For Country, Cause and Leader: The Civil War Journal of Charles B. Haydon (review)

Abstract

I76CIVIL WAR HISTORY as William J. Cooper, Jr. , points out in an informative introduction, the artist took pains to express "the universality of the soldier's experience." Actually, Thirty Years After is less a memoir than an account, set down in eighty short vignettes, of how a major army functioned in the field. In "Army Bread," "The Army Herd," and "Roadside Refreshment" Forbes details the daunting task of providing bread, beef, and water for tens of thousands on the march, while in "The Drummer Boy," "The Army Blacksmith," "Crossing the Pontoons ," and "The Supply Trains" he pays his sincere respect to the ranks of specialized support personnel who helped keep the fighting man on the move. Forbes's text is always interesting and often witty, as in his characterization of the always-hungry Union soldier as "a kind of traveling human locust dressed in faded blue." One appreciates also the humorous description in both word and picture of the steps involved in shoeing a spirited mule by trussing it up and holding its ears to the ground. There are chillier moments as well: in "Re-forming the Line" infantrymen in a straight line stretching toward the horizon prepare to deliver—and take—another volley over the nearby stretched-out bodies of their dead comrades; and in "The Crime of Desertion" a firing squad is set to send another kind of volley into four blindfolded men seated on their coffins. But, like most Civil War art and memoirs, Forbes's pictures and essays deal with the sunnier moments of the soldier's life. Homer's Civil War drawings and paintings have, with good reason, recently received extensive scholarly attention, and Waud's wartime artwork has been the subject of a handsome monograph. This striking facsimile republication of Forbes's magnum opus is a praiseworthy addition to the literature on Civil War art. Ben Bassham Kent State University For Country, Cause and Leader: The Civil War Journal of Charles B. Haydon . Edited by Stephen W. Sears. (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1993. Pp. xvii, 371. $25.00.) Throughout his military service, Charles B. Haydon kept a journal, written in some twenty pocket diaries and sent in installments to his home in Michigan. These diaries are reproduced here, judiciously edited by Civil War scholar Stephen W. Sears, who has wisely removed family gossip and other ephemera to leave the body of Haydon's relevant observations intact. Haydon enlisted on April 22, 1861 , during the rush to the colors following Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call to arms. He witnessed the first Bull Run offensive , the building of the Army of the Potomac, the Peninsula campaign, the events surrounding second Bull Run and Fredericksburg. Early in 1863 his regiment, the 2d Michigan, was transferred to the West, where it did duty in Kentucky and at Vicksburg under U. S. Grant. Haydon was severely BOOK REVIEWSI77 wounded in Mississippi, and, understandably, his journal entries become sporadic after that point. In March 1864, weakened by wounds and exposure, he contracted pneumonia and died in the Cincinnati Military Hospital. He had risen from sergeant to lieutenant colonel. Although he saw a good deal of the war, Haydon's diary is not most useful for its view of great battles. Because he served mainly at junior grades, he was not privy to command decisions, and his depictions of major events are often incomplete, compounded of limited eyewitness observations, camp gossip, and guesswork. He was on the periphery at first Bull Run and Fredericksburg and missed Antietam completely. Haydon is at his best in describing the everyday texture of army life. He was an unusually educated man for his rank, having spent four years at the University of Michigan before entering the legal profession. In camp, he read the Atlantic Monthly and the latest works by Charles Dickens. He also had a flinty intellectual integrity, a determination to record all of what he saw. The book gives a fine account of the life of a company officer struggling to impose drill and discipline, feeling the stress of responsibility, appreciating the compensations of small camp comforts and comradeship. The author graphically describes the misery of picket-line duty during the...