Lee and Jackson’s Bloody Twelfth: The Letters of Irby Goodwin Scott, First Lieutenant, Company G, Putnam Light Infantry, Twelfth Georgia Volunteer Infantry (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lee and Jackson’s Bloody Twelfth: The Letters of Irby Goodwin Scott, First Lieutenant, Company G, Putnam Light Infantry, Twelfth Georgia Volunteer Infantry Steven E. Sodergren Lee and Jackson’s Bloody Twelfth: The Letters of Irby Goodwin Scott, First Lieutenant, Company G, Putnam Light Infantry, Twelfth Georgia Volunteer Infantry. Ed. Johnnie Perry Pearson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-1-57233-723-7, 312 pp., cloth, $38.95. When reviewing soldier correspondence from the Civil War, one is immediately struck by the repetition and attention to detail found in letters written [End Page 421] from the field. These were a natural outgrowth of life in the armies of the North and South, and today they serve to captivate historians and arouse interest from the general public in the life of the nineteenth-century American soldier. Both of these elements of soldiers’ narratives are vividly displayed in Lee and Jackson’s Bloody Twelfth. This collection documents the surviving wartime letters of Lt. Irby Goodwin Scott of the 12th Georgia Volunteer Infantry, a soldier who was involved in most of the major engagements in the eastern theater, including the 1862 Valley Campaign, Gettysburg, and the Overland campaign. While Scott’s letters are not preserved for the entire war, with the largest gap being from the end of the Overland campaign to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the surviving letters are still an emotional display of one man’s course through the war. The collection is presented in an effective manner, with an introduction that gives background to Scott and his family while placing him within the larger narrative of the Civil War soldier. The supporting materials, including biographies and footnotes containing information primarily obtained from compiled military service records, offers more context for Scott’s letters. Unfortunately, the concluding elements contain few details of Scott’s postwar career, with only the briefest of commentary on his marriage and later involvement with veterans’ groups. As with those of most soldiers on both sides, Scott’s letters called upon his family to write him as often as possible (he never seemed to get enough letters), commented on politics (he was strongly against Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia), and reacted to conscription (he was for it). Scott’s experience was atypical because his father owned twenty-six slaves at the start of the war and, in response to Irby’s request that he and his friends “now need a negro to cook for us,” periodically sent one slave or another to serve as Irby’s personal servant for various periods of the war (95). Scott frequently commented on how such slaves contributed to soldiers’ lives at the front and thus revealed a rather obscure element of life in the Confederate armies. The title of the collection is somewhat deceptive in that it also includes a dozen letters written by Irby’s brother, Nicholas Ewing “Bud” Scott, from his enlistment in the 12th Georgia in June 1863 to his death at Spotsylvania in May 1864. Bud’s death ultimately offers the most captivating and emotional moment of the collection; by reading the three letters where Irby relates the death of Bud to his parents, one sees in heartbreaking detail how Irby tried, and apparently failed, to reconcile the loss of his little brother. Hearing Irby [End Page 422] declare “I cannot cry . . . I wish I could” is made even more poignant after one reads in earlier letters his repeated efforts to discourage Bud from enlisting (166). The tragedy of the Civil War is rarely displayed with such power. Steven E. Sodergren Norwich University Copyright © 2011 The Kent State University Press