The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers During the Era of the Thirty Years War

Reviewed by: Fighting Means Killing: Civil War Soldiers and the Nature of Combat by Jonathan M. Steplyk Jennifer M. Murray Fighting Means Killing: Civil War Soldiers and the Nature of Combat. By Jonathan M. Steplyk. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018. Pp. x, 294. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-2628-1.) Over the last three decades, Civil War scholars have expanded considerably historians' understanding of the war's soldiers, shifting the focus from political and military leaders to the war's common soldiers. Many of these studies explore the lives of Civil War soldiers and engage questions of motivation, thereby creating a vibrant, ongoing debate in the historiography. The focus on soldier motivation has left some subjects of the war's soldiers wide open. Few historians, for instance, have addressed the Civil War's most fundamental element: how soldiers understood fighting and killing. In Fighting Means Killing: Civil War Soldiers and the Nature of Combat, Jonathan M. Steplyk, an instructor at Texas Christian University, explores how Union and Confederate soldiers understood killing. In doing so, Steplyk offers an invaluable contribution to the Civil War literature. Although Steplyk's monograph is the first to explore Civil War soldiers' attitudes toward killing, military historians have engaged this topic in other conflicts. S. L. A. Marshall, for example, has studied the behavior of U.S. infantrymen in combat in World War II. Dave Grossman's On Killing (Boston, 1995) explores the psychology of killing and its consequences. Using Grossman's [End Page 457] framework as a point of departure, Steplyk argues that Union and Confederate soldiers demonstrated a "greater willingness in their attitudes and behavior to kill in battle than previously supposed" (p. 8). Rather than explore soldiers' attitudes toward killing in a binary way—those who embraced the act of killing in war and those who opposed it—Steplyk considers Civil War soldiers' attitudes toward killing on a spectrum. Indeed, attitudes toward killing were far from monolithic, and Steplyk skillfully examines a range of behaviors in combat and reactions to "seeing the elephant" (chap. 2). In doing so, he finds some soldiers to be "enthusiastic and purposeful killers," while others proved more reluctant, and some even tried to avoid killing the enemy (p. 75). Steplyk explores acts of "murder and mercy" beyond the fighting and killing on the war's battlefields, when soldiers were forced to grapple with lawful and unlawful killings (chap. 6). For example, Steplyk underscores acts of soldiers' restraining themselves from wanton killing. These acts included the merciful treatment of prisoners and the wounded as well as fraternization between Union and Confederate soldiers. The other end of the spectrum included non-battlefield killings. Here, situations such as the execution of foraging soldiers or revenge killings forced soldiers to consider laws of warfare and unlawful killings. Soldiers' wartime correspondence reveals much about their attitudes toward killing. In evaluating the "language of killing," Steplyk finds that Civil War soldiers used a variety of expressions and phrases to describe combat and killing (chap. 3). Euphemisms such as "bite the dust" and stating that a man had gone to his "long home" were popular expressions in soldiers' correspondence (p. 78). In constructing the "language of killing," Steplyk argues, soldiers built "a way to protect them [selves] from any guilt or anxiety they might feel in regard to killing in combat" (p. 76). When describing fierce firefights, soldiers commonly wrote of a "good execution," "murderous fire," and "deliberate aim" (pp. 83, 84). Steplyk suggests that this terminology allowed soldiers to develop a "businesslike attitude" toward combat and killing (p. 83). Fighting Means Killing offers a critical exploration of the psychological nature of Americans killing fellow Americans. Steplyk's engagement with wartime correspondence and postwar reminiscences of Union and Confederate soldiers who fought in regular units, in both eastern and western theaters, provides a balanced, engaging treatment. Steplyk's study brilliantly blends military history and social history, pioneering an interpretation of how Civil War soldiers understood fighting and killing, war's most important, inescapable element. Jennifer M. Murray Oklahoma State University Copyright © 2019 Southern Historical Association

178CIVIL WAR HISTORY vided a greater imperative for him to connect his relatively meager local black material with that available from the bigger picture of Civil War participation by black men. In fairness to the author, it must be noted that this is an unpretentious book. The author states clearly the motivations behind his research: "The lack of recognition given to the contributions of African American troops from Philadelphia motivated the research for Strike the Blow as a doctoral dissertation at Temple University." The author achieves this modest goal by providing due recognition of these black soldiers. Had he chosen to pursue the wider implications of his findings, this fine example of local military history might have achieved greater resonance. Myra B. Young Armstead Bard College Strugglefor the Round Tops: LawsAlabama Brigade at the Battle ofGettysburg. By Morris M. Penny and J. Gary Lane. (Shippensburg, Pa.: Burd Street Press, 1999. Pp. v, 254. $24.95.) In this traditional miUtary history, the authors reconstruct the movements of Law's Brigade at Gettysburg. Their telling ofthe story misses Uttle: readers will be able to arrive on the field with the Brigade andjoin it as it engaged the enemy around Devil's Den and the Round Tops. Those interested in the movement of armies wiU find the book satisfactory. Unfortunately the authors do not pursue some promising excursions into the social history of the military and the experience of common soldiers. Some of the bettermoments in the book come early, when the authors provide biographical information on commanders and others in the brigade. They might have expanded their scope somewhat by collecting similar data on common soldiers. With such material, the authors might then have contributed to our understanding of the socioeconomic structure of the Confederate army and the reasons men fought. As it is, the authors reveal very little about common soldiers and even less about what they believed was their stake in the conflict. This absence of attention to concerns of "the new military history" is most evident in treatment of desertion. The authors mention the problem but say very Uttle about its extent or what it revealed about the state of the army at that point. Other studies of the military during the Civil War have used the problem of desertion in the Confederate army as a window through which to assess the depth of "Southern nationalism ," the decline in soldiers romantic notions about war, and the impact of bad news from the home front on the commitment of men to "the cause." The authors of this book never reveal any consideration of Gary Gallagher's provocative argument in The Confederate War. Nor do the authors ask questions so thoughtfully posed and pursued in Gerald Linderman's Embattled Courage. They remain content with the narrowest approach possible to miltiary history book reviews179 and in so doing fail to capture fully the reality of the Civil War experience for the Alabama men about whom they write. Henry M. McKiven Jr. University of South Alabama A Texas Cavalry Officer's Civil War: The Diary and Letters ofJames C. Bates. Edited by Richard Lowe. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Pp. 366. $34-95·) James Campbell Bates entered Confederate service as a private in Company H of the Ninth Texas Cavalry and, despite a near-fatal facial wound suffered early in the Atlanta campaign, ended the War as the regiment's Ueutenant colonel, commanding. Nevera slaveholder, Bates was a yeoman-class farmer from Lamar County on what was then the Texas frontier, and, as Richard Lowe observes, was "intelligent, well educated, courageous, physically hearty, burning with resentment of the Yankees, and deeply committed to Confederate victory." Bates was also a remarkably lucid and vivid writer, and his Civil War letters and diary bring to their readers a wonderful sense of immediacy and a fresli— although necessarily limited—perspective onthebattles and campaigns ofRoss's Texas Cavalry Brigade, one of the South's most famous and effective military units. Bates and his regiment played a vital role in many ofthe pivotal engagements oftheWesterntheater, includingElkhornTavern, Corinth, the Holy Springs Raid, and Thompson's Station, as well as numerous nameless cavalry actions northwest ofAtlanta and during...

The first book to appear in the illustrious Oxford History of the United States, this critically acclaimed volume--a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize--offers an unsurpassed history of the Revolutionary War and the birth of the American republic. Beginning with the French and Indian War and continuing to the election of George Washington as first president, Robert Middlekauff offers a panoramic history of the conflict between England and America, highlighting the drama and anguish of the colonial struggle for independence. Combining the political and the personal, he provides a compelling account of the key events that precipitated the war, from the Stamp Act to the Tea Act, tracing the gradual gathering of American resistance that culminated in the Boston Tea Party and “the shot heard ‘round the world.” The heart of the book features a vivid description of the eight-year-long war, with gripping accounts of battles and campaigns, ranging from Bunker Hill and Washington’s crossing of the Delaware to the brilliant victory at Hannah’s Cowpens and the final triumph at Yorktown, paying particular attention to what made men fight in these bloody encounters. The book concludes with an insightful look at the making of the Constitution in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 and the struggle over ratification. Through it all, Middlekauff gives the reader a vivid sense of how the colonists saw these events and the importance they gave to them. Common soldiers and great generals, Sons of Liberty and African slaves, town committee-men and representatives in congress--all receive their due. And there are particularly insightful portraits of such figures as Sam and John Adams, James Otis, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and many others. This new edition has been revised and expanded, with fresh coverage of topics such as mob reactions to British measures before the War, military medicine, women’s role in the Revolution, American Indians, the different kinds of war fought by the Americans and the British, and the ratification of the Constitution. The book also has a new epilogue and an updated bibliography. The cause for which the colonists fought, liberty and independence, was glorious indeed. Here is an equally glorious narrative of an event that changed the world, capturing the profound and passionate struggle to found a free nation. The Oxford History of the United States The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, a New York Times bestseller, and winners of the Bancroft and Parkman Prizes. The Atlantic Monthly has praised it as “the most distinguished series in American historical scholarship,” a series that “synthesizes a generation’s worth of historical inquiry and knowledge into one literally state-of-the-art book.” Conceived under the general editorship of C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter, and now under the editorship of David M. Kennedy, this renowned series blends social, political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, and military history into coherent and vividly written narrative.

Reviewed by: Tennesseans at War, 1812-1815: Andrew Jackson, the Creek War, and the Battle of New Orleans by Tom Kanon Jonathan M. Atkins (bio) Keywords Andrew Jackson, War of 1812, Battle of New Orleans, Tennessee, Creek War Tennesseans at War, 1812-1815: Andrew Jackson, the Creek War, and the Battle of New Orleans. By Tom Kanon. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014. Pp. 263. Cloth, $49.95; ebook, $49.95.) The title Tennesseans at War might lead readers to expect a study of the sixteenth state’s homefront during the War of 1812. Tom Kanon, archivist at the Tennessee State Library and Archives, plans instead to address the state’s social and cultural history in a separate volume. Here he presents a ‘‘military and political history of the Old Southwest’’ (2) that focuses on Tennessee soldiers in Andrew Jackson’s armies during the Creek War and at the Battle of New Orleans. These campaigns deeply influenced Tennessee, Kanon argues, because although no fighting occurred in the state, Tennesseans ‘‘participated in more Southern battles than any other state in the region’’ (6–7). Beginning with the observation that the nickname ‘‘Volunteer State’’ dates from the War of 1812—not, as popularly believed, the Mexican War—Kanon’s study opens with an assessment of the conditions that encouraged Tennesseans to fight. Both East and ‘‘West’’ Tennessee (the contemporary term for modern Middle Tennessee) stood as frontier societies at the opening of the nineteenth century. Frequent conflicts with Native Americans arose mainly from the settlers’ conviction that Indians were ‘‘wasting’’ (12) valuable lands, but Tennesseans also blamed Great Britain and Spain for inciting Indian attacks to stop American expansion. European hostility likewise threatened access to New Orleans, the crucial port for shipping their produce; and Spanish possession of the Florida [End Page 488] territories, where several southwestern rivers emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, blocked other potential outlets for trade. Kanon finds that westerners sincerely condemned Britain’s violation of American neutral rights in the Atlantic. Mainly, though, they charged Britain with supposedly instigating the Shawnee chief Tecumseh’s efforts to form a hostile alliance of Native nations. With the onset of war, the Indian threat, British insults to American honor, and the need to assert their worth as descendants of their Revolutionary fathers—as well as peer pressure, opportunities for adventure, and an ‘‘inner drive for ‘fame’ ’’ (43)—convinced Tennesseans of the need to fight. Volunteers expected to participate in an effort to seize Canada, but circumstances instead took them to the southwest. Several themes guide Kanon’s account of the region’s conflict. The sudden abortion of Jackson’s Natchez expedition in late 1812 and early 1813 once again displayed the federal government’s ‘‘utter lack of urgency to western needs’’ and ‘‘encouraged Tennessee to stand on its own when it came to military matters’’ (47). East and West Tennesseans put aside their differences to join forces in the Creek War, though sectional tensions persisted; Jackson eventually ordered the arrest of East Tennessee’s commander, Major General John Cocke, for ‘‘mutinous conduct’’ (95). Shortages of men and supplies constantly plagued Jackson’s efforts, and his army almost dissolved because of confusion over when the volunteers’ terms of service actually expired. The ultimate victory at New Orleans nevertheless confirmed the legend that frontier militiamen and sharpshooters devastated the British army that had defeated Napoleon, though Kanon attributes the result mainly to superior American artillery. ‘‘Regular army soldiers, naval personnel, French Creoles, and Baratarian pirates operated the heavy guns,’’ Kanon concludes, ‘‘and if the Lion’s share of the American victory goes to artillery fire, then these men deserve their just rewards’’ (187). Other studies have well-covered the southwestern campaigns, most notably Frank L. Owsley, Jr., Struggle for the Gulf Borderlands: The Creek War and the Battle of New Orleans, 1812-1815 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1981) and Robert V. Remini, The Battle of New Orleans: Andrew Jackson and America’s First Military Victory (New York, 1999). Still, Kanon’s well-written and thoughtful account offers a fresh perspective. Especially insightful is the author’s use of letters, diaries, and memoirs left by common soldiers, whose observations displayed the human [End Page 489...

Soldiers as Citizens: Popular Politics and the Nineteenth Century British Military

190CIVIL WAR HISTORY barometer of public opinion, perhaps there was a real chance for such a realignment, properly managed. This would challenge the current view that the culture of party loyalty was too strong to permit a realignment. Fermer might have considered this question if he had not overlooked LaWanda Cox and John H. Cox's classic study Politics, Principle, and Prejudice, which suggested that the Herald figured in Seward's strategy. It would have been interesting to see how close Bennett actually came to collaborating with his long-standing nemesis. This, then, is a most welcome and useful volume that scholars can read with profit. George McJimsey Iowa State University Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, Series I, Volume I, The Destruction of SL·very. Edited by Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pp. xxxvii,852. $39.50.) One of the most ambitious documentary histories ever undertaken in the United States, the Freedman and Southern Society Project, anticipates five series with each including one or more volumes. The Project's first volume, published in 1982 and devoted to the black military experience during the Civil War, received universal praise as an extraordinary contribution to the social history of emancipation. No less impressive, the current volume traces slavery's collapse "under the pressure of federal arms and the slaves' persistence in placing their own liberty on the wartime agenda" (xxii). Selected from the voluminous holdings of the National Archives, the 331 documents (or groups of documents under a single number) in this volume range in length from a few lines to several pages and include military reports, affidavits, depositions, and petitions, as well as letters from slaves, slave owners, black soldiers, and politicians . The centrality of the slaves' role in their own liberation clearly emerges from these documents. Although federal officials at first maintained that the sole objective of the Civil War was the restoration of the Union, slaves had a wholly different understanding. Determined to make the abolition of slavery a wartime aim, they seized every opportunity offered by the military conflict to achieve this end. Several considerations , including geography, the character of the slave society, the extent of white unionism, the progress of the military conflict, and the changing policies of Union and Confederate governments determined both the opportunities open to slaves to pursue their own liberty and the form that their struggle for freedom assumed. No two paths out of slavery followed the same course. For slaves in the low country of South BOOK reviews191 Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, who lived on large plantations and possessed a substantial measure of independence, the road to freedom differed from that of slaves in the Mississippi Valley, Kentucky, or even Maryland. Regardless of where slaves resided or the conditions under which they lived, they chipped steadily away at their bondage by "taking help where they could find it and turning every loophole to their advantage" (334) . By placing their loyalty, labor and lives in the service of the Union, they ultimately succeeded in making any federal policy short of universal emancipation untenable. Even so, the destruction of slavery was an uneven, halting and often tenuous process. Just as a Union advance could accelerate the process, a Union retreat could reverse it. These documents also underscore the hesitancy and contradictions involved in making emancipation official Union policy. Caught in the crossfire of slaves and masters, Union commanders struggled to avoid being either slave stealers or slave catchers. A Union officer in Louisiana expressed his frustration by requesting to be relieved of duty because "fighting disloyal citizens" was much more to his "taste than settling the pecadilloes of negroes, creóles or thoroughbred planters" (241). Some Union commanders, such as Generals William T. Sherman and Don Carlos BeII, were either contemptuous of blacks or intensely pro-slavery; others embraced emancipationist principles and bent the First and Second Confiscation Acts in the slaves' favor. In the trans-Mississippi theater commanders such as Samuel R. Curtis and John W. Phelps transformed federal forces into an army of emancipation. Everywhere wartime experiences turned many common soldiers into abolitionists. All the...

This essay discusses the views of historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who sets forth that democratic societies tend toward a determinist outlook; she fears that the weakened belief in free will and its heroes endangers a democratic society. She regards H. G. Wells as the founder in 1920 of the "new history," with its antiheroic bias. She welcomes therefore the television series The Civil War for having achieved "a history from above and history from below," with its heroes among common soldiers as well as the generals and statesmen. Himmelfarb criticizes the "debunking" historians who not only belittle the significance of heroes but find in "small causes" (e.g., the origins of Hitler's obsessive anti-Semitism) a basis for large-scale events (e.g., the Holocaust). Himmelfarb finds that H. G. Wells's Outline of History was intended not only to displace military conquerors as the heroes of history but to elevate the scientific elite in their place as history's truly constructive people. Americans, however, were, earlier, first introduced to another variety of "new history" by two Columbia University professors, Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson, who wrote textbooks used by perhaps millions of high school students; Beard had derived the concept in 1906 when he read the Socialist History of France, much of it written by the French socialist, Jean Jaurès. The philosophy of history still remains in a position similar to that which has long prevailed in the philosophy of physics, where determinism and indeterminism have persisted irreconcilably.

The Crisis of Confederate Womanhood Nina Silber (bio) Drew Gilpin Faust. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. xvi + 326 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliographic note, and index. $29.95. Like the former sinner in “Amazing Grace,” the Civil War—at least from the vantage point of social historians—“once was lost but now is found.” Indeed, just a decade ago, Maris Vinovskis wondered if social historians despite an otherwise expanding field of vision—could find their way back to the sectional conflict. 1 Now only the most die-hard military buffs can remain unaware of the transformation occurring in Civil War historiography. In analyzing a war that was fought largely by volunteers from both sections, by “ordinary” Americans who left behind families and friends whose support efforts were essential to battlefield successes, historians have gradually begun to fashion an understanding of the broader social dimensions that enveloped the military conflict. With this in mind, recent scholars have greatly enhanced our picture of the era of North-South aggression by studying attitudes of common soldiers, life on the homefront, and women’s experiences during the war. In Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, Drew Faust has not only strengthened the social historians’ position, she has also broken new ground in the study of the sectional conflict. Although hers is not the first study of women, or even of southern white women, in the war, hers is the first to offer some bold reassessments of how white southern females shaped the Confederate experience. Unlike earlier studies, Faust examines gender as much as she examines women and is thus able to ponder more deeply the ways in which the Confederacy confronted a gender crisis as it waged the war and attempted to preserve its bulwark institution of slavery. Along the way, she opens a fascinating window into the lives of southern women who saw their world turned upside down. In part, Faust can more thoroughly probe the problem of gender because her book casts a relatively small net around its subject matter. Drawing on the records and writings of over 500 women, Faust examines a specific sector of southern white womanhood, the “women of the slaveholding South.” The [End Page 422] actual text tends to concentrate even more specifically on women in the wealthier slaveowning families, an emphasis that is justified by Faust’s intention to study the southern ruling class in its “moment of truth” (p. xii). To some extent, Faust follows in the tradition of Anne Scott’s The Southern Lady (1970) by considering this most elite group of southern females. But unlike Scott Faust emphasizes the benefits over the burdens of wealthy southern women, especially the advantages they hoped to keep as a result of their slaveowning status. Thus, where Scott stressed the demanding and exhausting work routines of southern white women, Faust presents ladies who appeared ignorant of the most basic tasks on their plantations. Writing as part of the first wave of women’s history scholarship, Scott focused on women’s achievements in the face of overwhelming obstacles. Twenty-five years later, Drew Faust writes from a perspective that emphasizes the class and racial advantages that even women, notably white, upper-class women, have enjoyed. Focusing on elite women and their privileges allows Faust to contemplate those with the most to gain, and perhaps the most to lose, by the Confederacy’s gamble. This gives Faust’s work a vantage point that previous studies of Confederate women have lacked. George Rable, Faust’s closest companion in terms of topic, examined white women, including those of the poor, yeomen, and slaveowning classes, in his work Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (1989). Rable provided tremendous breadth in his discussion of southern white women’s experiences, but his work occasionally suffered from taking too broad a perspective. Southern white women were, after all, deeply divided by their class and their slaveowning status. And, as Rable’s work shows, especially in the many reiterations of class distinctions among southern females, southern womanhood does not lend itself to...

Grinding, bloody, and ultimately decisive, the Petersburg Campaign was the Civil War's longest and among its most complex. Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee squared off for more than nine months in their struggle for Petersburg, the key to the Confederate capital at Richmond. Featuring some of the war's most notorious battles, the campaign played out against a backdrop of political drama and crucial fighting elsewhere, with massive costs for soldiers and civilians alike. After failing to bull his way into Petersburg, Grant concentrated on isolating the city from its communications with the rest of the surviving Confederacy, stretching Lee's defenses to the breaking point. When Lee's desperate breakout attempt failed in March 1865, Grant launched his final offensives that forced the Confederates to abandon the city on April 2, 1865. A week later, Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House. Here A. Wilson Greene opens his sweeping new three-volume history of the Petersburg Campaign, taking readers from Grant's crossing of the James in mid-June 1864 to the fateful Battle of the Crater on July 30. Full of fresh insights drawn from military, political, and social history, A Campaign of Giants is destined to be the definitive account of the campaign. With new perspectives on operational and tactical choices by commanders, the experiences of common soldiers and civilians, and the significant role of the United States Colored Troops in the fighting, this book offers essential reading for all those interested in the history of the Civil War.

In The Tribute of Blood Peter M. Beattie analyzes the transformation of army recruitment and service in Brazil between 1864 and 1945, using this history of common soldiers to examine nation building and the social history of Latin America’s largest nation. Tracing the army’s reliance on coercive recruitment to fill its lower ranks, Beattie shows how enlisted service became associated with criminality, perversion, and dishonor, as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Brazilian officials rounded up the “dishonorable” poor—including petty criminals, vagrants, and “sodomites”—and forced them to serve as soldiers. Beattie looks through sociological, anthropological, and historical lenses to analyze archival sources such as court-martial cases, parliamentary debates, published reports, and the memoirs and correspondence of soldiers and officers. Combining these materials with a colorful array of less traditional sources—such as song lyrics, slang, grammatical evidence, and tattoo analysis—he reveals how the need to reform military recruitment with a conscription lottery became increasingly apparent in the wake of the Paraguayan War of 1865–1870 and again during World War I. Because this crucial reform required more than changing the army’s institutional roles and the conditions of service, The Tribute of Blood is ultimately the story of how entrenched conceptions of manhood, honor, race, citizenship, and nation were transformed throughout Brazil. Those interested in social, military, and South American history, state building and national identity, and the sociology of the poor will be enriched by this pathbreaking study.

JUST BEFORE THE START OF THE BLOODY PENINSULA CAMPAIGN OF JUNE 1862, the soldiers of the Fourth Texas Infantry Regiment purchased a horse for General John Bell Hood, commander of what came to be known as Hood's Texas Brigade. Later, as the regiment assembled at dress parade, First Sergeant J. M. Bookman presented the horse to General Hood. Sir: In behalf of the non-commissioned officers and privates ..., I present you this war-horse. He selected and purchased by us for this purpose, not that we hoped by so doing to court your favor, but simply because we, as freemen and Texans, claim the ability to discern, and the right to reward, merit wherever it may be found. In you, sir, we recognize the soldier and the gentleman. In you we have found a leader whom we are proud to follow--a commander whom it is a pleasure to obey; and this horse we tender as a slight testimonial of our admiration. Moved by this gesture of deference and respect from his men, General Hood sprang into the saddle and promised to act as their rallying point when the struggle came.(1) These Texas soldiers--who soon earned a reputation as the toughest combat troops in Robert E. Lee's fabled Army of Northern Virginia--did not always behave so deferentially toward officers. In fact, when the Texas regiments came to Virginia, they clashed frequently with the Confederate government over the authority to select their own regimental and staff officers. men of the Texas regiments claimed the right to veto any appointment that proved unacceptable to them. Fourth Texas Regiment, for instance, refused to accept the assignment of Colonel R. T. P. Allen to lead their unit. He had been in camp for only a short while when several soldiers hoisted Allen onto his horse, and using switches, drove him out of the regimental grounds amid the hoots and jeers of the boys; and he was never seen again.(2) This study examines the social and cultural dynamics of leadership, command, and soldiering in Hood's Texas Brigade for clues to unravel the broader enigma of the antebellum southern social structure, particularly with regard to the place and status of plain folk, yeoman farmers, and other non-elite whites. Much of the literature about the antebellum South hinges on the long-standing debate over whether the Old South an elitist slaveholding aristocracy or an agrarian plain-folk democracy.(3) drift of many recent studies has been toward synthesis, arguing that antebellum society represented a hybrid of hierarchy and equality.(4) However, even studies that recognize the complexity and paradoxes of this society fall short as social history, because the class dynamic that they advance to link elite and commoner, rich and poor, is too one-sided. planters' hegemony is a given. The nonslaveholder, according to one historian, was in a very passive, dependent position vis-a-vis the planter.(5) Studies based on the so-called republican synthesis also tend to infer yeoman values and ideas from the language and behavior of political elites; consequently, the social relation is seen from the top down, the capacity of plain folk to form their own lives is shortchanged, and thus the truly dynamic, interactive, and relational nature of power in the antebellum South has not been fully understood.(6) common soldiers of Hood's Texas Brigade fought the Civil War mainly on their own terms, defending and justifying their right to do so by drawing on a unique mix of ideological and cultural resources. Their conduct as soldiers combined beliefs about popular sovereignty and natural liberty with backcountry shaming rituals of social control, like the charivari, that were used to hold privates and officers alike to particular standards of conduct defined by the volunteer soldiers themselves. This essay examines how popular constitutional ideas and traditional forms of community action affected the performance of one of the elite fighting units in the Army of Northern Virginia. …

Wet Dreams, Dirty Pictures, and the Ragged Heart of the Civil War Mark Smith (bio) Judith Giesberg. Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. xiii + 135 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Jonathan W. White. Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams During the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. xxiv + 265 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. A year before the Civil War ended, Lt. John Foster of the 155th Pennsylvania Volunteers had a wet dream. In letters to his wife, he confessed it was sufficiently vivid that he'd soiled his shirt; he then encouraged her to masturbate by their fireplace in his absence. What, precisely, inspired Lt. Foster's dream we do not know. Perhaps it was the result of war-induced absence of sexual intimacy. Or, perhaps, Foster and others who experienced these "nocturnal emissions, foul dreams, etc.," as a chaplain for the 145th Pennsylvania Volunteers styled them, had been exposed to the widely available erotic images and spicy stories, which soldiers on the march and in camp apparently devoured with keen appetite (White, p. 34). If the latter, then it is in the intimate dreams of Lt. Foster that the two books under review here meet: one by Judith Giesberg about pornography during the war, the other concerning war-time dreams and sleep by Jonathan W. White. Whatever happened to the Civil War where soldiers marched and fought, officers directed and failed and gloried, and students indelibly committed every movement, battle, and engagement to storied memory? The answer, up until quite recently, is, simply, not much. To be sure, the intervention of social historians in the field beginning in the 1990s offered a transition of sorts, one ostensibly written against the predominantly military history of the war. We were politely ushered from the generals and the decisive battles to the common soldiers and the interesting skirmishes, escorted from the fields of glory to humble home fronts, themselves essential to determining the outcome of the war. New narratives and some terribly important [End Page 445] interpretations emerged as a result of this shift, chief among them the idea that the enslaved freed themselves. And yet, as Drew Gilpin Faust and others have noted, these new social histories barely grazed the interpretive thrust of the conventional understanding of the war. The war was still an abiding moment of truth, offering something digestible to historians of all stripes, social and military.1 The war still lacked ambivalence, was still held together by a narrative, bookended thread, and still had a holistic quality. The war was hard but noble, a thoroughly American and, indeed, even human experience, replete with transcendent qualities, ones so enduring and seemingly impervious to reinterpretation that in 1999 a frustrated Ed Ayers averred that we still needed a real sense of the war's depth and texture.2 Enter the "new revisionist" historians who, within the past decade, have tried to answer Ayers's call. As Stephen Berry explained in his superb and genuinely path breaking edited collection of essays, Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War's Ragged Edges: "What caused the war? Who gets credit for victory or defeat? Who freed the slaves? How did the war condense us as a people? These are tired questions; their assumptions box us in." To unbox us, Berry and his authors invited us to listen to new voices and actors: from "soldiers who looted bodies and joyfully blew things up; from men who guiltlessly made money making war; from madams who trafficked in the war's wake; and from African American troops who decided desertion was the better part of valor" (p. 3). Are these new voices representative of the experience and meaning of the war? No, said Berry; but that's the point: they leave us with a fragmented, episodic, crooked view of the war, one that can be revealing in its "weirdness." These are the "ragged" edges of the war, edges that decenter the war and take us to revealing peripheries. At first blush, the two books under review...

The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War by Lucian Staiano-Daniels (review)

The War People: a social history of common soldiers during the era of the Thirty Years’ War

With the following two contributions the International Review of Social History hopes to focus scholarly attention on a rather neglected theme: the labour conditions of the ordinary foot soldiers in rebel armed forces. Although quite disparate in time, social setting, and method, both articles deal with the position and circumstances of common soldiers; both study these soldiers during a period of civil war; and both deal with rebel forces that were ultimately to emerge victorious and eventually be transformed into a regular army. Erik Swart's contribution on the soldiers in the army of the northern Netherlands is set in the late sixteenth century, just after the start of Holland's war of independence. Within a couple of years, the military underwent a comprehensive process of professionalization. The consequences for ordinary soldiers were far reaching: lower wages, fewer privileges, fewer rights, and an obligation to carry out digging work and other forms of manual labour. By contrast, their predecessors (the Landsknechts) had enjoyed a significantly higher status, with a system of organization not much different from that of nineteenth-century trade unions.