Citizen Soldiers Research Articles

The Other Mrs. Clemm

The Other Mrs. Clemm

The military prose of Zakhar Prilepin and the tradition of Western interwar literature: between polemics and reception

The article examines the dialogical interaction of Zakhar Prilepin’s military prose with the tradition of Western interwar literature. The article analyses the connection between Zakhar Prilepin’s battle studies and the poetics of the novels by Henri Barbusse, Jaroslav Hašek, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque. The specificity of the influence of the poetics of the “Lost Generation” on the features of the works “The Pathologies”, “Some Won't Go to Hell”, “Citizen Soldiers' Romance” are determined. In particular, the intertextual connections of Zakhar Prilepin's battle studies both with interwar Western prose itself and its reception in Soviet literature are revealed. The polemical attitude of Zakhar Prilepin to the pacifism of the “Lost Generation” is analysed. The article considers such features of the dialogue between Zakhar Prilepin’s military prose and the Western interwar tradition as the development of the idea of front-line partnership, the use of irony and humour, the implementation of editing and defamiliarisation techniques. It is concluded that in his innovative militaristic poetics Zakhar Prilepin moves from ideological criticism of the “Lost Generation” representatives to a partial acceptance of their ethic and aesthetic principles.

Review: Steele Brand, Killing for the Republic: Citizen Soldiers and the Roman Way of War

Review: Steele Brand, Killing for the Republic: Citizen Soldiers and the Roman Way of War

Managing the remains of citizen soldiers

The aim of this article is to shed light on the conditions under which the funerary management of human remains was carried out by the French authorities during the early years of the First World War. It seeks to understand how the urgent need to clear the battlefield as quickly as possible came into conflict with the aspiration to give all deceased an individualised, or at the very least dignified, burial. Old military funerary practices were overturned and reconfigured to incorporate an ideal that sought the individual identification of citizen soldiers. The years 1914–15 were thus profoundly marked by a clash between the pragmatism of public health authorities obsessed with hygiene, the infancy of emerging forensic science, the aching desire of the nation to see its children buried individually and various political and military imperatives related to the conduct of the war.

Greek Orthodox Citizen Soldiers under the Ottoman Banner

The Great War proved to be an unpleasant and traumatic experience for many Greek Orthodox citizen soldiers called to fight under the Ottoman banner. Although many served dutifully in arms or otherwise, few had self-legitimized their conscription. Regardless, the denomination of minority citizen soldiers by the Ottoman military authorities led to their mass assignment to unarmed positions, which could mean their transfer to the labor battalions, and possibly their death. Most Greek Orthodox were aware of labor battalions’ harsh conditions, and their transformation into killing grounds for the Armenian citizen soldiers. Based on grassroots sources such as diaries, memoirs, and interviews, I demonstrate that this discriminatory war policy was not systematic, as several recruits were later trained and armed during the war, and I argue that a new contractual relationship emerged for those skilled and literate Greek Orthodox through which they could successfully negotiate their skills to avoid the labor battalions and, thus, have greater chances of surviving the war.

Upper Canada Preserved

Following the end of the War of 1812, there was a conscious effort on the part of prominent Upper Canadians to immortalize the deeds and contributions of the Canadian Militia. Hugely overstating their meagre efforts, these figures claimed the lions share of victory for the citizen soldiers, ignoring the far more meaningful and significant effect that British redcoats and Indigenous warriors had in defeating the Americans. By creating this myth these prominent men, many of whom served in the militia, sought to enrich and entrench their positions in Upper Canadian society. Additionally, this Militia Myth helped form a new sense of Canadian identity (a specifically British version of it), that would be crucial in fostering a new nationalism that would emerge in mid-19th century Upper Canada.

Killing for the Republic. Citizen Soldiers and the Roman Way of War by Steele Brand

Killing for the Republic. Citizen Soldiers and the Roman Way of War by Steele Brand

The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

Killing for the Republic: Citizen Soldiers and the Roman Way of War by Steele Brand

Killing for the Republic: Citizen Soldiers and the Roman Way of War by Steele Brand

On the complex geometry of individuality and growth: Cook’s 1914 “Curves of Life” and reading measurement

Growth in reading ability varies across individuals in terms of starting points, velocities, and decelerations. Reading assessments vary in the texts they include, the questions asked about those texts, and in the way responses are scored. Complex conceptual and operational challenges must be addressed if we are to coherently assess reading ability, so that learning outcomes are comparable within students over time, across classrooms, and across formative, interim, and accountability assessments. A philosophical and historical context in which to situate the problems emerges via analogies from scientific, aesthetic, and democratic values. In a work now over 100 years old, Cook’s study of the geometry of proportions in art, architecture, and nature focuses more on individual variation than on average general patterns. Cook anticipates the point made by Kuhn and Rasch that the goal of research is the discovery of anomalies—not the discovery of scientific laws. Bluecher extends Cook’s points by drawing an analogy between the beauty of individual variations in the Parthenon’s pillars and the democratic resilience of unique citizen soldiers in Pericles’ Athenian army. Lessons for how to approach reading measurement follow from the beauty and strength of stochastically integrated variations and uniformities in architectural, natural, and democratic principles.

Children Crusading against Communism: Mobilizing Boys as Citizen Soldiers in the Early Cold War State

Abstract In 1951, the Bowman Gum company released a collectible card set, sold with bubblegum, entitled The Children’s Crusade Against Communism: Fight the Red Menace. As a consumer item, the cards drew boys into a burgeoning form of American citizenship, but their overtly military tone also links this citizenship to ideas about national security. The narrative of the cards broadly reflects the tenets of the Truman Doctrine: that it is the duty of the United States to uphold global freedom; that communism must be contained; and that national security depends on nuclear power, a strong military, and civilian preparedness to mobilize in defense of peace. The molding of such political content in the cards to appeal to a young audience allows us to understand how such an audience was conceived of in ideological terms. A picture can be conjured of how the audience was imagined to look, what kinds of cues were deemed to be appropriate to such an audience, and how the audience was expected to respond to those cues. An analysis of the cards as they operated within the rhetorical and visual culture of the period reveals that they excluded certain groups from the narrative of American history and, thereby, certain children from the goal of becoming ideal American future citizens, citizens bearing an identity defined by a militarism and a nationalist exceptionalism predicated on pious certitude and righteous superiority.

Homecoming of Citizen Soldiers: Postdeployment Problems and Service Use Among Army National Guard Soldiers.

The present study described the types and amount of problems and services sought among returned deployed Army National Guard soldiers (4568 soldiers in 50 units). The study responds to gaps in the research literature to better understand community intervention needs of reservists. About half (48%) of the soldiers reported one or two problems, mostly those of psychological well-being, such as feelings of anger and frustration, upsetting memories, and troubled sleep (34% of the study sample), followed by problems of social support (18%), alcohol use (17%), feelings of isolation including suicidal thoughts (13%), and financial difficulties (11%). Having engaged in direct combat and having wounded or killed someone showed positive relationships with reported problems. One-third (35%) of soldiers who reported having used services went to one service and, generally, soldiers went to services related to their expressed problems. Variance in self-reported problems explained by service use was low, suggesting unsought postdeployment services.

Citizen Soldiers and the Key to the Bastille, by Julia Osman

<i>Citizen Soldiers and the Key to the Bastille</i>, by Julia Osman

Citizen-Officers: The Union and Confederate Volunteer Junior Officer Corps in the American Civil War by Andrew S. Bledsoe

Reviewed by: Citizen-Officers: The Union and Confederate Volunteer Junior Officer Corps in the American Civil War by Andrew S. Bledsoe Lorien Foote Citizen-Officers: The Union and Confederate Volunteer Junior Officer Corps in the American Civil War. Andrew S. Bledsoe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8071-6070-1, 352pp., cloth, $47.50. Historical and sociological studies of soldier motivation in wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries agree that the leadership of junior officers plays a significant role in the willingness of soldiers to fight and in their performance in battle. Although studies of Civil War soldiers abound, until now there has been no monograph that focuses exclusively on that conflict’s junior officer corps. Andrew Bledsoe’s Citizen-Officers provides a much-needed examination of the men who were the “sinews and tendons” of Civil War armies (71). Although most of his conclusions will not surprise scholars who are well versed in the sources and literature on soldiers and armies, no other book better captures the challenges of command during the Civil War and the transformation of volunteers into a cadre of effective officers. Volunteer officers, like the soldiers they commanded, were immersed in a republican citizen-soldier ethos that was not necessarily compatible with the demands of military service. They believed in voluntary consent, moral excellence and self-control, egalitarianism, and that ability rather than status should determine who rose through the military ranks. Thus they often struggled with the tension between their own beliefs and the need to establish authority and discipline. The majority of junior officers commissioned before 1864 became officers through election. Although this process created problems, it also ensured that officers were men who possessed the leadership abilities necessary to win the approval of a majority of their men. Bledsoe’s research sample indicates that officers were older than enlisted men, mostly unmarried, practiced a trade or profession, and were from middle-to upper-class backgrounds. [End Page 68] In his best chapter, “The Challenges of Company Leadership,” Bledsoe considers how these elected, untrained, and inexperienced citizen officers legitimized their authority and established command over the independent-minded citizen soldiers who continually tested the boundaries of army discipline. Through trial and error, natural ability, creativity, and observation, they learned the skills they needed. They had to master many roles: caretaker, motivator, disciplinarian, teacher, counselor, conflict resolver, and bureaucrat. They had to be carefully attuned to the physical and emotional needs of their soldiers. But most importantly, they had to internalize a “habit of command” and compartmentalize their instincts toward egalitarianism. A “command presence,” combined with the powerful interpersonal relationships and deep connections that officers developed with their men, was key to successful leadership in battle. Officers needed to win the trust of their men, and Bledsoe argues that for this purpose displays of “competence” on and off the battlefield were more important than displays of courage. Over time, volunteer officers “developed a unique interior culture” that blended examples they took from the regular army officer corps with their persistent citizen soldier ethos (102). Bledsoe describes a process of “regularization” rather than professionalization through which officers consciously adhered to a modified version of the standards, customs, and systems of the regular army. Gentlemanlike behavior that encompassed self-restraint, virtue, and courtesy, among others, was essential to this culture. Bledsoe concludes his study by considering volunteer officers in combat. Early battles were initiations that provided the essential foundation for the future. By 1863, officers had learned that discipline in battle was more needed than personal bravery and that effective leaders were constantly aware of the condition, needs, and fighting effectiveness of their men. Their most important role in battle, Bledsoe argues, was emotional. They were the “moral center of gravity” for the volunteers in their company during the stress and terror of battle. They calmly translated the surrounding chaos into a set of problems and actions the men could understand and perform. As volunteer soldiers became veterans, officers were less occupied with custodial roles and were able to turn their focus and energies toward battlefield circumstances and tactical factors. Three years of combat changed the composition of the officer corps...

Escaping the Mechanism: Soldier Fraternization during the Siege at Petersburg

Escaping the MechanismSoldier Fraternization during the Siege at Petersburg Lauren K. Thompson (bio) On July 18, 1864, Gen. Robert E. Lee issued Special Orders No. 167 to the 1st Army Corps commander, Lt. Gen. R. H. Anderson. Lee ordered, "The practice of permitting communication between our pickets and skirmishers and those of the enemy, is highly injurious to the service and subversive of discipline. No intercourse or conversation with the enemy shall be allowed, and no officers or man will be permitted to go outside of our picket lines except by authority of the Corps commander or officer commanding detached troops."1 Lee's concern over rampant fraternization demonstrated the frequency with which soldiers risked their standing in the army, and ultimately their lives, to communicate with the enemy. As citizen soldiers, both northern and southern men went to war expecting to prove their worth but soon realized military life contradicted notions of individualism. For example, Union soldier Thomas Bell wrote, "A private has but little chance of knowing what movements are or what they are for. His only duty is to receive orders and obey them. I first launched out to gain a livelihood for myself and (as then I thought) to be independent but alas the folly that ambition often leads to."2 Bell's thoughts signified a gap between soldiers' expectations and [End Page 349] reality.3 To lessen this divide, soldiers seized opportunities to fight the war under military discipline while still maintaining some personal freedom. Aside from the more commonly studied forms of resistance—such as desertion, drinking, and brawling—Union and Confederate soldiers fraternized with one another despite strict prohibitions from the high command. Throughout the war, fraternization occurred during the Peninsula, Fredericksburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga campaigns; across the Rappahannock and Chattahoochee Rivers; and during burial truces from Manassas to Nashville. When the Army of the Potomac besieged the Army of Northern Virginia at Petersburg in 1864, the resulting trench warfare led to one of the war's most widespread and longest-lasting incidents of fraternization. The development of fraternization between enemies provides insight to how loyal soldiers constructed ways to counter the limitations of trench warfare. Click for larger view View full resolution Trading Coffee for Tobacco, from Edwin Forbes, Army Sketchbook (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1890), shows pickets trading along the Rappahannock. Certainly, this was no "Brothers' War." Bell Irvin Wiley cautioned against exaggerating the "significance of the fraternizing that dotted the war" in his scholarship more than seven decades ago.4 Kenneth Noe and Jason Phillips also [End Page 350] "warn against inflating the true degree of fraternization between Johnny Reb and Billy Yank."5 However, when one takes fraternization at face value or dismisses it as a form of cowardice, an opportunity to understand how soldiers withstood the harsh realities of army life is lost. Labeling soldiers as either committed or coward, with those who fraternized as the latter, overlooks the majority of men whose resistance actually reflected their commitment to fight the war.6 Fraternization did not result in an earthshattering experience that triggered soldiers to desert their ranks in massive droves, nor did it cause soldiers to abandon their motivations for fighting. Rather, it allowed them to replenish their spirits. In other words, for a soldier who fraternized, it was less about the enemy and more about himself. Because it was outlawed and a punishable offense, but happened so frequently, fraternization obviously carried considerable value for the soldiers. Whether it was a relief from the monotony of camp or the provision of a plug of tobacco or a newspaper, soldiers used fraternization to make their duties more manageable. Soldiers responded to war in a variety of ways. Some fraternized, some did not, and many witnessed it. For those who did, fraternization served as a means of handling challenges to their ideology and maintaining their individuality.7 Historians proved the majority of Civil War soldiers knew quite clearly why they enlisted and continued to fight: they fought and died for intrinsic and deep-seated notions of identity, nationalism, and independence. Confederate soldiers, slaveholders or not, fought for the protection and expansion of a slave labor society that...

TOWARD A CITIZEN SOLDIER PARADIGM? ASSESSING THREE DECADES OF CIVIL–MILITARY RELATIONS IN ARGENTINA

1.IntroductionSince the wave of transitions to democracy that began in Latin America in the 1980s, scholarship on civil-military relations in the region has been concerned with the age-old question of how civilian governments can control the armed forces, in order to keep them centered on their professional roles in national defense and disinterested in politics. Among Latin American countries, Argentina has made the most far-reaching progress in establishing civilian control of the military (Pion-Berlin 2014: 64). Where once the Argentine military frequently intervened in politics (1930-32, 1943-46, 1955-58, 1963, 1966-73, 1976-83), for it to do so now has become virtually unthinkable. This was crucially apparent in 2001, during Argentina's most devastating and recent economic crisis, when the military did not intervene in any significant way - not even through public statements, or in private meetings with political candidates - in events of the crisis (Diamint 2006: 163). Enabling this restraint were nearly two decades of reform of the armed forces that included reduction of the institution's prerogatives, separation of the military from internal security roles, curtailment of military budgets, and divestment of the armed forces' extensive defense and industrial sector holdings. Since the crisis in 2001, further reforms aimed at resocialization of the armed forces were instituted, with the goal of creating who are both public servants specialized in the profession of national defense, and holders of obligations and rights substantially equal to those of all other citizens.Argentina's achievements in civilian control deserve attention - not only because they have gone farthest in the region, but because they were by no means inevitable. The process of establishing civilian control over the armed forces was long, complex, and often involved setbacks. As this paper lays out, the reform process proceeded through several stages, involving strategies of confrontation in the 1980s, incorporation in the 1990s, and subordination in the 2000s. Civilian leaders spent the first two decades in a long quest toward subordination, which was achieved through legal and institutional reforms centered on a combination of force restructuring, legal restrictions on military roles, and creation of an increasingly robust defense ministry. By the mid 2000s, they turned to further legal, gender normative, and educational innovations in an effort to create citizen soldiers, with the goal of making the armed forces a participant in the consolidation of democracy. Thus legal and institutional restructuring has led to efforts to promote a culture shift in the armed forces.If Argentina's achievements were by no means inevitable, they are also unexpected in the scholarly debates on civil-military relations in Latin America. The theoretical model of democratic civilian control that emerged in early scholarship on democratic transitions from military rule (Stepan 1988; Diamond and Plattner 1996; Linz and Stepan 1996) emphasizes that a comprehensive set of conditions must be met in order for the armed forces to serve in the context of a democratic state and society. This model requires not only the elimination of military prerogatives that give the armed forces autonomy from civilian oversight, but also the empowerment of civilians, through institutional capacity and technical know-how, to take an active role in defining the parameters for military actions. Democratic civilian control exists when the armed forces are constitutionally accountable to a democratically elected legislature and executive, which set legal guidelines for their conduct and oversee such conduct through an institutional framework (e.g., a civilian-led defense ministry). In this framework civilian authorities supervise the most significant areas of defense and military policy: they control defense budgets and defense policy, and they set parameters for the military's professional training, education, promotion policies, and military doctrine (Fitch 1998: 172; Diamint 1999: 29-30). …

Wartime Resistance and Republican Political Agency in Primo Levi's Partisan Novel

Primo Levi is best known as a Holocaust survivor whose works are considered to be indispensable contributions to the literature of testimony about Nazi genocide. In trying to draw politically-relevant insights from Levi, readers have generally focused on his analysis of the extremes of human deprivation in his Holocaust writings. This article considers Levi more broadly as an analyst of the various forms of human agency and argues that his novel of partisan warfare, Se non ora quando? (1982), presents a vision of virtuous republican political agency. Levi's partisan novel dramatizes the fraught relationship between civil and military values in order to investigate what it takes for a republic to be founded and maintained in a world of risk. Considered against the backdrop of Levi's own short-lived experience as a partisan, relevant writings from republican theorist and fellow Jewish refugee Hannah Arendt, and the early Eighties presidency of ex-partisan Sandro Pertini, Levi's novel is revealed to be a text that speaks (however ambivalently) to a republican tradition of endorsing citizen soldiers and affirming the worth of political foundation.

Citizen soldiers and the key to the Bastille

Citizen soldiers and the key to the Bastille

The Legacy of the Russell Tribunal

Reviews 183 c:\users\ken\documents\type3402\rj 3402 050 red.docx 2015-02-04 9:19 PM THE LEGACY OF THE RUSSELL TRIBUNAL Stefan Andersson stefankarlandersson@live.com Michael Uhl. Vietnam Awakening: My Journey from Combat to the Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry on U.S.War Crimes inVietnam. Jefferson, nc and London : McFarland, 2007. Pp. vii, 255. isbn: 978-0-7864-3074-1. us$28.45. n the introduction to The Vietnam War on Campus (2001), Marc Jason Gilbert writes: … though critics of the anti-war movement on campus remain loath to admit it, at the forefront of the allegedly elitist, ignorant, draft-evading, placard-carrying (and perhaps card-carrying) campus protesters were soldier-turned-scholar members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (vvaw). These students knew the war as intimately as did any Pentagon pundit. They were also aware that other veterans had concluded that the limits on American foreign policymaking imposed by the demonstrations of their compatriots at home were undermining the war in which they had fought. They were, however, not only willing, but often eager to lead their fellow students in what they saw as an effort to save their nation’s honor and to prevent the further loss of life in Southeast Asia. (P. xiii) Michael Uhl is an example of such a student. His book was written to satisfy, in part, the requirements of a doctoral program at the graduate school of the Union Institute. It consists of two major parts, the first covering Uhl’s background, growing up in a middle-class family on Long Island, and the f= 184 Reviews c:\users\ken\documents\type3402\rj 3402 050 red.docx 2015-02-04 9:19 PM circumstances that led him to join the Counterintelligence Corps in Vietnam, and a second in which he chronicles through contiguous episodes his postwar years as a “front line activist in the anti-Vietnam War veterans’ movement” (p. 2). In this review I will limit myself to Uhl’s experiences as a former gi and graduate student looking for ways to express his protests. This led him to Jeremy Rifkin, Tod Ensign1 and the Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry into United States War Crimes in Indochina (cci), which had been created by Bertrand Russell’s private secretary and head of the brpf in New York, Ralph Schoenman, in November 1969 in connection with the news about the My Lai Massacre, which had taken place in March in 1968. After the session of the iwct in Stockholm in May 1967, Schoenman went to Bolivia to be present at the trial of Régis Debray. When he tried to join the second session in Roskilde in November, American secret diplomacy was one step ahead of him. After several failed attempts to get into Denmark, he had to return to the us.2 This marked the beginning of the end of Schoenman’s relationship with the brpf, the iwct and Bertrand and Edith Russell. Back in the office on Fifth Avenue, he continued to handle the brpf correspondence . He succeeded in returning to the uk for a short time during the summer of 1968 and visited a surprised and concerned Russell in Wales, before he was deported. He returned to the New York brpf office. When the truth about the My Lai Massacre was revealed, Schoenman reacted immediately and started to organize the National Committee for a cci and look for former gis prepared to testify on war crimes, just as at the second session of the iwct in Roskilde.3 In “Organizing Veterans through War Crimes Documentation”, Ensign writes: While the Russell Tribunal hearings were known within the American peace movement, two more years passed before anyone began documenting u.s. war 1 Tod Ensign died in May 2014. I visited him at the Citizen Soldiers’ office in New York in June 2012 and had two long, exciting sittings with him when he told me stories about Schoenman, the cci, the failed cooperation with Jane Fonda, Mark Lane and the vvaw, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk and much else, not all of it fit to print. He gave me a copy of G.I. Guinea Pigs (1980), which he...

Black Confederates Out of the Attic and Into the Mainstream

Black Confederates Out of the Attic and Into the Mainstream Kevin M. Levin (bio) Not long after the beginning of the 2010 school year, William and Mary historian Carol Sheriff decided to review the chapter on the Civil War in her daughter’s fourth grade history textbook. Sheriff noticed a number of factual errors and questionable interpretations in Joy Masoff’s Virginia: Past and Present, but one passage in particular caught her attention: “Thousands of Southern Blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson.” Sheriff reasonably wondered how such a claim could have made it into this book.1 Shortly thereafter, the story broke in the Washington Post and was soon picked up by newspapers around the country and beyond. Sheriff appeared on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann to discuss the issue.2 Stonewall Jackson biographer, James I. Robertson, confirmed the lack of evidence regarding the presence of African Americans under his command, and fellow academic historians echoed the scholarly consensus that little evidence can be found supporting the existence of significant numbers of black soldiers in the Confederate army. As the controversy flared up, a sharp divide emerged between the academic community and a small but vocal crowd that championed the existence of anywhere between a thousand and a hundred thousand black Confederate soldiers and a racially integrated Confederate military.3 In 2011 a new edition of Masoff’s book, without the offending passage, was approved for Virginia’s fourth graders but the controversy is far from settled. In fact, it is likely that this narrative will be even more entrenched in our public discourse about the Civil War at the end of the Civil War Sesquicentennial than it was at the beginning. The success of the black Confederate phenomena can be traced directly to the expansion of the Internet, including access to rich databases of primary sources and the availability of digital tools such as blogs, wikis, and other platforms that allow practically anyone to publish a Web site and engage and influence a wide readership. This has led to a sharp increase in [End Page 627] the amount of history published online by individuals and organizations with little or no formal training in the field. As a result, the democratization of history through online publishing continues to blur the distinction between professional and popular historians and challenges any presumption of who has the right to research and publish history. While professional historians assume the responsibility of critically assessing the work of their peers, they have yet to explore their role in responding to and evaluating online content. The black Confederate narrative provides academic and public historians with an opportunity to reflect on how they might engage history enthusiasts and the broader general public in an environment that promotes an unregulated marketplace of ideas. The black Confederate narrative includes a number of related claims concerning the roles and status of African Americans within the army as well as their significance to how we remember the Civil War. It is best understood as an extension of the loyal slave narrative, though its most recent incarnation is a direct response to the increased focus on slavery and race as central to our understanding of the Civil War that gradually came to dominate popular memory in the decades following the civil rights movement. Most interpretations that can be found online assume a broad definition of a soldier that encompasses personal body servants, impressed slaves, and free blacks, who performed a wide range of functions both in the army and on large-scale military projects such as the construction of earthworks and railroads. Little attention is given to their legal status, or to any analysis of the coercive nature of the master-slave relationship. Rather the mere presence of these men alongside Confederate ranks is seen as sufficient to count them as soldiers and therefore worthy of the same respect accorded to white citizen soldiers. The result is a picture of an interracial and integrated Confederate army that stands in sharp contrast with segregated Union regiments. Its popularity is difficult to pin down. In response to the South’s rapidly changing demographics, the Sons...