All's for the Best: The Civil War Reminiscences and Letters of Daniel W. Sawtelle, Eighth Maine Volunteer Infantry.

Edited with an introduction by Peter H. Buckingham. Voices of the Civil War. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001. Pp. xxxii, 361. $34.00, ISBN 1-57233-136-4.)

The typical classroom synthesis of the American Civil War jets from "turning point" to "decisive moment," and all the while it is easy to forget that the war experience of the ordinary soldier often consisted of uninterrupted emptiness. And so it was for Daniel Sawtelle, a private in the Eighth Maine Infantry for most of the war. Sawtelle, who had been a trapper, farmer, and hunter before the war, enlisted in September 1861. A month later his regiment sailed to Port Royal, South Carolina. His unit would remain along the South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida coasts and see little of the enemy for its first three years in the war.

In May 1864 the Eighth Maine was transferred to the Army of the James under Benjamin Butler. Sawtelle had reenlisted that spring, spent a month on convalescent furlough in Maine, and returned to the front just in time to join the war of attrition around the Richmond-Petersburg corridor. Initially, even there the Eighth Maine's participation was marginal, but at the battle of Drewry's Bluff, repeated Confederate charges nearly overwhelmed the regiment. Soon afterward, the Eighth Maine was shifted to the Army of the Potomac, with which it suffered through the agony of Cold Harbor--and lost nearly a third of its men. After Cold Harbor, the war in Virginia settled into a siege, which for the ordinary soldier meant the anxious, gruesome monotony of trench warfare. Sawtelle captures the claustrophobic feeling of the war's final months.

Sawtelle's memoir alone will be of limited use to professional historians. Peter H. Buckingham's fine introduction struggles gamely to build up its broader significance by relating it to larger themes. Buckingham suggests, for example, that Sawtelle helps us understand the racial attitudes of Union soldiers and the ways that political party identifications shaped the average soldier's outlook upon the war. In truth, Sawtelle was a wonderful writer but a superficial observer. His account of his war experience is visceral but lacks introspection and depth. The most interesting aspect of the volume is that it pairs Sawtelle's memoir with a collection of his letters. Unlike his memoir (which he did not start writing until 1912), Sawtelle's letters are almost all fixated upon race and politics. By bringing together both in one volume, All's for the Best would make a wonderful addition to a Civil War seminar because it would allow students to examine the relationship between the war as a lived experience and the war as a remembered event. For the general reader, too, Sawtelle's stylishly crafted memoir offers a glimpse of life in the Civil War for the ordinary soldier, in all of its horror, boredom, adventure, and discomfort.

ADAM-MAX TUCHINSKY

University of Southern Maine