Fighting with the Eighteenth Massachusetts: the Civil War Memoir of Thomas H. Mann.

Edited by John J. Hennessy. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Pp. xxii, 264. $34.95, ISBN 0-8071-2577-6.)

The publication of Civil War diaries, correspondence, and memoirs is always a welcome treat. They broaden the sources readily available to historians, and they offer the public a "you are there" avenue into history. But memoirs are fraught with pitfalls, and this one is no exception. Indeed, the difficulties with it are such that historians looking for firsthand accounts of the war should approach this one with considerable care.

In Fighting with the Eighteenth Massachusetts Thomas Mann recounts his experiences as a corporal in the Union army from the summer of 1861 to May 1864, when he was captured at the Wilderness. Although Mann subsequently spent ten months in the notorious Andersonville prison and later published an account of his experiences there, he does not revisit his imprisonment in this memoir. Instead, he writes a history of the Eighteenth from a grunt's vantage point. At times funny, at times poignant, Fighting with the Eighteenth Massachusetts details the challenges enlisted men faced: from the enemy, their own officers, and--not inconsiderably--the weather. Like many Union soldiers, Mann did not join up out of any abolitionist sentiment. But his feelings about the slaves, if not about blacks generally, shifted as he began to see the military value in freeing them. Mann's memoir is particularly interesting in that he remained a staunch and unapologetic supporter of General George B. McClellan decades after the war ended.

In writing his story, Mann relies on his memory and that of an old army pal, Sergeant William S. Alderman, and on the wartime letters he wrote home. Although comprehensive histories of the war were available and the government was in the middle of churning out the Official Records by the 1890s, when Hennessy believes Mann undertook the project, Mann appears to have availed himself of few outside sources to buttress his and Alderman's recollections. And therein lies the problem. The memoir is rife with factual errors, which Hennessy has conscientiously run down and corrected in his footnotes. To be fair, Mann's manuscript probably never made it beyond the first draft, according to Hennessy. But the number of mistakes runs so high that one begins to question even the reliability of Mann's impressionistic memories. These concerns are somewhat offset by excerpts--sometimes lengthy ones--from his wartime letters home, but again, caution is the watchword. Mann, a physician and newspaper editor after the war, edited and polished his letters heavily before including them in his memoir, so accuracy remains in doubt.

This memoir could prove useful to scholars interested in the war from the enlisted man's standpoint, but only with a healthy dose of the usual caveats about the use of memoirs.

JENNIFER L. WEBER
Princeton University