The Civil War Soldier: a Historical Reader.

The Civil War Soldier: A Historical Reader. Edited by Michael Barton and Larry M. Logue. (New York and London: New York University Press, c. 2002. Pp. xii, 515. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8147-9880-2; cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-8147-9879-9.)

When Walt Whitman remembered the Civil War, his "main interest" was "the rank and file of the armies" (Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs, and Good Bye My Fancy. [New York, 1910], 73). Yet the poet suspected that the common soldier "with all his ways ... will never be written" (Whitman, Complete Prose Works, 74). If so, it would not be for lack of interest or effort. Since Appomattox, veterans and scholars have chronicled, examined, quantified, and debated the lives of Civil War soldiers with unending fervor. In The Civil War Soldier." A Historical Reader, Michael Barton and Larry M. Logue present a valuable anthology of classic works and recent scholarship on the rank and file.

Barton and Logue organize their selections in straightforward parts: who soldiers were, how soldiers lived, how soldiers fought, how soldiers felt, and what soldiers believed. In Part I, Bell Irvin Wiley, Maris A. Vinovskis, and others examine who enlisted and why. Part II illuminates the minutiae of army life. Parts III and IV are the largest, and their chapters reveal a wide diversity of scholarship. In Part III, Wiley, David Donald, Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson, Paddy Griffith, and Earl J. Hess debate tactics and combat effectiveness, while veteran Thomas Wentworth Higginson and historian Joseph T. Glatthaar offer different views on black soldiers and their white officers. Part IV covers morale and the psychological costs of war with work from Drew Gilpin Faust, Reid Mitchell, Eric T. Dean Jr., and others. Finally, Part V includes the influential debate between Gerald F. Linderman and James M. McPherson over soldiers' values, Hess's assessment of Union soldiers, Barton's content analysis of soldiers' diaries, and Faust's study of the Good Death.

I will not fault a 515-page book for omissions, but some readers will be disappointed by what is not included in The Civil War Soldier. Without contributions from Charles Royster and Gary W. Gallagher, the anthology misses two giants of the field. Perhaps Royster's The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York, 1991) was impossible to boil down, but surely a piece of Gallagher's The Confederate War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997) could have fit. Some important topics lack sufficient space as well, particularly gender and memory. This reviewer would have enjoyed a Part VI on what soldiers remembered. Though veterans' accounts shaped and continue to influence how Americans understand the war, Barton and Logue end their coverage in 1865. Perhaps their reluctance to address reunions, monuments, pensions, and postwar mythology is understandable.

Overall, this anthology achieves its purpose. Barton and Logue map the contours of historiography and point toward some uncharted terrain. Many issues are unresolved. Should scholars consider Confederate and Union soldiers as culturally similar or different? What were the relative influences of ideology, religion, and gender on troops' morale and their worldview? To what degree did the war scar soldiers' psyches? Other subjects still need historians. Soldiers' perceptions of the enemy, the effect of propaganda on the ranks, and the spread of rumors require closer examination. Thousands of immigrants who fought for the Union also deserve more attention.

Barton and Logue's collection illustrates that historians are fascinated by common soldiers for the same reason that Whitman was. Exploring how millions fought and thought about the war provides an invaluable glimpse of nineteenth-century American culture--or as Whitman put it, "the latent personal character and eligibilities of these States" (Whitman, Complete Prose Works, 73). This endeavor has made the study of Civil War soldiers, in Barton and Logue's words, "the liveliest topic in middle period historiography," and there is no end in sight (p. 2).

JASON PHILLIPS

Mississippi State University