Through Ordinary Eyes: the Civil War Correspondence of Rufus Robbins, Private, 7th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers.

Edited by Ella Jane Bruen and Brian M. Fitzgibbons. (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger Publishers, 2000. Pp. [xiv], 220. $39.95, ISBN 0-275-96589-9.)

Doctor to the Front: The Recollections of Confederate Surgeon Thomas Fanning Wood, 1861-1865. Edited by Donald B. Koonce. Voices of the Civil War. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000. Pp. [xxvi], 252. $30.00, ISBN 1-57233-082-1.)

The study of the Civil War's common soldiers is a field just reaching maturity. The ground broken by Bell Wiley in his Life of Johnny Reb (Indianapolis, 1943) and Life of Billy Yank (Indianapolis, 1952)--terrain that lay fallow for twenty years after--is productive again, giving us an increasingly sophisticated sense of the motivations and experiences of the men who did the actual killing, fighting, and dying of the Civil War. Contributing to the field's fertility is the steady (perhaps relentless) release of firsthand accounts of the war, some of which, like those reviewed here, are valuable precisely for their ordinariness, for their insights into the mundanities of everyday life in a Civil War army.

Through Ordinary Eyes collects the correspondence of Rufus Robbins and his family, primarily his brothers, sister, and parents. The Robbins family seems to have been typical of their hometown of South Abington, Massachusetts--the touchstones of their lives were fruit trees, frugality, shoemaking, and a Universalist faith. Enlisting in the army at the age of thirty-one, Rufus Robbins served in the Peninsula campaign, though his regiment was not engaged in the thickest of the fighting. His letters, then, shed little light on the great battles and figures of the war but are valuable for their descriptions of the staples of camp life: picket and fatigue duty; building barracks, forts, entrenchments, and breastworks; drills and target practice; camp games, rhythms, and meals. Rufus provides a mind-numbing amount of information on this last point; the recurring description of what he had for dinner can be a little fatiguing. By the middle of the book, however, such descriptions have become sublime, as one realizes that Rufus is communicating with his family through the shared language of fruit crops and farmland, weather and the earth's produce. "This is the season that wakes up all my home feelings," Rufus notes after gorging himself on applesauce, "when the fruit is ripe" (pp. 168-69).

Rufus's loving accounts of musk melons and apple orchards, however, raise another question: what is this simple New England farmer/cobbler doing in a military camp in Virginia? Fortunately, Rufus tells us; he is doing his duty, and anyone who supposes that the motivation to kill and die has to be more compelling or complicated little understands the bedrock simplicities of the nineteenth-century worldview. "I [do] want to see my home," Rufus wrote his family, "yet money could not tempt me to leave the army now. I shall see joy when and where God wills it ..." (p. 126). As it happened, God willed that Rufus Robbins should die of chronic diarrhea while his doctors transferred him from hospital to hospital, unable to cure him yet unwilling to discharge him. Quaintly, Robbins bore this as he did the rest of the hard work and miseries of camp life--with resignation and easy grace. "Last night," he noted just before his death in early 1863, "I dreamt I was at home and I was out under the trees.... I opened my eyes and right down through the window the beautiful moon and one bright star was shining for me. I could not keep the tears back when I thought how good God is" (p. 191). To be sure, an army of Rufus Robbinses would never be the flashiest or the fiercest, but it might be the most enduring.

Doctor to the Front presents the story of the common soldier from the opposite camp. Though written twenty years after the war, Thomas Wood's recollections seem little distorted by hindsight, and the editor's decision to intersperse the memoir with extant letters helps the reader corroborate Wood's memory. Like Rufus Robbins, Wood participated in the eastern theater but was not deeply involved in the fighting--in this case because, as a surgeon, he spent most of his time in the rear of the army. Coupled with the fact that these are recollections, Doctor to the Front thus sometimes has more of the reporter's tone than the participant's. (The inclusion of the letters here works against the book: they are so vibrant that one wishes Wood had brought the same flair to the writing of his memoir.) Doctor to the Front, however, is historiographically useful in ways that Through Ordinary Eyes is not. Of particular note in this regard are Wood's discussion of the difficulty the Confederacy faced in constructing an army out of hot-headed dandies (himself included), his insights into the practice of medicine before, during, and after the war, and his participation in one of the conflict's more intriguing campaigns--Jubal Early's 1864 march on Washington. Among the letters reprinted are those Wood sent to his hometown newspaper, the Wilmington Journal, for which he served as a sort of self-declared war correspondent during the Early campaign. These letters underline a point that has been made by several scholars: that the Confederacy's offensives, while occasionally cosily and rash, were nevertheless crucial to the morale of civilians and soldiers alike.

In short, these two books are full of the sort of useful glimpses into common soldiering that made Bell Wiley's books so successful. Of course, today's scholars need a different quality of evidence to flesh out answers to the compelling questions Wiley only touched upon, such as why civilians in a democratic country willingly endured so much to become fighters and killers of their former countrymen. The books reviewed here offer only small insights into such questions, and interested scholars would have to read many such volumes before they could hope to answer them. Fortunately, such volumes are on the way, and so long as they are as good as these two, they undoubtedly will keep on coming.

STEPHEN W. BERRY
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill