The Civil War Veteran Experience

Soldiers returning home from war often have difficulty adjusting to civil society, visualizing their future, and living out the balance of their lives. Following the Civil War, men, both North and South, had different memories of the conflict and conceptions of the goals they wanted to achieve with the war over. Veterans were not all the same and can not easily be characterized by only their experiences in the war. In “The War Went On” the editors have collected fifteen essays by leading academics on the postwar lives and experiences of former combatants.

We see former soldiers’ engagement in electoral politics, their roles as historians, and the diversity of their postwar experiences. The contributions cover Confederate and Union veterans, including veterans of the United States Colored Troops, as well as former prisoners of war, deserters, disabled veterans, Confederate dissenters, Southern Unionists, and former Confederate guerrilla fighters.

These essays offer a concise, provocative, and approachable view of different voices, dealing with difficult issues and providing possible topics for future research.

A number of essays look at aspects of the veteran experience that have perhaps been rather neglected.

Evan Rothera’s “The Men Are Understood to Have Been Generally Americans in the Employ of the Liberal Government” suggests that many veterans, from Ulysses S. Grant himself on down to ordinary Union and Confederate soldiers, challenged United States foreign policy, wanting to defend the Monroe Doctrine and to become more active in North American, the Caribbean, and world affairs.

Mathew Hulbert’s “The Trial of Frank James: Guerrilla Veteranhood and the Double Edge of Wartime Notoriety” uses the experiences of Frank James to effectively show how irregulars sometimes found a way to become law abiding citizens.

“Speaking for Themselves: Disabled Veterans and Civil War Medical Photography”, by Sarah Handley-Cousins discusses the many difficulties that disabled veterans faced in seeking pensions, which not only required medical certification and the testimony of sometime comrades and others to gain bureaucratic approvals, but also called for photographs, essentially placing their disfigured bodies on public display.

In “Exposing False History”, Steven Sodergren uses published stories in the National Tribune, to examine how both Union and Confederate soldiers were concerned that the “other” side was winning the written history of the conflict, seeking “truth” and what they desired from the past that should be remembered by future generations.

Mathew Norman’s “Our Beloved Father Abraham”, asserts that veterans of the U.S.C.T. believed they understood Lincoln better than white soldiers and citizens, and argues that during the war African American troops helped educate him into an evolving view of race, thus allowing them to participate in preserving the Union and contribute to the end of slavery.

All of the papers in “The War Went On” are well written, reflecting careful research, well supported by helpful notes. Readers come away with a better understanding of how in the aftermath of the war, soldiers returning home had to cope with a nation still deeply divided, lacking a consensus on what the end of slavery meant, an common understanding of the role of the slaves in society, and even how the former Confederate leaders should be treated.

This reviewer highly recommends this new study of the postwar experiences of Civil War veterans.

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Our Reviewer: David Marshall has been a high school American history teacher in the Miami-Dade School district for more than three decades. A life-long Civil War enthusiast, David is president of the Miami Civil War Round Table Book Club. In addition to numerous reviews in Civil War News and other publications, he has given presentations to Civil War Round Tables on Joshua Chamberlain, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, the Battle of Gettysburg, and the common soldier. He earlier reviewed The Petersburg Regiment in the Civil War, Civil War Places, The Union Assaults at Vicksburg: Grant Attacks Pemberton, May 17–22, 1863, America’s Buried History: Landmines in the Civil War, and The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation.

Note: “The War Went On”, a volume in the LSU series “Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War” is also available in several e-editions.

StrategyPage reviews are published in cooperation with The New York Military Affairs Symposium