8. Citizen Soldiers
Questions:
1. Why did soldiers join up and why did they continue fighting?
2. What was the significance of the fact that most Civil War soldiers
on both sides were volunteers? What was the relationship between soldiers
and the home front?
3. What were the principal challenges facing Civil War soldiers?
Reid
Mitchell, “Soldiering, Manhood and Coming of Age,” chapter
1 of The Vacant Chair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)
Reid
Mitchell, "From Volunteer to Soldier: The Psychology of Service" from
Civil War Soldiers (1988)
James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men fought in the Civil
War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)
James I. Robertson, Soldiers Blue and Gray (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1988)
Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997)
J. Tracy Power, Lee’s Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern
Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomatox (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1998)
Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the
American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987)
Aaron
Sheehan-Dean, “Everyman’s War: Confederate Enlistment
in Civil War Virginia,” Civil War History 50.1 (2004)
Lorien
Foote, “Rich Man’s War, Rich Man’s Fight: Class,
Ideology, and Discipline in the Union Army,” Civil War History
51.3 (2005)
Primary sources
David W. Blight, ed., When This Cruel War is Over: The Civil War Letters
of Charles Harvey Brewster (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1992)
Jerome Mushkat, ed., A Citizen-Soldier’s Civil War: The Letters
of Brevet Major General Alvin C. Voris (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University
Press, 2002)
Emil Rosenblat, ed., Anti-Rebel: The Civil War Letters of Wilbur Fisk
(Privately printed: Croton-on-Hudson, New York, 1983)
M. Thomas Inge, ed., “Company Aytch”, or, A side show of
the big show and other sketches by Samuel R. Watkins (New York: Plume,
1999)
Robert Hunt Rhodes, ed., All For the Union: The Civil War Diary and Letters
of Elisha Hunt Rhodes (New York: Orion, 1985)