Major Sullivan Ballou’s final letter to home, penned to his wife Sarah a week before Bull Run, has become something of a Civil War chestnut. Though he had written earlier that morning, when darkness overcame camp Sullivan felt “impelled to write a few lines.” He unconvincingly assured Sarah that something “whispered” to him that he would survive the anticipated battle. But forebodings soon crowded out hope. He apparently had heard other whispers. If he should fall on the field, Sullivan begged and consoled her, “do not my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last...

The young man tosses his head back, swinging a curtain of long hair over his shoulder. His left hand, which holds a cigarette, trembles slightly. “It’s gonna be a great, a great smash,” he says. “I’m really excited for it. I will release other frustrations in my life by showing that monitor who’s the alpha male.” The man stubs out his cigarette, picks up a sledgehammer, and swings it like a baseball bat, pulverizing the screen of a desktop computer that sits on the ground. He heaves the sledgehammer over his head and brings it down again and again; the...

By 1865, in North Carolina’s western Piedmont district, a man named David Schenck had confiscated and sold at auction the property of hundreds of people living around him. He kept the choicest properties for himself or sold them at rock-bottom prices to others who were, like him, ardently committed to the Confederate cause. In spite of the economic disaster unfolding all around, he acted with impunity — believing all the while that his work would withstand Divine scrutiny and that, indeed, he was advancing the cause of Southern independence just as he was advancing his own interests. The extraordinary story of...

It would be hard to grow up in Missouri and not know of the exploits of the state’s Civil War guerrillas like Bloody Bill Anderson, Jesse James, and William Clarke Quantrill. Much ink has been spilt debating whether these guerrillas were terrorists, intent on plunder and self advancement, or heroes, fighting a rearguard action to defend a Southern sympathizing population against Union occupation during the Civil War. In his book, Inside War, Michael Fellman has described the way some boys ended up being guerrillas in the chaotic conditions of the times. One day, Fellman suggests, they were out at night...

In the closing months of the Civil War, Kate Stone, a Louisiana planter’s daughter turned Texas refugee, commented on the ways in which the war had changed the courtship patterns of elite Southerners. According to this youthful Confederate, wartime courtships, especially with soldiers, were “just a piece of amusement on both sides,” and both men and women casually formed engagements that they had no intention of honoring. While Kate and “most of the girls” of her acquaintance accepted and even welcomed such temporary wartime romances, her mother, in keeping with antebellum customs in which courtship was intended to lead to...

There is a formula to most Civil War soldiers’ memoirs. They open with a modest statement of inadequacy in the face of taking stock of a long life. A profession of insignificance before God, and a registration of incredulity that any earthly peer beyond immediate friends and family could have any interest in these reflections, follow in quick succession. The formalities dispensed with, the veteran dives headlong into the crucible of his making, the moment when he and his fellows lived their lives to the top. When Elizabeth Alsop Wynne (or Lizzie as she was known) put pen to paper...

Colonel Alfred Pike was aggravated. For more than two months he had been hunting for a notorious deserter named Bill Owens in the central counties of North Carolina’s piedmont. On Saturday evening, April 23, 1864, a posse including soldiers and civilians commanded by Pike, who was the deputy sheriff of Randolph County and also probably an officer in the county’s militia, made its way to Owens’s spring just across the county line in Moore County where the men sought Bill’s hideout. When the soldiers inquired as to Bill’s whereabouts, his wife, who was then in the process of washing clothes...

In the spring of 1864, a white boy known only as “Morton,” residing in Scott’s Hill, Virginia, felt hungry — very hungry. By 1864, many famished people lived in the states of the Confederacy. Three years of warfare had taken a toll on the regional food supply, especially in places that witnessed much fighting, as Virginia did. According to a relative, Morton satisfied his hunger with a rat pie. He caught, skinned, and boiled a number of rats, which took several days, and then baked the fillets in a pan lined with pie dough. The outcome was “an old time ....

I learned the profoundest lesson of Civil War history from a dog-eared 1978 translation of The Song of Roland. As the translator Frederick Goldin explained in his introduction, the past, by its past-ness, has an “urge” to be epic. Roland, we know, is going to die. We know, when he dons his armor, that he dons it for the last time. We know he can’t not go into battle. He does what he does because he must, because history demands it, because we are watching and know that it has already been done. Betrayed and defeated, Roland must helplessly lift...

On December 5, 1864, a Bostonian named Cadwallader Curry opened his newspaper and, with scissors in hand, set out to do something about the plight of slave refugees in the Civil War. He clipped an article from the Boston Journal that included the sworn affidavit of Joseph Miller, a Kentucky slave turned Union soldier, who recently suffered the loss of his seven-year-old son. The affidavit described how on the morning of November 23, the Millers — all slaves who fled to Camp Nelson, Kentucky, to seek freedom over the past year — were awakened by Union guards ordering that Joseph’s wife, Isabella,...

In the primeval spring of Confederate defeat, when the white lilacs first in the dooryard bloomed, more than eight thousand Southerners — one “incessant stream pour[ing] from the city,” as a newspaper described it — whelmed an amphitheater in Memphis for a ring tournament. Spectators came alone on foot and on horseback, together in carriages and in omnibuses, alone and together in “every other kind of vehicle known to the motion of horses and wheels.” They skylarked in pageantry. They gushed in spectacle. “[H]ere are a thousand fair ladies, in whose persons stand expressed the perfection of the beauty of form,” the...

William Sikes was in his early twenties and living in Memphis when the Civil War started. He quickly saw the conflict firsthand, explaining, “I was with the Rebel Arms with my boss Maj. Dyer who had hired me and carried me in the army with him. I was a slave at the time.” At some point Sikes emancipated himself from Major Dyer, since he enlisted in the Union’s Third United States Colored Heavy Artillery Regiment in December 1863. Perhaps because he was a servant for a Confederate officer, Sikes was immediately made a corporal. Two months later, though, he was...

On September 14, 1862, during the Battle of Munfordville, Kentucky, Captain George Dobson abandoned his company to help carry from the field his wounded regimental colonel, who also happened to be his brother-in-law. For three days, he personally tended to the dying man, and then claimed illness as the Union army reoccupied the field. Captured and paroled twice, Dobson waited almost two months after being exchanged to report for duty. His regiment’s new colonel ordered Dobson arrested and court-martialed for dishonorably deserting the colors during action, allowing himself to be captured, and remaining absent without leave. Dobson angrily fought back,...

In Henri Barbusse’s World War I classic, Under Fire, a soldier named Baraque approaches the narrator, Barbusse, who is immersed in thought, writing in his journal about the muck and death of trench warfare. He asks the writer if his comrades will be quoted verbatim. Will they, in print, “speak like they really do, or will you tidy it up and make it proper?” “I am talking about swearwords” Baraque injects. The writer agrees that he has no intention of hiding the rough language of soldier talk, even if the readers might condemn him as a “foul-mouthed pig.” Baraque is...

James McNeill Whistler, arguably America’s greatest artist, did not fight in the American Civil War, although he might have done. He was dismissed from the U.S. Military Academy in June 1854, a year short of graduation, for excessive demerits and “deficiency” in chemistry. He failed chemistry, Whistler claimed in later years, because he had misidentified silicon as a gas on his final oral examination. Given the type of questions we know his classmates faced on that same exam, it seems unlikely he was asked, much less flubbed, such an elementary query. His claim is all the more suspicious because it...

With her husband, Will, away fighting the American Civil War, Emma Shannon Crutcher had a dream. She dreamed of receiving word from an army surgeon that her husband had been shot in the leg, but spared his life. Crutcher reacted to the news with “maximized joy” and noted, “Now, thought I, he will never leave me again, for he will be of no use, in the army, and — if I die, he will never marry again, for no one but me would love a lame man — he is mine now.” She not only realized that her husband, as a lame...

Although the cessation of fighting brought Confederate men back to their homes, the reuniting of Southern families and the resumption of life after war proved challenging as Southern men and women, affected by war, struggled to reconstitute their marriages, families, and communities. Southern men who had served in the military and who were lucky enough to have escaped death returned to the home front with physical and emotional scars that hampered a return to anything resembling a “normal” life. Of course we now recognize that veterans suffered effects of a variety of physiological and psychological ailments, including posttraumatic stress disorder...

On November 14, 1911, an obituary appeared in the Hartford Daily Times with the headline: “Death of Ira E. Forbes, Soldier Newspaperman.” The obituary went on to describe Forbes as “one of the best known newspapermen in the state” but also someone “prominent in military circles” and well known for his bravery and modesty. Forbes, the paper explained, had courageously helped to save the colors of the Sixteenth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers during the battle of Plymouth. “Of the bravery of his comrades,” the paper noted, “he was always eloquent; of his own exploits he was strangely reticent.”¹

Ira E. Forbes,...

Taken together, these essays open a fundamental and disturbing line of questioning. What if we zoom in from grand abstractions like Honor, Duty, Freedom, and Sacrifice to focus instead on the experiences of civil war as people really suffered them? What if we do not conclude that the ends justified the means? Or, indeed, that the ends were ambiguous and the means were horrifically wounding? What if we search for many human-sized narratives rather than celebrating the grand narrative of the Redemptive Good War?

Viewed up close, this war, like all wars, dissolves into a disjointed and fearsome congeries of...