Guest Review: The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans, edited by Brian Matthew Jordan and Evan C. Rothera

Civil Discourse encourages guest submissions from academic and popular historians alike. Today's guest reviewer is Jonathan Tracey, a public historian focused on soldier experience, medical care, and veteran life in the Civil War era. He holds a BA in History from Gettysburg College with minors in Public History and Civil War Era Studies and is currently working on an MA from West Virginia University in Public History with a Certificate in Cultural Resource Management. He has also worked several seasons with the National Park Service at various sites, including three summers at Gettysburg National Military Park.

The War Went On is the latest in recent scholarship to look beyond the American Civil War of 1861-1865 and instead examine how wartime service affected veterans in the years and decades beyond. Topics run the gamut from political to social history, with inclusions of the fields of economics, memory studies, race, and others. Though not comprehensive, this excellent book explores a range of experiences and offers insight into complicated and diverse groups of veterans.

Roughly split into three categories, “Rejecting Hibernation,” “Narrating the Past,” and “The Multivocality of Civil War Veteranhood,” it includes fifteen unique essays, each by a different author. They range from Matthew Christopher Hulbert’s chapter on guerilla veteranhood to Angela M. Riotto’s chapter on ex-prisoners of war and Rebecca Howard’s piece on Arkansas’s Union veterans. Several works touch upon the issue of race, especially Matthew D. Norman’s work on African American veterans’ feelings towards Abraham Lincoln as well as Kelly D. Mezurek’s essay on the intersection of race and soldiers’ homes. Naturally, white supremacy and the Lost Cause rear their heads in several chapters, so common threads often tie chapters together with similar themes.

For brevity’s sake, I wish to focus on three exceptional essays within the volume. Sarah Handley-Cousins work, “Speaking for Themselves: Disabled Veterans and Civil War Medical Photography,” builds upon her 2019 book Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North. Here, she hones in on photography, exploring how these images of wounded veterans served dual purposes. These images furthered the practice of medicine through compilation into works such as the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion but were also occasionally used by veterans themselves in efforts to receive or increase a pension. Photos of veterans and the aftermath of their operations are often shocking, but Handley-Cousins, along with staff at places such as the Seminary Ridge Museum and the National Museum of Civil War Medicine have renewed work to uncover exactly what they meant to doctors and veterans. After all, Handley-Cousins understood that “Soldiers’ bodies held tremendous potential to create meaning out of the war,” and this article moves towards a better understanding of that meaning (103).

Kelly D. Mezurek’s addition, “’The Colored Veteran Soldiers Should Receive the Same Tender Care:’ Soldiers’ Homes, Race, and the Post-Civil War Midwest,” provides coverage of a topic devoid from most writings on veterans. Thousands of veterans and their families found themselves dependent on assistance, often due to compounded hardships during years of service. Many found comfort and solace through moving to soldiers’ homes, where disabled veterans were supported. As Mezurek notes, African American soldiers often found themselves needing assistance and faced threats of discrimination, even as they received a benefit earned through service to a country that often let them down. Though there is much room for future analysis of soldiers’ homes, Mezurek compellingly argues that these veterans in the Midwest offer meaningful insight into an unfortunately ignored experience.

Steven E. Sodergren’s chapter, “’Exposing False History:’ The Voice of the Union Veteran in the Pages of the National Tribune,” was perhaps my favorite. The National Tribune targeted Union veterans as the primary audience for the newspaper. Importantly, it included a column dedicated to printing submitted soldier narratives. These narratives were sometimes as simple as a veteran explaining their service or that of his regiment at a certain battle, often new battles came into being, fought with ink and pen. Veterans clashed not only with Confederate re-tellings of the war, but with each other. Some grew exceedingly heated as veterans believed their honor or that of their comrades was being besmirched by a misguided author, leading to insults. The National Tribune is an incredible source to see how veterans remembered their own experiences, and Sodergen makes a vibrant argument that veterans used it as a platform “to tell the ‘truth of history’” (146). These three chapters alone made the book worth the purchase price to me, but each other article is worth the reader’s attention as well.

The War Went On does more than just rehash old perspectives on veterans but instead presents a range of views on a group that defies the monolithic tendency often attributed to it. Though the chapters skew towards mostly focusing on white Union veterans, that group left the most material record behind. This work fits smoothly into the previous literature on veterans, building upon it and expanding into new ideas. Larry Logue and Michael Barton’s 2007 edited volume The Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader is a clear inspiration as well as more recent works. Specifically, it takes notes from books by Brian Matthew Jordan and James Marten. Fitting within the broader Civil War historiographical movement sometimes referred to as “the dark turn,” works like Jordan’s 2015 Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War focus on how many veterans found themselves irrevocably changed by the war, struggling to move forward with the trauma of the past on their shoulders, while Marten’s 2011 Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America explores veterans rising above the trauma of their wartime experiences. Despite Jordan serving as an editor and contributing a chapter, this work moves beyond that divide by including a variety of articles that bridge this dichotomy, and this text presents unique views and new perspectives on Civil War veterans. If nothing else, the diversity of topics and approaches here prove Jordan’s argument in his concluding chapter that “historians have much to discover about the postwar lives of Johnny Reb and Billy Yank” (312).