•Joseph G. Dawson III CHAPTER

CHAPTER
The Experience of the Civil War
Men at Arms
ANDREW HAUGHTON
In 1982 Marvin R. Cain published a plea for an assessment of motives and men in American Civil War historiography—a Face of Battle for the soldiers of the Union and the Confederacy. Reflecting upon the preoccupation of previous generations of historians first with the causes of the war, and then with its consequences, Cain suggested that the human equation had been neglected, and, even as an increasing body of literature had addressed the daily lives of common soldiers in the war, analysis of their attitudes, behavior, and motives had remained superficial and incomplete.
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The construction of a detailed and comprehensive Face of Battle for the
Civil War is beyond the scope and brevity of this chapter, indeed, a sizable tome would be required to give proper attention to such a complex subject.
However, a number of historians over the past twenty years have made suggestions as to why the men who fought for blue or grey were willing to go to war, risk death or disablement, and stick it out until one side or the other could no longer continue. This chapter is, in part, a survey of the questions that have been posed, the answers that have been offered, and the problems that remain unsolved in analyzing the hopes and fears of the men who experienced the sharp end of the Civil War. In conjunction with this historiographical analysis the key areas of debate will be reassessed through an overview of Civil War armies, the battlefield environment, and the daily pressures endured by Billy Yank and Johnny Reb.”
Any assessment of such a large and diverse body of men as made up the armies of the North and South must begin with a caveat. Every observation concerning the common soldier of the Civil War can be applied to only a
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portion of the aggregate. Studies of this type are based upon highlighting factors which pertained to a significant number of the participants, which are repeated time and again in their letters and diaries, but which could not possibly hold true for each and every man involved in the conflict. Indeed,
both armies, Union and Confederate, encompassed the complete spectrum of their society, from the wealthiest Boston Brahmin to immigrant laborers,
from university professors to young men who had barely completed their schooling. One contemporary observer marveled at the incredible variety of men serving in the Confederate army early in the war, noting that numbers of wealthy planters serve as privates side by side with the professional man,
the shopkeeper, the clerk, the laborer and all go through ordinary fatigue duties incident to camp life.”
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The first experience of the Civil War for most volunteers was, therefore, the shock of being thrown into a large and varied society in the confined space of a Camp of Rendezvous.

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