| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joseph Allan Frank. With Ballot and Bayonet: The Political Socialization of American Civil War Soldiers. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 1998. Pp. ix, 304. $40.00.

The rank and file of the Civil War armies have long fascinated historians. Even in the old days, when the doings of statesmen and generals dominated American historiography, the common soldiers of 1861–1865 maintained a high profile, most notably through Bell Irvin Wiley's classic studies of The Life of Johnny Reb (1943) and The Life of Billy Yank (1952). The advent of the "new social history" a generation ago sparked more interest. Since then, studies of Civil War soldiers have proliferated. These are generally more focused than the older studies, for what particularly intrigues modern scholars is the soldier's mind. Historians today want to know what made Johnny and Billy tick. 1

Joseph Allan Frank offers a study of the "political socialization" of the men in blue and gray. That at least is what the subtitle promises; Frank's actual subject is considerably broader. The book examines how antebellum America's civic culture molded the men who would become soldiers, how the war refined and broadened the soldiers' political consciousness, how the soldiers influenced—and were influenced by—the political views of the civilian populace, and how the soldiers' intense political engagement was manifested in their wartime behavior. The key to it all, says Frank, is that these men were mostly neither professional soldiers nor conscripts but volunteer citizen-soldiers, men who went to war to defend republican ideals and who insisted that their army was nothing more, or less, than the sword of republicanism. . . .

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