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Review
| Citizen Soldier's Civil War: The Letters of Brevet Major General Alvin C. Boris, ed. by Jerome Mushkat. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. 266 pp. $36.00.
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| This volume of letters composed during the Civil War by a Union volunteer officer delivers exactly what a reader would expect of the title: the viewpoints of a politically active citizen who followed his country's flag into war and utilized his correspondence to both detail his wartime experiences and offer lucid, pungent commentary on the political and social issues characterizing the era. General Voris's accounts and opinions offer a valuable window into the mind of an educated man struggling with the primal horrors and deprivations of war, yet striving to make his generation's sacrifice matter as it engaged in the great struggle between Union and Confederacy. General Voris survived the war. His letters run from late 1861 to December 1865. His tenure as a Union officer witnessed all manner of wartime experience: combat, boredom, disease, horrid weather, bad food, poor leadership, and the waste of human life. In this regard, his account mirrors other collections of soldiers' letters in detailing the consistent deprivations and infrequent battle action which was the soldier's lot. His service extended from the Shenandoah Valley against Stonewall Jackson's Valley Army in the spring of 1862 to the post-Seven Days' Battles south of Richmond and then on to a lengthy siege of Charleston, South Carolina in 1863 (in which he was wounded in the famous attack on Fort Wagner). Next he depicts the vicious fighting around Richmond in 1864 and 1865 (a campaign in which he led black troops). Finally, he commanded a postwar "military subdistrict" as the nation stumbled into Reconstruction. |
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The "you-are-there" nature of the correspondence is, at times, unnerving: the reader can practically hear "sechesh" bullets popping into nearby trees as the general composes another letter while entrenched around Richmond. An interesting characteristic of this aspect of General Voris's letters is the overall absence of the longing for home that readers may expect from wartime correspondence. He is an objective man, in some ways coldly analytical; only as his service lengthens into a third year in 1864 does the reader sense some of the desperation for home and hearth common to such collections. True, this aspect of the correspondence carries recognizable themes: the hope and naive belief that the war will be short, the ineffectiveness of "political generals" as leaders, the necessity of engaging the enemy vigorously to end the war quickly, and the valor of the common soldiers he led into battle and assiduously provided for in the longer periods of interminable boredom (earning him the nickname "Old Promptly"). But what distinguishes General Voris's letters from other volumes of Civil War correspondence is their commitment to placing his day-to-day experiences in a political and social context. The contribution of this collection thus lies in General Voris's unabashed and vigorous commentary. He never loses sight of why he is in uniform or the differences between Union and Confederacy. His arguments are reasoned, ironic, sarcastic, nuanced, and offer some insight into the mind of an educated Union officer. This aspect of the correspondence would be particularly useful to the teacher of Civil War history. Students exposed to this volume would learn that the typical Union soldier was neither generally rural nor uneducated, nor was he easily stereotyped. General Voris was a Lincoln man, but he thought the President weak; he hated slavery, yet referred to southern blacks as "niggers" and had a black "boy" to serve him. He believed in black troops fighting, but considered them inferior soldiers; he loved the beauty of the Virginia countryside, yet hated the institutions supporting its people. He believed that the Southern people were generally less educated and, therefore, more easily led by their society's elites (p. 34: March 8, 1862), but he knows that only in national unity can the nation progress (p. 77: July 23, 1862). He comments frequently on the horrors of war, but characterizes fighting Americans as "heroic, sagacious, and tenacious beyond parallel, and the latter quality is being wonderfully developed by the war." (p. 174: May 15, 1864) |
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In short, teachers utilizing this volume would be able to address the human complexity often receiving scant attention in wartime accounts. Yes, this war was brutal and perhaps "irrepressible," but anyone holding the polarizing biases so popular today in evaluating such sources would find this volume both perplexing and enriching. Its usage in the college classroom (or even in an Advanced Placement high school setting) would certainly serve to expand the intellectual horizons of student readers, especially in an American society facing war today in similar polarizing circumstances. |
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