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Cargando... The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Homepor Reid Hardeman Mitchell
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. What a stunning premise, Union soldiers fought to protect their way of life. Their parents raised them to think the Union should be preserved. The Union commanders most revered were the ones that engaged their men in paternalistic relationships. And yet this book received rave reviews...and I haven't even gotten to the typos... ( ) In this book Mitchell looks at the Northern soldier during the Civil War. He uses journals and letters to let the soldiers, nurses, and family members speak for themselves. He really gets inside the heads of the men who fought for the Union. His chapters cover motivations for enlistment, war experiences, encounters with Confederate soldiers and civilians, and how Northerners coped with death. Northern soldiers joined the army to preserve the Union, to fight beside their friends, and protect their families. Many young men considered the war to be their "coming of age" experience. Enlistment was viewed as masculine duty; the army was often considered to be one big family. Northerners struggled with seeing the South for the first time; Yankees felt like they were in a foreign country. They often derided the lack of industry and the South's laziness (in their opinions) due to reliance on slave labor. Some Northerners became abolitionists as a result of army service, they saw the effects of slavery for the first time in person and were appalled by the horrible conditions they saw on plantations. In the South, family livelihoods were torn apart by the invading armies, slavery was unraveling before their very eyes, and the government was unable to support the army and the citizens. Often the family back home would encourage soldier's to desert to keep them safe. Many Confederates soldier's thought the war would never end, and eventually they gave up on the Confederate cause, because their families were more important to them. In the end the North's determination to win, the necessity to preserve the Union, their views of domesticity and patriotism, and the support of the home community and family gave them the strength to endure. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
In many ways, the Northern soldier in the Civil War fought as if he had never left home. On campsites and battlefields, the Union volunteer adapted to military life with attitudes shaped by networks of family relationships, in units of men from the same hometown. Understanding these links between the homes the troops left behind and the war they had to fight, writes Reid Mitchell, offers critical insight into how they thought, fought, and persevered through four bloody years of combat. In The Vacant Chair, Mitchell draws on the letters, diaries, and memoirs of common soldiers to show how mid-nineteenth-century ideas and images of the home and family shaped the union soldier's approach to everything from military discipline to battlefield bravery. For hundreds of thousands of "boys," as they called themselves, the Union army was an extension of their home and childhood experiences. Many experienced the war as a coming-of-age rite, a test of such manly virtues as self-control, endurance, and courage. They served in companies recruited from the same communities, and they wrote letters reporting on each other's performance--conscious that their own behavior in the army would affect their reputations back home. So, too, were they deeply affected by letters from their families, as wives and mothers complained of suffering or demanded greater valor. Mitchell also shows how this hometown basis for volunteer units eroded respect for military rank, as men served with officers they saw as equals: "Lieut Col Dewey introduced Hugh T Reid," one sergeant wrote dryly, "by saying, 'Boys, behold your colonel,' and webeheldhim." In return, officers usually adopted paternalist attitudes toward their "boys"--especially in the case of white officers commanding black soldiers. Mitchell goes on to look at the role of women in the soldiers' experiences, from the feminine center of their own households to their hatred of Confederate women as "she-devils." The intimate relations and inner life of the Union soldier, the author writes, tell us much about how and why he kept fighting through four bloody years--and why demoralization struck the Confederate soldier as the war penetrated the South, threatening his home and family while he was at the front. "The Northern soldier did not simply experience the war as a husband, son, father, or brother--he fought that way as well," he writes. "That was part of his strength. The Confederate soldier fought the war the same way, and, in the end, that proved part of his weakness." The Vacant Chair uncovers this critical chapter in the Civil War experience, showing how the Union soldier saw--and won--our most costly conflict. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)973.7History and Geography North America United States Administration of Abraham Lincoln, 1861-1865 Civil WarClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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