Embattled Courage

Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War. By Gerald F. Linderman. (New York: The Free Press, 1987. Pp. 357).

In every war, the trials and tribulations of battle transform the soldiers who march, fight, and die for their cause. Naiveté passes, ideals shatter against reality, and the combatants find themselves committing acts that would not be condoned in civilized society during peacetime. In Embattled Courage, Gerald Linderman examined this process for the Civil War soldiers in both the Southern and Federal armies. Adhering to beliefs such as honor, duty, and courage, Civil War soldiers marched off to battle with idealistic visions of warfare that could not withstand the hard realities of combat. New concepts of courage and behavior evolved for soldiers but not necessarily for civilians on the home front. At war’s end, soldiers had to return home and try to reconcile the realities of combat that they knew existed with the ideals that civilians still held dear.

Linderman based his research on a host of sources with a heavy reliance on letters and postwar memoirs. In the opening chapters, he discussed how both the North and the South held values such as courage, duty, honor, and fairness in high esteem. As the war started, most soldiers planned to conduct the war according to these values. Courage became the most important trait by directing the conduct of individual behavior and by being the cement that held the early armies together. The early Civil War ideal of courage was to stand up under enemy fire and boldly advance without showing any trace of fear. Ducking fire or taking cover in ditches was viewed as cowardly behavior. As for officers, the men wanted a courageous leader and disdained those whose bravery did not meet the standards. In early Civil War armies, the infrastructure of discipline, training, and punishment did not exist like in later armies such as those of World War II. Courage and the various ideals associated with it held the armies together and allowed them to function in battle. Officers could not punish their men too severely without instigating insubordination or outright mutiny. Instead, they used their own personal reputation of courage to demand obedience and appealed to the men’s ideals of courage to perform in battle. Such ideas of courage along with other traits such as honor led to practices such as fair treatment of civilians, abstaining from vices, being chivalrous to the enemy, and performing deeds of bravery that would be deemed foolish by later generations. Loved ones back home sent letters exhorting the soldiers to maintain these values. Overall, Linderman does a fair job reconstructing the soldiers’ mindset, but these values should be taken as ideal traits with obvious regional, ethnic, and individual deviations from them.

Linderman also uses the sources well to illustrate how prewar ideals, especially that of courage, changed. Modern technology such as rifled muskets and powerful artillery made old conceptions of courage seem downright stupid. Men who refused to duck or take cover died very quickly. Soldiers who initially disdained the idea of digging trenches and earthworks in favor of a magnificent charge changed their minds after witnessing the carnage of charges in battles such as Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, and Fredericksburg. As the war progressed, ideas such as chivalry towards the enemy and fair treatment of civilians also changed. For example, brave officers who demonstrated their courage were often spared by enemy marksmen early in the war. Later, the sharpshooters killed the brave ones first in order to demoralize the rest of the troops. As for civilians, most commanders tried to avoid looting and outright destruction of personal property in the early days. Eventually, many civilians suffered as soldiers of both armies looted food and personal belongings and burned homes.

The soldiers, therefore, became very hardened and altered many ideals due to their experiences in the war. When the war ended, they returned home to a civilian war that still held many of the old values dear. Many soldiers developed selective memories that ignored the harsher side of war while extolling the glories. This practice became especially prevalent after the 1880’s when veteran memoirs became very popular. The soldiers did not totally forget the new values forged in war. Intriguingly, Linderman linked the rise of business and its ruthless practices during the Gilded Age with the passing of old morals during the war. As the veterans followed civilian occupations, business became like war with naïve ideals of fairness and chivalry tossed aside. These linkages are debatable but they offer an interesting area of debate. In summary, Embattled Courage takes the reader beyond the strategies and grand movements of the armies and shows how the war affected the common soldier.

Johnny Spence Texas Christian University

Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War. By Gerald F. Linderman. New York: The Free Press, 1987, 1-297.

In Embattled Courage, Gerald F. Linderman seeks to show how the Civil War affected soldiers from the North and the South. He concludes that the experiences f soldiers seemed universal. Linderman contends that most men went to war because they were driven to be courageous. Courage and bravery led men to be religious, moral, and honorable. As the war progressed, Linderman notes that most men ceased to act courageously. When soldiers looted, harmed citizens and burnt towns, Linderman concludes that these men no longer acted bravely. Additionally, Linderman believes that religious tenets helped men to act courageously. After years of combat, Linderman notes that many men began to believe that God no longer protected true believers. (1-297).

Although historians, such as James M. McPherson, note that there were many reasons why men enlisted and continued to fight for four long years, Linderman believes that men signed up and engaged the enemy only because they wanted to be courageous. In order to act courageously, soldiers had to lead prayerful lives. Most attended masses that were held by clergyman within their camps. Many soldiers believed that God sustained the lives of brave soldiers and kept them safe from the bullets of the enemy. On the other hand, a number of soldiers thought that God smote the irreverent (7-113).

Along with being religious, many soldiers also believed that to act courageously meant that they most lead moral lives. In both the North and the South, men were influenced by their superiors to give up drinking, cursing, and gambling. Linderman notes that several soldiers gave up vices because they believed God would be on their side (7-113).

Although Linderman notes that many soldiers did not want to obey their superiors, they usually followed commands while they engaged the enemy. Most generals sought to demonstrate that they were brave men. Most soldiers refused to follow leaders that they believed were inferior. Enlisted men would heckle their commanding officers, if they believed them to be incapable cowards. Some officers resigned their positions (7-113).

During the war, commanders, such as Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, believed that it was immoral to ransack and to destroy towns. Linderman cites that Shaw was very much against the destruction of a Georgia town called Darien. According to Linderman, “When a vindictive senior colonel ordered his troops to loot and burn Darien, Georgia, Robert Gould Shaw restrained his own regiment and denounced the enterprise, in part because there was ‘not a deed performed from beginning to end, which required any pluck of courage’” (71;Shaw, 27).

As the war continued, Linderman contends that men began to cease acting courageously. He notes that many soldiers no longer sought to attend mass. Those who gave up liquor and gambling soon returned to their old habits. Although many believed that God would save them from enemy’s fire, some soldiers no longer believed this, once they saw religious men die. According to Linderman, “Godliness as a protective mantle … decline[d]. For every story in the war’s first months about a pocket Bible that had stopped an otherwise fatal bullet, there was in later years a matching tale of the opposite implication … that the replica of the Virgin Mary around [a colonel’s] neck would protect him, and minutes later he was mortally wounded” (158-159). Linderman cites that soldiers began to believe that holy objects only stopped mortal wounds due to chance. Along with Bibles and holy medals, Linderman notes that even secular objects, such as playing cards, prevented bullets from harming soldiers (156-169).

Although soldiers were encouraged to act courageously, Linderman demonstrates that as time passed more men began to abandon the cause and became runaways. For those who remained in their units, these soldiers stopped acting morally. Enlisted men burned towns and harmed citizens. Linderman believes that years of combat drove men to abandon their morals. Linderman contends that these men behaved like cowards and not as honorable soldiers (113-266).

Linderman seeks to counter the common beliefs that all soldiers were courageous, religious, and moral. He demonstrates that soldiers began to abandon the cause, distanced themselves from religion, and behaved unethically. Although Linderman’s conclusions would apply to some men, a number of men would not fall into these categories.

Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War. By Gerald F. Linderman. (New York: The Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1987. Pp. 357. Cloth.)

Following the American Civil War, hundreds, if not thousands, of its participants documented their experiences so that contemporaries and future generations could know their stories and understand why such a brutal war was waged. While Civil War historians have tended to focus on battles, campaigns, and politics, the vast number of primary documents that soldiers have made available to historians has allowed the study of the common soldier to develop into one of the principal subfields in Civil War history. As a result, the historiography of the common soldier has evolved rapidly, and the number of books devoted to the subject continues to increase as historians relate the experiences of day-to-day soldier life and debate the character and motivations of the more than three-million men who fought in the Civil War. Recent times have witnessed an especially exciting period in the historiography of the common soldier as professional historians engage in debate concerning the basic motivations of Billy Yank and Johnny Reb. In 1987, Gerald F. Linderman, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Michigan, initiated the contest when he published Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War, a controversial examination of the common soldiers’ cultural world and how the crucible of war altered the way these men looked at not only warfare but also life in general.

Embattled Courage is divided into two sections, the first of which is entitled “Courage’s War.” It is in this section that Linderman delineates the basic value system and its sources of reinforcement that Civil War volunteers carried with them into military life. Rarely differentiating between Union and Confederate soldiers, Linderman asserts that servicemen on both sides adhered to a specific “constellation of values,” which included duty, godliness, honor, knightliness, and manliness (pp. 7-8). At the center of this value system was courage—“heroic action undertaken without fear”—and it served as the polestar to which the soldiers gravitated and from which all other values emanated (p. 17). The ethos of the Civil War soldier called upon him to stride gallantly into battle under the authority of an officer sitting stolidly atop a horse without fear of the incoming hail of minie balls and artillery shells. Despite the seeming foolishness of such action, these men actually believed their dauntless displays of courage kept them safe, for they trusted that such virtue merited the favor of a God who would protect them. Moreover, their decisions to carry out the war in this fashion received support from the homefront as “soldiers’ families enforced and reinforced the centrality of courage” by calling upon their boys to eschew cowardice and by promoting the idea of the “‘honorable death’” (pp. 12, 83).

The second section of Embattled Courage is entitled “A Perilous Education,” and it is here that Linderman outlines the destruction of the soldiers’ value system as they realized that the war “could not be fought as its soldiers set out to fight it” (p. 113). Exposed to the horrors of disease and the suddenness of death on the battlefield, soldiers began to question the practicality of dauntless courage. The introduction of new technology like rifling and breech-loading repeaters exposed the futility of the fearless frontal assault, and Civil War armies began constructing shelter and engaging in trench warfare. The spade, once considered the “‘ignoble weapon’” of cowards, became a common instrument of the level-headed as “soldiers became more concerned with survival than with any private triumph of values” (pp. 143, 234). According to Linderman, the abandonment of the basic precepts of their definition of courage led soldiers to rally around “destroyer generals” like Ulysses Simpson Grant, Philip Henry Sheridan, and William Tecumseh Sherman, whom the men believed would lead them to a quick victory even if purchased at a level of brutality once thought unacceptable. The experience of such previously unimaginable warfare “frustrated their attempts to fight the war as an expression of their values and generated in them a harsh disillusionment,” and “they were frustrated by what they had expected to do and could not do and horrified by what they were sure they would never do and then began to do” (pp. 2-3). This disillusionment led the soldiers to abandon not only the central value of courage but also their belief in God’s protection and their ties to the homefront.

Gerald F. Linderman’s Embattled Courage is nothing short of controversial, and it stands as one of the most thought-provoking books published on the Civil War soldier. Despite its insightfulness, however, historians have not unanimously rallied around its conclusions, and it has drawn criticism from some of the brightest minds in the business of professional history, including James M. McPherson and Steven E. Woodworth. The responses to Linderman’s book take issue with his victimization of common soldiers and explore a wider range of motivating forces in their decisions to enlist and fight. They also criticize Linderman for overstressing the role of courage and failing to acknowledge the centrality of ideology as a basic tenet of soldier motivation. Moreover, they repudiate Linderman for letting his post-Vietnam sensibilities infringe upon his understanding of nineteenth-century society and its ideas about warfare. Linderman’s Embattled Courage provides a bleak portrait of the disillusioning experiences of Billy Yank and Johnny Reb—it is left to the reader to speculate whether it is the Civil War soldier or Professor Linderman who is the more disenchanted.