Larry J. Daniel. Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee: A Portrait of Life in a Confederate Army. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

            The story of the Civil War has been told many times from the top-down view of generals, politicians, and macro military and political machines in the one-hundred fifty years since the war. Until recent decades, however little concerted effort had been made to create a social history of the conflict from the grassroots perspective of common soldiers. Larry J Daniel’s Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee: A Portrait of Life in a Confederate Army was written to help correct that historiographical imbalance and to “show the perspective of the men in the ranks. (xi.)” Daniel picks up essentially where Bell Wiley’s Life of Johnny Reb and James I. Robertson’s Soldiers Blue and Gray leave off, examining the day-to-day conditions of the lives of western Confederate soldiers in the Army of Tennessee to shed light on the western soldier’s Civil War experience and illuminate any differences from Confederate soldiers in the east.

            Daniel’s theme is to “discover exactly who were the men of the Army of Tennessee. How did they feel about their officers, the Yankees, and the course of the war? What occupied their time? How well were they armed, clothed, and fed? (xii)” In the course of answering these inquiries, he found several key differences between eastern and western Confederate soldiers. Troops in the Army of Tennessee were on average less socially refined or well-mannered than their eastern counterparts, and typically existed at a state of lower morale. Secondly, the Army of Tennessee lacked the successful battlefield record of the Army of Northern Virginia, and thus “could not maintain the cohesiveness in confidence in leadership and battlefield victories. (xii)” Instead Daniel argues that the men of the Army of Tennessee maintained a “bottom up” consciousness formed through shared trauma, training exercises, revivals, and long marches that differed from the identity of Lee’s army which was roughly formed around the person of its leader.

Daniel explores a wide variety of themes including manners, drilling and marching, eating and rations, arms and armaments, disease and sickness, hospitals and medical care, leisure time and recreation pastimes, vices including gambling and sex, morale, crimes and punishments from the commonplace to desertion, and religion. His chapter on religion is especially noteworthy in his fair treatment of religion among soldiers, and his conclusion that “It would be unfair to treat the religious outpouring of the soldiers of the Army of Tennessee only as a sociological phenomenon. For most soldiers the transformation [to religious identification] was genuine and deeply personal. For many it was the only thing that made life bearable and death hopeful… (125)” Furthermore, outbreaks of religion and revival helped to form the grassroots association of the soldiers of the Army of Tennessee. Daniels also makes an interesting point by noting that historians have a tendency to look with hindsight upon the tactical and morale outcomes of battles during the overall course of the war, while ignoring the experiences of common soldiers who often believed in the moments after combat that they had won satisfying victories, even if the Army of Tennessee suffered an overall strategic defeat such as at the Battle of Franklin (149). 

Daniel’s sources include letters and diaries of more than three-hundred fifty Confederates who were for the most part under the rank of captain, in order to gain a grass roots interpretation of the Army of Tennessee apart from the bias of general officers. For the same point, Daniel avoids using memoirs as sources, finding them oftentimes politically biased.

Overall, Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee is a splendid little book. Its one noticeable flaw is its bittersweet short length of just over one-hundred fifty pages, which occasionally squashes the reader’s thirst for more details, yet keeps the book a quick read. Daniel’s writing is enjoyable and direct, and features lively anecdotes and quirky quotes that serve to illustrate the personalities of the troops of the Army of Tennessee. The book is a successful social history, and Daniel well achieves his goal of exploring the lives of those soldiers in the theater which increasingly is considered to have determined the outcome of the Civil War.  

-Jonathan Jones

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Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee: a Portrait of Life in a Confederate Army. By Larry L. Daniel. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991)

 

            Ever since Thomas Connelly published his two-volume study of the Confederate Army of Tennessee, Army of the Heartland and Autumn of Glory, the importance of the Western Theatre has been well established in the historiography of the American Civil War.  Historians have paid scant attention to the life and society of the average soldier that served in that theatre.  In Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee: a Portrait of Life in a Confederate Army, Larry L. Daniel seeks to bring the common soldier into focus by exploring the Army of Tennessee from the bottom up.  What he finds is that while the army is substantially similar to its more famous counterpart in northern Virginia, the Army of Tennessee experienced a different war than did the army under Robert E. Lee.

            Through extensive manuscript material and personal memoirs written by individuals with the rank of captain or below, Daniel is able to establish some of the hallmark differences that set the Army of Tennessee apart from its contemporaries and reassess prior historical beliefs concerning events in the Western Theatre.  The most glaring difference between the Army of Tennessee and the Army of Northern Virginia is that the Army of Tennessee consistently lost battles.  This belittled attempts by commanding generals like Braxton Bragg to establish an esprit de corps like the one found in the ranks of the highly successful Virginia army.  This then meant that a different method of unit cohesion needed to be found for the Army of Tennessee, especially since from the outset the formation was plagued by heavy desertion. 

            Daniel argues that desertion was not only an indicative hallmark of the Army of Tennessee, but a key to understanding why those that stayed in the army did so.  Unlike the Army of Northern Virginia, the Army of Tennessee operated over a larger geographical region of the south as it fended off Union advances from multiple angles.  Those campaigns were ultimately unsuccessful in most cases and as Union troops retook more and more of the South Confederate soldiers from those areas had little reason to continue fighting.  Daniel finds that the Army of Tennessee was not a national army so much as it was a large local militia force.  Soldiers serving in it did so to defend the perceived threat to their home.  Once Union forces captured an individual soldier’s hometown, he had little reason to continue to serve in the army if there was little chance Confederate forces would be able to retake the area.  Instead, that soldier’s war was over in his own mind and he returned home to look after his family or get on with a normal life. 

            Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee also forces a reexamination of established understanding of a number of events during the war.  One of the most telling is the popularly held belief, one espoused by no less than General John Bell Hood, that the Army of Tennessee’s moral was broken by the time he took command and a losing attitude had been to entrenched in the army by the like of Joseph Johnston and Braxton Bragg for Hood to correct.  Any battlefield defeats therefore were not Hood’s fault but rather him making the best he could with faulty equipment.  Daniel finds however that the soldiers were in fact eager to win and wanted to fight, but the constant replacement of their commanding officers by Jefferson Davis implied to the soldiers that Davis had little faith in their abilities.  Compounding this, was the recent setbacks by Confederate forces across the South which only heightened the desertion problem since communicating with family and making sure they were safe meant letters needed to cross enemy lines.  It was not the moral of the soldiers that was broken at this point, but rather, the Confederacy itself was starting to crack.

            Through personal letters and a bottom up look at the Army of Tennessee, Larry Daniel is able to shed new light on the American Civil War by looking from a new and intriguing angle. Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee is an important contribution to the historiography of the conflict.

 

Joe Stoltz                                                                                   Texas Christian University

 

 

Larry J. Daniel, Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee: A Portrait of Life in a Confederate Army. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

 

     The Confederate Army of Tennessee, although less well known than Robert E. Lee’s much vaunted Army of Northern Virginia, endured equally intense hardships and battles, and as the major Southern army in the decisive Western Theater, ultimately determined the fate of the Confederacy. While numerous studies have examined the Army of Tennessee’s dysfunctional commanders and their acrimonious relationships with superiors and subordinates, these command controversies have long overshadowed the dedicated men who served in the ranks. Larry J Daniel’s Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee: A Portrait of Life in a Confederate Army, rectifies this neglect. Daniel, the author of several Western Theater studies, utilizes an extraordinary collection of firsthand accounts of common soldiers to argue that “the Army of Tennessee, unlike its sister army in Virginia, could not maintain cohesiveness through confidence in leadership and battlefield victories. It relied instead on certain ‘glues’ that bonded the men together at the lower ranks. Thus the unity of the army can properly be understood only from the bottom up, not the top down, as was the case in Virginia” (xii).

 

     For Soldering in the Army of Tennessee, Daniel examined the “letters and diaries of nearly 350 soldiers (xii),” conducted a statistical analysis of the surviving official records, reviewed contemporary newspaper accounts, along with an abundant number of memoirs and post war reminiscences. The impressive amount of research provided many startling conclusions regarding the life of the lower ranks, for instance, the Army of Tennessee maintained a much larger instance of venereal disease throughout the war than the Army of Northern Virginia or its opponents in the Union Army. Also, while supply difficulties occurred frequently, the most typical complaint regarding rations was the monotonous diet, rather than hunger, and more often than not, the Army of Tennessee was better fed than Confederate armies elsewhere. Daniel also notes an eternal lack of sufficient arms that plagued the army throughout its existence, an improving quality of medical care within the army as the war progressed, and the emergence of a dynamic religious revival after the Chattanooga disaster that greatly improved morale and sustained the army through 1864, without which the army may have collapsed much earlier than it did.

 

     One of the most enlightening conclusions regarding morale in the army is Daniel’s observation that the common soldiers viewed most of the battles fought by the army as victories, although most historians today consider them to be defeats. At the battles of Shiloh, Perryville, and Murfreesboro, savage Confederate attacks forced back the Federals, although in each instance the Southerners ultimately retreated. Despite the retreating retrograde movements, the ordinary soldiers viewed these battles as tactical victories, and this conviction was vital in maintaining the cohesiveness of the army until the middle of the war. It was only at Chattanooga that the army endure a rout that all recognized as a defeat, which shattered unit confidence almost to the breaking point. Daniel also reveals that despite many postwar testimonials, Joseph E. Johnston’s repeated retreats during the Atlanta campaign did not preserve high morale, and his replacement, John Bell Hood, did not immediately suffer a large outpouring of resentment. Daniel’s research proves that it was only later, after the fall of Atlanta and the catastrophic 1864 Tennessee campaign, that Hood became one of the army’s most hated commanders, and conversely, Johnston became its most beloved.

 

     In the end, Daniel concludes that despite horrendous casualties and repeated battlefield defeats, the unity of the Army of Tennessee was preserved through “punishments inflicted upon deserters, in other words, coercion; a well-timed religious revival that stressed commitment, sacrifice, and the ability to take hardships patiently; an spirit developed through shared suffering of the soldiers; and the troops’ often viewing battlefield losses from a different perspective than that of modern historians” (22). Although the Army of Tennessee displayed incredible bravery and self sacrifice, it could not overcome the crippling lack of leadership the eventually destroyed both it and the Confederacy it defended.

 

Than Dossman