The Life of Johnny Reb

The Life of Johnny Reb. By Bell Wiley (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943. Pp. 440. Notes. Bibliographical Note. Illustrations.

Bell Wiley’s Johnny Reb is an atmospheric social history of the common Confederate soldier. Wiley’s reason for writing was to open up the lives of the thousands of young Confederates who served the southern confederacy. These young men, Wiley said, had been ignored or at best served as a hazy backdrop for the comings and goings of great men at the head of great armies. So in many ways this book, now almost seventy years old, was the first real social history of the Confederate army. Wiley used extensive primary sources; the bulk of those sources were wartime diaries and letters. These letters opened up the Civil War to Wiley as it really was; his most sensational pieces of history often came “from the barely decipherable missives of rustic privates.” Wiley covers almost every aspect of the southern soldier’s life. The actual battles, while important and defining moments in the lives of these young men, often were less heart wrenching than hunger, camp hardship, and separation from wives and lovers. Wiley prefaces his work with one constant theme: try as historians might to reconcile the Confederate experiment with a sort of reactionary and preservative U.S. constitutionalism (one thinks of William Cooper or Emory Thomas), Wiley maintains that southern soldiers saw themselves as rebels, knew they were participating in a rebellion, and gloried in this identity.

Southern soldiers went to war in 1861, often because of deep-seated anger at northerners who young Confederates viewed as godless hypocrites. But the most important reason many young men went to war was their innate desire for adventure. Once the soldiers got to war, Wiley tells the reader that fear of battle was generally replaced by an “extreme nervousness” that was generally relieved when the battles actually began. Soldiers noted this transformation; they saw themselves as new men the moment that actually engaged in a battle. Some soldiers ran, but these were a small minority. Those who didn’t run or desert had the hardness of winter to endure. Surviving winter was not impossible, but real comfort was difficult to come by.

Food and the acquisition thereof was the major concern of Confederate soldiers. Early in the war Confederate armies were well stocked and soldiers well fed, but by July of 1861 some armies were beginning to conserve diminishing rations. Confederate armies began to starve much earlier than other historians have previously thought. Some armies in the east were facing devastating food shortages in the middle of 1862; Wiley did not that the armies in the west fared a little better. The deplenished food supplies went hand in hand with the deteriorating clothing of the Confederate army. The Confederate government’s vision of the average southern soldier was a impressive one indeed, but few soldiers ever actually wore the uniforms proscribed by the Confederate Army Regulations. Even fewer kept the uniforms they were given. By the end of the Civil War the Cofederate soldier famously lacked eve shoes; the parallel to Valley Forge would have been appricated by southern soldiers in the winter of 1864/1865.

Wiley addresses the struggle of soldiers to reconcile their pre-war conceptions about life and war with the reality they were now presented with. Southerners were particularly surprised by the North’s will to fight. Most southern soldiers had assumed that northerners would not fight and didn’t want to fight at all. Once the soldiers realized that the war would be protracted they settled into the routines of soldiering; they tried anything they could. They drew, played sports, and organized their own fraternities within the army. Many wrote home, providing them with an emotional outlet and future historians with excellent sources material. They fought disease, especially malaria, but they also enjoyed the beauty of female company while on camping. Some struck up innocent dalliances and some even married local women where they were fighting.

Confederate soldiers lived their rebellion to the fullest. They endured hardship for many reasons, but at their core, they continued to fight not just for the Confederacy, but also ultimately for each other. The Confederate soldiers were just ordinary people. Wiley concludes that they did great things; ordinary people doing great things ultimately elevated them to greatness.

Miles Smith Texas Christian University

The Life of Johnny Reb: the Common Soldier of the Confederacy. By Bell Irving Wiley. (Indianaplis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1943.)

Many books, concerning the Civil War, have appeared since the ending of hostilities. Most deal with military tactics, commanders or battles in general. One of the first to examine the individual Civil War combatant was Bell Irving Wiley in his groundbreaking work The Life of Johnny Reb: the Common Soldier of the Confederacy. In this work, Wiley attempts to capture the essence of the Confederate soldier, along with his motivations and concerns. In the seventeen chapters of his book, he does an outstanding job of what he has set out to accomplish.

In the initial chapters of his work, Wiley investigates what factors provoked young southerners to take up arms against their northern brothers. He comes to several conclusions, the most important, in his opinion, being the hatred of the northerner. Wiley explains that the young southerner held a constructed view of the Yankee; which he perceived to be threatening his very way of life. Most felt that the northerner would destroy his family, friends and his community. This contrived fear forced many to join the fight. Secondly, Wiley concludes that many young men went to war for the experience and adventure. Many men and boys joined the fight to experience the “glory” of war. The last reason so many went to war, in the opinion of Wiley, was the pressure exerted by the community. Their fellow community members often ostracized those that did not rush to join up for the cause. Many joined in order to escape the shame that would have been thrust upon them. Wiley also suggest that to understand the rebel soldier you must look at the entire picture. Most southern men were illiterate and understood very little about the true nature of the war. They knew only what they had been told or what they gained through personal experience. After the soldiers reached the actual war, they only could see what was happening in their particular area of the war. Wiley explains that everything the soldiers learned about the war arrived with letters from home. These letters became an important lifeline to the Confederate soldier, who always wished to protect his home and family.

In the remaining chapters of his work, Wiley investigates the daily life of the Confederate soldier. He demonstrates the difficulties faced by the common soldier including lack of supplies, and the shear hardship of living and fighting in the field. Wiley also spends some time looking at the diversions in which the rebels took up to pass their free time. Often, according to Wiley, gambling and drinking captured the interest of the rebel soldier. According to Wiley, at the very first of the conflict the typical rebel soldier felt invisible and unstoppable, but by the end of the war he had lost hope for the cause and wished to return home. Above all, the protection of family and home always accompanied the rebel soldier.

Wiley has done an excellent job with this work. It is apparent the extensive amount of research compiled by Wiley. He has spent countless hours sorting through personal letters, contemporary newspaper articles, and other assorted sources. By using personal letters to construct his work, Wiley enables the reader to obtain a picture of what life was like for the typical confederate infantryman. Wiley also constructs his work with little bias and gives a balanced account of the Rebel infantryman. This book has been incredibly helpful to the Civil War student since its first publication and it should remain important for years to come. Wiley’s work will remain the definitive book on the average soldier.

The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy. By Bell Irvin Wiley. (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge La. 1943)

In 1861 as the Southern states seceded from the Union, thousands of men flocked to the colors to defend their states and their new country. Many of them saw war as a game, a welcome respite from farm life or a chance for adventure. They were wrong. The American Civil War turned into a bloody four-year conflict that ended up costing over 350,000 Southern lives alone. During the course of that conflict the Confederate soldiers came simply to be known as “Johnny Reb” by their counterparts in blue. In The Life of Johnny Reb, Bell Wiley attempts to paint a picture of the life and mentality of Johnny Reb as an aggregate based on their journals, letters and diaries. In the process he created one of the seminal works in Civil War history.

In the first chapter, Off To War, Wiley gives a glance at the motives of Southerners for volunteering and then the process by which the volunteers became disciplined soldiers. He begins by pointing out that many Southerners were “Rarin’ for a fight,” so eager were they to be at the enemy. Many of them were motivated by a deep-seeded hatred for the North and Northerners. They felt as if Yankee attitudes toward slavery were entirely unreasonable, and they were prepared to fight for their peculiar institution. But most of the volunteers, Wiley points out, were motivated by a desire for adventure, to escape the doldrums of farm life.

Meanwhile they organized into companies and began to drill. Women helped by sewing uniforms and other necessities, and often presented local companies with flags amidst community celebrations. Universities closed down as all of their students went to war and the South in general prepared for war. Companies were allowed the tradition of electing their own officers, and this sometimes led to problems with popular but incompetent leaders for the new companies and regiments. However, by 1862 Wiley notes that most of the volunteers’ rough edges had been hewn away; the volunteer had become a soldier.

Southerners were particularly anxious to come to blows with the enemy. Excitement was felt by most who had not yet seen combat. When they did finally see battle, they found it revolting. The death and carnage all around them, the smoke and exhaustion all combined to cause a deep depression experienced by most men after their first taste of battle. But they became used to the killing and bloodshed as time wore on and soon alarmingly found that they were immune to sensitivity regarding the dead.

Many evils also attended Confederate camp life. Gambling was perhaps one of the most prevalent of these sins, followed by excessive drinking. Theft and destruction of private property were also ubiquitous. The most difficult vice in obtaining information about is the promiscuity that attended the Confederate armies when prostitutes were near at hand. It was certainly prevalent and many cases of venereal disease were reported in the officers and enlisted men alike. But because of the Victorian ethic of the day such things were rarely spoken about in public.

There is an entire chapter devoted to the reactions to combat. Wiley notes that many Confederates did desert when faced with danger and hardship, but his conclusion is that considering the hardships with which they were faced, the wonder is that more didn’t desert. Often hungry, tired and fighting a losing war, many Confederates stayed on in the face of adversity to the bitter end.

Food and clothing also played a healthy part in the interest of Johnny Rebs. Toward the beginning of the war Confederate soldiers complained about the quality of their rations when they received bad beef or other meat. Toward the end, they only complained about quantity. As the Confederacy began to crumble food became more and more scarce and many were lucky if they got one meal a day. As to raiment, Confederates began the war dressed very well. As the war wore on the material for clothes and the availability of shoes became an issue of concern. The veterans of the Army of Tennessee perhaps had it worse than anyone else by the end of the war as they retreated from the frozen field of Nashville back across the Tennessee River. Lee’s veterans fared somewhat better because of their relatively stationary position inside the trenches at Petersburg, but by the end they too had scarcely enough clothing to cover themselves and certainly not enough to keep out the elements.

As the war dragged on, many Southerners began to lose hope and turn to God for the salvation of their cause. Wiley asserts that many Confederates began to lose hope in 1864 and 1865 and this contributed to the demise of the Confederacy. Toward the end of the war there was an increase in revivalism as Evangelical Christianity swept through the ranks. In part this was a reaction to the failing Confederacy and in part it was a reaction to the danger faced by the men day in and day out. During the last years of the war many Southerners lost hope and deserted while those who remained turned to God for salvation and a renewal of spirit.

Wiley asserts that a lack of discipline and rampant disease also harmed the Confederate war effort. Drawing on soldiers’ letters and diaries to make the point, he states that because of the volunteer nature of the units, discipline never rose to the level necessary to sustain an effective force in the field. The deadliest foe of the Confederate soldiers was disease, both communicable and infectious. Outbreaks of measles and mumps combined with gangrene brought on by unsanitary conditions brought about the deaths of many soldiers during the war. The Confederacy was also hurt by a lack of modern weaponry and equipment. They remedied this by the end of the war, but the Southern soldier hated excess baggage in the extreme. If possible he would strip down to nothing but his clothes, haversack, canteen, accouterments and rifle.

Another point that Wiley espouses is that based on the interactions between Union and Confederate pickets and other niceties exchanged during the war, the Civil War was a chivalric, needless and crazy war. He asserts that these niceties represent underlying feelings by combatants on both sides that prevented it from becoming as gruesome and bitter a conflict as it might otherwise have been. Wiley signifies this contradiction with the phrase “beloved enemy.”

Finally, Southern soldiers had an extremely diverse background. In general they were young, unmarried Anglo Saxon Protestants who came from divergent points of reference to become one of the greatest fighting forces of all time. Wiley asserts that there are few armies in history with soldiers who exhibited such élan, and though they were human in every sense of the word, this spirit is what has earned them a permanent place in the history of great fighting men.

In conclusion, Wiley’s work emerges as one of the first relatively unbiased accounts of the Confederate soldier. To this point most Confederate history had circled around the Lost Cause mythology of Civil War history, but Wiley strips away the veneer to a degree and allows the reader to see Johnny Reb as he really was. There is a Lost Cause flavor to the work, but many of the points Wiley makes about the demise of the Confederacy clearly contradict the scholarship of the day and earn for The Life of Johnny Reb a permanent place in the true history of the Confederacy.