Linderman, Gerald F. (1980). Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War. (click preceding link for information on purchasing from Amazon)New York: The Free Press.

Excerpts permanently located on a Library of Social Science Website here.

Abstract: “General, General, my wife is dying.  I must see her.” “Man, man, do you love your wife more than country? 

115—“So rampant was disease in the Civil War that Paul Steiner has called it “natural biological warfare.” Union battle deaths—those killed in combat or mortally wounded—numbered 110,000, but twice as many, 224,580, died of disease, and in the Confederate forces the ratio must also have approximated two to one.”

125—“Father Sheeran visited the field of Second Manassas: “[T]hose scattered throughout the woods and over the fields presented a shocking spectacle.  Some with their brains oozing out; some with the face shot off: others with their bowels protruding: others with shattered limbs.  But to him it was Chancellorsville that was “perhaps the most revolting scene I had ever witnessed.”

“Our line of battle extended over some eight miles and for that distance you see the dead bodies of the enemy lying in every direction, some with their heads shot off, some with their brains oozing out, some pierced through the head with musket balls, some with their noses shot away, some with their mouths smashed, some wounded in the neck, some with broken arms or legs, some shot through the breast and some cut in two with shells.” “No one would even comprehend the war’s 623,026 deaths or 1,084,453 casualties, but soldiers were still stunned by the scale perceptible to them.”

127—“Some soldiers, it was true, seemed untouched by their encounters with the dead.  Writing home, Francis Amass Walker put the rhetorical question, “Shall I tell you how they (Union soldiers) die?” and then described a wounded Massachusetts boy—knee joints blown out; hands torn off; leg broken; the side of the body punctured—who, Walker wrote without apparent pain or perplexity, died in the cause, “the holy name of freedom, country, law” and fell “under the bright, beautiful banner of freedom.”

129—“Wilson thought the experience of listening to wounded soldiers “crying piteously” for aid “horrible beyond description” and was convinced that if everyone could see and hear as he had, “war would cease, and there would never be another battle.”

130—“William Smaller Owen of the Washington Artillery of New Orleans remarked: “The sorriest sights are in those dreadful field-hospitals, established in barns, under large tents, and in houses. The screams and groans of the poor fellows undergoing amputation are sometimes dreadful--and then the sight of arms and legs surrounding these places, as they are through into great piles, is something one that has seen the results of battle can never forget.”

137—“Sherman, moreover, appears to have felt less than others a visceral resistance to the prospect of meeting battle on the defensive and to have resisted better than others the impulse to demonstrate courage in the charge; he was thus prepared to apply that lesson.”

137—“Sherman’s willingness to accept a defensive posture—“undoubtedly precipitated the ruin of the Confederate cause.” Sherman never broke the connection between courage and the charge. He continued to cite “the courage and spirit” of those Southern attackers who, repulsed again and again, renewed the charge a half-dozen times.  But he saw more clearly than others that the charge had become defeat.”

158—“A related casualty was the conviction that courageous behavior imparted battlefield protection. Experience taught the opposite: The cowards wither remained at home or found ways to avoid battle; the bravest “went farthest and stand longest under fire;” the best died.  In January 1863 General Frank Paxton of the Stonewall Brigade complained: “Out of the fifteen field officers elected last spring, five have been killed and six wounded. In those losses are many whom we were always accustomed to regard as our best men.”

“Three months later he again found it “sad, indeed, to think how many good men we have lost. Those upon whom we all looked as distinguished for purity of character as men, and for gallantry as soldiers, seem to have been the first victims.” After thirty days of Wilderness combat, Colonel Theodore Lyman of Meade’s staff deplored Grant’s strategy; “[T]here has been too much assaulting, this campaign! The best officers and men are liable, by their greater gallantry, to be first disabled.”

Those in the ranks noted the phenomenon principally by its result: a decline in the quality of their leadership. John Haskell, an artillery commander in Lee’s army, was bitter that those who took such care to protect their own lives, “the dodgers,” by virtue of their seniority had been promoted to replace dead or disabled officers who had “taken no pains” to preserve their lives. 

By such routes soldiers moved far from their original conceptions of ostentatious courage as protection and assurance of victory to the realization that it was instead an invitation to death.  A few might attempt to find a new virtue in that reality—Charles Russell Lowell, contemplating the death in battle of Robert Gould Shaw, decided that the best colonel of the best black regiment had to die, for “it was a sacrifice we owed”—but most simply felt its demoralization.”

159—“As convictions about the potency and protectiveness of courage yielded the suspicion that special courage had become the mark of death, another of the war’s original precepts—that the courageous death was the good death; that it had about it some nobler quality reflected, for example, in the smiles of courageous dead and withheld from frowning cowardly dead—also failed the test of observation.”

160—“Lieutenant William Wood of the 19^th Virginia was one of the 15,000 who made Pickett’s charge. Prior to the attack he and his men were ordered to lie down, exposed both to a boiling sun and to fire of Federal artillery batteries. (A Napoleon cannon could hurl a 12-pound ball a mile.” When they were brought to attention to begin the attack, some of the men immediately dropped of “seeming sunstroke,” but for the charge itself Wood had only praise. It was a “splendid array” and a “beautiful line of battle.”

But it failed: “Down! Down! go the boys,” A he reached that spot of ground beyond which no Confederate could go, he suffered a sense of personal shame: “Stopping at the fence, I looked to the right and left and felt we were disgraced.” the assault’s failure bluntly told him that he and his comrades had not done enough, and yet he knew that they had done everything they had earlier been sure would carry the victory. The result was a paralyzing disbelief: “With one single exception I witnessed no cowardice, and yet we had not a skirmish line [still standing]. Courage should have conquered!”

160-161—“And then the charge: To Dooley it became simply that which opened the “work of death.” “Volley after volley of crashing musket balls sweep through the line and mow us down like wheat before the scythe.” Only thirty-five of his regiment’s 155 men escaped bullets and shells, and Dooley, with his shattered thighs, was not one of them.

“I tell you, there is no romance in making one of these charges,” he concluded; “the enthusiasm of ardent breasts in many cases ain’t there” He realized that the spirit of heroism no longer possessed the men; he mildly regretted its departure, but he had lost confidence that its presence would have reversed the outcome.”

177—“By the spring of 1864 he had become convinced that “[p]eople must learn that war is a thing of life or death: if a man won’t go to the front he must be shot.”

178—“General, General, my wife is dying.  I must see her.” “Man, man, do you love your wife more than country? George Picket chided him for treating wounds and illness as symptomatic of a lack of efficiency, patriotism, or courage: “He places no value on human life, caring for nothing so much as fighting, unless it be praying.”

To a subordinated who had protested that a certain attack would be “madness: my regiment would be exterminated, “Jackson was said to have replied, “Colonel, do your duty.  I have made every arrangement to care for the wounded and bury the dead.”

Caption to photograph “The stance and expression of an Ohio soldier convey the youthfulness, hopefulness, and determination that marked those who marched to war in 1861. In both Union and Confederate armies, eighteen-year-olds constituted the largest single age-group during the first year of the war.”

211—“As experience upended assumptions about the nature of war, Sherman too seemed to draw power from the sense of powerlessness conveyed by his civilian failures. “Generally,” he said, “war is destruction and nothing else.” “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.” “You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war.”

Accordingly, against such a force, one no more subjected to man’s control than natural phenomena, individuals were powerless save to conform. “I have made war vindictively; war is war, and you can make nothing else of it.” But that was simply a logician’s sleight-of-hand. By subordinating himself, by presenting himself to wage war in just those ways that made it what he said it was.  Sherman said war was hell, and the last years of the Civil War were hellish because he and others made them so.”

214—“Still by 1864 most soldiers were inextricably bound to the dynamic of war and echoed almost all aspects of Sherman’s position. Watching Atlanta burn, Michael Fitch agreed that war “is made up of cruelty and destruction.” Robert Burdette of the 47^th Illinois saw inevitably in the demolition of Southern homes, fences, and railroads: “That’s war. Destruction of innocent and useful things. Destruction of everything.”