The Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader

Edited by Larry M. Logue and Michael Barton
Index, softcover, 456 pp., 2007. New York University Press, 838 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10003-4812, $26 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Clint Johnson
Clint Johnson's latest book is The Politically Incorrect Guide To The South. His next book will be Pursuit - The Chase, Capture, Persecution and Surprising Release of Confederate President Jefferson Davis coming in June 2008.

Review:
This is an interesting book if you don't mind the dry as bone style of writing practiced by professors, and aren't looking for the blood and guts of battle reports. In fact, this is a valuable book because I haven't seen the kind of information it contains in any other publication.

I do, however, have a problem with its mundane title. At first glance and first thought this book looks like it is a compilation of articles from the magazine published by the Sons of Confederate Veterans called Confederate Veteran, but it covers both sides.

This book is a detailed - very detailed - look at the lives of Civil War veterans after they returned home. In fact, it starts with the very act of returning home. Two of the early articles describe how veterans of both sides made their way home. Most of the Union troops took special trains and some of them didn't make it.

A sobering line from one veteran's letter describes how the tops of the train cars were covered with soldiers unwilling to wait for another train. When the train stopped, most of them were missing. The soldiers returning home had fallen off the tops of the cars, presumably to their deaths after surviving months and years of combat and camp diseases.

Some of the articles reveal interesting information about how land such as was available in the territory of Nebraska was distributed to veterans as rewards for serving. A man who had served just 90 days to qualify as a veteran in the Union army could get 160 acres of land along a railroad under the Homestead Act. A civilian who had not served got only 80 acres.

Several articles give a good analysis of the cost of the war. Eighteen Northerners out of 1,000 were killed during the war, compared to just three per thousand during World War II. The same article says that by 1910, 28 percent of all American men aged 65 and older were receiving some form of pension.

Another article describes how one out of three Southern soldiers was wounded and fewer than half of the young Confederates who had gone off to war in 1861 were alive by 1890.

There are articles about opiate addition, post-traumatic stress syndrome, where United States Colored Troops were when they left the army and how they used their pensions.

There are even several essays about how the war helped enlarge the federal government by creating entitlement programs such as pensions that grew exponentially as politicians discovered the veterans were a voting bloc to be courted.