Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments

by Cimbala, Paul A.; Miller, Randall M.

• ISBN13: 9780823221462
• ISBN10: 0823221466
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-02-01
• Publisher: Fordham University Press

Summary

Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments explores the North's Civil War in ways that brings fresh perspectives to our knowledge of the way soldiers and civilians interacted in the Civil War North. Northerners rarely confronted the hardships their southern counterparts faced, but they still found the war a challenging event that to varying degrees would re-shape and transform their old comfortable assumptions about their lives. Having given up their sons to save the Union, they craved information and followed the progress of the companies and regiments that they had sent off to fight. At the same time, their soldier boys never fully severed their ties with home, even as the rigors of war made them rougher versions of their old selves. The home front and the front lines remained intimately connected. This book expands our understanding of those connections.The authors of the essays in this volume bring new and different approaches to some familiar topics while offering answers to some questions that other scholars have ignored for too long. They explore such varied experiences as recruitment, soldiers' motivation, civilian access to the combat experience, wartime correspondence, benevolence and organized relief, race relations, definitions of freedom and citizenship, and ways civilians interacted with soldiers who sojourned in their communities. It is important that they do not stop with the end of the fighting, but also explore such postwar problems as the reintegration of soldiers into northern life and the claims to public memory, including those made by African Americans. Taken as a whole, the essays in Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front provide a better understanding of the larger scope and depth of wartime events experienced by both civilians and soldiers and of the ways those events nurtured the enduring connections between those who fought and those who remained at home. In that regard, the essays go to the very heart of the Civil War experience.

Author Biography

Paul A. Cimbala is Professor of History at Fordham University and editor of the Press's series The North's Civil War and Reconstructing America. Randall M. Miller is Professor of History and holder of the William Dirk Warren Sesquicentennial Chair at Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	xi
Randall M. Miller
PART 1: FILLING THE RANKS
``We Are All in This War'': The 148th Pennsylvania and Home Front Dissension in Centre County during the Civil War	3	(27)
Carol Reardon
``Volunteer While You May'': Manpower Mobilization in Dubuque, Iowa	30	(39)
Russell L. Johnson
``If They Would Know What I Know It Would Be Pretty Hard to Raise One Company in York'': Recruiting, the Draft, and Society's Response in York County, Pennsylvania, 1861-1865	69	(50)
Mark A. Snell
PART 2: NORTHERNERS AND THEIR MEN IN ARMS
``Tell Me What the Sensations Are'': The Northern Home Front Learns about Combat	119	(24)
Earl J. Hess
``Listen Ladies One and All'': Union Soldiers Yearn for the Society of Their ``Fair Cousins of the North''	143	(39)
Patricia L. Richard
Soldiering on the Home Front: The Veteran Reserve Corps and the Northern People	182	(37)
Paul A. Cimbala
Saving Jack: Religion, Benevolent Organizations, and Union Sailors during the Civil War	219	(44)
Michael J. Bennett
In the Lord's Army: The United States Christian Commission, Soldiers, and the Union War Effort	263	(30)
David A. Raney
Carrying the Home Front to War: Soldiers, Race, and New England Culture during the Civil War	293	(34)
David A. Cecere
PART 3: FROM WAR TO PEACE
``Surely They Remember Me'': The 16th Connecticut in War, Captivity, and Public Memory	327	(34)
Lesley J. Gordon
``Honorable Scars'': Northern Amputees and the Meaning of Civil War Injuries	361	(34)
Frances Clarke
The Impact of the Civil War on Nineteenth-Century Marriages	395	(22)
Megan J. McClintock
A Different Civil War: African American Veterans in New Bedford, Massachusetts	417	(25)
Earl F. Mulderink III
``I Would Rather Shake Hands with the Blackest Nigger in the Land'': Northern Black Civil War Veterans and the Grand Army of the Republic	442	(21)
Donald R. Shaffer
``For Every Man Who Wore the Blue'': The Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States and the ' Charges of Elitism after the Civil War	463	(20)
Dana B. Shoaf
Afterword	483	(6)
Joseph T. Glatthaar
Contributors	489	(4)
Index	493