Civil War Veteran: A Historical

¶ … Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader by edited by Larry M. Logue and Michael Barton. Specifically it will summarize and analyze the book, including the author's thesis. The two editors of this book focus on the aftermath of the Civil War, especially on the veterans who fought in and survived the war. They write early in the book, "[T]he veterans shared a profoundly important event, but the rest of their lives followed courses determined by a host of circumstances" (Logue and Barton 5). Thus, their thesis is the varied experiences of veterans after the war, something that is not often discussed in most history textbooks.

This book covers the period directly after the war throughout Reconstruction and beyond, and discusses the experiences of war veterans after the war, both black and white. It focuses on several key issues, including compensating the veterans after the war, how they coped with their experiences, (some became drug or alcohol abusers), and how society viewed the veterans. It also focuses on memory in at least some of the sections, and sums up that memory by noting, "The fleeting character of memory demands the continuous creation and re-creation of a sense of the past; no enduring social memory can be entirely static" (Logue and Barton 436). The book does evoke a sense of the past and the men who fought in the Civil War, so in that, it does what it sets out to do. It also illustrates the difficulties that veterans have when they return from war, something that is often overlooked in most textbooks, and it indicates that memory is a very important part of any historic occasion, and that memory must continue to alter as the event passes further into the past. This book helps keep the memory of those veterans alive, and so, it serves a vital purpose for many Civil War historians and enthusiasts.

Perhaps the most compelling part of this book focuses on the veterans and the southern veterans trek homeward after the war. As the losers, they faced violence and ridicule in Northern states, but all in all, the "Confederate dead were more powerful and awesome than the survivors of the war" (Logue and Barton 51). The dead were those that were remembered and martyred in the South, and the survivors had to do just that - survive. Northern soldiers eventually got some kind of pension as a reward for their valor, but the South was in disarray, and Southern soldiers really did not gain anything for their valor. The reactions to this were difficult to read, because many soldiers turned to drugs, alcohol, violence, and many suffered from mental problems. This is an area not often explored, and it made this book more interesting. It would have been nice if the editors had included even more essays and evaluations in this section of the book, because it was definitely the most commanding of all the sections.