Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War [Paperback]

Gerald Linderman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 1989 | ISBN-10: 0029197619 | ISBN-13: 978-0029197615

Linderman traces each soldier's path from the exhilaration of enlistment to the disillusionment of battle to postwar alienation. He provides a rare glimpse of the personal battle that raged within soldiers then and now.

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (April 17, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0029197619
• ISBN-13: 978-0029197615
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #406,192 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I recommend it to anyone that wants a common's view of war!, July 19, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (Paperback)

I had purchased this book from a now defunct bookshop and was told from a friend in Cyberspace, that if I wanted an in depth understanding of the common soldier and his thoughts about combat and the war, I had to read Linderman's Embattled Courage. In the overleaf, Linderman quotes from Livy's History of Rome, XXX.20, "Nowhere do events correspond less to men's expectations than in war." Linderman uses this quote for his main thesis. He lets the soldiers themselves communicate their thoughts using their own letters to home. In the early chapters, Linderman examines the values of the soldiers and their will to fight for their respective causes. He focuses on the values that the soldiers carried with them to the front-manliness, godliness, duty, honor, and knightliness. In the letters from the soldiers, Linderman reveals how the young men believed that they had joined up to fight a civilized war where bravery and courage would protect them and guarantee victory. ! After the newness of battle wore off on the citizen soldiers, they began to learn what war actually was-killing, death by disease, and extreme boredom. The war itself is transformed in the latter years to what Sherman described as "total war." No longer were heroic charges the mainstay of attack. In 1864, the shovel was used to build trenches. War in the latter stage was not as glorious as the soldiers perceived it to be in 1861. The disillusionment of war is stated by Rice Bull of the 123rd NY: "The next afternoon on our way back to the picket line I saw fifteen unburied Confederate soldiers lying where they had fallen. It was not a pleasant sight to me, even though these man had been our enemies. I thought when I saw them, of the sorrow and grief there would be in fifteen homes somewhere; and for what had these young lives been sacrificed?...There should be some way to settle political differences without slaughtering human beings and wearing out the bod! ies and sapping the strength of those who may be fortunate ! enough to escape the death penalty." Rice Bull's late war attitudes differ greatly from that which many had in 1861. At war's end, men distanced themselves from all facets of the war. In the 1890's, as the soldiers faded into old age, they once again fondly reminisced about their war days. The GAR swelled from 30,000 men in 1878 to 428,000 men in 1890. Youngsters were told of the great days that the soldiers had in war. Ironically, those same soldiers who were so disillusioned in war at its closure were forgetting those lessons in their twilight years. Those soldiers who were to learn that their expectations of war in 1861, differed greatly from that which they saw in 1864-65, would return in the 1890's to re-perpetuate their prewar expectations thus creating the vicious cycle of war that has plagued man since the days of the Romans. Linderman's book was quite thought provoking for me and I recommend it to anyone that wants to reflect on what motivates men to fight ! in war and the lessons that never seem to be learned about the cruel realities of war. Ask yourself what peaks your interest in the Civil War, the Courageous War of 1861-63 or the Cruel War of 1864-65?****************Korky

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but questionable scholarship, March 22, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (Paperback)

Linderman has written a very interesting study of soldiers' psychological reactions to the Civil War. He discusses the viewpoints that people had going into the war and how they changed with the experience of combat. Perhaps the best part of the book is his study of Civil War veterans and the post-war reaction. Having said that, though, I found some of Linderman's scholarship problematic. He has a tendency to make broad sweeping statements ("All soldiers thought X...) which worries me. His bibliography is a little short and is slanted, as is some of his analysis, toward Northern contributors. Thus, he has very little to say about whether losing the war was psychologically different from winning it, which one would think would be the case. Overall, this is a useful book but I would read it in conjunction with other works on the subject -- McPherson's studies and *Seeing the Elephant* in particular.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Two Faces of Civil War Courage, December 19, 2003

By 

Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (Paperback)

Gerald Linderman's "Embattled Courage" (1987) is an outstanding study of the motivation of soldiers during the American Civil War and of the values of the society to which they responded.

The book is in two broad sections. The first part of the book, titled "Courage's War" covers the early years of the war to about mid-1863 (the time of the climactic Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg). During these years, Linderman sees the primary motivating factor of the war as courage and of individual effort. The soldier enlisting in the war effort -- and during the early years volunteers bore the overwhelming brunt of the effort- had concepts of personal bravery in the face of danger, fearlessness and commitment to duty and to a purpose. He believed that the actions of an individual mattered and could make a difference to the result of a battle. This was an idealistic concept and Linderman shows well how it was reinforced and complemented by concepts of manliness, comradeship, godliness and morality, chivalry, and the brotherhood of soldiers, which assumes a certain degree of respect for the enemy on the other side of the line. Linderman points out that the Civil War may have been the last conflict in which these ideals were taken seriously. They were dashed in WW I, and in the later phases of the Civil War itself.

The second part of the book, titled "A Perilous Education" shows how the initial idealism underlying the soldiers' war effort became hardened and tarnished with the stark reality of combat. The concept of courage didn't disappear but it changed and the soldiers became tougher and more realistic. On occasion cynicism and disilusion set in. The factors leading to this change in perspective were the horrors and deaths on the battlefield, reulting largely from the increased range of Civil War weaponry which helped make the traditional offensive charge (as at Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Cold Harbor) ineffective and death-dealing to the agressor. Other factors include the crude Civil War hospitals, with blood and amputation on every side, the long forced marches, the toll of disease in the camps, which led to twice as many deaths as did combat, the boredom of camp life, imprisionment in camps such as Andersonville, the lengthy character of the war, the confiict between volunteers and draftees, and the lack of food and supplies which led soldiers to "forage" from civilians and to strip valuables and clothes from the bodies of dead comrades and enemies. The civil war became a total, brutal war in the final two years. Stonewall Jackson early in the war, and Grant and Sherman subsequently, understood the total nature of the effort that was required to pursue this war.

The idealism with which the volunteers entered the war and their concept of individual effort changed radically when faced with the harshness of the war. This changed their understanding of themselves, the war effort, and their relationship to the civilian population.

There is a lengthy "epilogue' to the book which discusses the fate of the concept of courage following the war and how it evolved through the end of the 19th century. Broadly speaking, a certain nostalgia set in beginning in the 1880's when the original ideals of courage revived in memory and the hardships of the war effort receded.

Lindererman's book is well documented with contemporaneous accounts from the soldiers and with subsequent memoirs. It taught me a great deal about motivation in combat and how it changes with experience. Those interested in pursuing the subject further might be interested in James McPherson's "For Cause and Comrades", which takes issue with Linderman on certain points, and in David Blight's "Race and Reunion". The latter book develops the theme sketched in Linderman's epilogue by showing the effects of time on how people in the United States perceived the conflict of 1861 - 1865.