Social and Broken Courage: Embattled Courage by Gerald Linderman
Sometimes courage is knowing your limitations, failings, and flaws, yet striving within them. This is not a definition of courage that the American soldiers of 1861 would have respected, but it's as true as theirs.
Embattled Courage has two sections: in the first he details the traditional American ideas of war and valor at the start of the Civil War. This worldview defined courage as fearlessness in battle: all other virtues flowed from it. Only the brave had honor, or the decency not to hurt civilians, and this courage was highly gendered. The brave triumphed, dying not at all or with a smile on their faces, while cowards died in pain, as they deserved.
In the second part, ideal meets reality. War is disease, desperation, brutality and misery: men grew hard or died. In the epilogue the fascinating process is recounted by which soldiers and society erased the reality decades later through selective memory and active propaganda in order to recreate heroic illusions that'd lure in a new generation of soldiers.
From the start, Linderman acknowledges limitations: he doesn't address drafted men, his sources--written accounts and letters of the men--privilege the literate and fortunate, and he specifically excludes African-American experiences. This is a shame, because he has written a socio-culture history, of what happens when an untenable cultural ideal meets brutal reality: it shatters, then reforms, a process that deserves its own book.
These limitations leave questions unanswered, and analytic gaps. The book implicitly makes it clear that this culture and conception of courage was largely white, largely Anglo-Saxon, and largely Protestant, but why did this create this particular Courage Culture? This culture had troubling limits. The bravery of African-American soldiers in battle won over such as General George Thomas, but are these reactions of a Courage Culture, or were they shared by the men? Certainly not by the Confederates, who sometimes massacred and brutalized black soldiers, raising questions about the unity of soldiers on both sides.
Slaves are absent in descriptions of how soldiers interacted with civilians in escalating brutality. How did Union soldiers interact with the slaves they met and sometimes freed? How does his narrative of ad-hoc, sometimes bottom-up brutalization fit with Lee's orders to capture and enslave blacks during his second invasion?
There's much room for research into the nature of this culture, the creation of the soldiers' subcultures, and the overall shift from hard truth to--decades later--courageous lies of glorious battle. Such research, or a more openly sociological approach, could have enhanced the book.
Despite this, Linderman's book is riveting, redeemed by its attention to details and insightful teasing out of primary sources to give a human and humane look into the lives of certain groups of soldiers, the culture they came from, and both the war they expected and the war they fought. This book is highly recommended for general readers, and even academic readers--if they are mindful--can find much of value in his account.
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A/N: The assignment said close to 500 words. It's meant to be a brief and concise review of a book in a manner very common in historical journals, and that means there's not a lot of time to summarize every point. It's a new genre for me.
This is not a final draft, and has not yet been turned in, but I think it's pretty solid, and I'm not sure how much more I could say considering the word limitations involved therein.
Amazon Link to Book Reviewed:
https://www.amazon.com/Embattled-Courage-Experience-Combat-American/dp/0029197619
