REVIEWS

The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies

By Peter S. Carmichael

University of North Carolina Press, 2018, $31.97

COMPLEX VOLUNTEERS

REVIEWED BY ANDREW F. LANG

Scholarship on the common soldier of the Civil War is strong and vibrant, and Peter Carmichael’s The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies adds a new and ambitious element to the field. His work fundamentally alters the trajectory of the literature, compelling readers to recognize not why soldiers fought but instead how they thought.

Treating Union and Confederate citizen-soldiers with absorbing empathy, Carmichael reminds us that his subjects were governed by a range of emotional commitments antagonized by the horrors of war. To appreciate the full scope of the soldiering experience, he argues, one must understand the inner mind of common volunteers.

Carmichael gives due credit to the myriad historians who have paved the dynamic field of soldier studies, yet his perspective leaves little doubt about what he considers the subject’s current limitations. While ideological rhetoric may explain a soldier’s commitment to a national political cause, such lofty expressions cannot capture the