Against the "toy soldier model" of the Civil War

I've been trying to post this as a comment to this post:  Challenging The Toy Soldier Model of Civil War History  by Kevin Levin, Civil War Memory blog 07/12/06.  But Typepad is just refusing to take my comment for some reason.  So I'm posting it as a separate post here.

I like the "toy soldier" metaphor.  Military history is obviously valuable for a lot of reasons.  But even the most devoted student will surely have their eyes glaze over occasionally as they read about this side's left flank holding firm, while the center in the other side weakened because some officer gave a mistaken command, etc.

I haven't read Lee's Miserables.  But I have seen some of the work that Reid Mitchell and James McPherson have done on the ordinary soldiers in the Civil War.  It's actually a valuable source on soldiers' lives.  The armies on both sides were highly literate, probably the most literate armies the US has ever fielded (including today's).  Many of them were in their late 20s and 30s and were husbands and fathers.  So they had reason to write lots of letters and were literate enough to write a lot of good ones.  Plus, there was no systematic military censorship of the soldiers' mail.

The drawback of stories focusing on the individual soldiers' experiences in the war itself is that the political context of the war often is obscured by the methodology itself.  There have already been good stories written by our "embedded" journalists in the Iraq War describing the narrative details of soldiers' experiences there - like Matt Taibi's current piece in Rolling Stone.

But someone could know minute details of how IEDs work, what kind of vehicles the Army uses in which part of the country and how the guerrillas are countering US helicopters and still be completely clueless about the causes of the war and its various political implications.

To understand that requires looking at the prewar political, intelligence and strategic decisions.  And the same is true of the Civil War.  For understanding how the war came to be in the first place requires knowing about things like the Fugitive Slave Law, the Wilmot Proviso and Bleeding Kansas.

The Civil War soldiers were aware of public events, especially because the decade before the war had such intensely polarized politics.  And some of that comes through in their letters, of course.  But mostly they weren't writing the folks back home to analyze the legal and political implications of the Dred Scott decision and things like that.