In Their Letters, in Their Words: Illinois Civil War Soldiers Write Home - Softcover

Mark Flotow (editor)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809337630 ISBN 13: 9780809337637

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 2020

Synopsis

A vital lifeline to home during the Civil War, the letters of soldiers to their families and friends remain a treasure for those seeking to connect with and understand the most turbulent period of American history. Rather than focus on the experiences of a few witnesses, this impressively researched book documents 165 Illinois Civil War soldiers’ and sailors’ lives through the lens of their personal letters. Editor Mark Flotow chose a variety of letter writers who hailed from counties throughout the state, served in different branches of the military at different ranks, and represented the gamut of social experiences and war outcomes.

Flotow provides extensive quotations from the letters. By allowing the soldiers to speak for themselves, he captures what mattered most to them. Illinois soldiers wrote about their reasons for enlisting; the nature of training and duties; necessities like eating, sleeping, marching, and making the best of often harsh and chaotic circumstances; Southern culture; slavery; their opinions of commanding officers and the president; disease, medicine, and hospitals; their prisoner-of-war experiences; and the ways they left the army. Through letters from afar, many soldiers sought to manage their homes and farms, while some single men attempted to woo their sweethearts.

Flotow includes brief biographies for each soldier quoted in the book, weaves historical context and analysis with the letters, and organizes them by topic. Thus, intimate details cited in individual letters reveal their significance for those who lived and shaped this tumultuous era. The result is not only insightful history but also compelling reading.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Flotow is the retired director of the Illinois Center for Health Statistics and is a former president of the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems. He is an adjunct research associate in anthropology at the Illinois State Museum and a volunteer interviewer with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library’s oral history program. Flotow has published articles about Illinois Civil War soldiers in Illinois Heritage and has given many presentations on the topic.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface 
 
Athens, Alabama, December 13, 1863, to Millie
dear wife I am hungry for a letter from your precious hands—I do not know what I should do if I had not my dear wife to think about & talk to —Assistant Surgeon William Allen, 9th Illinois Infantry, from Bond County
 
Letters are somewhat passé today, but during the Civil War they were the next best thing to an in-person conversation. They generally were written as if talking, and undoubtedly the readers imagined hearing their loved ones’ and friends’ voices as the words ?owed o? the pages. Their writing was personal, detailed, and revealing, and their letters represent a treasure trove of intimate information for us seeking to understand the past.
 
The letters of Illinois Civil War soldiers bear scrutiny for at least four import-ant, state-history-related reasons. First, Illinois had the highest rate of volunteer soldiers per 1,000 capita of any Union state, at 151.3. Illinois generally met its periodic federally mandated quotas for soldiers with minimal use of the draft. Whether patriotism or enthusiasm, Illinois’s robust response was perhaps partially due to a favorite son in the White House. Second, by 1860 Illinois was becoming nationally prominent in several key respects. No longer a frontier region, Illinois had the fourth largest population of all the states. Illinois was mostly rural (with about half of its soldiers from farms), but Chicago already was established as an important urban center (109,260 population, with roughly half foreign born). Illinois was becoming the nation’s crossroads both by established waterways and newer railroads that crisscrossed the state. These transportation modes translated into important strategic factors during the Civil War. The third reason relates to the o?cial state motto, “State Sovereignty, National Union,” which re?ects early Illinois’s southern roots. The 1860 presidential election had two candidates from Illinois: Democrat Stephen Douglas and Republican Abraham Lincoln. The southern third of Illinois voted strongly Democratic, the northern third Republican, and the middle third a close division of these two major political parties, mirroring a mix of migrants from the Southern, New England, and mid-Atlantic states.4 Finally, Illinois would become known as “the Land of Lincoln,” in itself a unique reason to study the Civil War and the sixteenth president’s impact and legacy through the words and letters of Illinois’s soldiers.
 
Beyond Illinois, there is Bell Irvin Wiley’s classic The Life of Billy Yank, which explores the experiences of Union Civil War soldiers.6 Wiley uses quotations from soldiers’ letters throughout the book. Two interesting letter-focused works are Robert Bonner’s The Soldier’s Pen and John Zimm’s This Wicked Rebel-lion. Bonner featured letters from a handful of both Union and Confederate soldiers, and Zimm utilized soldiers’ letters that had appeared in Wisconsin newspapers. I appreciate the personal perspective of the former and the state-wide focus of the latter.
 
How is this volume di?erent? In 2013, I sought a book like this one, but without success. At that time, I was writing poems to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the war, and I scoured Illinois soldiers’ personal letters to understand the mindsets, speech, and everyday life of those who had lived (and shaped) the Civil War era. I wanted to foster a social history directly inspired by those with a boots-in-the-mud perspective. After reviewing letters from a variety of public and private sources for both the poems and this book, I ultimately used only letter collections from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (formerly the Illinois State Historical Library) in Spring?eld. This institution’s letter collections covered Illinois geography, had good provenance, were very often the original items (instead of images or transcriptions), and were well organized and readily accessible (for future readers and researchers too). I selected 165 soldiers and sailors from various branches of the military, from the enlisted and commissioned ranks, originating from sixty-four of Illinois’s counties, who had participated in a wide array of military campaigns, and who represented the gamut of war experiences and outcomes. Map 1 shows the distribution of the 165 soldiers by county. Appendix A contains a brief biography for each soldier who thus is a contributor to this book. With a few exceptions, I have presented selected extracts rather than nearly complete letters, which renders a more targeted and concise text and avoids needless repetition. (While soldiers’ diaries also are personal, they generally are neither conversational nor social. Consequently, I did not employ them for the purposes of this book.)
 
The book is arranged primarily by topics and themes, and somewhat secondarily by the chronology of the Civil War. The salient topics gleaned from soldiers’ letters form the book’s backbone to which their collective experiences coalesced. Since soldiers’ statements tend more toward social commentary than military, I made only limited e?orts to provide coverage of the major engagements and campaigns in which Illinois regiments participated. However, simply because so many Illinois soldiers were in the war’s western campaigns, this book contains descriptions of the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, the Battle of Shiloh, the siege of Vicksburg, the Battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga, the campaigns in Georgia, and many others.
 
I presume readers may have little knowledge of the Civil War. Therefore, I have provided context regarding soldiers’ speci?c references, such as to high- ranking o?cers or political leaders, various battles, and singular events. Appen-dix B is a basic Civil War chronology, and map 2 shows cities and battle sites relative to this book. If you are desiring explanations of the strategies, tactics, and other military-related topics, there are numerous insightful compendiums and books by a wide variety of authors on almost any battle or campaign that could be mentioned. Some of these are included in the bibliography.
 
The types of Illinois soldiers’ letters speci?cally not included are those that were not personal. For example, military correspondence and o?cial reports in the form of letters were not used for this book. Similarly, I have excluded soldiers’ letters written speci?cally for newspapers, or their editors. These types of letters—meant for o?cial posterity or perhaps to raise an issue—were written, in many cases, as quasi-public statements.
 
A notable exception to using just letters as sources for this book is the inclusion of some former soldiers’ written reminiscences of their Civil War prisoner-of-war experiences, found in chapter ten. While I have included some cautiously written letter extracts from prisoners of war, they are generally devoid of personal expression and details. I felt the retrospective writings were a necessary exception to properly depict the often perilous and dire realities faced by captured and incarcerated Illinois soldiers.

 

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809337630
• ISBN 13: 9780809337637
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320