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I finally finished Bell Irvin Wiley’s The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union! This would have gone much faster, but I decided that I ought to take copious notes, which I’m sure I will appreciate in the future but BOY does it slow things down when you have to stop every other chapter to transcribe your many, many notes.
I had some doubts about this book, given that Wiley kicks it off by saying that “In the initial stage of research I was fearful that my long attachment to Johnny Reb would prevent my treating his foe with the sympathy that he deserved and fair historical treatment required.” (Wiley earlier wrote The Life of Johnny Reb.) And he does get a little defensive when discussing the Yank’s generally negative descriptions of the south in their letters home, entreating readers to remember that the Yanks were being shot at and therefore were, perhaps, not totally objective in complaining that white southerners were dirty and ignorant and uncultured.
(He does concede that the northern soldiers’ letters probably can be taken as proof that many southern white women did, indeed, chew tobacco, simply because there are SO many letters commenting on this fact. The Yanks generally found it gross and disgusting and an affront to their ideals of womanhood. One guy was so revulsed that he decided to stop chewing tobacco himself.)
However, for the most part he achieves the sympathy and fairness to which he aspired, and I still think that this book would form an amazing nucleus for a TV show about the Civil War. It would save the battles for the midseason and season-ending cliffhangers; most of the focus would be on everyday camp life and ridiculous soldier antics, like holding a mock-funeral for a particularly spoiled ration of salt pork, or pranking the new guy by clucking over the quartermaster’s failure to give him his army-issue umbrella.
***
I decided I didn’t have to take notes from Thomas P. Lowry’s The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War unless I really felt like it, which probably means I lost some good stuff, BUT on the other hand it didn’t take me three months to read it, so.
This book does not have a lot about same-sex activity in the Civil War (just one chapter, most of which is discussed at greater length and more sensitively in Jonathan Ned Katz's Love Story: Sex between Men before Homosexuality). However, there IS loads of great material about prostitutes (easily available if the army camped near a city; $3 to $5 a pop, generally), dirty pictures (also widely available at the time; often burned before battles because soldiers didn’t want such pictures found on their corpses), and love letters between soldiers and their wives/sweethearts. Here’s an excerpt: a girl is writing to her fiance about a mutual acquaintance who is pregnant, and our letter writer reports that this acquaintance said “she felt good enough when making it. If it felt good as it did to me the first time you put it in full length, it struck bottom, that is sure.” (35)
Do you KNOW how hard it is to find explicit textual evidence of premarital sex in the nineteenth century? DO YOU KNOW?
It’s impossible to prove, of course, but Lowry speculates that there were probably lots of sexy letters exchanged - he quotes a few other examples, including a wife writing to her husband with specific instructions for “storming her battlements." Like the dirty pictures, probably almost all these letters got destroyed, if not during the war then afterward when people were cleaning up the records they left for their descendents. Do the kiddies need to know that Great-Grandmama sent Great-Grandpapa three paragraphs describing just how to storm her battlements? NO THEY DO NOT, Great-Grandmama decides, and consigns the letter to the flames.
I had some doubts about this book, given that Wiley kicks it off by saying that “In the initial stage of research I was fearful that my long attachment to Johnny Reb would prevent my treating his foe with the sympathy that he deserved and fair historical treatment required.” (Wiley earlier wrote The Life of Johnny Reb.) And he does get a little defensive when discussing the Yank’s generally negative descriptions of the south in their letters home, entreating readers to remember that the Yanks were being shot at and therefore were, perhaps, not totally objective in complaining that white southerners were dirty and ignorant and uncultured.
(He does concede that the northern soldiers’ letters probably can be taken as proof that many southern white women did, indeed, chew tobacco, simply because there are SO many letters commenting on this fact. The Yanks generally found it gross and disgusting and an affront to their ideals of womanhood. One guy was so revulsed that he decided to stop chewing tobacco himself.)
However, for the most part he achieves the sympathy and fairness to which he aspired, and I still think that this book would form an amazing nucleus for a TV show about the Civil War. It would save the battles for the midseason and season-ending cliffhangers; most of the focus would be on everyday camp life and ridiculous soldier antics, like holding a mock-funeral for a particularly spoiled ration of salt pork, or pranking the new guy by clucking over the quartermaster’s failure to give him his army-issue umbrella.
***
I decided I didn’t have to take notes from Thomas P. Lowry’s The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War unless I really felt like it, which probably means I lost some good stuff, BUT on the other hand it didn’t take me three months to read it, so.
This book does not have a lot about same-sex activity in the Civil War (just one chapter, most of which is discussed at greater length and more sensitively in Jonathan Ned Katz's Love Story: Sex between Men before Homosexuality). However, there IS loads of great material about prostitutes (easily available if the army camped near a city; $3 to $5 a pop, generally), dirty pictures (also widely available at the time; often burned before battles because soldiers didn’t want such pictures found on their corpses), and love letters between soldiers and their wives/sweethearts. Here’s an excerpt: a girl is writing to her fiance about a mutual acquaintance who is pregnant, and our letter writer reports that this acquaintance said “she felt good enough when making it. If it felt good as it did to me the first time you put it in full length, it struck bottom, that is sure.” (35)
Do you KNOW how hard it is to find explicit textual evidence of premarital sex in the nineteenth century? DO YOU KNOW?
It’s impossible to prove, of course, but Lowry speculates that there were probably lots of sexy letters exchanged - he quotes a few other examples, including a wife writing to her husband with specific instructions for “storming her battlements." Like the dirty pictures, probably almost all these letters got destroyed, if not during the war then afterward when people were cleaning up the records they left for their descendents. Do the kiddies need to know that Great-Grandmama sent Great-Grandpapa three paragraphs describing just how to storm her battlements? NO THEY DO NOT, Great-Grandmama decides, and consigns the letter to the flames.
