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Summary
Summary
A senior military historian presents an unflinching account of the human costs of the Civil War.
Many Americans, argues Michael C. C. Adams, tend to think of the Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. Millions of tourists flock to battlefields each year as vacation destinations, their perceptions of the war often shaped by reenactors who work hard for verisimilitude but who cannot ultimately simulate mutilation, madness, chronic disease, advanced physical decay. In Living Hell , Adams tries a different tack, clustering the voices of myriad actual participants on the firing line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical reenactment.
Perhaps because the United States has not seen conventional war on its own soil since 1865, the collective memory of its horror has faded, so that we have sanitized and romanticized even the experience of the Civil War. Neither film nor reenactment can fully capture the hard truth of the four-year conflict. Living Hell presents a stark portrait of the human costs of the Civil War and gives readers a more accurate appreciation of its profound and lasting consequences.
Adams examines the sharp contrast between the expectations of recruits versus the realities of communal living, the enormous problems of dirt and exposure, poor diet, malnutrition, and disease. He describes the slaughter produced by close-order combat, the difficulties of cleaning up the battlefields--where tens of thousands of dead and wounded often lay in an area of only a few square miles--and the resulting psychological damage survivors experienced.
Drawing extensively on letters and memoirs of individual soldiers, Adams assembles vivid accounts of the distress Confederate and Union soldiers faced daily: sickness, exhaustion, hunger, devastating injuries, and makeshift hospitals where saws were often the medical instrument of choice.
Inverting Robert E. Lee's famous line about war, Adams suggests that too many Americans become fond of war out of ignorance of its terrors. Providing a powerful counterpoint to Civil War glorification, Living Hell echoes William Tecumseh Sherman's comment that war is cruelty and cannot be refined.
Praise for Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861-1865
"This excellent and provocative work concludes with a chapter suggesting how the image of Southern military superiority endured in spite of defeat."-- Civil War History
"Adams's imaginative connections between culture and combat provide a forceful reminder that Civil War military history belongs not in an encapsulated realm, with its own categories and arcane language, but at the center of the study of the intellectual, social, and psychological currents that prevailed in the mid-nineteenth century."-- Journal of American History
Praise for The Best War Ever: America and World War II
"Adams has a real gift for efficiently explaining complex historical problems."-- Reviews in American History
"Not only is this mythologizing bad history, says Adams, it is dangerous as well. Surrounding the war with an aura of nostalgia both fosters the delusion that war can cure our social ills and makes us strong again, and weakens confidence in our ability to act effectively in our own time."-- Journal of Military History
Author Notes
Michael C. C. Adams, Regents Professor of History Emeritus at Northern Kentucky University, is the author of The Best War Ever: America and World War II and Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861-1865 , winner of the Museum of the Confederacy's Jefferson Davis Prize for the best Civil War book.
Reviews (2)
Choice Review
How does one grapple with the violence of war? The question, which haunts the study of armed conflict, becomes ever more important with the passage of time. In the 21st century, the study of the Civil War is often divorced from its devastating impact on soldiers and communities. In eight chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion, Adams (retired, Univ. of Northern Kentucky) asks readers to track the transformation of the Civil War from the eager eyes of the new recruit to the doubting wisdom of the scarred veteran. Through extensive use of published memoirs and appropriate secondary literature, the author explores the excitement of the new soldier, the decimation on the battlefield, the underappreciated work of clearing the dead, and the psychological legacy of war. The book closes with an attempt "to assess the war's outcomes, including its high human and material cost." But what can be said of the 750,000 Civil War deaths, a number that Adams oddly misstates by using the out-of-date figure of 620,000? Filled with grim passages from the battlefield and surgical unit, the book recaptures life in and around the battlefield. In the end, it attempts to understand why such details become faded memories. --Scott Gac, Trinity College
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Adams (Echoes of War) eschews the celebratory patinas of Civil War memorials to reveal the extremely dark sides of the war. Using soldiers' accounts, the author describes the misery, gore, and futility "the real war" that poet Walt Whitman omitted in his works. Adams describes it all: the disease and desperation that led soldiers to have mental and physical breakdowns, the life-altering injuries and post-traumatic stress disorders suffered by those on the front lines, the ravages and rapes of civilians by invading and retreating armies, and much more. Insisting that we have glorified the war too much and, thus, betrayed history, Adams aims to right the course with his honesty. He also ponders the questions of how and why we have come to adore the Civil War and have, as a result, minimized its terrible truths. VERDICT This essential book gives soldiers their due and presents the realities of war in a way few have dared. Ideal for anyone interested in military history. Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. ix |
| Opening | p. 3 |
| 1 Gone for a Soldier | p. 13 |
| 2 On the March | p. 37 |
| 3 Close-Order Combat | p. 60 |
| 4 Clearing the Battlefield | p. 84 |
| 5 The Edge of Sanity | p. 108 |
| 6 Deprivations and Dislocations | p. 133 |
| 7 Invasions and Violations | p. 159 |
| 8 State of the Union | p. 182 |
| Closing. General Lee and the Gray Ladies | p. 206 |
| Notes | p. 219 |
| Suggested Further Reading | p. 267 |
| Index | p. 277 |