Eyewitness accounts help put the
towering events of the Civil War into a
recognizably human context.

When New Jersey poet Walt Whitman predicted during the Civil War that “the real war will never get into the books,” he wasreferring to the impossibility of anyone describing accurately the myriad horrors he had witnessed as a volunteer nurse at Unionhospitals in Washington, D.C. He might just as well have been speaking for the hundreds of thousands of common soldiers,Northern and Southern, whose own humble rolesin the war would go unreported in the official histories and notable memoirs of the age.

Fortunately for us, the men and women of the Civil War generation were unusually literate–at least by today’s benightedstandards–and they left behind their own homespun accounts of the greatest event of their otherwise unremarkable lives. Inletters, diaries, journals and jottings, they vividly described the war from the point of view of a single person, or a single family,caught up in the coils of a giant cataclysm the likes of which no one in American history had seen before. Sometimesmisspelled, sometimes ungrammatical, their writings nevertheless are always alive with the unmistakable authenticity of a first-person account, an eyewitness report from the scene of a great national tragedy.

This issue of America’s Civil War ushers in a regular new department, “Eyewitness to War,” that will enable these usuallyunheard voices to speak again. ACW readers have consistently requested more firsthand accounts, and it is truly an honor anda privilege to be able to fulfill their requests.

As the late great historian Bell Irvin Wiley discovered years ago, it was often the common soldiers (and their wives, daughters,sweethearts, fathers and sons) who were best able to capture the life-altering sweep of the Civil War, by placing it in thecontext of one small life at a time. Wiley, in his groundbreaking study The Life of Johnny Reb, noted early on that “in the greatcrisis of the 1860s, the ‘lowly’ people gave a better account of themselves than did the more privileged members of Southernsociety. They quarreled less than those who were rated their superiors; they were more cooperative with each other and withtheir leaders than were the ruling caste. They bore their hardship, which exceeded that of any other group, North or South,with less complaint than the bigwigs, partly because they were more habituated to deprivation, suffering, and sorrow. Theoverwhelming majority were generous in their impulses, wholesome in their reactions, and stalwart in their adversity.” They andtheir Northern adversaries, he concluded, were “the very heart of the America over whose fields and plains they fought themost tragic of American wars.”

That America was a very different country from today’s sprawling, MTV-saturated megalopolis, and those Americans werevery different from us. Historians are leery about making too-sweeping statements regarding the past, but statistics–theultimate refuge of liars, Mark Twain once observed–reveal that the men and women of the Civil War generation, on average,were more religious, more idealistic, more romantic and more patriotic than we are today. This is not intended to insult thosereaders who consider themselves any or all of the aforementioned things, but merely to suggest that the average 21-year-old(or 41-year-old) in 1861 was more likely to be willing to die for a set of philosophical beliefs than his more jaded modern-daycounterpart. As the Gulf War and the ongoing military presence in Bosnia reveal, there are thousands of young men andwomen in the military today who are equally willing to pay the price for safeguarding our liberty, but whether they are anoutright majority–as were the young Southerners and Northerners who answered the call in the Civil War–is decidedlydoubtful.

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