Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar
Adjustments explores the North's Civil War in ways that brings fresh
perspectives to our knowledge of the way soldiers and civilians
interacted in the Civil War North. Northerners rarely confronted the
hardships their southern counterparts faced, but they still found the
war a challenging event that to varying degrees would re-shape and
transform their old comfortable assumptions about their lives. Having
given up their sons to save the Union, they craved information and
followed the progress of the companies and regiments that they had sent
off to fight. At the same time, their soldier boys never fully severed
their ties with home, even as the rigors of war made them rougher
versions of their old selves. The home front and the front lines
remained intimately connected. This book expands our understanding of
those connections.
The authors of the essays in this volume bring new and different
approaches to some familiar topics while offering answers to some
questions that other scholars have ignored for too long. They explore
such varied experiences as recruitment, soldiers' motivation, civilian
access to the combat experience, wartime correspondence, benevolence and
organized relief, race relations, definitions of freedom and
citizenship, and ways civilians interacted with soldiers who sojourned
in their communities. It is important that they do not stop with the end
of the fighting, but also explore such postwar problems as the
reintegration of soldiers into northern life and the claims to public
memory, including those made by African Americans. Taken as a whole, the
essays in Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front provide a better
understanding of the larger scope and depth of wartime events
experienced by both civilians and soldiers and of the ways those events
nurtured the enduring connections between those who fought and those who
remained at home. In that regard, the essays go to the very heart of the
Civil War experience.
