Date of Award
2-22-2022
Document Type
Thesis
Department
History
First Reader
Dr. Christopher Mortenson
Second Reader
Dr. K.C. Motl
Third Reader
Professor Autumn Mortenson
Abstract
The most acceptable answer in today's political climate is that the Civil War was fought over slavery. Even in the rural South where I grew up, academics cast a wary eye when it is suggested that the Civil War was fought for any other reason. Historical writing is often careful to mention that other causes of the war are still interrelated with slavery, thus adding nuance. Yet still, slavery was the central cause of the Civil War, as there would have not been a war without the presence of institutionalized slavery in America. What history may remember as the spirit of the war and the reality of the war can be very different.
History often favors the key players, such as the generals of the Civil War who can be listed off and studied extensively in libraries. Figures such as Lincoln, Grant, and Lee receive the limelight of historical research, and their letters and diaries have been studied with scrutiny. Lower-ranked soldiers, simply because of their sheer numbers, do not receive this same treatment. Civil War soldiers were predominantly white, and many did not own slaves, even in the Confederacy. A common argument from Confederate apologists is that most Confederate soldiers did not own slaves. This is true, however, the average Confederate soldier was more likely to own a slave than the average civilian: Historian Joseph T. Glathaar observed that: "slightly more than one in ten [soldiers] owned slaves personally. This compared favorably to the Confederacy as a whole, in which one in every twenty white persons owned slaves." Some Confederate soldiers even sympathized with the African Americans they encountered, even though they were fighting a war over the right to enslave them. It may seem tempting for new students in history to point out these discrepancies as evidence that slavery was not the key cause of the Civil War. Nonetheless, I also argue that the Civil War was fought over slavery, even if the everyday soldier did not see slavery as their personal inspiration to fight. The diaries and letters of both Confederate and Union soldiers will be analyzed to observe what stood out to soldiers at the time of battle and how these memories were altered by ideology such as the Lost Cause and other influencing factors. To deepen my study, I also wish to compare soldiers' wartime writings to memoirs of the same battle to see if there are any differences or exceptional observations to be made about soldiers' writing long after the war.
I anticipated that the soldier's memoirs would be less accurate than diaries and letters written during battle. The passage of time can deteriorate memory, but more importantly biases can form after the war's end. The Lost Cause is a famous example of Confederate revisionist history, and the memoirs of Confederate soldiers likely will contain plenty of examples of this ideology. The entries written shortly after the battle of Shiloh likely would have less of this hindsight bias, which would make the diaries the more accurate method of identifying a soldier's thoughts and feelings about the battle.
After conducting my research, I was surprised to discover that this was not always true. In fact, the diaries and letters typically had less consistent and less factually correct information than that of the memoirs written after the war. As this essay will divulge, rumor dispersed misinformation throughout soldiers. Often, soldiers were unaware if their army was winning or losing - both at the battle of Shiloh and in the overall war. Soldiers were convinced that they were winning the war since Shiloh took place early on in the Civil War. Shiloh was one of the first battles that made soldiers come to realize just how gruesome the war would be, which thus makes Shiloh significant to Civil War memory. Topics linked to emotion, such as trauma, religion, and thoughts about scenery also persisted with soldiers both during and after the battle of Shiloh. The specifics about these emotions vary based upon the time soldiers wrote about them, however, the emotional aspects of war overall demonstrate the importance of Shiloh in the memory of soldiers. Memoirs largely were written for a broad audience and were more inclined to convince readers of an agenda.
For Confederate soldiers, this agenda may be the perpetuation of white supremacy or the superiority of the Southern army. The Lost Cause and the association of the Confederacy with 'Southern Heritage' meant that once the Civil War had ended, soldiers could continue the legacy of the Confederacy in their authorship. Soldiers would thus be motivated to retroactively promote a narrative about the battle of Shiloh that may not be accurate to what they initially thought during the conflict. Literature published several decades after the war, especially from Confederate soldiers, typically exaggerated or misconstrued the circumstances at Shiloh in order to defend their regional honor.
On the other hand, diaries and letters were published more often as Civil War artifacts and thus did not have as much of a specific motive or message to promote. This observation was contrary to my expectations prior to this study. Diary and letter entries often were less factually correct than memoirs, however, memoirs were also more likely to contain hindsight bias and revisionist perspectives to the battle of Shiloh.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Taylor, Brianna, "Memory and Memoirs: A Study of Civil War Soldiers' Perspectives on the Battle of Shiloh" (2022). Honors Theses. 916.
https://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/honors_theses/916