The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home

TitleThe Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home
Publication TypeBook
Year of Publication1993
AuthorsMitchell, Reid
Number of Pages201
PublisherOxford University Press
CityNew York
Abstract

In The Vacant Chair, Mitchell draws on the letters, diaries, and memoirs of common soldiers to show how mid-nineteenth-century ideas and images of the home and family shaped the union soldier's approach to everything from military discipline to battlefield bravery. For hundreds of thousands of "boys," as they called themselves, the Union army was an extension of their home and childhood experiences. Many experienced the war as a coming-of-age rite, a test of such manly virtues as self-control, endurance, and courage. They served in companies recruited from the same communities, and they wrote letters reporting on each other's performance—conscious that their own behavior in the army would affect their reputations back home. So, too, were they deeply affected by letters from their families, as wives and mothers complained of suffering or demanded greater valor. Mitchell also shows how this hometown basis for volunteer units eroded respect for military rank, as men served with officers they saw as equals... In return, officers usually adopted paternalist attitudes toward their "boys"—especially in the case of white officers commanding black soldiers. Mitchell goes on to look at the role of women in the soldiers' experiences, from the feminine center of their own households to their hatred of Confederate women as "she-devils."

URLhttps://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=886722
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