F. N. Boney

Not a terribly interesting read, I'm afraid, but at least mercifully short. I read it in about an hour. Editor Boney tried to make this brief day diary of a Union soldier interesting, but it was a losing battle, despite careful research and voluminous footnotes. This is not a war diary. Although Matthew Woodruff was a veteran of the whole war, this account began after the war was over. Woodruff, who had been wounded in the closing days of the war, at the battle of Mobile Bay, spent a month or two in hospital and back home in Missouri. But upon his recovery, he was posted back to his company which was tasked as part of the Union's occupation army, first in Pascagoula and then in Mobile. As the First Sergeant of his company, Woodruff's diary is filled mostly with humdrum entries of deskwork, including the making of duty rosters, writing up of deserter and AWOL reports, babysitting drunk and rowdy soldiers, reducing them in rank, bailing them out of jail, etc. Many reports of drunken brawls, knifings and shootings in the unsettled aftermath of the war. Woodruff also writes of day trips to go fishing or explore the surrounding countryside, dances attended. His contempt for the defeated southerners and especially for the newly freed slaves and "colored soldiers" co-garrisoned with his unit is undisguised and obvious. There are also accounts of riots and crooked postwar elections, and with the soldiers' increasing impatience to be mustered out of the postwar army and sent home. Many of them simply disappear, deserters. In fact, after six months of entries (from July 1865 to New Year's Day 1866), the diary simply ends. The editor notes that not long after that Woodruff himself deserted, just weeks before his unit was finally disbanded and mustered out. I would only recommend this book for serious students of the U.S. Civil War, to give a flavor of the postwar occupied South.… (altro)