Joseph Allan Frank

For generations after the Civil War the most notable attempt to document the experience of soldiers in combat was Stephen Crane’s 1895 novel The Red Badge of Courage. Despite the rich primary literature of soldiers’ letters and memoirs, historians never really studied common soldiers' experiences until after World War II, when Bell Wiley wrote his Life of Johnny Reb and Life of Billy Yank.

In the 1980s historians including Michael Barton and Grady McWhiney began theorizing about the morale and military traditions of Union and Confederate troops. Political scientist Joseph Allan Frank and National Park Service historian George A. Reaves entered the field in 1989 with this book. “Seeing the Elephant” is a quantitative study that tests a hypothesis based on relevant twentieth-century research, especially Anthony Kellett’s book Combat Motivation. “Seeing the elephant” was a common expression in the 1860s, both north and south, for experiencing battle for the first time. Frank and Reaves compiled a data set of what might be called first elephant sightings, drawn from the writings of 381 Union and Confederate men who had experienced brigade-level combat for the first time at the Battle of Shiloh.

Why focus on Shiloh? The April 1862 battle, in which some 90,000 troops saw combat, had the highest proportion of raw troops of any major engagement of the war. Generals on both sides soon lost control of what became a horrifying two-day bloodbath. Frank and Reaves expected to find that “seeing the elephant” would traumatize new recruits. What they found, however, was that the soldiers were remarkably resilient despite heavy casualties and that they remained as committed to their cause after the battle as they had been beforehand.

These results, Frank and Reaves found, are consistent with modern studies of combat psychology and military sociology. Combat experiences of fear, disorientation, rage, and euphoria seem to have been similar in the Civil War and in more recent wars. Where there are differences between the experience of Civil War veterans and their modern counterparts, Frank and Reaves suggest that it can be attributed in part to the greater unit cohesion of regiments whose members normally all came from the same community, and who constantly drilled and fought in close formation. Civil War soldiers were somewhat less likely than modern soldiers to experience a sense of isolation in combat. The proximity of comrades from their community increased pressure not to flee, and Civil War veterans were much more disparaging of shirkers than was the case in World War II. After their first experience of combat they were also more likely than World War II soldiers to express personalized hatred of the enemy. Frank and Reaves suggest that this was because the enemy was physically closer and easily seen as a numerous threat, unlike the enemy in twentieth-century wars.

Frank and Reaves find no evidence to support the contentions of Michael Barton (Goodmen: The Character of Civil War Soldiers) and of Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson (Attack and Die: Civil War Militia Tactics and the Southern Heritage) that there were substantial differences in the fighting traditions of northern and southern soldiers. At least in the western theater, where soldiers in either army were very likely to have recent kinship ties to their enemies, northern and southern soldiers seem to have had almost everything in common, except their allegiance. Frank and Reaves also reject arguments that most soldiers did not fire their weapons or that desertion was unusually high among Civil War troops.

For Frank and Reaves, the typical raw recruit was a patriotic citizen-soldier motivated to fight out of a sense of duty to country. There are a few caveats that may prevent readers from wholeheartedly assenting to this thesis.

In compiling their data set, Frank and Reaves took care to record the kind of source that supplied each record and the kind of audience it was intended for. In their text, unfortunately, they make no effort to distinguish between private letters, letters to newspapers, and memoirs written late in life. At one point the authors cross-tabulate records by date of composition, but do not appear to take account of types of source or intended audiences. The reader is left to wonder whether the authors’ finding that soldiers were patriotic and politically astute rests on an over-selection of letters to newspaper editors.

It would have been useful to have more detailed information on the authors’ data set, perhaps in an appendix. As it is, the reader must rely on the authors’ judgment, including some “inferences” concerning soldiers for whom only limited data were available. One inference that the authors fail to consider is the possibility that soldiers may have remained at the front because the horrors of combat and the experiences of military life had estranged them from civilian society.

Despite these shortcomings, “Seeing the Elephant” is a valuable contribution to Civil War history — perhaps the closest we will ever come to an opinion survey of Union and Confederate recruits in 1862.… (altro)