Thomas McCormick Walker, 111th Regiment Pennsylvania Vet. Volunteers, noted what he found in the way of Southern culture and society in 1865 after his several years of fighting in the South: After my journey is over I sum up my Southern Experiences in no very flattering terms to the Country or its people. I cannot but despise a people who have the effrontery to claim that they are the Chivalry…

The process of “hardening” (via the experience of battle over a period of time) has been analyzed by historians and interpreted in several different ways. James M. McPherson saw the stress (combat fatigue) of combat as a breaking down of the soldier’s senses (“the nerve to endure”) thus subduing the awareness to suffering. That though they saw horrible things, they could rise above it and McPherson stressed the importance of…

In the Soldier Studies: Civil War Soldier Series, Chandra M. Manning posed the question, “Can Soldiers Tell Us Anything about Lincoln?” Manning does a fine job analyzing Lincoln’s influence on Northern soldiers, whom as she noted, he affectionately called his “thinking bayonets.” What motivated both Confederate and Federal soldiers to fight has been addressed admirably by noted historians (James McPherson, Gerald Linderman, Reid Mitchell, Earl J. Hess, Randall Jimerson, and…