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Kevin Adams, The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in the Civil War Armies, Journal of American History, Volume 107, Issue 1, June 2020, Pages 206–207, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaaa082
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Peter S. Carmichael's ambitious attempt to recast our understanding of soldiers’ experiences during the American Civil War is likely to remain in readers’ minds long after they finish it. To be sure, only time will reveal whether The War for the Common Soldier will become the authority of record on the subject. What can be said now is that the book provides an important introduction to essential elements of soldiers’ lives such as cowardice, religious faith, and defeat.
Some bold assertions in the introduction set the tone. Believing that the literature on soldiers to date has failed to “fully [recover] the life of the rank and file,” in part because scholars have “cherry-pick[ed]” quotes that align with predetermined arguments, Carmichael insists that a “case-study approach” that traces the evolution of soldier thinking amid “the flow of events over an extended period of time,” provides the key to understanding the Civil War soldier (pp. 10, 12). Importantly, solving the enigma of the common soldier entails the realization that there is no solution: since soldiers came from a multiplicity of backgrounds—racial, ethnic, regional, or class—“there was no common soldier in the Civil War” (p. 12).
