Writing of Boredom, Grief, and Death: On the Illinois Soldiers of Mark Flotow's "In Their Letters, In Their Words"

Mark Flotow, Editor | In Their Letters, In Their Words: Illinois Civil War Soldiers Write Home | Southern Illinois University Press | 2019 | 320 Pages

Walt Whitman famously once wrote about the Civil War that “the real war will never get in the books.” If Mark Flotow’s new edited volume In Their Letters, In Their Words: Illinois Civil War Soldiers Write Home does not capture “the real war,” then it is doubtful that any book ever will. Like Bell Irvin Wiley’s classics, Life of Johnny Reb and Life of Billy Yank, this book tells the story of the Civil War’s common soldier. The book relies on selections from the letters of 165 Union soldiers and sailors from across 64 Illinois counties. Flotow’s voice is hardly present in the book, only a paragraph or a sentence at a time to provide the necessary historical context for readers to understand the quoted excerpt. Organized by topical themes, Flotow deftly guides the reader through the range of Civil War soldiers’ experiences. Readers enlist, march, and fight alongside Illinois’ Civil War soldiers. More than that, readers bear witness to the boredom, homesickness, and longing for loved ones that soldiers felt. The insight into soldiers’ emotional inner worlds is a reminder that the Civil War was fought by citizen soldiers who thought of themselves as the former, not the latter. In Their Letters shows the most intimate, emotional moments of a generation called to war. 

By allowing the words of the soldiers to stand on their own, Flotow encourages the reader to respond empathetically to historical actors. Notably, the book does not privilege any class or rank of men above another. Officers and enlisted men are quoted side by side. In Their Letters demonstrates that not all soldiers wrote their letters in the high-tongued, Shakespearean style of Sullivan Ballou, whose last letter home was paired with the tune “Ashokan Farewell” in Ken Burns’ The Civil War and became ingrained into the minds of many a Civil War buff. Flotow’s hands-off editorial style restores the voices of barely literate men who spelled words based on their sound, with some possessing less than a grade school education. For every Sullivan Ballou, there was a Corporal Levi Stewart, who wrote to his sister-in-law that “it is with a heavy heart I rite to inform you that Lewis [levi’s brother] got kilt in the battle… he was shot in the breast and was kiled instantly Dead it is to horiable for me to tell you all of the particklers a bout it.” With the turn of each page, readers bridge the 150-plus year gap between the present and the Civil War. Taking a pause and thinking of the author of each letter puts the war into perspective: a distraught Levi Stewart having watched his brother die on the field of battle, now writing his sister-in-law to inform her of the death of her husband.

In Their Letters, In Their Words also demonstrates that the difficult challenges of 2020 are not a historical first. As society searches for information and understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic, readers of this book bear witness to men dealing with the diseases and illnesses that would kill more Civil War soldiers than battle ever would. That two soldiers died of disease for every one killed in battle during the Civil War remained in my mind as I turned each page and America’s COVID-19 death toll rose. Similarly, the chapter on “Debility and Disease,” which follows soldiers’ responses to disease, puts in perspective all of the amazing journalism done to convey the ongoing pandemic’s seriousness. At moments, it felt like the soldiers were speaking directly to us in the present, the reader, reminding us of the importance of responding to this historical moment appropriately. One sentence worth sharing comes from Sergeant Z. Payson Shumway of the 14th Illinois Cavalry, who admitted to being “a great coward in sickness & fear it more than the Enemys bullets.” Maybe we would all do a little better if we became cowards in the face of an invisible, airborne enemy.

If Flotow’s Illinois soldiers speak to the ongoing pandemic, they also speak to the ongoing national dialogue about the role of slavery in the Civil War. The chapter featuring soldiers’ response to the Southern people and landscape includes a few pages of soldier’s observations and thoughts on slavery. Chaplain James Woollard of the 111th Infantry, though once opposed to middling with slavery, wrote in 1864 that “I am now in favor of coming to the End in the shortest way and declaring freedom to every slavery, and putting them in the field to put down the Rebelyon and to obstain their oan [own] freedom.” Corporal James Crawford agreed that “it is plain to me that slavery caused this war. put down slavery and there is no more war.” That not every soldier responded to emancipation favorably and without believing in equality for African Americans is a reminder of the complexity of individual responses to broad political events. But for those seeking an insight into the continued national dialogue about the Civil War, look to Flotow’s book, which puts the words of Civil War soldiers directly into the hands of the readers.

In Their Letters, In Their Words exclusively quotes from letters held in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Arguably, what this book reveals is that in an age where some are decrying what they perceive as the destruction of history, that the best way to preserve history is to support—meaning donate to—our archives, historical societies, and humanities education. Books equally as powerful and insightful as Flotow’s are waiting in archival folders and collections across the country. The impetus remains on us, citizens and historians, to do as this book does, to take the events and people of generations past and restore their vibrant humanity to a modern audience still wrangling with the meaning and consequences of their actions.  

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