Print

Introduction xvii soldier would run at the first experience of gunfire or he would stay and fight. This issue would also have been a personal one for all the thousands of soldiers who faced combat for the very first time, either Northern or Southern. Primary documents and writing from that period reflect the dif- ficulty of transforming a democracy—created for the development of the individual—into a large war-fighting machine—created for the destruc- tion of the individual. Chapter 2 discusses further the tribulations of the soldierly life by focusing on Ambrose Bierce’s “Chickamauga,” a short story that presents the more personal side of the war. Primary documents and writing from that period by soldiers and generals reflect the personal challenge of fighting in a war that created so many casualties and caused so much economic and social damage in American culture. Chapter 3 examines Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, a fictionalized account of her work as a nurse during the war. Primary documents concerning the establishment of a hospital system to care for the enormous casual- ties during war help illuminate just how difficult society found the task of caring for the soldier’s wounds. Just like the tribulations of a soldier’s life during the war, the life of an individual who cared for the wounded and sick was equally difficult. Chapter 4 focuses on the poetry of two of the nation’s leading poets during the war: Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Chapter 5 examines Lincoln’s conceptualization of how to both preserve the Union and free the nation from slavery. The record shows that Lincoln’s process was evolutionary rather than revolutionary. This chapter focuses on the “Gettysburg Address.” Primary documents and writing illuminate Lincoln’s evolution as a war-time president, in the mid- dle of the most difficult test of the United States of America. What this book demonstrates most is that the Civil War tested not only a fractured and incomplete democracy but truly also the individual in historically unprecedented ways. Note 1. James McPherson, “A Defining Time in Our Nation’s History,” The Civil War Trust. Retrieved from https://www.civilwar.org/learn/articles/ brief-overview-american-civil-war