Abstract
The timing of this book may not be surprising. At the start of the Civil War centennial, in 1961, Alan T. Nolan published what was, for many years, the decisive book on the Iron Brigade, The Iron Brigade: A Military History. Now, with the sesquicentennial of the Civil War upon us, Lance Herdegen offers us a new appraisal of this most famous, and only wholly western (mostly from Wisconsin with one Indiana regiment), infantry brigade in the Army of the Potomac. It reveals in its title one of the main shifts between Civil War scholarship in the 1960s and today: the inclusion of memory. The further away from the Civil War we move in time, it seems, the greater our urge to explore its memory as that was understood in its own day and in ours. Not that the memory of the Iron Brigade is in much danger of fading. For one thing, it has its own dedicated website. For another, its enduring fame is in no small part thanks to Herdegen’s many works on the subject. These include a study of the brigade during the Gettysburg campaign (Those Damned Black Hats: The Iron Brigade in the Gettysburg Campaign, 2010) and an edited edition of the journal of a soldier from the 7th Wisconsin Volunteers, one of the regiments that made up the Iron Brigade (Four Years with the Iron Brigade: The Civil War Journal of William R. Ray, Seventh Wisconsin Volunteers, 2009).
Herdegen’s prodigious scholarship on the subject to date, of course, may mean that the first question facing any potential reader of this volume might be: do we actually need another study of the Iron Brigade, albeit one that promises coverage of the unit from its inception in 1861 all the way to Appomattox (Nolan had ended his story at Gettysburg, the battle that almost ended the brigade) and beyond? Herdegen is fully aware of this question, and seeks to address it in his introduction, mainly via reference to ‘previously unused material’ and to ‘new sources found over the past half-century’, Together these offer, he argues, answers to many ‘lingering questions’ about the Iron Brigade. Indeed, although it is traditionally not viewed as constructive to ask any man what he is thinking, Herdegen is not alone among Civil War scholars in seeking to discover precisely what his subjects were dwelling on ‘during battle, or while lying wounded in a field’ (p. xii). How much thinking actually takes place during any battle may be a moot point, but overall Herdegen works hard to locate the individual soldier not just in his own narrative but in the larger story of the Iron Brigade and the war itself. His is a mainly chronological approach that tracks the unit from Camp Randall in Wisconsin, through the Peninsula Campaign and Fredericksburg, to that fatal first day at Gettysburg when the Iron Brigade was all but wiped out.
Throughout, Herdegen intersperses this military narrative with details of camp life, what the men wore, ate, sang, and, inevitably, thought. What they thought is largely gleaned from diaries and letters home, and through deft use of these Herdegen never lets readers lose sight of either the supportive relationship between home front and battlefront throughout the war, or the impact of casualty reports on those individuals and communities who anticipated the letter from the front with a combination of excitement and, inevitably, dread. Detailing ‘[o]ne tragic mix-up’ when a letter ‘sent one family at Fond du Lac into tears and mourning until another telegraph brought news the loved one was in fact alive and well’, not only allows Herdegen to highlight the plight of families at home, but draws out the confusion and the sheer chaos of the Union at war (p. 286). This is an aspect of the conflict that can sometimes slip out of sight in the vast number of apparently tidy and well-organized editions of letter collections that we now have available, one that usually only the percentage of unidentified dead at the war’s end forces us to consider.
Given its intended audience, its level of detail, and its general sensibility about the individual cost of the Civil War, it may be churlish to criticize this extremely handsome, well-presented book. Its scholarship is, as one might expect from this author, rigorous; its battle maps are especially clear; and the many daguerreotype reproductions that intersperse the text reinforce the fact that this is, as its author intended, a work about the flesh-and-blood men who made up the ‘Iron Brigade of the West’. Yet the ‘memory’ part of the title is something of a misnomer, and any reader anticipating the kind of assessment of Civil War memory provided by, for example, Robert Hunt in The Good Men Who Won the War: Army of the Cumberland Veterans and Emancipation Memory (2010) may be disappointed by the rather insubstantial postscript provided here. This does little more than assert that the Iron Brigade ‘veterans returned troubled in mind and spirit by what they had seen and done’, that they also ‘brought home a new sense of nation’ (p. 599) having marched over much of it, and that, in time, they, in common with many Civil War veterans, met again at reunions in the course of which they could relive their glory days but also bear witness to those comrades who had not returned home with them. The difficulties of tracking any Civil War veteran into post-war life are considerable. Much of the material, the letters and diaries, the reports and newspaper accounts, that Herdegen has used to such tremendous effect here ceased with the ceasefire. And yet one hopes that the author may consider a future project along these lines, because not the least of the success of this present volume is that, at its end, the reader actually does want to know more about the men of the Iron Brigade.