With an Afterword by Joseph T. Glatthaar

The View from the Ground brings together the perspectives of Civil War soldiers on all aspects of the conflict, revealing as much about nineteenth-century America as it does about the war itself.

The contributors investigate the issues engaged by soldiers during the war, including slavery and racial tensions, the isolation that many men of faith felt in the early months of the war, the divide between soldiers and civilians, and the inherent difficulty in reconciling the act of killing with Christian precepts of charity and peacefulness. They also explore the ways veterans remembered the war.

The View from the Ground shows that soldiers willfully shaped the course of the war, as soldiers and as citizens. The result is a collection that illustrates how new questions and fresh analyses of participants' lives and writings can expand our knowledge of our nation's greatest conflict.

Aaron Sheehan-Dean, assistant professor of history at the University of North Florida, is the editor of Struggle for a Vast Future: The American Civil War.

Reviews:

"The View from the Ground, a collection of essays edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, enhances our understanding of these nineteenth-century combatants. Collectively, these essays reinforce the importance of studying military history beyond technology, battles, and leadership."-- Ohio Valley History

"Taken together, the essays are particular interesting and informative in revealing the various ways in which the participants remembered this bloody conflict, revealing soldiers and civilians through their experiences as political, spiritual, and individual beings-- autonomous historical actors. There is also a good assessment of the scholarship on Civil War soldiers. Readers interested in military history and the connection between the home front and the battlefield will find this collection valuable."-- E.M. Thomas, Choice

"These essays use the soldiers' personal accounts to examine their beliefs and practices, creating a most readable treatment of this horrendous conflict."--Booklist

"The overall effect of this collection is refreshing and two-fold: First, soldiers are given their due agency; they shape, and are in turn shaped by, the realities of the war they made. Second, soldiers are firmly connected to their wider context. As an extension of their homefront societies, Civil War soldiers were political, spiritual and individual beings, struggling with all their might to remain connected to former selves and former lives, even as they remade America. Taken together, these essays make a convincing case that the war was what the common soldiers made it. They led, and the nation followed."--Stephen Berry, author of All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South

"These nicely crafted and thoroughly noted essays do indeed represent well the recent scholarship on the Civil War soldier and his world."--The Journal of Southern History