{"id":1126,"date":"2005-04-21T18:19:38","date_gmt":"2005-04-21T18:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/?p=1126"},"modified":"2014-01-06T18:25:31","modified_gmt":"2014-01-06T18:25:31","slug":"life-of-the-republic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/2005\/04\/21\/life-of-the-republic\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: The Struggle for the Life of the Republic"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Struggle for the Life of the Republic: A Civil War Narrative by Brevet Major Charles Dana Miller, 76th Ohio Volunteer Infantry.<\/em>\u00a0Edited by Stewart Bennett and Barbara Tillery (Kent: The Kent State University Pres, 2004. xxiii, 301 pp. $34.00, ISBN 0-87338-785 -6.)<\/p>\n

Among the thousands of books stemming from the American Civil War, memoirs of soldiers, Union and Confederate, constitute an appreciable share.\u00a0 Given the accumulation of such books, perhaps publishers considering expending print and paper on another manuscript of personalia should weigh several questions:\u00a0 does it present a significant view of a battle or campaign, of leading military figures, of ordinary soldiers or of why men fight.\u00a0 Though hardly remarkable on any of these counts,\u00a0The Struggle for the Life of the Republic<\/em>, a reminiscent narrative of Charles Dana Miller, a soldier from Ohio, deserves publication primarily because of his description of camp life.<\/p>\n

The editors, Barbara Tillery, a descendant of Miller and a desktop publisher, and Stewart Bennett, a historian, have given order to a narrative that Miller composed sometime between 1869 and 1881.\u00a0 Tillery, unfortunately, has written a baffling preface on the provenance of the narrative, at times referring to it as Miller’s handscribed manuscript, at other times as a transcribed copy of the manuscript.\u00a0 Readers will find the narrative a primer on the mobility of regiments in the western theater, but Bennett goes too far in asserting that it is an \u201cindispensable and sorely needed treasure trove of historical documentation of the Civil War (xxiii).\u00a0 It will not flutter the dovecotes of Civil War historiography.\u00a0 Constructed years after the war and rather polished, Miller’s prose lacks the spontaneity and rough-hewn language of a soldier in the field recording first-hand the tedium and terror of war.\u00a0 Thus the editors have been spared the task of cleaning up syntax.\u00a0 They have provided exhaustive and useful notes to the text.<\/p>\n

Miller, born in Mt. Vernon, Ohio in 1836, was a grain merchant in Newark when he entered service in the 76th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in October of 1961 in answer to Abraham Lincoln’s call for 500,000 volunteers.\u00a0 He saw his enlistment and later reenlistment as a commitment to the \u201cConstitution, the Union and for human liberty . . . . \u201c (80) \u00a0and as a means to suppress a \u201cwicked rebellion\u201d leading to anarchy (72).\u00a0 He exemplified what James McPherson has noted in\u00a0For Cause and Comrades<\/em>(1997): a substantial majority of men who enlisted and reenlisted in the Union army did so out of a resolve to preserve the Union and to sustain their own honor (18-19, 168-169).<\/p>\n

Appointed first sergeant of his company, Miller first recruited men for the 76th in central Ohio – – his account of the competition for recruits is interesting – – and then joined his company in the field.\u00a0 He rose to the captaincy of the company as the regiment fought Confederates at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Arkansas Post, the siege of Vicksburg and Sherman’s march on Atlanta (he was on leave when unit of the regiment scaled Lookout Mountain).\u00a0 He recalled in conventional fashion the fighting, often recounting the tactics of a battle and occasionally depicting the evisceration of combat, but wrote in rich detail on camp life – – on the prevalence of disease there, the building of shelters – – \u201cshebangs,\u201d the soldiers’ privations, the boredom of routine, and the search for diversion – – men in his company played pranks of Jimmy Ring, a diminutive Irishman fond of whiskey and John Bollman, a black servant of an officer.\u00a0\u00a0 Altogether, the 76th counted ninety-one men killed in combat or dying of wounds; another 271 died of disease or in accidents.\u00a0 Of about 123 Ohio infantry regiments organized in the first eighteen months of the war, the regiments that did most of the fighting in Ohio’s name, the 76th ranked fifty-third in deaths in combat – – William Fox.\u00a0Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861-1865,\u00a0<\/em>(1898), 492ff.<\/p>\n

Unlike Stephen Crane’s Henry Fleming, Miller was not uncertain about his conduct in combat, about whether he would should the white feather He expressed no hint of fear.\u00a0 And he had no sympathy for men who acted as cowards, threatening on one occasion to shoot a man if he \u201cstepped back one foot\u201d in a fight (160).\u00a0 He admired officers whose bravery inspired soldiers to close with the enemy.\u00a0 At no point did he suggest that his men fought out of loyalty to each other, out of unit cohesion, the explanation that psychologists of combat often offer for the willingness of men to fight and die.<\/p>\n

Miller had pronounced views on issues inherent in the war.\u00a0 He had only contempt for the Copperheads and their leader, Clement L. Vallandigham; home on leave because of the lingering effects of malaria, he found it \u201cvery painful\u201d to witness a \u201cVallandigham convention\u201d in Newark (133). On Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, he said nothing; but he approved the enlistment of Blacks in the Union army, asserting that the Rebels were making use of them \u201cto cultivate the soil and raise supplies to feed their armies\u201d and that \u201cevery body of negroes taken from them [the Rebels] was a blow against their material strength\u201d (91).<\/p>\n

Though rising to positions of authority – – late in the war he was appointed Acting Assistant Inspector General of a brigade in the 15 th Army Corps – – Miller was no practitioner of chickenshit, the habitude of military men who, as Paul Fussell has described them in\u00a0Wartime<\/em>:\u00a0Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War<\/em>(1989), subjected underlings to petty harassment in the name of necessary discipline that had nothing to do with winning a war (80-81).\u00a0 Indeed, perhaps he was lax in assessing damages against soldiers who destroyed governmental property.\u00a0 And he believed that a \u201cwarm attachment\u201d existed between the men in his company and himself (198, 214).\u00a0 He was no egalitarian, though: assigned to the deck of a steam boat with enlisted men while officers lounged in comfortable cabins, he \u201cfelt the mortification of being forced below my social level\u201d (14).<\/p>\n

For his narrative, Miller had an objective similar to what Sergeant Berry Benson, a Confederate sharpshooter, had for his reminiscences; Benson hoped that they would \u201cgo down amongst his descendants for a long time.\u201d\u00a0 Miller thought that \u201cThere may be, in the future, readers of these memoirs who will be interested in the history of that grand old Regiment\u201d (229).\u00a0 With the publication of\u00a0The Struggle for the Republic<\/em>,\u00a0<\/strong>perhaps that will happen.<\/p>\n

Carl M. Becker<\/em>
\nProfessor Emeritus, Wright State University<\/em><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Struggle for the Life of the Republic: A Civil War Narrative by Brevet Major Charles Dana Miller, 76th Ohio Volunteer Infantry.\u00a0Edited by Stewart Bennett and Barbara Tillery (Kent: The Kent State University Pres, 2004. xxiii, 301 pp. $34.00, ISBN 0-87338-785 -6.) Among the thousands of books stemming from the American Civil War, memoirs of … Continue reading Book Review: The Struggle for the Life of the Republic<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1622,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39918],"tags":[43822,41938,43834,10574,18770],"class_list":["post-1126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-volume-3-issue-1-spring-2005","tag-3-1","tag-carl-becker","tag-charles-dana-miller","tag-civil-war","tag-review"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1622"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1126"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1130,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126\/revisions\/1130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}