Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War

With forceful arguments and compelling prose, Jordan (Civil War-era studies, Gettysburg Coll.) turns conventional wisdom on the postwar world upside down by showing that poverty, alcoholism, sickness, mental illness, public neglect, and even contempt marked the lives of returning Union soldiers. Jordan argues that rather than understanding veterans' needs, too many civilians insisted they get on with their lives. Civilians rushed toward reconciliation with Southerners to patch up the Union and focus on "progress," while Union veterans insisted the nation not forget the causes and costs of the war and give soldiers and emancipated slaves their due. In their memoirs, monuments, veterans' organizations, and lobbying for benefits, the veterans refused to concede their history to those who wanted to romanticize the war and forget what the soldiers had sacrificed. Jordan overstates historians' supposed neglect of the issue, the indifference of Northern civilians to the veterans' plight, and the extent of veterans' inability to adjust to "coming home." However, the author has written a brilliant and bracing study of Civil War soldiers' efforts to adapt to a peacetime environment that had no place for them and even considered them a burden on public resources.