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The Vacant Chair : The Northern Soldier Leaves Home by Reid Mitchell; Frank and Virginia Williams Collection of Lincolniana (Mississippi State University. Libraries) is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Vacant Chair : The Northern Soldier Leaves Home about?

In many ways, the Northern soldier in the Civil War fought as if he had never left home. On campsites and battlefields, the Union volunteer adapted to military life with attitudes shaped by networks of family relationships, in units of men from the same hometown. Understanding these links between the homes the troops left behind and the war they had to fight, writes Reid Mitchell, offers critical insight into how they thought, fought, and persevered through four bloody years of combat. In The Vacant Chair, Mitchell draws on the letters, diaries, and memoirs of common soldiers to show how mid-nineteenth-century ideas and images of the home and family shaped the union soldier's approach to everything from military discipline to battlefield bravery. For hundreds of thousands of'boys,'as they called themselves, the Union army was an extension of their home and childhood experiences. Many experienced the war as a coming-of-age rite, a test of such manly virtues as self-control, endurance, and courage. They served in companies recruited from the same communities, and they wrote letters reporting on each other's performance--conscious that their own behavior in the army would affect their

Author

Reid Mitchell; Frank and Virginia Williams Collection of Lincolniana (Mississippi State University. Libraries)

Publisher

IRL Press at Oxford University Press

Published

1993

Language

EN

ISBN

9780199938193

Subjects

History, Humanities

Rating

3.62 / 5 (34 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-13