Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life in the Army of Northern Vir... by Carlton McCarthy

The negro men and women in the neighborhood, now in the full enjoyment of newly-conferred liberty, and consequently having no thought of doing any work, congregated about the garden, leaned on the fence, gazed sleepily at the toiling soldiers chuckled now and then, and occasionally explained their presence by remarking to each other, 'Come here to see dem dar white folks wuckin.'

There is a wonderful moment in his account where he describes a group of former slaves who took the initiative to observe the two men at work: Just outside of Richmond, McCarthy and a friend decided to work on a farm for a little money before the final leg of their journey. McCarthy provides incredibly rich descriptions of the war in 1864, but it is his account of the immediate postwar period which provides a useful perspective to the transition from peace to war and the tensions and difficulties attached to the end of slavery and the shuffling of positions in the evolving social structure. It is, however, a very useful source for my project since so few soldiers left accounts of their journeys home after the surrender at Appomattox. The book was published in 1882 and bares all the markings of a memoir. McCarthy was born in 1847 in Richmond and served in the Richmond Howitzers during the final year of the war. Today I read the last two chapters of Carlton McCarthy's Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865. Wills considers the book's niche in Civil War literature.I finished my paper for the upcoming SCWH conference in Philly and am back to work on finishing up my project on the demobilization of the Army of Northern Virginia.

David Donald wrote in the New York Herald Tribune that McCarthy's book, too, was 'as fresh, as amusing, and as revealing' as the day it was first published in 1882. Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life does for the Confederate side what John Billings's Hardtack and Coffee, also a Bison Book, does for the Northern. Real but forgotten faces are glimpsed momentarily in famous battles, and the tramp of feet on the way to Appomattox is heard. Carlton McCarthy, a private in the Army of Northern Virginia, describes the not-always-regular rations, various improvisations in clothing and weaponry, campfire entertainments, the jaunty spirits and the endless maneuvering of the men in gray. Never as well equipped and provisioned as the Yankee, he nevertheless performed heroically. But the experience was perhaps even worse for Johnny Reb because of the odds against him. Like his Northern counterpart, the Confederate soldier fought against bullets, starvation, miserable weather, disease, and mental strain. This Civil War classic of soldiering in the ranks debunks all the romantic notions of war.

Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life in the Army of Northern Vir... by Carlton McCarthy