Horrors of Being an American Civil War Soldier

My book, The Times You Grew Up With, takes you back: https://paulmcallister.store The American Civil War killed more soldiers than every other American war combined — from the Revolution through Korea. But most of those men didn’t die on a battlefield. They died of disease, infection, and starvation, in their own camps, behind their own lines, from causes a modern pharmacy could fix in a week. This is the story of what it actually meant to serve as a Civil War soldier between 1861 and 1865. The Minié ball that shattered bone beyond repair. The field hospitals where surgeons amputated sixty thousand limbs without understanding germs. The camps where diarrhea and typhoid killed twice as many men as enemy fire. Andersonville and Elmira. The three-hundred-dollar commutation fee that let the wealthy stay home. The march, the hunger, the hardtack full of weevils, the slow collapse of the Confederate supply chain, and the psychological damage that came home with the survivors — damage the country had no name for and no plan to treat. The first industrial war in history. The last war fought with pre-industrial medicine. Sources: James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 1988) Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) John D. Billings, Hardtack and Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life (1887) Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank and The Life of Johnny Reb (Louisiana State University Press, 1952/1943) J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History, Vol. 57, No. 4 (December 2011) Frank R. Freemon, Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care During the American Civil War (University of Illinois Press, 2001)