The best books on the common people of the Civil War

This book won all the awards from professional history organizations—almost literally. Yet it’s also readable and moving. It’s a deeply researched book about the fraught experiences of the hundreds of thousands of slaves who ran away, or were liberated, during the Civil War. Contraband camps were an opportunity for former slaves to be thought about as something other than property. Yet the camps were also dangerous places, where disease and administrative indifference made freedom nearly as deadly as slavery. This is simply the best recent book about the African American experience during the Civil War.

Not about the war itself, but nevertheless a riveting novel of the gradual unraveling of a Civil War veteran turned town marshal—clearly suffering from PTSD—as a forest fire and a deadly epidemic threatens his small town in 1870s Wisconsin. War memory, horror, and a vivid portrayal of postwar life are all crowded into this 200-page book. The writing is brisk and accessible, but the plot is full of twists and nuances that build toward an eerie and surprising ending.

Accounts of the common soldier are part of a long tradition in Civil War history—but this is not your typical study. Carmichael sets out not to examine motivations or ideology, but to explore "the life of the rank and file as it was lived." The war forced soldiers in the North and South to bridge the gulf between two competing impulses. "Sentimentalism" helped soldiers understand war as a series of hardships and sacrifices that could be endured through faith, courage, and patriotism. Confronting this conventional approach was a "pragmatism" that guided soldiers desperately seeking to survive with honor the filth, blood, and despair that they actually experienced. Carmichael makes his argument through careful, moving, and fascinating narratives of men trying to explain the war to their loved ones and to themselves.

An amazing 2 percent of the population died in combat or from disease during the Civil War. Drew Faust examines how Americans experienced death—their own, those of their loved ones—and explained those deaths to themselves and to others. Faust covers topics ranging from the anguish felt when sons and husbands died far from home without experiencing the “good death” in the comforting bosoms of mourning families to the origins of embalming techniques (only the richest dead soldiers could be sent home) to the campaign to identify and re-inter tens of thousands of unknown soldiers hastily buried almost where they fell on the battlefield. Throughout, readers get a sad and wonderful sense of how normal Americans endured the war’s carnival of death.

Over twenty years after it was published, Horowitz’s examination of how late twentieth century southerners, black and white, remembered the Civil War, is sadly relevant. Although much of the book is a kind of travelogue describing Civil War buffs, battlefield commemorations, and so-called “heritage” groups like the Sons, Daughters, and Children of the Confederacy, Horwitz’s pivot at the midway point to cover a murder trial in Kentucky leads to a serious discussion of race relations that turns this into a book that is not only an entertaining read, but also an important one.