Marching Home

Much like how Glymph recaptures the daily lives and struggles of African Americans in the South, Jordan takes you into the personal histories of Union veterans.

Following them as they march home and then struggle with social acceptance, battlefield wounds, and personal struggles, he offers a sobering view of the legacies of the war. The book takes a lot of the shine off the Civil War, reminding us of the immense human toll it took, even among its victors. 

At the end of the Civil War, men in gray returned home, vanquished, dispirited, but confident they fought bravely. Men in blue returned victorious, many bearing wounds of war—the missing limb, the disfigured face—but they lived with the certainty that they had prevailed. Brian Matthew Jordan’s Marching Home describes a troubling narrative of Union veterans as they struggled to transition from soldiers to citizens. Jordan writes: “Demobilization at first glance was a stunning success for 800,000 men, but it was in fact a protracted process, punctuated with delay, discomfort, and even disaster.” Jordan also documents the mental condition that many… show more.