The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy
Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1943. Hardcover. 444 pages, illus., notes, bibliography, index, DJ worn & large pieces missing, discolor. inside boards, name & address of previous owner on front flyleaf. Bell Irvin Wiley (January 5, 1906 in Halls, Tennessee – April 4, 1980 in Atlanta, Georgia) was an American historian who specialized in the American Civil War, and was an authority on military history and the social history of common people. Wiley offers a rare but complete portrait of the ordinary soldier of the Confederacy during the Civil War, via extensive research of letters, newspaper stories, official records, and excerpts from diary entries. The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (1943) deviated from the usual procedure of examining the lives and doings of officers, exposing the "deep-seated [hatred that] had been accumulating from the time of [the soldiers'] earliest recollections" based on their perception of the North as a "godless and grasping society", while at the same time the white soldiers on both sides shared fraternal feelings: "Men would shoot and kill when the time came. Yet there was a familiarity and an understanding, at times something that verged almost on liking." "The war of the sixties has been called the 'polite war', and in a sense, the designation is apt. Men of the opposing armies when not actually engaged in a shooting fray were wont to observe niceties that in twentieth-century warfare would be regarded as absurd."
Wiley's intensive research included reading 30,000 letters written by Civil War soldiers. He published numerous books of popular history, as well as scholarly editions of letters and correspondence. He also wrote studies of the United States Army in World War II, and served on many commissions and committees, including the Civil War Centennial Commission during the Civil War Centennial (1961-1965), in which he chaired the commission's executive committee on historical activities.
Wiley summed up much of his feelings toward the common soldier in a commencement address he delivered in North Carolina about 1960:
“The greatest people I know in American history are the plain soldiers who wore the blue and the gray during the Civil War. These lowly people and their folk at home suffered more than any other class. They endured their hardship with less complaint. They supported their leaders with more loyalty, and, in general, they acquitted themselves more admirably than their more privileged fellows.”
Wiley spent more than 50 years in the classroom as a teacher, and authored or co-authored and edited 24 books. He was honored as the president of the Southern Historians Association in 1955, and chairman of the National Civil War Centennial Commission in 1961. Condition: Fair / poor.
Keywords: Civil War, Confederacy, Soldier life, Historiography, Social History, Military History
[Book #310]
Price: $35.00