Lorien Foote

Having read some of the author's previous scholarship I had mixed expectations, in that I expected to be informed but not necessarily engaged. I was pleased to discover that I was actually entertained, as the memoirs of the Union escaped prisoners give real dash to an analysis of the Confederacy's sociological and political collapse in 1864-1865. The real heroes and heroines coming out of this story are the slaves and white loyalist women who put their lives on the line on a regular basis for the sake of those escaping the reach of Confederate governance. As for Foote's epilogue regarding this maelstrom, while she finds little sense of organized Confederate malice against its prisoners, you couldn't tell this to the actual prisoners who survived, and their embittered remembrances created the traditional "Andersonville" narrative. Foote also has the sense that the whole structure and logistics of the Confederate and Union POW systems, and the entailed costs, are worthy of further examination.… (mais)

Having started out writing a study on military justice and discipline in the Union Army in the American Civil War, the author eventually found it necessary to write a work about social conflict in that army, as period expectations of equality between men ran into the barriers of the demands for military efficiency & discipline on one hand, and "unequal designations of manhood" on the other. These matters being exacerbated as the war went on, particularly once the volunteers who started the war were replaced more and more by men who came to the service as draftees and as paid substitutes for men who had been drafted; the "roughs" of the title who basically only recognized the authority of someone who could physically best them one on one, and who had little use for "civilized" virtues or social order. Foote's bottom line is that these conflicts have tended to be glossed over in the years since the war, and a close attention to the records of regimental court-martials are a bracing check to more romantic notions about why Union soldiers fought and what was necessary to keep them literally in line. The one thing that gives me pause is that the author appears to be a protege of Tom Lowry, a scholar who has since been discredited for writing a book using falsified documents.… (mais)

During the last 18 months or so of the Civil War, the Confederacy as a state began to break down. One consequence is it didn't have enough resource to guard Union captives. As a result many of them got loose and wondered around North and South Carolina. Add to this slaves who helped them, union sympathizers, and citizen vigilantes and it was something of a free for all. Lorien Foote interweaves a number of stories in a somewhat chaotic manner perhaps reflecting the chaos of the times. Many curious incidents abound. There are few things more reliably interesting than the "escape narrative", be it frontier settlers escaping from Indians, slaves escaping to freedom or escaped soldiers during war. Foote gives a taste of a number of these accounts showing how widespread and consequential the problem was for the Confederate war effort.… (mais)