Product Details
The Citizen-Soldier: The Memoirs of a Civil War Volunteer

The Citizen-Soldier: The Memoirs of a Civil War Volunteer
By John Beatty

Price: $16.00 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com

29 new or used available from $1.20

Average customer review:

Product Description

When Southerners fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, John Beatty left his bank job in Ohio to answer President Lincoln’s call for soldiers. Within a short while he was commanding the Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment, as green to combat as his men. The diary he kept from June 1861 to January 1864 shows how well they did their fearful job without losing their humanity.

In October 1862 the Ohio regiment lost nearly forty percent of its five hundred men on the field at Perryville. After heavy fighting at Stone’s River the following year, Beatty was promoted to brigadier general. In these pages the cost of union is carefully weighed by an intelligent and modest man who never glorifies war. Advancing through the South with the Army of the Cumberland, he lives to tell about the horrific battles at Chickamauga and Missionary Ridge. Whether describing large events in Kentucky, Tennessee, and elsewhere or the quiet times of camp life, Beatty never loses personal perspective

Steven E. Woodworth, in his introduction, writes about the life of this extraordinary “ordinary man,” whose diary, originally published in 1879, “stands out as one of the dozen or so best memoirs of the Civil War for its clarity, honesty, humor, and plain good sense.”

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #1638877 in Books
  • Published on: 1998-03-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 376 pages

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Steven E. Woodworth is an assistant professor of history at Texas Christian University and the author of Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West, Davis and Lee at War, and, most recently, Six Armies in Tennessee: The Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns.

Customer Reviews

From the Grave5
John Beatty intended to speak from the grave to future generations and did so with clarity, humility and with a poignant reminder of the failings of politics and those in power. The magnetic pull of the romance of war and adventure for young men soon morphed into campside remembrances of home and hearth. The diary format made it an easy read quickly drawing you into the life of that period.You can almost smell the adrenalin of the young untried soldiers chomping at the bit to get into a skirmish. Later to sense their fear,hurt,shock and ultimately their inexperience with the harshness of war...after seeing friends disembowled and crying for help...The political passions of that period were at a fever pitch which makes it all the more remarkable given the abscence of CNN and other 24/7 news channels beating the political drums...150 years later and we seemingly have devolved..."Civil War"? the ultimate oxymoron...how can any war be "Civil"...John Beatty scrapes it close to the bone in his revelations about the inefficieny of war...a worthy and very interesting visit to the past!

War Is Hell (of a Good Book)5
This soldier's journal from the American Civil War is a delight to read, beautifully written and insightful throughout. John Beatty was sensitive to the horror of war, but also to the humor of it. History has been kind to an author who, in writing this book, was very kind to history.