The bulk of the essay discusses how scholarly usage of Civil War soldiers’ diaries and letters has changed over time and where historians agree and disagree about the conclusions that can be drawn from soldiers’ writings. Having examined their origins, the essay will then turn to where and in what form the writings of Civil War soldiers can be found today. It is first to illuminate the origins of Civil War soldiers’ letters and diaries with particular attention to the logistics of their creation and the number of them. The purpose of this essay, then, is threefold. In fact, one of the most influential historians of the Civil War Era recently argued that historians’ indiscriminate use of soldiers’ letters and diaries has led scholarship on Civil War soldiers to “a point of diminishing returns.” Yet much disagreement remains on how historians should use these sources and what they ultimately reveal about the men who fought the Civil War. Without the mountain of letters and diaries written by Civil War soldiers that in one form or another have survived to the present, we would have a much dimmer understanding of that conflict and of nineteenth-century American history. Any student or scholar of the Civil War who wants to know what contemporaries believed to be the cause of the war how the war dragged on for four deadly years or how the course of the war reshaped the attitudes and beliefs of those who experienced it must turn to the work of historians who spent thousands of hours combing through the writings of Civil War soldiers to find answers to these questions. In turn, Civil War historians have relied heavily and at times exclusively on soldiers’ letters and diaries to craft groundbreaking works on how the conflict unfolded and what it meant to participants.
The letters and diaries written by Union and Confederate soldiers have bequeathed to scholars in the field the unusual problem of having an overabundance of firsthand accounts to consult. About eight out of every ten Confederate soldiers and nine out of every ten Union soldiers could read and write. Civil War soldiers were among the most literate in history.
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