Reading and Reading Groups

Civil War soldiers avidly read newspapers to learn about news from home. Newspapers obtained by soldiers were sometimes traded with the enemy in picket exchanges. All types of paper were used for these newspapers, from wallpaper to wrapping paper. The exchange of letters, newspapers, and fiction among soldiers and their families helped them to maintain their emotional connections even while at a physical distance. Soldiers gained access to books from shipments from home, picket exchanges, religious and charitable sources, and traveling loan libraries. Men also read while convalescing after battle injuries.

A field nurse, Jane Stuart Woolsey, wrote in her 1870 book Hospital Days that "Soldiers were omnivorous readers, but many wanted a better order of books than novels and magazines. One of the forwsiest of the 'inv'lids' was a devourer of everything Mr. Sumner wrote. Files of the 'Scientific American' were in demand. The personage of Cicero and the store-room of Shakespeare went about the wards. Dickens was very popular. I think David Copperfield was the favorite story" (p. 59).

Novels by well-known British and American authors were among the favorites read aloud in camp, both North and South. In their letters and journals some soldiers mentioned reading Walter Scott (1771–1832), Charles Dickens (1812–1870), James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863), and Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1831–1891). The chaplain of the 8th Connecticut Volunteers in wrote home: "Dickens has a great run. The tales of Miss Edgeworth and T. S. Arthur are very popular. The Army and Navy Melodies are hailed with delight" (Koch 1918, p. 4). George Williams, a Union soldier, recalled reading groups in camp in his 1884 article "Lights and Shadows of Army Life": "Especially when the army was in winter quarters and books were in short supply, a good reader with a copy of Bulwer-Lytton, Scott or Dickens could be assured that his hut would be filled with listeners. The standard rule about extinguishing lights at taps was seldom enforced under such conditions" (p. 808).

For soldiers of both armies a camp fire served as a makeshift memory of the family hearth. George Freeman Noyes recalled in his 1863 book The Bivouac and the Battlefield, Campaign in Virginia and Maryland, "Around each pyramid of flame sat the men, engaged in various avocations; some, of course, cooking, for no camp fire was ever without a soldier making coffee, no matter what the hour; some reading or playing cards." Noyes said that he regretted the boredom of do-nothingism in camp during the war:

If you wish to demoralize a man, to dilute his manliness, corrode his patriotism, steal away his cheerfulness, destroy his enthusiasm, and impair his health, pen him up in an isolated camp with little to do, no books to read, no resources against idleness; if you wish to demoralize an army, march it off from a severely contested battle-field into the woods, and condemn it to a month or two of listless do-nothinginsm. At such a time the men need, as never so much before, books of a cheerful and moderately exciting character, strong, bracing stories like those of Charles Kingsley, quiet pictures of homelife like that fascinating sketch of "John Halifax, Gentleman,"military tales like those of Lever, the wonderful character pieces of Charles Dickens, and choice productions of our American authors. (p. 224)

Cheap fiction was popular in camp. Soldiers often read nickel and dime novels. These 4 inch by 6 inch, 100-page volumes could fit into a soldier's pocket and their low price appealed to many. Private Dwight Henry Cory, a Union soldier who had a good voice and liked to sing, was one of these readers of popular fiction. In his journal on Friday, March 3, 1865, reproduced in the "Dwight Henry Cory Letters," he wrote: "Read storys or novels as they are commonly called and answer letters. In fact these two vocations are the chief employment of the soldier in camp."

When Civil War soldiers mentioned their reading in their letters home, they often spoke of reading from the Bible or prayer books. Robert Cruikshank, for example, wrote to his wife Mary on September 21, 1862, from Arlington Heights, Virginia, that "They read their Bibles every day." He asked his wife on November 15, "Send me papers with the war news." Henry Cory told his wife: "DDear, you sent a big letter but not much reading…. They call me their chaplain. I have a testament in my pocket. I read a chapter every day."

One source of soldiers' reading material was the regimental library. Alonzo Hall Quint, a Union soldier who kept the volumes within one of these, preserved his writings in the 1863 published work The Potomac and the Rapidan and Army Notes, 1861–63. He wrote,

Among devices for this vacation period we have a small regimental library…. I owe public thanks for this especially to Mr. MH Sargent, who interested himself most generously and heartily in obtaining and forwarding the books… the nest egg of which was a kind donation from Mr. Tolman's church at Wilmington… If the donors could see the eagerness with which the books are read, they would feel still happier in doing good (p. 94).

Among the most read of these books, Quint noted, were those of Dickens. "Among the most read (I take from the book where I charge volumes, to show the taste) are Deacon Safford, Winthrop's John Brent, Dickens's Christmas Stories, Abbot's Practical Christianity, Dexter's Street Thoughts, the Lives of Washington, Jackson, Fremont, Franklin, and Boone" (p. 94).

While marching through the south, Louis J. Dupré, in Knoxville, Tennessee, saw books in southern homes. He wrote in his 1881 book Fagots from the Campfire, "In every house there was Weems 'Life of Washington,' Jefferson's 'Notes on Virginia.' and Brownlow's 'Whig' and the National Intelligencer" (p. 137). Likewise, August Joseph Hickey Duganne wrote in his 1865 book Camps and Prisons, Twenty Months in the Department of the Gulf of seeing books while he was part of a Northern occupying force:

Meanwhile, here we sit, hostile strangers from the North, amidst the dusty lumber of a southern home. The family portraits rest against the wall, backs turned upon us. I handle many a duplicate of favorite authors in my home library. Here stand, in line, battalia of books, which show the classic taste of their collector. The British Poets muster, rank on rank, some ninety strong; the British Essayists beneath, and here are Dickens, Irving, Cooper, Bulwer, Thackeray; with hundreds, rank and file, of literary yeomen, and brave historians. (p. 56)

Reading was also practiced by prisoners of war. Confederate captain Robert E. Park of the 12th Alabama Regiment wrote on February 8, 1865 from a Baltimore prison, "Some read novels and histories, others study ancient and modern languages and mathematics, and these divert for the time, their minds from the painful, desperate, hopeless surroundings" (Park 1877, p. 46).

Reading fiction aloud was a popular pastime in many homes. Families and friends often gathered in the front room parlor of a home or by the fireplace to read aloud to each other. In the North free blacks were among those who met in reading circles. In one southern home Bill Arp read The Arabian Nights aloud to his family, as he noted in his 1903 book From the Uncivil War to Date: "We love to read the Arabian Nights, and we rejoice with Ali Baba who outwitted the forty thieves and with Alladin who found the wonderful lamp. Just so we rejoice in Cinderella for marrying the prince, and we take comfort in it, although we know it never happened" (p. 188).

Books were also vocalized in Joseph Waddell's household in Augusta, Virginia. He notes in his diary that on Thursday evening September 25,1857, "Kate was reading The Life of Charlotte Bronte and would persist in reading passages aloud, not withstanding my restlessness." Waddell was then reading Count Robert of Paris and The Pira. He had just finished reading The Ocean by Gipe. The night that Kate read aloud from Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Bronte, he had been reading the newspaper.

Belle Kearney of Vernon, Mississippi, recalls in her 1900 book A Slaveholder's Daughter that she made a bargain with her younger brothers, enticing them to house work in return for reading aloud to them from Dickens or Scott.

"Well," I answered, "suppose we make a bargain? If you will cook every time mother gets sick, I will tell you one of Dickens's stories or one of Walter Scott's novels as regularly as the nights roll around." "All right! I'll do it!" was the ready assent; — and the compact was sealed. It was never broken.

As the days went by and mother's health failed to improve, and my work failed correspondingly to grow lighter, the younger boys were pressed into service by similar agreements…Every night after our lessons were learned for the next day, we gathered around the hearth in mother's room and I told the boys the promised stories; going into the smallest details; dwelling on peculiarities of characters, painting minutely their environment, waxing humorous or pathetic according to the situation; all the while watching closely the faces of my auditors. There they would sit for hours, my little brothers, listening intently to every word that was uttered; at time clapping their chubby hands with intense enjoyment, or doubling up their bodies with convulsive laughter, or holding their lips together with fore-finger and thumb to prevent too boisterous an explosion of hilarity, at other times allowing the great tears to roll down their cheeks, or with bowed heads sobbing aloud. My precious little comrades! They constituted my first audience and it was the most sympathetic and inspiring that has ever greeted me in all the after years (p. 25).

Stories were available in Northern homes as well as southern ones. In some cases the younger children just looked at the pictures. While Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend was being serialized in Harper's in 1864, one reader wrote about the fondness of her children for the visual content of the magazine:

The appearance of Harpers Magazine at our house is an event of great importance with my children. The illustrations in it are the chief cause of this. [On one page there is an] illustration of winged children as "Angels of the Household." All the children are mischievous. One of them raids a cookie jar as her sister looks on and reaches up for it; three children slide down a banister; one pulls at a cat's tail; another breaks a mirror. Meanwhile, a little girl with wings holds up torn pages in her hand and stomps over shattered shards on the floor as her parents look on (pp. 820–821).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arp, Bill. From the Uncivil War to Date, ed. Marian Arp Smith. Atlanta, GA: Hudgins, 1903.

Cory, Dwight Henry. Dwight Henry Cory Letters. Ehistory.com. Available from http://ehistory.osu.edu/.

Cruishank, Robert. "Robert Cruishank Collection: Letter to his wife Mary of September 21, 1862." Ehistory.com. Available from http://ehistory.osu.edu/.

Dupré, Louis J. Fagots from the Campfire. Washington, DC: Emily Thornton Charles and Co., 1881.

Duganne, August Joseph Hickey. Camps and Prisons, Twenty Months in the Department of the Gulf. New York: J. P. Robens, 1865.

Harper's New Monthly Magazine (August 1864): 820–821.

Kaser, David. Camp and Battle: The Civil War Experience. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Kearney, Belle. A Slaveholder's Daughter. New York: Abbey Press, 1900. Documenting the American South. Available from http://docsouth.unc.edu/.

Koch, Theodore Wesley. War Libraries and Allied Studies. New York: G. E. Stechert and Co., 1918.

McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the History of African-American Literary Societies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Noyes, George Freeman. The Bivouac and the Battle Field, or Common Sketches in Virginia and Maryland. New York: Harpers, 1863

Park, Robert E. "Diary of Captain Robert E. Park." Southern Historical Society Papers, Richmond 3, no.1, January 1877, p. 46.

Quint, Alonzo Hall. The Potomac and the Rapidan: Army Notes from the Failure at Winchester to the Re-enforcements of Rosencrans, 1861–3. Boston: Crosby and Nichols, 1864.

Waddell, Joseph. The Diary of Joseph Waddell (1855–1865). Valley of the Shadow. Available from http://etext.virginia.edu/.

Williams, George F. "Lights and Shadows of Army Life." Century Magazine (October 1884): 808.

Woolsey, Jane Stuart. Hospital Days. New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1870.

Robert P. McParland