Shiver applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, War Fought and Felt: The Emotional Motivations of Confederate Soldiers, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about War Fought and Felt at the LSU Press website.Men also bonded by carousing together. In a letter to his cousin, Private Daniel H. Whitener of the 35th North Carolina Infantry Regiment wrote that there was a “different kind of religion that is in our regiment” which involved “some a cursen and swering some playing cards Some dansing and all kind of foolishness.” Likewise, Private Benjamin L. Mobley of Cobb’s Georgia Legion wrote to his sister that “Sis I enjoy my Self fine ly we have a dance evre night or two when the fiddle is at home.” The shared experience of dancing, playing cards, and listening to music was important in building esprit de corps. According to psychologists Bronwyn Tarr, Jacques Launay, and Robin I. M. Dunbar, the experience of listening to music, either passively or through active engagement leads to synchrony (otherwise known as “self-other merging”) or neurohormonal mechanisms (primarily in the form of endorphins) which encourage interpersonal bonding. It is like, they note, “that some combination of endorphin release and self-other merging lead to the social bonding effects of music, although the relationship between the two mechanisms remains to be sufficiently explored.”If readers opened my book to page 99, they would not get a good idea of the whole work. With its emphasis on social bonding and neurobiology, this page does capture some of the essence of the book. However, War Fought and Felt provides a much broader understanding of the relationship between Southern masculinity, interpersonal relationships, emotion, and psychological and neurobiological research. This is a book about why soldiers fought and, most importantly, how primal emotions shaped their military service. Moreover, it examines how Confederate soldiers reshaped pre-war cultural norms of emotional self-control to meet the inordinate and unprecedented brutality of America’s bloodiest war.
Sometimes, music shared with one’s enemies promoted interpersonal connection. Private George K. Evans of the 4th Virginia Cavalry was on picket duty one night in the later summer of 1862, when he heard music coming from nearby Union ships. “I was ¼ of a mile frome any other Videt,” he recalled to a friend from a hospital soon after, “and stood two hours one very dark night and listened to the music on the Yankey gun boats which kept me frome being loansome.” Even today, men generally build relationships through shared activities. It was no different in the mid-nineteeth century. After the Battle of Fredericksburg, Captain D. A. Dickert of the 3rd South Carolina Infantry Regiment recalled that even in the midst of camp’s ennui, “troops abandoned themselves to base ball, snow fights, writing letters, and receiving as guests in their camps friends and relatives, who never failed to bring with them great boxes of the good things from home, as well as clothing and shoes for the needy soldiers.”
At its outset, the American Civil War was expected by many to be a short and relatively bloodless affair. Only a few months into its first year, it was clear that this would not be the case. Instead, the American Civil War stretched on for far longer, and the body counts stretched far higher, than anyone could have dreamed. The human psyche was not made to endure the horror of such prolonged conflicts, and it should be no surprise that emotional self-control proved increasingly unrealistic. Many soldiers wondered: would the next charge be their last? The next outbreak of disease the beginning of the end? Their last letter home their final words?
This continual sense of impending demise led to soldier’s eschewing norms of emotional self-control in favor of emotional effusion on a level far greater than one would glean from the past eighty years of studies on the common soldier of the American Civil War. While there have been many books attempting to answer the question of why Civil War soldiers fought, and more recently, books on the “inner worlds” of Civil War soldiers, none have taken as broad of a sample from which to draw their conclusions as War Fought and Felt does. It paints a complex portrait of complex men who fought for complex reasons who were unified by their desperate need for emotional succor. In this way, it is an attempt to understand Confederate soldiers in three dimensions rather than the two-dimensional socio-cultural or ideological explanations of their motivations in past literature. In essence, it is a story about humanity, the necessity of relationships, the power of emotions, and the struggle to survive.
--Marshal Zeringue
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