Goodmen: The Character of Civil War Soldiers

Was Johnny Reb more romantic than Billy Yank, and Billy more enlightened? Historians have long debated what essential differences there were between the North and the Old South at the time of the Civil War, but their investigations have relied exclusively on the tools of their own discipline.

This book examines the same question through the methods of social science. Rather than conjecturing about the attitudes and values of the period, the author has taken a large sample of primary documents and evaluated their differences by means of content analysis. The sample consists of 100 diaries and more than 300 collections of letters written by officers and enlisted men from all states in the Civil War. Excerpts from these documents provide a fascinating glimpse of the period, but the most important conclusions result from Dr. Barton's statistical analyses, which by turns support and refute commonly held notions of how Northerners and Southerners viewed themselves and each other.

The book begins with a discussion of the letters of one soldier to illustrate the general nature of the sources and the kind of revealing information they contain. Subsequent chapters detail the varying viewpoints of noted historians and the ways in which their theories can be tested, after which the results of the content analyses are presented and explained. A concluding chapter discusses the special insights that anthropology and sociology can contribute to an understanding of the Victorian era in America.