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Summary
Summary
Lt. Halsey fought for the North, while his brother Jim fought for the South. The editor begins with historical background, and then provides annotative comments that are interspersed among Lt. Halsey's journal entries. Letters of his brother Joseph supplement the diary excerpts. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the Civil War, Chadwick, a New York Daily News writer, offers a well-edited selection of the diaries and letters of Lt. Edmund Halsey of the Union army. Halsey was the son of a prominent family in Rockaway, N.J. He joined the Union army in 1862 over the vigorous objections of his father, and served as an officer in the 15th New Jersey until ill health and family obligations led to his resignation in December 1864. His older brother, a Virginia landowner, was an equally ardent Confederate, but that family rift was quickly mended after Appomattox. Halsey himself fought for principlesfor preserving the Union and freeing the slavesthough he placed neither motivation higher than the other. He saw action with VI Corps at Chancellorsville, in the Wilderness and in the Shenandoah Valley, apologizing in one case for interrupting a letter because of overhead fire. He is most eloquent in describing war's commonplace miseries. He writes about body lice and "soldier's cough," and about men keeping cartridges dry by putting them in their socks. He complains that "it is so hard to get a girl," and worries about his prospects for civilian life. His words offer fascinating proof that the Civil War was fought by citizen-soldiers who regarded it as an interlude in their lives rather than as a justification for living. Chadwick's competent presentation of the context of Halsey's personal experiences enhances a work that will be welcomed by readers interested in the Civil War's human dimension. Photos not seen by PW. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A thin exercise in documentary history, drawing on nondescript letters from two New Jerseyborn brothers who happened to fight on opposite sides in the Civil War Journalist-turned-historian Chadwick (Rutgers Univ.) cobbles together an unrevealing account of the Halsey brothers' lives and fortunes. It does not help that his chief protagonist, Princeton-educated Edmund Halsey, a Union officer, confined most of his letters home to family and the local newspaper to complaining about the food and the boredom of camp life, and that his writing is listless and general; we seldom see any glimpse of his character, his reaction to the great events and battles of his time. Nor does it help that the letters of Edmund's older brother, the proslavery convert Joseph Halsey, are similarly dry and few in number. This leaves Chadwick the onerous task of trying, through extensive annotations, to make the correspondence more interesting than it is. When Edmund writes, then, to his father that the Emancipation Proclamation is ``either the best or the worst thing which could be done,'' it falls to Chadwick to explain that the proclamation caused controversy in the North inasmuch as it was meant ``to change the entire political and cultural life of the nation.'' In this instance--and it is representative--Halsey's statement is opaque, and the commentary merely assertive, raising more questions than it answers (how was the proclamation intended to recast the nation?). And Chadwick's annotations are too often misplaced; we learn from them, for instance, that New Jersey is called the Garden State ``for its flowers and because of its place as one of the country's leading vegetable growers,'' while critical details of, say, the Battle of Spotsylvania pass by unremarked. Only specialists in New Jersey's role in the Civil War will find much of use in this collection.
