Booknotes: The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War

New Arrival:

• The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment by James Marten (UNC Press, 2025).

The Sixth Wisconsin was, as we all know, an integral component of one of the most celebrated infantry brigades produced by either side, the Iron Brigade. "One of the core units of the famed Iron Brigade, the Sixth was organized in July 1861 and mustered out in the summer of 1865, playing major roles at Second Manassas, Antietam, and Gettysburg, and in the Overland campaign of 1864." The unit's service history has been well documented in that integrated context (and in field grade officer Rufus Dawes's well-used memoir based on his wartime writings), but I am not aware of any prior full-length regimental history. According to James Marten, author of The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment, that might still be the case, as he categorically states that his book "is not a regimental history," but rather, as he calls it, a "regimental biography." Like a biography covering an individual's life, Marten's book "traces the birth, education, maturation, aging, and decline of its subject" (pg. 3).

From the description: "Reimagining one of the oldest genres of Civil War history," Marten's own brand of regimental study does not aim to recount in detail the Sixth's part in the various campaigns and battles. From the author's point of view, "the regiment’s full history is found in the stories of its men learning to fight and endure far from home amid violence, illness, and death, and in the lives of families that hung on every word in letters and news from the front lines. Those stories also unfolded long after the war’s end, as veterans sought to make sense of their experiences and home communities struggled to care for those who returned with unhealed wounds." Marten branches off from modern Civil War community, memory, and veteran studies by following "a single regiment through the entire gamut of experiences, from peace to war and back again" (pg. 4).

In his introduction, Marten explains his main goals for the book at some length. The first is to present the veteran lives of the Sixth's surviving members as being just as important as their soldier lives. This gets into the "long Civil War" part of the title. Most inspired by the focus and style of soldier studies from Gerald Linderman, Earl Hess, and Peter Carmichael, the second of Marten's goals is to "enrich and complicate the way we think about common soldiers' experiences." The third central intention is to explain, through the eyes of Sixth Wisconsin soldiers along with their loves ones and home communities, "how the Civil War generation invented the very idea of war" in the sense of "inventing a vocabulary, a series of acceptable responses," and "a way of explaining it to others and themselves." Finally, Marten uses his biography of the Sixth to develop the idea of "the Civil War regiment as a particular kind of constructed community" (pgs. 5-6). Through all of this, it is hoped that "readers will understand the long history of the Civil War" in a new way.