Booknotes: If I Can Get Home This Fall

New Arrival:

• If I Can Get Home This Fall: A Story of Love, Loss, and a Cause in the Civil War by Tyler Alexander (Potomac Bks, 2025).

Tyler Anderson's If I Can Get Home This Fall traces the Civil War experiences of Dan Mason, an enlisted man of Company D in the 6th Vermont (with their comrades of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th regiments, part of the celebrated First Vermont Brigade) who later served as a commissioned officer (a captain) with the Nineteenth U.S. Colored Troops. Composed primarily of former slaves from Maryland, the 19th USCI began active service with the Ninth Corps in the spring of 1864, participating in the Overland and Richmond-Petersburg campaigns before transfer to the Fifteenth Corps and subsequent postwar duties in Texas.

From the description: "Drawing on Mason’s letters home to his fiancé, Harriet Clark, and on other historical records, Tyler Alexander provides a compelling account of the human cost of war and offers insight about the experiences and attitudes of those who witnessed war firsthand, including enlisted troops and officers, men and women, Democrats and Republicans, and white and Black Americans."

In Alexander's words, Mason's letters are "elegant, candid, uncensored, graphic, humorous, full of romantic longing and relationship strife, and offer a good deal of insight into the factors that compelled so many off to war and sustained them throughout" (pg. xiv). Much of the original text for Mason's correspondence along with other materials are incorporated into the narrative in large blocks.

According to Alexander, Mason's letters reveal a soldier motivated by both preservation of the Union and "antislavery convictions." More: If I Can Get Home This Fall: A Story of Love, Loss, and a Cause in the Civil War "examines how the most controversial issues of the war—emancipation, the draft, military strategy, the arming of Black troops, and Reconstruction policy—were viewed in real time by the participants who found themselves engulfed in the maelstrom of war, particularly those from a strongly anti-slavery farming community in the hills of northeast Vermont." Mason "believed in making soldiers of Black Americans," and took pride in the role he played in fostering that transformation.