In July 1862, Union Lieutenant Stephen Spalding wrote a long letter
from his post in Algiers, Louisiana, to his former college
roommate. Equally fascinating and unsettling for modern readers,
the comic cynicism of the young soldier's correspondence offers an
unusually candid and intimate account of military life and social
change on the southern front. A captivating primary source,
Spalding's letter is reproduced here for the first time, along with
contextual analysis and biographical detail, by Michael D. Pierson.
Lt. Spalding in Civil War Louisiana lifts the curtain on the
twenty-two-year-old's elitist social attitudes and his consuming
ambition, examining the mind of a man of privilege as he turns to
humor to cope with unwelcome realities. Spalding and his
correspondent, James Peck, both graduates of the University of
Vermont, lived in a society dominated by elite young men, with
advantages granted by wealth, gender, race, and birth. Caught in
the middle of the Civil War, Spalding adopts a light-hearted tone
in his letter, both to mask his most intimate thoughts and fears
and distance himself from those he perceives as social inferiors.
His jokes show us an unpleasantly stratified America, with blacks,
women, and the men in the ranks subjected to ridicule and even
physical abuse by an officer with more assertiveness than
experience. His longest story, a wild escapade in New Orleans that
included abundant drinking and visits to two brothels, gives us a
glimpse of a world in which men bonded through excess and
indulgence. More poignantly, tactless jests about death, told as
his unit suffers its first casualties, reveal a man struggling to
come to terms with mortality. Evidence of Spalding's unfulfilled
aspirations, like his sometimes disturbing wit, allows readers to
see past his entitlement to his human weaknesses. An engrossing
picture of a charismatic but flawed young officer, Lt. Spalding in
Civil War Louisiana offers new ways to look at the society that
shaped him.
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