Why read The Citizen-Soldier?

Book cover of The Citizen-Soldier: Memoirs of a Volunteer

Book description

When Southerners fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, John Beatty left his bank job in Ohio to answer President Lincoln's call for soldiers. Within a short while he was commanding the Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment, as green to combat as his men. The diary he kept from June…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Citizen-Soldier as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

F. S. Naiden

Author

What about writers more like me? In this book, an Ohio small-town banker turned Union volunteer describes race relations not as Delaney thought they should be but as they were in Union armies commanded by officers who were often anti-Black as well as anti-slavery. It made me feel I was there.

Beatty was a sort of good Union man—no politics at the start of the war, but Radical (Republican) politics at the end of it.

From F.'s list on The best books about generals who were visionaries—and visionaries who wanted to be generals.