MILITARY HISTORY IN THE AMERICAN MAINSTREAM

Two recently-developed streams of historiography converge in this richly researched volume. They are the "new" military history, relating armed forces to their political, social, and cultural contexts, and the effort to recapture the history of ordinary, unfamous men and women. Edward M. Coffman of the University of Wisconsin, Madison has examined a staggering number of letters, diaries, and often-obscure army publications to tell us far more than historians have ever known before about life in the United States Army until its emergence as an instrument of world power. To be sure, the book inevitably encounters the difficulty obstructing almost every effort to write the history of the relatively inarticulate as they themselves saw it - that very inarticulateness. Coffman was able to find little documentation of the lives of enlisted men and their families and friends from their own perspective, especially for the pre-Civil War years. Even official records for the early years are scant or noncommittal enough to offer only a sketchy beginning of a collective portrait. The rank and file have to be perceived largely through the eyes of the commissioned officers, and altogether Coffman is able to tell us much more about those officers and their families than about private soldiers. Yet this drawback by no means cripples the project. The book remains a history of the relatively obscure. It is the junior and not the senior officers on whom Coffman focuses most, and on those whose careers remained routine more than on those who became famous. If the necessary bias of the documentation toward commissioned officers results in a collective portrait largely of a portion of middle-class rather than working-class America, the lens rarely points toward higher rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. Thanks in no small measure to the democratic selection process and the education at government expense offered by the United States Military Academy at West Point, those nineteenth-century officers who like Robert E. Lee were in some measure American aristocrats were exceptional; the army officer corps was not an aristocracy.