Goodmen, the character of Civil War soldiers

by Michael Barton

"Was Johnny Reb more romantic than Billy Yank, and Billy more repressed? Historians have long debated what essential differences there were between the North and the Old South at the time of the Civil War, but their investigations have relied exclusively on the tools of their own discipline. This book examines the same question through the methods of social science. Rather than conjecturing about the attitudes and values of the period, the author has taken a large sample of primary documents and evaluated their differences by means of content analysis. The sample consists of more than 400 diaries and collections of letters written by officers and enlisted men from all states in the Civil War. Excerpts from these documents provide a fascinating glimpse of the period, but the most important conclusions result from Dr. Barton's statistical analyses, which by turns support and refute commonly held notions of how Northerners and Southerners viewed themselves and each other."--book jacket.