Soldiers from Experience - (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War) by Eric Michael Burke (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Albert Castel Book Award
Winner of the Colonel Richard W. Ulbrich Memorial Book Award
Winner of the Civil War Books and Authors Book of the Year Award

In Soldiers from Experience, Eric Michael Burke examines the tactical behavior and operational performance of Major General William T. Sherman's Fifteenth US Army Corps during its first year fighting in the Western Theater of the American Civil War. Burke analyzes how specific experiences and patterns of meaning-making within the ranks led to the emergence of what he characterizes as a distinctive corps-level tactical culture. The concept--introduced here for the first time--consists of a collection of shared, historically derived ideas, beliefs, norms, and assumptions that play a decisive role in shaping a military command's particular collective approach on and off the battlefield.

Burke shows that while military historians of the Civil War frequently assert that generals somehow imparted their character upon the troops they led, Sherman's corps reveals the opposite to be true. Contrary to long-held historiographical assumptions, he suggests the physical terrain itself played a much more influential role than rifled weapons in necessitating tactical changes. At the same time, Burke argues, soldiers' battlefield traumas and regular interactions with southern civilians, the enslaved, and freedpeople during raids inspired them to embrace emancipation and the widespread destruction of Rebel property and resources. An awareness and understanding of this culture increasingly informed Sherman's command during all three of his most notable late-war campaigns.

Burke's study serves as the first book-length examination of an army corps operating in the Western Theater during the conflict. It sheds new light on Civil War history more broadly by uncovering a direct link between the exigencies of nineteenth-century land warfare and the transformation of US wartime strategy from "conciliation," which aimed to protect the property of Southern civilians, to "hard war." Most significantly, Soldiers from Experience introduces a new theoretical construct of small unit-level tactical principles wholly absent from the rapidly growing interdisciplinary scholarship on the intricacies and influence of culture on military operations.

Review Quotes

"Burke's vivid depiction of life and death across the swamps, trenches, and wooded hillsides of the western theater draws on impressive research, including letters, diaries, and other writings from nearly one hundred men of all ranks. Especially prominent are the voices of lieutenants and captains directly involved in close combat leadership, who occupied a pivotal position to shape tactical culture. . . . Military historians will be interested in Burke's innovative model for investigating the evolution and significance of unit-level tactical cultures."--Journal of Southern History

"In Soldiers from Experience, Eric Michael Burke presents a succinct and novel approach to this field by studying the mid-war development of a unit's culture rooted in surviving combat and punishing the enemy and the landscape. . . . This is an impressive work, not just in its attempt to detail the psychological formation of a corps' identity, but also in the documentation of one body of men and their experience in the campaign to seize Vicksburg."--Louisiana History

"Eric Burke's groundbreaking evaluation of tactical culture in Sherman's Fifteenth Army Corps is an important contribution to the field of Civil War unit studies, and greatly expands our understanding of how Civil War armies thought about and waged war."--Andrew S. Bledsoe, author of Citizen-Officers: The Union and Confederate Volunteer Junior Officer Corps in the American Civil War and coeditor of Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America's Civil War

About the Author

Eric Michael Burke is a historian at the US Army Combined Arms Center in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He earned a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina after serving as an infantry sergeant in the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan.