Well Satisfied With My Position: The Civil War Journal Of Spencer Bonsall

Flannery and Oomens (Continued from front flap) michael a. flannery, associate professor and associate director for historical collections at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is the author of John Uri Lloyd: The Great American Eclectic, published by Southern Illinois University Press; Civil War Pharmacy: A History of Drugs, Drug Supply and Provision, and Therapeutics for the Union and Confederacy; and coauthor of America’s Botanico-Medical Movements: Vox Populi and Pharmaceutical Education in the Queen City: 150 Years of Service. katherine h. oomens, formerly library associate for the Reynolds Historical Library at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is a graduate of Cornell University and holds master’s degrees in museum studies and library science. Printed in the United States of America “W e soon become familiarized with death in all its ghastly forms and lie down at night rolled in our blankets, with the shells bursting around us, and sleep as soundly as though in our peaceful beds at home. And this is war, ‘grim visaged war,’ brother arrayed against brother and father against son, each seeking the lifeblood of the other for an imagined wrong. No one who has not been engaged in it can for a moment form a conception of its horrors, and yet, here we laugh, dance, sing, and are merry over the discomfiture of our foes, not knowing but that moment may be our last.” —From the journal of Spencer Bonsall Cover photo: Cumberland Landing, Virginia, Federal encampment on Pamunkey River. Library of Congress. southern illinois university press 1915 university press drive mail code 6806 carbondale, il 62901 www.siu.edu/~siupress $27.95 usd isbn 0-8093-2770-8 isbn 978-0-8093-2770-6 Well Satisfied with My Position: The Civil War Journal of Spencer Bonsall Virginia, in which the Union suffered a staggering 10,200 casualties and the 81st Pennsylvania lost more than half its men. He vividly describes the bloody aftermath. Bonsall’s horse was shot out from underneath him at the Battle of Gettysburg, injuring him seriously and ending his military career. Although he was listed as “sick in hospital” on the regiment’s muster rolls, he was labeled a deserter in the U.S. Army records. Indeed, after recovery from his injuries, Bonsall walked away from the army to resume life in Philadelphia with his wife and child. Published for the first time, Bonsall’s journal offers an unusually personal glimpse into the circumstances and motives of a man physically ruined by the war. Seventeen illustrations, including some drawn by Bonsall himself, help bring this narrative to life. Southern Illinois University Press Well Satisfied with My Position The Civil War Journal of Spencer Bonsall Edited by Michael A. Flannery and Katherine H. Oomens Well Satisfied with My Position offers a firstperson account of army life during the Civil War’s Peninsula Campaign and Battle of Fredericksburg. Spencer Bonsall, who joined the 81st Pennsylvania Infantry as a hospital steward, kept a journal from March 1862 until March 1863, when he abruptly ceased writing. Editors Michael A. Flannery and Katherine H. Oomens place his experiences in the context of the field of Civil War medicine and continue his story in an epilogue. Trained as a druggist when he was in his early twenties, Bonsall traveled the world, spent eight years on a tea plantation in India, and settled in Philadelphia, where he worked in the city surveyor’s office. But in March 1862, when he was in his mid-forties, the lure of serving his country on the battlefield led Bonsall to join the 81st Pennsylvania Infantry. Bonsall enjoyed his life with the Union army at first, comparing bivouacking in the woods to merely picnicking on a grand scale. “We are about as jolly a set of old bachelors as can be found in Virginia,” Bonsall