History of the 83rd Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers
by Amos Judson
Book #1065
$35.00
333 pp., photos, roster, index, hardcover.
One of the most glaring omissions from Edmund Wilson’s brilliant Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962) is any glance at the single largest genre of Civil War literature: the regimental histories. Anyone who would care to correct Wilson’s oversight could hardly do better than to begin with Amos Judson’s History of the 83rd Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers. Not only is Judson’s memoir one of the first, if not the very first, of the regimental histories to appear (it was published late in 1865), but it is also the one which comes the closest to being a substantial piece of literary Americana all on its own.
Of course, given the battle record of the 83rd Pennsylvania, almost anything written about the regiment is bound to be of interest to the Civil War reader. Although it is best known for standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine on Little Round Top, it also had a major role to play at Gaines’ Mill, at Malvern Hill, and at Second Bull Run. Indeed, it has already produced more than one superb piece of Civil War literature, including Oliver Norton’s Army Letters and Attack and Defense of Little Round Top.
Judson, who rose to the rank of captain in the 83rd, commands our attention purely on his own merits. For one thing, Judson was aware that he was grappling with a great subject, and his initial instinct to write a good “Gibbonian” history of his regiment reveals his uneasy literary self-consciousness before an awesome but as yet unexplored subject. In fact, he fails to manipulate his subject to create a Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire precisely because it refuses to be thus manipulated. What he winds up with is a quirky and near brilliant history that reads for all the world like a picaresque novel. His style so often brings Mark Twain to mind that it is possible to say that Judson’s History is a soldier’s Life on the Mississippi; Like Twain, he had few illusions about his fellow warriors. Judson’s marvelous Chapter 20, analyzing the Union soldier with Twainish frankness and humor, may be the best thing any Union soldier ever wrote about his army. His frankness has no trace of envy or meanness to it. His tribute to Col. Strong Vincent, mortally wounded at Gettysburg, is moving and from the heart. Above all, like Twain, he has a sharp eye for the human and not merely the gratuitous detail, such as a soldier at Gettysburg shot down by Confederate snipers while urging his comrades to go out and help the Confederate wounded.
If Judson has any flaw, it is that he is too self-conscious. He protests that “I have no practice in the language of encomium,” and then proceeds to deliver one. He rails against the Confederacy, but cannot conceal his anguish over the piles of dead Confederates he finds at the foot of Little Round Top. What will surely madden the Civil War buff is Judson’s too lengthy preoccupation with Gaines’ Mill, and tactically useless discussion of Gettysburg (which suggests that, in 1865, it had not yet quite dawned on people which had been the more significant fight).
Perhaps this explains the surprising neglect to which Judson’s History has been consigned, for no subsequent edition since the tightly-packed, double-columned 1865 edition was ever printed. We can be thankful, therefore, that the Press of Morningside has seen fit to reissue it, including new typesetting and with a foreword and notes by John J. Pullen. It is one of the few unquestionable classics of the Civil War, both as Civil War history and as American literature, and it deserves serious and continued attention on both scores.—Dr. Allen Guelzo, Civil War News
