16th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry: Sergeant William H. Relyea Book

Marylanders faced difficult choices during the Civil War era. As residents of a border state, they participated in the life of a community that was situated between North and South and contained cultural elements of both; a slave state whose northern border was the Mason-Dixon Line, Maryland also had strong economic ties with the fast-growing industrial North. While the state officially remained in the Union, as many as 25,000 Marylanders joined the Confederate Army (as opposed to about 60,000 in the Union Army), voluntarily choosing exile from their home state. George Wilson Booth, a Baltimorean who in 1898 published his memoirs of wartime service, under the somewhat unwieldy but very 19th-century title of Personal Reminiscences of a Maryland Soldier in the War Between the States, is a good example of one such displaced rebel.

Booth's memoirs, republished by the University of Nebraska Press in 2000 under the much more reader-friendly title of A Maryland Boy in Lee's Army, provides a helpful glimpse into the life of a Maryland soldier in the Confederate Army. Booth provides a fairly conventional Southern reading of the war and its causes, citing his "sympathies in favor of the rights of the States under the constitution, and in opposition to the efforts and the dominant purpose of the north to violate the express terms of that compact, and to destroy the principles of home government" (p. 5). At the same time, he claims that "never for one moment did the question of slavery or the perpetuation of that institution enter into the decision of my course" (p. 6) - a questionable claim, given the importance of slavery as central cause of the secessionist movement and the formation of the Confederacy, but one that puts Booth's memoirs squarely within the tradition of the postwar "Lost Cause" ideology that de-emphasized slavery as a cause of the war while placing strong emphasis on high-minded constitutional motivations for secession.

Booth, who left Baltimore after an April 1861 mob attack on Union soldiers passing through the city led to Baltimore's occupation by United States authorities, served in the First Maryland Infantry, C.S.A., with the rank of first lieutenant. His service in the First Maryland, and later on the staff of fellow Maryland Confederate Bradley T. Johnson, took him into famous engagements like the First Battle of Manassas/Bull Run, the Shenandoah Valley Campaign, the Seven Days' Battles around Richmond, and the Battle of Gettysburg. Booth writes from a perspective of strong loyalty to the Confederacy generally and to his commanders and comrades-in-arms specifically, as when he defends "Stonewall" Jackson's much-criticized performance during the Seven Days by claiming that "there is no rational explanation of his failure to attack at this momentous juncture but the theory of his utter physical prostration" (p. 50).

There is so much emphasis throughout the book on Confederate valor and success, as when Booth writes of an 1863 rebel attack under which "the federals gave way, after a spirited resistance, and then broke into a rout, while the victorious confederates pursued them until they found refuge behind Meade's infantry lines at Gainesville" (p. 100), that after a time it seems surprising to reflect that the Union actually won the war. And while like-minded neo-Confederate readers may derive a frisson of pleasure from the moral indignation with which Booth denounces Union General Phil Sheridan's destruction of the Shenandoah Valley's agricultural economy, and Union General Ulysses S. Grant's authorization of that conduct, as "diabolical deeds, perpetrated under the guise of military necessity and with fiendish delight" (p. 151), I cannot help reflecting that Booth provides no comparably emphatic denunciation of, say, the massacre at Fort Pillow, or the execution of unarmed Unionist civilians at Lawrence, Kansas - or, for that matter, the numberless horrors and cruelties of 350 years of slavery. It seems that Booth's Civil War is a Southern Confederate war in which only the North, or the Union, is capable of atrocities.

In short, if you are looking for any expressions of self-doubt from a Confederate veteran regarding the "rightness" of the rebel cause, you will not find them by reading A Maryland Boy in Lee's Army. In a way, however, the author's fidelity, almost forty years later, to his wartime cause contributes to the book's value as an historical document. The introduction by National Park Service historian Eric J. Mink of Richmond National Battlefield Park provides a helpful sense of context. And the book does provide helpful insights into how many Maryland Confederates no doubt viewed the Civil War and their participation in it.

A Maryland Boy in Lee's Army can be a helpful read for students of the American Civil War - particularly if, like me, you are from Maryland. Just please remember, while you read it, that some of Booth's fellow Marylanders - Frederick Douglass, say, or Harriet Tubman - would have viewed the Civil War and its causes and combatants very differently.