ILLINOIS SOLDIER

Inside end, like a commissioned officer, he had occur to realize that his duty included doing whatever was needed to enforce the Emancipation proclamation and therefore fight for ones Negroes to survive as citizens, not slaves.

At the beginning, the army seemed boring and uneventful, in accordance with Wills' correspondence: ""I haven't written for your full week?Although soldiering is a hugely lazy life, yet these short days we look for getting smaller spare time." (p.38) Wills is obviously trying to spare the individuals at household around the miseries of camp life, and also the illness that comes with living in close quarters and in tents, regardless from the weather. "The sickly season is more than now and the well being is improving really much?I tell you I consider as powerful as 2 mules and am improving." (p. 39) But, when Wills and his troop encountered fighting, he had to report that "Two men killed on a plank road, 2 a lot more wounded?" (p. 77) Both serious was the condition from the troop's horses: "?our horses dying off very fast from horse cholera. The latter is often a serious point inside a regiment exactly where the men individual the horses themselves. For they (or nearly all of them) cannot purchase horses. Most of them are still owing for ones horses they have " (p. 77) If absolutely nothing else, this begins to thing out for the reader how the men enlisted in this war not only are producing very own and bodily sacrifices, but they might be in debt for your horses and other equipment they bring along.

Surely, like most who survive wars, there had been visible and invisible scars. But, the even-handed tone in the letters as well as the information Wills conveyed made him a worthy chronicler on the events on the Civil War . He, and hundreds of thousands of others had the work to keep the union, and did so. On each sides, boys became men, some men became cowards, other heroes. Some men accepted command responsibility (as Wills did) and some opted for others to fight their battles. 1 can think about this War as being a struggle of Man against Man, up to one of simply political or social principles. If the "little picture" is that men became hardened to wounds and death, blood along with a hatred with the enemy, the "big picture" is that, while the Union was preserved, the rancor with the four years' fighting continued for generations.

It is sad to report, in reading each these books, that Man tends to lose his straightforward instincts of honor and justice. War often turns basically honorable and upstanding men into anything else. Wills condemns his individual Union fellow solders up to the enemy: "This tiny squad of 500 men from the two months they have been mounted have committed a lot more devilment than two divisions of regular cavalry could in 5 years. Everything you'll be able to think of? " (p. 209) Too he writes home that he was not part of this. "I have steadily discountenanced it, and watched my men carefully. I am willing to be responsible for all they did, and will probably have a chance, as I understand a board of inquiry sits on the subject shortly." (p. 209)

Of course, this really is seeing the War inside North's side. 1 must be aware of how the Rebel soldiers felt, and what compelled them to sacrifice their lives, their well being in the conviction how the lead to for which they had been fighting was just and honorable. But, these had been civilian volunteers, not army men.

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