American History / Wisconsin
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Wisconsin Boy in Dixie "When I wrote to you last I was at Madison with no prospect of leaving very soon, but I got away sooner than I expected to." So wrote James Newton upon leaving Camp Randall for Vicksburg in 1863 with the Fourteenth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. Newton, who had been a rural Wisconsin schoolteacher before he volunteered for duty in the Union army in 1861, wrote to his parents of his experiences at Shiloh, Corinth, Vicksburg, on the Red River, in Missouri, at Nashville, at Mobile, and as a prisoner of war. These letters, selected and edited by noted historian Stephen E. Ambrose, follow Newton as he traveled more than five thousand miles as a Union soldier. A Wisconsin Boy in Dixie reveals Newton as a young man who grew to maturity through his Civil War experience, rising in rank from private to lieutenant. Writing soberly about the less attractive aspects of army life, Newton's comments on fraternizing with the Rebs, on officers, and on discipline are touched with a sense of humor—"a soldier's best friend," he claimed. He also became sensitive to the importance of political choices. After giving Lincoln the first vote he had ever cast, Newton wrote: "In doing so I felt that I was doing my country as much service as I have ever done on the field of battle." James K.
Newton
(1843–1892) served in the Union infantry until 1865. He
became a professor of French and German at Oberlin College in
Ohio. Stephen E. Ambrose was professor of history at the
University of New Orleans. Among his many books are D-Day,
June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II; Eisenhower:
Soldier and President; Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973–1990;
and Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938. |
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