With Ballot and Bayonet: Political Socialization of American Civil War Soldiers - Hardcover

A major contribution to a small but steadily growing body of work on Civil War soldiers . . . Frank has a particularly good sense of the internal dynamics of the war effort over time, and he is very concerned with dwelling on the concept of a people's war and a citizen army. Students of all these topics will greatly enjoy this book. His discussion of the South's debate over arming slaves is one of the best I have read. And no one can fault Frank for his grasp of political theory and the scholarship surrounding it (he is a political science professor), or for his wide understanding of other conflicts in the Western world that involved mass armies.--Civil War History

In this study of what motivated soldiers to enlist and fight in this nation's most bloody conflict, Joseph Allan Frank argues that politics was central to the development of the armies of the North and South: motivating soldiers, molding the organization, defining the qualifications of officers, shaping fighting styles, and framing the nature of relations between the army and society. This study relies on the letters and diaries of more than a thousand soldiers, with the author using social science categories for identifying politically aware soldiers and then defining and classifying the levels of political socialization.