A Civil War memory by a Jersey County soldier

[struggle4progress]

4 hours ago
By John J. Dunphy
Special to the Post-Dispatch

... I recently discovered a work titled "The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War 1861-1865" by Leander Stillwell. Born in 1843 “in a little old log house” on his family’s farm at Otter Creek in Jersey County, Illinois, Stillwell wrote the memoir for his youngest son, who had requested that his father write an account of his years in the Union army during the Civil War. The dedication to Jeremiah E. Stillwell is dated July 3, 1916 ...

Stillwell didn’t immediately enlist in the Union army when the war broke out because of “the belief then ... almost universal throughout the North that the ‘war’ would amount to nothing more than a summer frolic, and would be over by the 4th of July.”

While conceding that the Union defeat at the Battle of Bull Run was a "crushing disappointment,” Stillwell tells readers that the Confederate victory “was probably for the best” because had Bull Run “been a Union victory and the Rebellion then been crushed, negro slavery would have been retained and the ‘irrepressible conflict’ would have been fought out likely in your <his son’s> time, with doubtless tenfold the loss of life and limb that ensued in the war of the sixties.” Neo-Confederates and other Old South apologists claim that slavery wasn’t the cause of the Civil War. Stillwell, who lived and fought during those tumultuous times, obviously believed otherwise ...

http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/a-civil-war-memory-by-a-jersey-county-soldier/article_e37ca00a-f393-55d2-9389-6d2f25fcc185.html

[NBachers]

1. Excellent article- well worth the read. I'd love to read the whole book.