Having read "A Stillness At Appomattox", I'm amazed at the ineptness and cowardice of the Union conscript. Several battles seem to have been won by a Union officer rallying the troops at the last moment, when all seemed lost. And most of those officers appear to have come from the MidWest, not the North.
Amazing isn't it? The Midwesterners were backwoodsmen, farmers and tough as nails. The "Westerners" got the job done. The Army of the West kept the Union in the War. Grant, Sherman and many other generals were from Ohio and further west.
That is progress for the North. In the first two years of the war, if Lee can get the Union army to start running, the conscript soldier usually kept running. Gettysburg (1863) was the first battle in the Eastern Theater that the Union soldiers ran, but stopped and rallied.
One of my all time favorite reads. There's a line about recruits meeting veterans that goes something like , "When who thought they were bold met men who were bold in fact, it put a permanent scare into them." Kind of 'splaines the difference between Weasly Clark and Tommy Franks.
I'm amazed at the ineptness and cowardice of the Union conscript.
Well, there were the bloody anti-draft riots in New York. Apparent the good citizens were "brave" enough for mob violence and I suppose it's not too far fetched to think that a great-great-grandmother of Cindy the Ditch B*tch was there pimping here 'grief' for a son killed at Bull Run.
The author has a real grasp on human nature as well as historical facts.
In fairness, that was mainly a problem at the end of the war and mainly in the Virginia theater, after Grant had bled down his force to the point that they had to scrape the bottom of the manpower pool to fill the slots.
And given how poorly led they were by junior and even some senior officers in the Army of the Potomac, I wouldn't have felt very inspired to charge Confederate works on their behalf, either.