Description

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Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History

Winner of the Gov. John Andrew Award (Union Club of Boston)

An acclaimed, groundbreaking, and “powerful exploration” (Washington Post) of the fate of Union veterans, who won the war but couldn’t bear the peace.

For well over a century, traditional Civil War histories have concluded in 1865, with a bitterly won peace and Union soldiers returning triumphantly home. In a landmark work that challenges sterilized portraits accepted for generations, Civil War historian Brian Matthew Jordan creates an entirely new narrative. These veterans— tending rotting wounds, battling alcoholism, campaigning for paltry pensions— tragically realized that they stood as unwelcome reminders to a new America eager to heal, forget, and embrace the freewheeling bounty of the Gilded Age. Mining previously untapped archives, Jordan uncovers anguished letters and diaries, essays by amputees, and gruesome medical reports, all deeply revealing of the American psyche.

In the model of twenty-first-century histories like Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering or Maya Jasanoff ’s Liberty’s Exiles that illuminate the plight of the common man, Marching Home makes almost unbearably personal the rage and regret of Union veterans. Their untold stories are critically relevant today.

About the Author

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Brian Matthew Jordan is an associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University. His first book, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. He lives in Willis, Texas.

Praise For…

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A rich trove of journals, letters and published accounts reveal[s] the enormous toll that the Civil War took on its participants. . . . Books like [Marching Home] contribute to a much broader cultural narrative.

— Randall Fuller - Wall Street Journal

A far darker narrative of veterans profoundly and permanently alienated from a civilian public that neither understood nor properly acknowledged their wartime sacrifice. . . . Powerful.
— Gary W. Gallagher - Washington Post

Readers . . . will come away with a deeper appreciation of the sacrifices soldiers make; many living veterans will thank Jordan for his attention to an often neglected but important aspect of U.S. military history.
— Walter Russell Mead - Foreign Affairs

Yet another cautionary tale from the Civil War—that the pain of war endures long after the stacking of arms or the signing of an armistice. A fact that those who clamor for U.S. military intervention in every conflict too often forget.
— Frank Reeves - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A somber portrait of the reality of Union veterans’ postwar lives. . . . Theirs is a story that had to be told, and Brian Matthew Jordan tells it very well. The research is impeccable, and the writing finely crafted. . . . Highly recommended.
— Jeffry D. Wert - Civil War News

An eloquent elegy to the “Boys in Blue.” . . . Sensitively written and impeccably researched. . . . Will stand as an important contribution to the history of the American veteran.
— Allegra di Bonaventura, author of For Adam’s Sake: A Family Saga in Colonial New England

Framed as a Homeric odyssey, Jordan’s tale of the Union soldier combines unflinching honesty with generous humanity.
— James Oakes, author of Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861 - 1865