One More War to Fight: Union Veterans’ Battle for Equality through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Lost Cause

In his deeply researched debut, psychiatrist Goldman parlays decades of experience in academic and clinical medicine, including the treatment of combat veterans, into a unique history of the Civil War era. Focusing primarily on the Union Army’s Left-Armed Corps of amputee veterans, Goldman investigates the “warrior identity that motivates veterans in civilian life just as in uniform,” drawing on unpublished letters to reveal servicemen’s evolving views of the conflict and their lifelong commitment to the “unfinished work” of racial equality. Goldman delves into the important service that Union Army veterans provided in the Freedman’s Bureau, their vociferous opposition to Andrew Johnson’s racial policies and the Ku Klux Klan, and their “grand-scale political activism,” which helped Republicans in the 1866 midterm elections and eased the way for the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments. Even as the nation “stripped the Civil War of its underlying ideology and racial foundation,” Goldman writes, those “who defeated the Confederacy remembered the truth” and continued to fight for equality. Fresh and persuasive, this study of Union veterans whose battles did not end at Appomattox will appeal to Civil War buffs and fans of civil rights histories. (July)