University of Arkansas Press Publishes a Young Union Soldier’s Civil War Memoir

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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Army Life: From a Soldier’s Journal, by A.O. Marshall, edited by Robert G. Schultz (paperback, $29.95) and published in the University of Arkansas Press’ Civil War in the West series, is an engaging account of a young Union soldier’s life in the Civil War.

In 1884, when 44-year-old Albert O. Marshall published Army Life, a memoir of his service as a private in the 33rd Illinois Regiment, 20 years had passed since his 1864 discharge. Marshall left the journal untouched at publication, and today it is a journal that is rare in what it is not. This memoir is not a complete story of the 33rd (known as the “Normal Regiment” because many of its soldiers were from Illinois State Normal University), nor is it a complete roster of regiment members, nor a list of killed and wounded.

Army Life is not, even, a purely military account written from an officer’s point of view. It is the story of a 20-year-old private whose engaging writing belies his age but also allows his youth to shine through. Marshall tells of the battles he fought and the games he played, of his friends, fellow soldiers and officers, and of the regiment’s activities in Missouri and Arkansas, at Vicksburg, and in Louisiana and on the Texas Gulf Coast. And he tells of the many times he lost his knapsack in which he kept his journal, during a forced march or just before a battle, only to be amazingly reunited with it shortly thereafter. Enhanced with careful editing and thorough annotations, this journal Marshall carried faithfully to every mustering out is a rich and important Civil War memoir.

Albert O. Marshall was born in 1840 on a farm in Illinois. He served in the 33rd Illinois Regiment for three years, after which he became a lawyer and was elected to a four-year term in the state senate and later to the county court as a circuit court judge. Robert G. Schultz teaches at East Central College in Union, Mo., and has published numerous articles on local and regional history and postal history.

In their Preface to the book, series editors Daniel E. Sutherland and T. Michael Parrish, describe this “extremely rare and little-known work” as “an extremely valuable primary account by an intelligent and insightful Civil War soldier.” They draw particular attention to Marshall’s candid account of the “Union army’s destruction of property and seizure of cotton” and his vivid portraits “of the dangerous and difficult plight of runaway slaves who flocked by the thousands to the safety of Union lines.”

This book represents the first time a volume in the Civil War in the West series has been published as an original paperback only, in order to reach as wide an audience as possible.