While doing some research concerning Wisconsin Civil War soldiers I found an interesting study in the Journal of Military History from 2000 (Vol. 64 No. 1) by Joseph Allan Frank and Barbara Duteau. Their qualitative research method struck me as a bit extreme. It is not unusual for historians (or anyone) to use qualitative methods when dealing with letters and diaries while attempting to interpret or extrapolate meaning, motivation, and understanding. This type of analysis, as I know from experience, can prove difficult. Visceral entries about battle or deep inner-reflection about politics are not always easily found. The most effective type of research is when the historian can combine qualitative and quantitative analysis, such as John Robertson’s excellent study, “Re-enlistment Patters of Civil War Soldiers†(Journal of Interdisciplinary History).
Frank and Duteau take qualitative analysis to a new and even more perilous level with their study, “Measuring the Political Articulateness of the United States Civil War Soldiers: The Wisconsin Militia.†Not only do they come to conclusions based on what the soldiers seem to be saying in their correspondences, but also by what they are not saying. They sampled 841 Wisconsin soldier correspondences written between 1863 and 1865. Lets set aside the first problem I have with the study, and that is the omission of 1861-1862.
Right away they found few soldiers “sophisticated enough to incorporate their ideas into a coherent ideology.†That should not surprise anyone. Their research model is taken from Robert C. Luskin’s “Measuring Political Sophistication†published in the American Journal of Political Science in 1987. Luskin’s study centered mainly on modern political thought and thus there is no attempt to determine how Victorian era political sophistication might be different? Frank and Duteau do not address this in their study. Taken with the definition they use (barrowed from Luskin) to define ideology, “a particularly sophisticated belief system of ‘near-eliteworthy complexity,’†there seems to be significant flaws embedded within their methodology.
Anyway, they did find that a third of the 841 soldiers did document some kind of political awareness. Their study used three measures of political awareness: (1) “the precision or acuity†of the soldier’s writing; (2) the “breadth of their interest in the world around them;†and (3), their “sense of political effectiveness.†When soldiers only voiced “vague or inchoate†symbols of patriotism or politics they were considered to show only a very low level of interest or understanding. Essentially, they categorized soldiers by what they both said and didn’t say. For example, one soldier who fought at Vicksburg and after the city had fallen his correspondence home was found lacking as “[he] did not try to explain why its capture was significant for the outcome of the war.†So he was therefore categorized as politically “unsophisticated.†There could be lots of reasons for why this soldier didn’t write a deep analysis of the events unfolding around him.
Frank and Duteau found that of the 289 soldiers who expressed interest in some aspect of politics, half of them showed a level of “acuity and reflection,†yet only 7.6% met their “high standards†of political sophistication that would represent a coherent ideology. That a 1/3 of them expressed some level of political consciousness to me is substantial.
Books of interest: James McPherson (For Cause & Comrades), Reid Mitchell (The Vacant Chair), Gerald Linderman (Embattled Courage), and Bell Irvin Wiley (Life of Billy Yank).
