Well Satisfied with My Position
Subtitle: The Civil War Journal of Spencer Bonsall
Contributors: Michael A Flannery (Editor); Katherine H. Oomens (Editor)
Edition: 1st Edition edition
Publisher: Southern Illinois University; Southern Illinois University Press
Published: October 5, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 144
ISBN-13: 9780809327706
Subjects: American history: c 1800 to c 1900; Biography: historical; Civil war; Medical; History - Military / War; The Americas; History; United States - Civil War; Medical / History; 19th century; Army; Diaries; Employees; Health and hygiene; Hospitals; Military life; Soldiers; United States; United States
Description: Well Satisfied with My Position offers a first person account of army life during the Civil War's Peninsula Campaign and Battle of Fredericksburg. Spencer Bonsall, who joined the 81st Pennsylvania Infantry as a hospital steward, kept a journal from March 1862 until March 1863, when he abruptly ceased writing. Editors Michael A. Flannery and Katherine H. Oomens place his experiences in the context of the field of Civil War medicine and continue his story in an epilogue. Trained as a druggist when he was in his early twenties, Bonsall traveled the world, spent eight years on a tea plantation in India, and settled in Philadelphia, where he worked in the city surveyor's office. But in March 1862, when he was in his mid-forties, the lure of serving his country on the battlefield led Bonsall to join the 81st Pennsylvania Infantry. Bosnall enjoyed his life with the Union army at first, comparing bivouacking in the woods to merely picnicking on a grand scale. "We are about as jolly a set of old bachelors as can be found in Virginia," Bonsall wrote. But his first taste of the aftermath of battle at Fair Oaks and the Seven Days Battles in Virginia changed his mind about the joys of soldiering - though he never lost his zeal for the Union cause