By DAVID W. MUNNS, Assistant Editor

THE SOUTHERN JOURNEY OF A CIVIL WAR MARINE: The Illustrated Note-Book of Henry O. Gusley
Edited and Annotated by Edward T. Cotham Jr., Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, March 2006.
223 pp. $24.95.
ISBN: 0-292-71283-9

Most histories are based on primary sources, but few include the complete primary source itself. Edward T. Cotham’s recent release, The Southern Journey of a Civil War Marine: The Illustrated Note-Book of Henry O. Gusley, goes one step further.

In it, Cotham includes Gusley’s journal from when he served aboard two Union ships and his time in prison during the Civil War, illustrating his life with concurrent drawings by Dr. Daniel Nestell, who served in the same mortar flotilla as Gusley. To this, Cotham adds his own succinct history of the lives of the two men and the issues — strategic, social and technological — facing the small force of U.S. Marines during the war.

Though dubbed a “southern journey,” Gusley’s travels span from New York to Texas, where he was captured by Confederate soldiers in the Battle of Sabine Pass. Experiencing firsthand many areas of the country during the Civil War, Gusley provides a unique glimpse into the qualities that both divided and eventually unified the North and South. But he did not intend for his personal memoirs to become public.

Cotham concludes that Gusley, in fact, wrote the journal to be read only by his close friends and family upon his return to his hometown in Lancaster, Penn., where he had worked before the war as a printer. But his “Yankee note-book” was confiscated after he was taken prisoner at Sabine Pass, and installments were first published in 1863 by the Galveston Tri-Weekly News. The publication was actually printed in Houston where many of its readers had fled to escape the threat of a Union blockade.

Galveston Tri-Weekly News was one of the most influential southern publications during the war, Cotham writes, and the journal entries and published correspondence between Gusley and its editor became a sensation among readers in South, exposing how amiable and alike them this Yankee Marine was.

Gusley’s journal also records some of the most important naval campaigns of the Civil War along the Gulf Coast, including the Union’s spectacular success at New Orleans and the embarrassing defeats at Galveston and Sabine Pass.

While Gusley gained fame for his writings, Cotham brings light to the difficulties many Union Marines faced during the war. Cotham writes in his introduction that the Marines, who functioned primarily as guards for ships and forts at that time, lost about half of its already small force, just a few thousand, when members left to fight for the Confederacy.

In addition, many Marines were left without direction or purpose, and were almost exclusively relegated to sleep and work below deck on Navy ships.

One Marine, Pvt. George Riddell, wrote in a letter to his family that the “‘berth deck is only 2 feet 6 inches high,’” causing him to crouch down for most of the day.

Gusley, however, finds the poetic in his sea venture, likely influenced by his youthful obsession with literature, even writing when at port in Pensacola, Fla., “Time appears to move on with an amazing swiftness, and the different periods of time change names with a rapidity which almost puzzles one so isolated from newspapers and almanacs to remember.”

Gusley notes in Galveston that the people there are “a more respectable and behaved set” than he had ever seen, which is just one instance of his incredible openness to the surprising commonalities he found between the North and South.

For the South’s part, it, too, was struck that Gusley was not a raving abolitionist, but rather one member of an overwhelming Union force whose life was moderate, temperate and, most notably, similar to theirs.

In prison, Gusley turns from poet to philosopher, and expresses a poignant impression on the war in his letters to the Galveston Tri-Weekly News’ editor. He writes regarding the war, “the restoration of the Union is the grand incentive; and while such is the fact, every nerve and every sinew will be strained to bring about a victorious end. Would to Heaven that the blood already spilled was a sufficient sacrifice for this great result.”

Seapower does not review works of fiction or self-published books.