One More Time: Diary of an Enlisted Man

In an earlier posting, I mentioned that one of the trans-Mississippi classics is Lawrence Van Alstyne’s, Diary of an Enlisted Man (1910). Although it does show some signs of postwar embellishment, his account has a number of strengths. Van Alstyne enlisted in August 1862 and was assigned to Company B of the 128^th New York Infantry. In December 1862, the regiment was transferred by sea to Louisiana, and a few months later they participated in the Port Hudson campaign. In the fall of 1863, Van Alstyne received a commission as 2^nd Lieutenant and became part of the 90^th U. S. Colored Infantry. Although he served in the Port Hudson campaign, he was in a commissary role at the time and did not often come under fire. The 90^th was in the Red River campaign but saw little active duty. The lack of combat duty, though, does not mean the diary is boring. His entries about camp life are well done such as the following snippet about a common soldier complaint:

“July 18, 1863….One of the boys borrowed a pair of shears and I guess they will wear them out. The best thing though was a fine-tooth comb, which has been in constant use to-day. That too was borrowed. I am ashamed to tell it, but when I got the comb I pulled out five lice from my hair the first grab….Body lice we don’t care for. We just boil our clothes and that’s the end of them. Their feeding time is when we are still for awhile, but at the first move they all let go and grab fast to our clothing” (p. 155).

My favorite chapter was his account of traveling back to Louisiana after a leave. The ship he traveled on was loaded with conscripts, and some of them proved to be pretty tough characters. Van Alstyne, along with other soldiers, helped bring the situation under control. At one point, he wrote, “I grabbed the tough by the collar with one hand and with the other jammed the muzzle of a cocked revolver against his ugly face, telling him to climb that ladder or die. He was a coward after all and went on deck as meek as you please, where I handcuffed him to the rigging and went back after more” (p. 278).

Descriptions of the country he traveled through and the civilians that he encountered are well done, and his recruiting duties in Louisiana for the 90^th U. S. Colored were sometimes lively. Many of the African-Americans that served in the unit were bilingual, knowing both French and English. Diary of an Enlisted Man is a fine read, and it’s a shame that a modern edition of the book has never been published.

An Overlooked Gem: Diary of an Enlisted Man

Bell Irvin Wiley’s classics, The Life of Johnny Reb (1943) and The Life of Billy Yank (1952) were based on a solid foundation of unpublished manuscript sources, printed correspondence, printed diaries, unit histories, and printed memoirs. His “Bibliographical Notes” at the end of each book highlighted the best in each category, and that is how I learned of Lawrence Van Alstyne’s Diary of an Enlisted Man (1910). Wiley wrote that the book “gets off to a slow start but the author’s style, like that of some other diarists, improves with practice and the end product of his efforts is an absorbing book. The account is a memoir rather than a diary for the period after June 15, 1864” (page 440). Another plus is that Van Alstyne served in regiments that were stationed mostly in the trans-Mississippi. 

Before writing about some of the topics covered in his diary, I think it’s worthwhile to quote a part of Van Alstyne’s poignant preface. He enlisted in August 1862 in the 128^th New York Infantry; only 23 years old, he promised his parents to keep notes of his experiences. For most of his service, he wrote his diary entries in “small notebooks” and sent them home after he filled them up. When he returned home, he bundled them all up “and put them away in an unused drawer of my desk, where they lay, unread and undisturbed for the next forty-five years.” As the years passed and more and more veterans passed away, “It was with a feeling of ever-increasing loneliness that I untied the bundle and began to read the long-forgotten diary. In a little while I was a boy again, one of that great company that helped to make history read as it does. Almost half a century had suddenly rolled back and I was with Company B—‘Bostwick’s Tigers’ we were called, not altogether on account of our fighting qualities, but became of the noise we sometimes made….

I was never so absorbedly interested. I even forgot my meals. For weeks I thought of little else and did little else than read and copy those dim old pages. I read from them to any who would listen, and wondered why it did not stir their blood as it did my own.

But the reason is plain. To the listener it was hearsay. To me it was real. So it may be with the diary now it is printed. In the nature of things it cannot be to others what it is to me. It is a part of my life. My blood would not tingle as it does at the reading of another man’s life. It is what historians had neither time nor space to write, the everyday life of an enlisted man in time of war” (pages v-vii).