Southern Illinois Farmer Goes to War: Sgt. William S. Bolerjack and the 29th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, July 1861 - January 1863.

Abstract

This thesis examines Sgt. William S. Bolerjack's Civil War expectation and experiences in the 29th Illinois Volunteer Infantry regiment during the period 1861-1862. William's diary entries and collected letters represent the only documented firsthand accounts of the 29th Illinois's wartime activities and actions penned by a common soldier in that regiment. In this study, therefore, the Bolerjack manuscripts have been supplemented and substantiated by other Illinois soldiers' journals and letters collections, postwar memoirs, and unit histories, as well as by United States and Confederate States government documents and related secondary texts, journals articles, theses, and dissertations. Sergeant Bolerjack's wartime journals and collected letters both confirm and complement historians' understanding of the experiences of ordinary enlisted men in the Civil War. William's narratives not only illuminate the enlistment inspirations of southern Illinoisans, they also provide a chronologically and geographically accurate description of Union movements in the western theater during the first year of the conflict. The Bolerjack manuscripts are among very few primary accounts of the 29th Illinois's wartime actions and encounters, and provide a rare firsthand description of Van Dorn's raid on Holly Springs from a captured federal's perspective. William's manuscripts also provide a uniquely personal examination of the Dix-Hill prisoner exchange system of 1862, as well as the conditions and circumstances in which Union parolees were detained at Benton Barracks. In these and many other respects, Sergeant William S. Bolerjack's diaries and letters collection lend new perspectives and suggest new interpretations regarding the expectations and experiences of Illinois soldiers in the Union Army of the Tennessee during the years 1861-1862.