Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

Josiah Williams was 23 years old when he saw his Uncle Whit’s head blown apart at the Battle of Cedar Mountain, which took place in north central Virginia on Aug. 9, 1862. But even his account as witness wasn’t enough to convince his parents, back in Indiana, of Whit’s death. They simply refused to believe him and, without a body to bring back, he had no more proof to offer.

In “Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War,” the historian Gerald F. Linderman wrote, “Every war begins as one war and becomes two, that watched by civilians and that fought by soldiers” — a fact that confronted Josiah Williams and countless thousands of other Civil War combatants who found themselves separated by a deep gulf of experience from their families.

Josiah’s father, Worthington Williams, was a prosperous farmer in Putnam County, Ind., who possessed enough land to give his son his own farm nearby. While many youths his age were forced to migrate west in search of land, Josiah was so busy with his crops, besides being convinced that the war would soon be over, that he did not enlist in the three-months volunteers called up after the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861.

But he was not immune to the war fever. With his uncle, George Whitfield Reed, and some other local men, Josiah Williams formed and organized the drills of the Putnamville Home Guards. Josiah took particular pleasure in the uniforms planned for the company, which, he wrote, were “very patriotic as well as showy,” consisting of a deep blue sack coat, trimmed with red, and white pants, a combination that was “the real ‘red white & blue’ and very pretty.”

When, a month later, President Abraham Lincoln called for three-year volunteers, Williams concluded that he should “assist in fighting the battles of our much beloved and distracted Country.” Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 27th Indiana Volunteers, he arranged for his father to look after his farm and was dispatched to the nation’s capital. Upon reaching Washington, Williams and the other Hoosiers were somewhat disappointed, judging Indianapolis a better city, but they did enjoy the opportunity to see “Honest Old Abe.”

In the first months of his service, Josiah continued to think about his affairs at home. He sent his father instructions about planking the barn, caring for the stock, burning brush and tending peach trees. And he was sufficiently disenthralled with military service to advise his younger brother, Edwin, against entering the Army. Marching through the hot, dusty countryside with 70 or 80 pounds in a pack for up to 25 miles a day, he told him, “well tries the nerves & muscle of a full grown man.” Josiah told Ed to stay in school, but to no avail. At 18, Ed enlisted for six months in the 115th Indiana.

Like many volunteers, Williams served with friends and family from home. While Josiah was a second lieutenant, his Uncle Whit became a first lieutenant of the 27th’s Company I. Reed was the son of an early Presbyterian minister to Indiana, Isaac Reed. Although the family had New England roots, Reed sympathized with the South’s grievances before the war, as did many residents of Putnam County whose families had migrated from Kentucky and Virginia. But after the firing on Fort Sumter, Reed “realised [sic] he had a country to save” and abandoned “narrow views” about states’ rights.

Being surrounded by those one had known at home did not alleviate homesickness. The 27th named their winter quarters near Frederick, Md., “Hoosier City,” and Josiah exulted over a Christmas package sent from “the goodly land of Hoosier.” But Josiah and Uncle Whit learned to enjoy the prerogatives of Army service, including the “luxury” of having a contraband cook. By spring of 1862, Josiah had had his first experience of battle, seeing an officer’s head shot off and musket balls flying like hail. Perhaps remembering his own naïveté, Josiah felt even more strongly that Ed should stay at home because, having never seen a battle, he could have no idea what war was really like.

Growing intolerant of the antiwar movement at home, which he read about in the local newspaper, the Putnam Banner, sent to him by his father, Josiah favored suppressing elections. Since Indiana did not have an absentee voter law, Josiah reasoned that if the patriotic soldiers could not vote, the unpatriotic men who had not volunteered should not have that right either.

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Despite being in the Virginia theater for months, the 27th received its first serious battlefield experience at the Battle of Cedar Mountain on Aug. 9, 1862, when Union troops under Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks attacked Stonewall Jackson’s larger Confederate force. Although initially successful, a Confederate counterattack drove the Union troops back, with Banks losing an estimated third of his force.

Josiah wrote his parents on the day of the battle. Once again the bullets had flown like hail, but this time Josiah recounted, “I am sorry to inform you it was when Uncle Whit fell; who was killed by being shot in the left ear (or near there).” Josiah was 10 feet away when he saw his uncle “throw his hand up by his head and fall forward upon his face. As our men were falling thick & fast & the Reg’t giving back I had not time to get him from the field or see to his things; we being between two fires.” The next day Josiah “made a diligent and fruitless search for Uncle Whit’s (Lieut. Reed’s) body.”

Josiah found, however, that his parents simply did not believe their son’s report. For them, the war was still something abstract, happening far away; and how could an abstraction kill a loved one? The absence of the body encouraged them in hopes for Reed’s survival, hopes that their son, having seen his uncle fall, did not share. Four months later, Josiah insisted, “I would gladly believe Uncle Whit was yet living if possible; but I saw him fall.” But they insisted that, perhaps, he had been captured instead.

That, too, was false hope. Officers from the 27th who had been captured during Cedar Mountain were confined at Libby Prison in Richmond, Va. By the time Josiah wrote, those men had been exchanged and returned to the regiment. They had not seen Reed among the prisoners, Josiah reported. “If Reed had been alive & taken they would have taken him with the others & released now at the same time. They were released some three months ago. That settles all doubt with me.”

But it did not settle his parents’ doubts. Josiah sent the account of Lt. Thomas Box, one of the exchanged members of the regiment, who had been even closer to Reed on the battlefield than Josiah. Box had been standing beside Reed, who was shot twice: “Once through the cheek; or jaw passing along sideways; instead of through the head” as Josiah had thought. Josiah even drew a diagram of the wound in the letter to his parents. Reed had “whirled around & said he was shot,” then started toward the rear, but was shot again in the body after running a few steps, and fell. At last, his parents ceased to press the issue.

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By the time his three-year enlistment expired, Josiah’s martial fervor had diminished, a turn helped along by a leg wound at Chancellorsville. And yet his parents, still unable and unwilling to grasp the horror of the war, couldn’t understand why their son would give up the possibility for military glory. His mother very much wanted him to re-enlist, asking “why lay aside the blue coat that you have honored so long?” Although she acknowledged his war weariness, Lydia Williams confessed, “in truth Si I would like to see you wear the Eaglesupon your shoulders.” But he refused to return.

After the war, Josiah settled in Missouri and farmed. His later life was filled with disappointments, including disability from his war wound, which affected his ability to run his farm, and a failed marriage.

Perhaps in an effort to reconcile the civilians’ war with that fought by the soldiers, Josiah compulsively preserved the memory of the war. In letters to his parents during the war, he had named the dead and wounded from Putnam County after each battle. And when he returned from the war, Josiah compiled the list of the county’s dead that would be carved on its Civil War monument. He attended reunions when health permitted and wrote letters to magazines, correcting accounts of the battles in which he had participated.

At the end of the century, he moved back to Putnam County, where he died in 1900. He was buried with his parents and other family members in the cemetery that contained the Civil War monument for which, 35 years earlier, he had painstakingly compiled the names of the dead.

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Nicole Etcheson is the Alexander M. Bracken professor of history at Ball State University and the author of the prize-winning “A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community.”