From Broomsticks To Battlefields

This book has been nominated for the 2010 Tom Watson Brown Book Award through The Society of Civil War Historians. Henry Clay Robinett, a graduate of Delaware Military Academy, distinguished himself with valor during two Civil War battles - the defense of Battery Robinett during the Battle of Corinth (October 3-4, 1862), where he was wounded with a musket ball that creased his scalp, and later during the siege of Vicksburg. While honorable, and, given his two brevets, even somewhat distinguished, Robinett's service seems little different from that of any other young man, North or South, who went off to war in 1861. At a glance, Robinett, who emerged from the war as a Major, would hardly seem a likely subject for a biography. Unlike many who returned to civilian life after the war, Robinett pursued a career in the Regular Army. That career, however, was marred by increasingly erratic behavior that ended in his suicide just three years after the wear - the result of complex psychological problems that are carefully discussed in the book. From Broomsticks to Battlefields gives us a little more insight into the extent to which the horrors of war affect the personality and reminds us that historians and psychologists have barely begun to study the question of post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury among Civil War veterans. In From Broomsticks to Battlefields, Bill Speer has done something interesting. He has used Robinett's life to throw some light upon several aspects of the American experience and society in the mid-nineteenth century that have not yet been fully explored.