"Adapted to the Soldier's Pocket": Military Discipline, Religious Publishing, and the Power of Print Format during the US Civil War

Abstract:

In this article, I consider the surge of pocket-sized books produced for use by Union soldiers during the US Civil War, investigating how publisher choices about print format intersected with military and civilian attempts to manage the health, conduct, and efficiency of soldiers at scale. As objects believed to exert intimate influence over readers' mental and physical habits, books designed for the pocket promised both to aid and to undermine the production of orderly military bodies in nineteenth-century America. Even as reformers and military officials feared the influence of pornography and fiction published in small, concealable formats, religious organizations including the American Tract Society proposed that pocket-sized books could enhance efforts to discipline soldiers' minds and bodies for military success, including by habituating soldiers to hold books instead of playing cards. Meanwhile, the 1863 entry of Black soldiers into the Union Army, which I consider later in this article, prompted variations on these practices that highlight the racialized nature of Civil War-era approaches to soldier discipline. If wartime responses to pocket-sized books show that print formats may accumulate cultural meaning, such responses also demonstrate how works for the soldier's pocket activated nineteenth-century fantasies of individual optimization and population-level control.