Homesickness: An American History
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…It started early, with the colonists. “And to speake the truth I stay to get what I have lost and then god willing I will leave the Countrey: for this is the worst yeare here that … [ever] I saw like to bee,” wrote Edward Hill to his brother in England on April 14, 1623. The rebels who fought on behalf of the revolution were not too pleased with their lot, either. George Washington complained about his soldiers’ “unconquerable desire of returning to their respective homes,” which “not only produces shameful, and scandalous Desertions among themselves, but infuses the like spirit in others.” Matt shows that desertion rates hovered around 25 percent until the army became more professionalized in the later stages of the war. The Civil War was rife with what was then referred to as “nostalgia.” Some 5,537 Union soldiers were treated for the “disease” and 74 were recorded to have died from it, an unsurprising fact during an era when, as Matt writes, Americans “endlessly extolled domestic life as the chief sources of happiness and virtue.” One of the woeful was William B. Greene of Berden’s Sharpshooters, who wanted nothing better than to return to his home in New Hampshire. Matt quotes from letters sent to him by his mother and other relatives. “Willie for the love of God & your friends, let it never be said that Willie Greene brought disgrace upon himself by deserting his regiment or that he died the deserter’s death,” wrote his cousin in 1862. Matt tells us that he hung tough and was still in the army in 1865.
The settlement of the West was also a melancholy affair. The pioneers set out under “a façade of optimism and adventurousness,” but underneath lurked “regret and a deep longing for home and family.” We hear the uninspiring story of the would-be “Forty-niners” who had second thoughts along the rugged Overland Trail and were thus cursed as “Go Backers,” preventing them from ever having a football team named after them. The advent of cheap postal rates and pocket-sized daguerreotypes gave the transplants something to cry over. Observers noted the “novel” sight of long lines gathered in front of the post office. “It was interesting to mark the countenances and conduct of men as they turned away from the delivery windows at the horrible announcement, ‘Nothing for you, sir,’ or as they gasped and broke open letters which brought news from home,” wrote a clergyman. Another minister found that miners were so starved for the hearth fire that they lined up outside his home—“scores of men in the street as far as the eye could see and some were sobbing”—hoping for a taste of the familial atmosphere inside.
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