Bell I. Wiley

Bell Irvin Wiley (January 5, 1906 in Halls, Tennessee – April 4, 1980 in Atlanta, Georgia) was an American historian who specialized in the American Civil War, and was an authority on military history and the social history of common people.

Background

Born in rural western Tennessee, Wiley was one of 13 children, 11 of whom lived past infancy. The family did farm work, and Wiley had the experience of plowing behind a mule. His dislike for the drudgery of farm chores and the merciless Southern heat motivated him to plan a career in education.

Wiley's maternal grandfather served with the Army of Tennessee, fighting against Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s forces. While he barely knew him, Wiley did grow up with his widow, who often enthralled him as a boy with personal stories. Often during Sunday dinner, Wiley’s family would play host to both an ex-Rebel and ex-Yankee, who would give the young man a first-hand account as to what they faced when each had been trying to kill the other.

Education

Wiley earned a BA at Asbury College in 1928, and a PhD from Yale University in 1933, where he worked under Ulrich B. Phillips. In 1934 Wiley became a professor of history at State Teachers College (now the University of Southern Mississippi). He married Mary Frances Harrison in 1937; they had two children. He served as professor of history at the University of Mississippi (1938-1943), Louisiana State University (1946-1949), and Emory University (1949-1974). Wiley was a pioneer in the social history of the Civil War, with important books on soldiers, women. and blacks.

Wiley's dissertation Southern Negroes, 1861-1865 (1938) dispels many of the myths about blacks during the American Civil War. He showed it was false that most slaves remained loyal to their former masters following emancipation; instead, some slaves did choose to stay with their former owners, but most willingly left their masters behind in order to take control of their own lives. He also exposes the myth that former slaves who joined the Union Army were as well treated as white soldiers.

Scholarship

The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (1943) deviated from the usual procedure of examining the lives and doings of officers, exposing the "deep-seated [hatred that] had been accumulating from the time of [the soldiers'] earliest recollections" based on their perception of the North as a "godless and grasping society", while at the same time the white soldiers on both sides shared fraternal feelings: "Men would shoot and kill when the time came. Yet there was a familiarity and an understanding, at times something that verged almost on liking." "The war of the sixties has been called the 'polite war', and in a sense, the designation is apt. Men of the opposing armies when not actually engaged in a shooting fray were wont to observe niceties that in twentieth-century warfare would be regarded as absurd."

Wiley's intensive research included reading 30,000 letters written by Civil War soldiers. He published numerous books of popular history, as well as scholarly editions of letters and correspondence. He also wrote studies of the United States Army in World War II, and served on many commissions and committees, including the Civil War Centennial Commission during the Civil War Centennial (1961-1965), in which he chaired the commission's executive committee on historical activities.

Wiley summed up much of his feelings toward the common soldier in a commencement address he delivered in North Carolina about 1960:

“The greatest people I know in American history are the plain soldiers who wore the blue and the gray during the Civil War. These lowly people and their folk at home suffered more than any other class. They endured their hardship with less complaint. They supported their leaders with more loyalty, and, in general, they acquitted themselves more admirably than their more privileged fellows.”

Wiley spent more than 50 years in the classroom as a teacher, and authored or co-authored and edited 24 books. He was honored as the president of the Southern Historians Association in 1955, and chairman of the National Civil War Centennial Commission in 1961. In 1965-1966 he was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University.

Legacy

The New York Civil War Round Table awards the Bell I. Wiley Award to deserving authors who write about Civil War themes.

Further reading

• Rank and file: Civil War essays in honor of Bell Irvin Wiley (1976)

Works

• Cotton and Slavery in the History of West Tennessee (1929)
• Southern Negroes, 1861-1865 (1938) typescript in archives
• The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (LSU Press, 1943) read online excerpt and text search 2007 edition
• The Plain People of the Confederacy (LSU Press, 1943) read online excerpt and text search 2000 edition
• Greenfield, Kent Roberts, Robert R. Palmer, Bell I. Wiley. The Organization of Ground Combat Troops (1947) on World War II
• Palmer, Robert Roswell, Bell I. Wiley, William R. Keast. The Procurement and Training of Ground Combat Troops (1948) on World War II read online
• The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (1952) read online excerpt and text search 2008 edition
• The Road to Appomattox (1956)
• Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer by Brig. Gen. G. Moxley Sorrel, C.S.A. (ed.) (Tennessee: McCowat-Mercer Press, 1958)
• The Role of the Archivist in the Civil War Centennial (1961) read online
• Embattled Confederates: An Illustrated History of Southerners at War (Harper & Row, 1964) read online
• Confederate Women: Beyond the Petticoat (1975)
• Slaves No More: Letters from Liberia, 1833-1869 (University of Kentucky Press, 1980) read online
• The Bell Irvin Wiley Reader ed. by Hill Jordan, James I. Robertson, and J. H. Segars (2001) excerpt and text search