If I Can Get Home This Fall chronicles the epic story of Dan Mason, a white man who served in the Civil War as a soldier in the Sixth Vermont Infantry and as an officer in the Nineteenth U.S. Colored Troops. It is a story of these two units from very different realities but with a common purpose.
Drawing on Mason’s letters home to his fiancé, Harriet Clark, and on other historical records, Tyler Alexander provides a compelling account of the human cost of war and offers insight about the experiences and attitudes of those who witnessed war firsthand, including enlisted troops and officers, men and women, Democrats and Republicans, and white and Black Americans. Alexander examines how the most controversial issues of the war – emancipation, the draft, military strategy, the arming of Black troops, and Reconstruction policy – were viewed in real time by the participants who found themselves engulfed in the maelstrom of war, particularly those from a strongly anti-slavery farming community in the hills of northeast Vermont. The voices from this distant time offer an example of what real patriotism, courage, and moral conviction look like in times of extreme national divisions over race, identity, and the meaning of democracy.