Civil War Diary of Cyrus F. Boyd

The Civil War had a very large affect on all of the States. It changed men from gentlemen that went to church every Sunday and never cussed to people who rarely went to church and cussed all the time. Some of the people in the war were also very corrupt and did not do things as they should be done. The way that the enemy was looked at was even changed. All of these things were talked about in “The Civil War Diary of Cyrus F. Boyd”.

Boyd talks about how everyone was very eager to volunteer to join the military to have fun and to make some money and it seemed to be very easy because the war was expected to be very short. Things started to look a bit different even when, the volunteers got to the first destination to be sworn into duty. They started to wonder why they were being sworn in to service for 3 years when they all thought the war was going to be very short. Boyd and the rest of them figured that the government must know something more than everyone else knows. Even during the beginning of the service the conditions for the service did not look as good as they had expected, and the officer had seen that the volunteers started having second guesses about doing it so they put them into more comfortable quarters to keep them from going home. During the war most of the time the conditions were horrible. There were many problems with the soldiers during the war. Many died from being wounded, being shot, and the worst of all was the disease. The conditions were so horrible that many men couldn’t get enough sleep and even when they did get sleep they were sleeping in the rain or in the snow.

Before the war Boyd went to church all the time and thought that Sundays should be a day to relax. He was a very nice man that was kind to others and did not used bad language. When he went into the army he talked about how they did not do religious things all the time and that they didn’t even have a preacher every Sunday and most of the time they did not even have time to rest of do anything religious on Sundays, which bothered him greatly.

Boyd talked about how the war changed a man considerably. It took a nice man who would never cuss and do bad things and turned him into someone with the worst language he had ever seen. Also, lots of people did not follow the rules very often. People did minor things like going out late and trying to run from the guards. Bad things were also done, like burning down houses and farms that the army passes by during marches. They burned these houses even when it was not sanctioned by the army. There was no reprimand in the beginning for this, which also bothered Boyd greatly, but after a while there was a severe punishment for this. After a time, the amount of bullets were counted that a soldier had. This was so the army could tell if someone was randomly wasting bullets and shooting at things for fun. There was a large fine for every bullet that was missing. One punishment that was used very often for soldiers was the docking of their pay. This was very extreme because if you did something very minor, sometimes they would take ten dollars which was a very large amount considering some men only made thirteen a month.

In the beginning, Boyd liked his job and he did not enter the army for fame, glory, or money. At one time though, he was voted unanimously for the position of lieutenant. He did not get this position because there was another man named “Bye” that got the position only because he was friends with a high ranking officer. “Bye” was not