America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  Faith did not die on the battlefield, but the war shook it. Melville predicted the war would resemble “an upheaval affecting the basis of things,” and he was right. Tales circulated of how a pocket Bible stopped a bullet and saved a private’s life. As the war progressed, the veteran soldier learned that a deck of cards did just as well. A Confederate soldier summarized the view of many of his comrades: “The soldiers naturally distrusted the efficacy of prayer when they found that the most devout Christians were as liable to be shot as the most hardened sinner.”31

  Religious organizations on both sides rushed to shore up a faltering faith. Bibles, tracts, and sermons flooded camps. Ministers led revivals. Presidents Lincoln and Davis called for public fast days and prayer. Pocket songsters included tunes that urged piety and sobriety. These periodic paroxysms of religious fervor gained some converts, but they did nothing to ameliorate the war and may have prolonged it, for who could walk away from a crusade? Sacrifice required a great cause, but what kind of God would demand bloodletting on such a scale?

  A sense of betrayal gripped some of the young men. The nobility of serving a just cause the politicians had promised had proved elusive. They expected a Walter Scott novel, a quick victory, a bloodless conquest, and young women throwing rose petals at their homecoming. Many never came home, and few experienced the war as a romantic adventure. Ashley Wilkes, in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), thought the war would be an extension of his chivalrous life in the Old South. It wasn’t, as he wrote to Melanie from his Virginia camp: “I see too clearly that we have been betrayed, betrayed by our arrogant Southern selves, believing that one of us could whip a dozen Yankees, believing that King Cotton could rule the world.” What was left for Ashley Wilkes and his Confederate comrades was to fight and die for home and family, which would never have been in peril in the first place were it not for the betrayal.32

  Home and family rendered the threat of death and dying especially poignant. Most of these young men had never ventured beyond a few miles from home. They came from small towns and farms, generally, and they lived among extended family relations. They rarely met people from other parts of the country. Now, Georgia farm boys found themselves in Virginia camps, and Illinois clerks slogged through the mud of Mississippi. The shreds of familiarity in their lives were the letters to and from home. The correspondence documented that a reality existed outside the insanity of war. They complained when loved ones did not send replies quickly; they doted on information about young children; and they wept at the deaths they could not attend.

  When they closed their eyes, they saw home, they heard the tapping of treetops against the roof, they felt the breeze, and “the sweet-smelling meadow.” Long after the war was over, soldiers remembered how the visions of home sustained them. “Above the smoke of battle,” a former Iowa soldier wrote in 1892, “in the clear empyrean, arose the vision of the American soldier’s home, secure to him and his loved ones.” Such visions supported the men in their camps and on the battlefields, but not always. Longing for home also produced homesickness, which, more than fear, contributed to desertion on both sides. The worry over crops or businesses, or over illness, or just plain missing someone, a lover, a child, a mother, could compromise a soldier’s willingness to fight.33

  Women recognized how important they were to the attitude of the troops. “Don’t worry; all of us are fine” did more to boost a soldier’s morale than the most inspired sermon. Complaints, tales of woe, and entreaties to come home had the opposite affect, and women, north and south, received copious advice on their roles as morale boosters, moral sentries, and sounding boards for their men in uniform. This was especially so in the South, where white women occupied a specific and prescribed role as secondary figures with primary roles as supporters of their men. They received unstinting praise for their work, as in poet Henry Timrod’s salute “Two Armies,” praising women and their “thousand peaceful deeds,” satisfying “a struggling nation’s needs.” Newspapers set out their importance, that women held the “principal creation and direction” of Confederate public opinion “in their hands.”34

  These statements were as much warnings as endorsements. As the war progressed and battles produced more casualties, troop morale was ever more important. The press stepped up its admonitions to women: “The maid who binds her warrior’s sash / And smiling, all her pain dissembles.” “The mother who conceals her grief” had “shed as sacred blood as e’er / was poured upon the plain of battle.” More bluntly, a Huntsville, Alabama, newspaper warned women in bold headlines, “DON’T WRITE GLOOMY LETTERS.” Still, it was difficult, and time and again soldiers wrote home, “Be cheerful and do the best you can.”35

  Alabama writer Augusta Jane Evans published a popular novel, Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice (1864), based on the Greek mythological figure in the title who sacrificed herself on the altar of the gods in order to save Athens from defeat. The story’s modern-day heroine gives up both her father and her lover to the Confederate cause and lives a life of “Womanly Usefulness,” laboring in “God’s great vineyard.” Evans wrote approvingly of mothers who “closed their lips firmly to repress a wail of sorrow as they buckled on the swords of their first-born.” Yet Evans did not follow her own advice, sending sharply critical letters to General Beauregard and Confederate congressmen on military strategy and the class bias of the draft, and complaining that women’s talents were going wasted.36

  Mary Chesnut, wife of a prominent Confederate official, shared Evans’s frustration, confiding to her diary: “I think these times make all women feel their humiliation in the affairs of the world. With men it is on to the field—‘glory, honour, praise, &c., power.’ Women can only stay at home—& every paper reminds us that women are to be violated—ravished & all manner of humiliation. How are the daughters of Eve punished.”37

  Most of all, it was difficult to reconcile grief and patriotism, and grief became ever more common in the years after Shiloh. Widows lay in darkened rooms day after day clutching pictures of their lovers. Well-intentioned neighbors and family came to express their sympathies, but “O God … if they only knew the misery I feel.” Women in the North also sent their men into battle with smiles, forced or otherwise. By the time of the Civil War, however, northern women faced fewer strictures on maintaining a subordinate role. Their leadership in evangelical and anti-slavery causes, their numerous publications, and their organizing activities and political campaigning had primed society to accept a more diverse role for women during the war. It was not surprising, for example, that northern women quickly took up the nursing profession, while southern women debated its propriety.38

  Few northern families suffered the dislocations southerners did; with hardly any exceptions, they did not cope with the destruction of land and livestock and the loss of family fortune. In the more dense and more urban North, isolation was less common, news more frequent, the mail more reliable, and the economy stronger. The war engaged a much higher percentage of southern men. Pleading letters to come home and save the family farm came less frequently from northern women. The war strengthened some northern women as they warmed to the task of self-reliance. An Iowa woman whose husband went off to war wrote that “the whole responsibility” of keeping the family farm running “rested with myself and the children”—a girl of thirteen, two boys, ten and eight, and a baby girl. “They were my only assistance and companions … and it was wonderful what enthusiasm and helpfulness those four dear children manifested all the time. They seemed enthused with the spirit of the times.”39

  Both sides shared a common grief. That less chaotic circumstances surrounded northern women and their families provided little solace for the loss of a life’s partner. George Norris, a future senator from Nebraska, recalled his childhood in Ohio during the war when his older brother, John, died fighting in Georgia. Four months later, his father died. Thereafter, “I never heard a song upon the lips of my mother. I never even heard her hum a tune.… The war
ended, and the young men came back, but John slept in a soldier’s grave in the blackened southern countryside. There were times when it seemed that the heartache over her son never would pass.”40

  War was death, and death was war. How to deal with its possibility as a soldier, and how to process its reality if you were a friend or a family member? How do you die when you are lying helpless in the woods and the fire is about to consume you, or a wild pig is tearing at your entrails, or you have lost your legs to an artillery shell and you know you will bleed to death? Do you think about the Union? States’ rights? God? Your family? Or, do you plead for someone to shoot you? Is it better to die as your comrade did this morning as you sat eating breakfast together and a minié ball crashed into his brain and splattered it over your plate? How do you die if you are stretched out on a hospital bed, sweating from fever and infection, while a young woman wipes your face with a cold cloth and you ask her if you are going to die and you do not hear her answer? Or, if you are moving in and out of consciousness, catching your breath at every draw, and gasping “water,” and maybe your nurse hears “Jesus,” because that is what she writes to your family. How do you respond when you receive a black-rimmed envelope bearing an official seal from Richmond? How do you respond when you are handed a letter from a stranger, a nurse, a comrade, assuring you that your husband or father or son died nobly for his country? Do you thank God?

  Yet the manner of dying was important, particularly for the living. This was Victorian America, and sentiment and form counted a great deal. If the dying soldier in his pain and delirium could not think of a grand cause, of the angels who awaited his ascension, or of love of family, others could. Some soldiers composed farewell letters before the fact and requested comrades to forward them to loved ones in the event of death. William McKinley, a future president, wrote the following two days before he saw his first action in the war: “This record I want left behind, that I not only fell as a soldier for my Country, but also a Soldier of Jesus.” The fear of an anonymous death was almost as great as the fear of battle, and sometimes greater.41

  These letters told of deathbed conversions and of heartfelt expressions of love for God and country, sentiments that would have surprised the deceased’s friends at home, but that consoled his family in their grief that, at last, he was saved. The wounded who could speak beseeched their comrades, “Won’t you write to my folks that I died a soldier?” Parents appreciated these reassurances about their sons, that the war had not debased them. The parents of a dead Union soldier expressed their appreciation to the nurse who wrote about their son’s last moments: “You wrote you thought he was praising God. It was the greatest comfort to us of anything.” It was kind and very necessary for that nurse to pick out a prayer from her patient’s incoherence. Not to die in vain, to die nobly and honorably, with words of faith and family on one’s lips did not remove grief, but made it more bearable.42

  It often fell to comrades to write a letter to the family and enclose a cherished possession of the deceased and perhaps a lock of his hair, always to reassure the loved ones that their son, husband, and brother died a meaningful death. Marion Hill Fitzpatrick, a Georgian in the Army of Northern Virginia, fell at Petersburg toward the end of the war. His comrade wrote the following to his mother: “I am happy to say he died happy and I certainly think that he is now better off. A few minutes before he breathed his last he sang Jesus can make a dying bed as soft as downy pillows are & he said he would of liked to of seen you before he died. He said that the Lord’s will be done and for you to meet him in heaven.” It was a sentiment many southern evangelical women would have understood, especially the lines referring to Jesus, which came from an 1844 Sacred Harp hymnal.43

  Sometimes, words were all a family received. In an era when formal burial services were essential passages to heaven, their absence rode especially hard. Fortunate families received the remains of their soldiers. Most did not. More than half of the Union war dead, and a considerably larger percentage of Confederate casualties, were not even identified, let alone given proper burial in the soil of their birth. Battles reduced remains to ashes or mud, forever obliterating any remnant of a human being. A shocked Confederate soldier on his way to the battlefield at Shiloh on the second day of fighting reported, “The first dead soldier we saw had fallen in the road; our artillery had crushed and mangled his limbs, and ground him into the mire. He lay a bloody, loathsome mass, the scraps of his blue uniform furnishing the only distinguishable evidence that a hero there had died.”44

  Burials in the South occurred quickly, or as quickly as possible, and hopefully before the stench permeated the landscape for miles and before bloated bodies, human and animal, burst, and animals carried away or ate remains. Common graves and the absence of a formal religious service reflected the hastiness with which armies worked to bury the dead. Early in the war, Richmond staged elaborate funerals for the Confederate dead. The mounting death toll soon made those rituals impractical. There were 3,600 casualties at Bull Run in July 1861, 20,000 at Shiloh. And more wasteful battles were yet to come. Not to have the physical remains, the lock of hair, the swatch of cloth, the last look before the clods of dirt fell on the coffin, deepened the loss. Abraham Lincoln exhumed the coffin of his son Willie twice to gaze upon his face; no one thought that was unusual. Soldiers may have felt estranged from civilian life from time to time, but both soldier and civilian shared the bond of death.

  Proper burial of the battlefield dead became increasingly difficult, especially once Grant initiated his relentless spring 1864 offensive in Virginia. The burial party here is laying to rest the remains of federal soldiers—and “remains” is the operative word—at Cold Harbor in April 1865. The battle occurred ten months earlier. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  The randomness of it all. A Confederate soldier at Fredericksburg in December 1862, with shot coming thick and heavy, made ready to discard his blanket to move more quickly; at the last moment, he felt the winter chill and rolled the blanket and tied it around his shoulder at the precise instant a Yankee bullet hurtled toward his neck only to be buried harmlessly in the cloth. Or another seemingly lucky young man, a bullet grazing his arm, a superficial wound; only now he lies in a home, a makeshift hospital and morgue in the Tennessee countryside, with his arm crimson, swollen, and blistered, swathed in filthy bandages and emitting a stench so foul, no one can bear to tend him. He will lose the arm certainly, and his life probably.45

  Medical knowledge was an oxymoron. A visit to a field hospital confirmed it. Sam Watkins, the young Tennessee private in Albert Sidney Johnston’s army, decided to see a wounded friend near his camp. The field hospital was not difficult to find; just follow the penetrating odor caused by gangrene and sepsis, conditions that were rampant. And much more preventable had the overworked doctors and the caring nurses known what general practice would know in another decade or two. The evidence of this ignorance lay in the rear of the building in the form of rotting arms and legs taken from these young men to save their lives. Amputation was the first course of treatment. Watkins stumbled on his friend James Galbreath, who had received a severe wound several days earlier yet was still alive. Watkins gave the wounded soldier some water and promised to write to his family. He asked his comrade how he felt, and Galbreath pulled down his cover. “The lower part of his body was hanging to the upper part by a shred, and all of his entrails were lying on the cot with him, the bile and other excrements exuding from them, and they full of maggots.” Watkins pulled the blanket back up. “I then kissed him on his lips and forehead, and left.”46

  The young men could not help but wonder when their turn would come, and how it would be for them. A New Yorker on the way to his first engagement came across a wounded Confederate soldier, lying by the road “with a sabre cut in the side of his head four inches long, and his brains were running out on to his coat. O! How sick I felt.… I thought to myself, if I got sick at the sight of one dead man what would I do on a battle fi
eld.” Another New York recruit, coming up to replace a decimated unit at Fredericksburg in December 1862, hard-pressed to avoid stepping on mangled blue-clad corpses, saw “their ghastly gaping death wounds” and wondered if they predicted “what might be in store for us.”47

  Dead federal soldier, Petersburg, April 1865. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  Dead Confederate soldier, Petersburg, April 1865. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  A federal soldier disemboweled during the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1863. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  Another soldier came upon a small group of severely wounded men moving on their hands and knees and led by a fellow whose face lacked a lower jaw, now replaced by weirdly angled shards of bone and flesh. The men crawled to a creek to drink its water, but lacked the strength to back away or keep their heads up. They drowned.48

  Sometimes a young soldier envied the wounded with their red badges of courage; sometimes there was thankfulness that your wound was not as bad as another fellow’s. Sam Watkins, shot in the arm, retreated to a field hospital. Along the road he encountered a comrade whose left arm was completely gone. Looking closer, he exclaimed “‘Great God!’ for I could see his heart throb, and the respiration of his lungs.” The man soon collapsed and died.49

  The longer you lived, the worse you felt. Death sundered the bond you had formed with the comrade who marched with you, shared your hardtack, sang songs, and talked about home and love and family. And suddenly, he was gone, just as the one before and perhaps the one after. The only permanency was the killing. You went through this because you believed you fought for a finer thing, an idea, a faith, a loved one. You wondered at times whether these were enough, whether anything would be enough to cover the broken hearts, the shattered bodies, and the lives ended.