This Republic of Suffering
Page 6
There is little surviving evidence with which to assess the accuracy of Grossman’s assertion about high rates of nonfiring by Civil War soldiers; his claim is based chiefly on extrapolations from studies of other wars, studies that are themselves contested. The intriguing puzzle of multiply loaded guns may have other explanations: for example, a soldier’s pure panic, or his failure amid the din of battle to realize a weapon had not discharged. But some anecdotal evidence of resistance to firing does exist. One Confederate soldier at Chickamauga made a dramatic show of his refusal to kill. Instead of aiming at the enemy, he shot straight up into the air while “praying as lustily as ever one of Cromwell’s Roundhead’s prayed.” When his captain threatened to shoot him, a comrade reported his reply: “You can kill me if you want to, but I am not going to appear before my God with the blood of my fellow man on my soul.” Willing to remain “exposed to every volley of the enemy’s fire,” the soldier was ready to give his life rather than take that of another.15
Subsequent wars introduced forms of combat with levels of impersonality and anonymity that reduced the burden of individual responsibility endured by Civil War infantry. Many of the bombs and missiles used in twentieth-century warfare, for example, almost entirely separated the killer from his victims. The crew of the Enola Gay or the specialists targeting precision weapons in the First Gulf War had a very different relationship to killing than the Civil War soldier—or the twenty-first-century enlisted man on the ground in Afghanistan or Iraq. Physical distance between enemies facilitates emotional distance from destructive acts. But fewer than 10 percent of Civil War troops were artillerymen, who lobbed shot, shell, or canister toward a distant enemy, and even these targets were usually close enough to be clearly identifiable as men. Most Civil War wounds were inflicted by minié balls shot from rifles: 94 percent of Union injuries were caused by bullets; 5.5 percent by artillery; and less than 0.4 percent by saber or bayonet. Although Civil War weapons did have significantly increased range, infantry engagements, even as they grew to involve tens of thousands of men, remained essentially intimate; soldiers were often able to see each other’s faces and to know whom they had killed. Historian Earl Hess asserts that despite the capabilities of the new rifles, most combat occurred at a distance of about one hundred yards, even though, as one Yankee soldier explained, “when men can kill one another at six hundred yards they generally would prefer to do it at that distance.” S. H. M. Byers of Iowa remembered one terrible battle where “lines of blue and gray” stood “close together and fire[d] into each other’s faces for an hour and a half,” and after Gettysburg, Union soldier Henry Abbott wrote his father of opposing “rows of dead…within 15 and 20 feet apart, as near hand to hand fighting as I ever care to see.”16
The growth in size of battlefields between the Civil War and the two World Wars of the next century influenced the kinds of interactions that took place upon them. In Civil War engagements, The Penguin Encyclopedia of Modern Warfare calculates, the ratio of soldiers to space on the field averaged one man per 260 square meters; by the end of World War II, the ratio rose to one per 28,000 square meters. With its large volunteer armies, its longer-range weapons, and its looser military formations, the Civil War thus placed more inexperienced soldiers, with more firepower and with more individual responsibility for the decision to kill, into more intimate, face-to-face battle settings than perhaps any other war in history. Absent the reassurance provided by distance or controlling discipline or combat experience, many Civil War soldiers were likely to have struggled as they decided when and even whether to fire at men who were visibly very like themselves.17
For many soldiers, the horror of killing was exemplified by sharpshooters, whose work appeared simply to be “cold blooded murder.” Sniping was a fundamental reality of Civil War military life, and rifles made marksmen accurate up to a distance of almost half a mile. Other technological innovations, the telescopic sight and the breech-loading rifle, further enhanced the sharpshooter’s lethality. Confederate sharpshooters’ units required men to be able to hit a target at six hundred yards with open sights. A Vermont recruiting poster for “The Sharp Shooters of Windham County” announced, “No person will be enlisted who cannot when firing at the distance of 200 yards, at a rest, put ten consecutive shots in a target, the average distance not to exceed five inches from the centre of the bull’s eye to the centre of the ball.”18
Soldiers often described bullets whizzing by even as they sat composing their letters home. “Dear Brother, Wife and All,” Isaac Hadden wrote to his family in New York from Virginia in June 1864, “There was a man this moment shot in the belly 20 feet from me which is nothing unusual in this country. It is worth a man’s life to go to sh-t here.” To shoot a man as he defecated, or slept, or sat cooking or eating, or even as he was “sitting under a tree reading Dickens,” could not easily be rationalized as an act of self-defense. Soldiers in camp wanted to think themselves off duty as targets as well as killers, and they found the intentionality and personalism involved in picking out and picking off a single man highly disturbing. Union sharpshooting units customarily wore green uniforms to serve as camouflage, and Confederates came to refer to these marksmen as “snakes in the grass.”19
The cool calculation, the purposefulness, and the asymmetry of risk involved in sharpshooting rendered it even more threatening to basic principles of humanity than the frenzied excesses of heated battle. When twelve soldiers from a regiment of Union sharpshooters were taken prisoner in Virginia in 1864, a local Petersburg newspaper argued for their execution: “in our estimation they are nothing but murderers creeping up & shooting men in cold blood & should receive the fate of murderers.” After enduring twenty-four days of steady and debilitating sniper fire between Union and Confederate troops near Port Hudson, Louisiana, John De Forest confessed, “I could never bring myself to what seemed like taking human life in pure gayety.” Men who had displayed great courage in battle had broken down “under the monotonous worry” generated by sniper fire. De Forest judged it a “sickening, murderous, unnatural, uncivilized way of being.” Men who could kill others in this way were not men as De Forest had before the war understood them to be; they violated his assumptions about both human nature and human civilization; he believed they undermined what defined their human selves.20
“The Army of the Potomac—A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty.” Engraving from an oil painting by Winslow Homer. Harper’s Weekly, November 15, 1862.
Dehumanizing the enemy is a common means of breaking down restraints against killing. Military training and propaganda often explicitly encourage such behavior, and soldiers themselves are inventive at differentiating and demeaning those whom they are assigned to destroy—be they Krauts or Nips or Slopes, to cite three twentieth-century examples. In the mid-nineteenth century, racism served to place African American soldiers in particular peril. Even in the Union army the 180,000 black soldiers who enlisted beginning in 1862 faced degrading inequalities in pay and opportunity. Constituting nearly 10 percent of federal forces, they served under white officers and were overwhelmingly assigned to labor details and fatigue duty rather than entrusted with the responsibilities of combat.
For Confederates, black troops represented an intolerable provocation. To permit blacks to serve as soldiers, Howell Cobb of Georgia declared, suggested “our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” These inferior beings, he believed, were incapable of the courage required for battle. But for white southerners, the issue was not primarily one of racial theories. The terrifying actuality of a force of armed black men seemed equivalent to a slave uprising launched by the federal government against the South. White southerners feared and detested African American troops. Mary Lee, who had endured three years on the front lines in embattled Winchester, Virginia, felt “more unnerved” by the appearance of black Union soldiers in 1864 “than by any sight I have seen since the war [began].”21
Confederate soldiers regarded black troops as “so many devils,”
whose very presence in the South justified their deaths. As the Arkansas Gazette proclaimed, “Arming negroes, as soldiers or otherwise, or doing any thing to incite them to insurrection is a worse crime than the murder of any one individual: Therefore, all officers and soldiers…guilty of such practices…should be punished as murderers.” Southern soldiers did victimize black Yankees, with atrocities that ranged from slaughter of prisoners to mutilation of the dead. W. D. Rutherford of South Carolina boldly declared his intentions in a letter he sent to his wife before an 1864 engagement with a regiment of U.S. Colored Troops: “The determination in our army is to kill them all and spare not.” The Fort Pillow massacre of April 1864, when Nathan Bedford Forrest’s men killed nearly two-thirds of the approximately three hundred black soldiers present, most after they had surrendered, was only the most notorious of such incidents. Others were perhaps even more grisly. At a battle at Poison Springs, Arkansas, which occurred in the same month as Fort Pillow, the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry lost 117 dead and only about half as many wounded. This was a suspicious ratio in itself, as numbers of wounded almost always far exceed numbers of slain. A Confederate officer described bodies “scalped …nearly all stripped…No black prisoners were taken.” A Union soldier confirmed “that the inhuman and blood thirsty enemy…was engaged in killing the wounded wherever found.” But a local newspaper defended the Confederate actions as entirely consistent with the larger purposes of the war, “We cannot treat negroes…as prisoners of war without a destruction of the social system for which we contend…We must claim the full control of all negroes who may fall into our hands, to punish with death, or any other penalty.” Slavery required subordination and control, and arming men elevated and empowered them.22
It was not just African American soldiers who were at risk of southern retribution. A Texas officer described with some amazement his unit’s engagement with a black regiment near Monroe, Louisiana: “I never saw so many dead negroes in my life. We took no prisoners, except the white officers, fourteen in number; these were lined up and shot after the negroes were finished. Next day they were thrown into a wagon, hauled to the Ouchita river and thrown in. Some were hardly dead—that made no difference—in they went.”23
Even black teamsters or servants working for the federals were at risk, and male slaves suspected of fleeing to join the Union army were more than fair game for Confederate rage. A Confederate major described an incident in which black civilians accompanying Union troops were slaughtered. “The battle-field was sickening…no orders, threats or commands could restrain the men from vengeance on the negroes, and they were piled in great heaps about the wagons, in the tangled brushwood, and upon the muddy and trampled road.” All too often, however, orders and commanders encouraged rather than restrained such atrocities. Private Harry Bird reported that Confederates after the Battle of the Crater in 1864 quieted wounded black soldiers begging for water “by a bayonet thrust.” Bird welcomed the subsequent order “to kill them all” it was a command “well and willingly…obeyed.” General Robert E. Lee, only a few hundred yards away, did nothing to intervene.24
“The War in Tennessee—Rebel Massacre of the Union Troops After the Surrender at Fort Pillow, April 12.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 7, 1864.
Jefferson Davis himself had approved the execution of four captured black soldiers in the fall of 1862, and Secretary of War James Seddon declared in April 1863 that “the Department has determined that negroes captured will not be regarded as prisoners of war.” General Kirby Smith, commander of the Trans Mississippi Department, even admonished an officer who had shown himself too merciful to black combatants. “I have been unofficially informed,” he wrote, “that some of your troops have captured negroes in arms. I hope this may not be so, and that your subordinates who may have been in command of capturing parties may have recognized the propriety of giving no quarter to armed negroes and their officers.”25
In the case of black soldiers and the officers who surrendered the privileges of whiteness by consenting to lead them, “propriety” seemed all too often to dictate murder. Killing was not simply justified but almost required, even when such action demanded suspension of fundamental rules of war and humanity. In practice, it would prove impossible for Confederates to maintain a policy of killing all black prisoners, at least in part because of threatened Union reprisals. Some African Americans were treated as prisoners of war, as were, for example, the approximately one hundred men incarcerated at Andersonville. But violence against black soldiers and their white officers was extensive and widely discussed among northern soldiers and civilians alike.26
Well before white atrocities stoked an intensified desire for vengeance, black soldiers approached war’s violence differently from white Americans. Their understanding of why the war was righteous and why their fighting was justified grew out of their knowledge of centuries of suffering under slavery, as well as from their own personal experiences of cruelty and oppression. As T. Strother explained in a letter to the Christian Recorder, the newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church,
To suppose that slavery, the accursed thing, could be abolished peacefully and laid aside innocently, after having plundered cradles, separated husbands and wives, parents and children; and after having starved to death, worked to death, whipped to death, run to death, burned to death, lied to death, kicked and cuffed to death, and grieved to death; and, worst of all, after having made prostitutes of a majority of the best women of a whole nation of people…would be the greatest ignorance under the sun.
Slavery manufactured death, Strother charged; it was itself a kind of warfare perpetrated against blacks; to take arms against it was by definition an act of self-defense, an assertion of manhood and a claim for personal liberation. “Those who would be free must strike the blow,” a young soldier explained in 1863. Blacks fought to define and claim their humanity, which seemed to many inseparable from avenging the wrongs of a slave system that had rendered them property rather than men.27
It would come to seem ironic to many observers, both during the war and later, that manhood should be defined and achieved by killing. Writing the history of the black experience in war and Reconstruction in 1935, W. E. B. DuBois found it “extraordinary…that in the minds of most people…only murder makes men. The slave…was humble; he protected the women of the South, and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold, he was a man!” In fact, like other Civil War soldiers, African Americans wrote often of dying and of Christian sacrifice as fundamental purposes of their military service. “Wounded Colored Soldiers in Hospital” after the 1863 assault on Fort Wagner cast themselves as “soldiers for Jesus” and assured the readers of the northern black press that “if all our people get their freedom, we can afford to die.” Black soldiers did die in dramatic numbers; one-fifth of the approximately 180,000 who served did not survive the war, although disease proved a far more deadly killer than combat. (Overall, twice as many soldiers died of disease as from battle wounds; ten times as many black soldiers did.) But these deaths promised political as well as spiritual redemption. Black soldiers sought to win a place in the polity, as citizens and as men, through their willingness to give up their lives. “When you hear of a white family that has lost father, husband or brother,” wrote a corporal from the Third U.S. Colored Troops reporting the loss of ten comrades in South Carolina, “you can say of the colored man, we too have borne our share of the burden.” Black and white northerners could honor heroic black deaths, even if, as historian Alice Fahs points out, the racist assumptions of many whites made them “only too willing to celebrate the manhood of black soldiers who no longer had any manhood to exercise.”28
“Unidentified Sergeant, U.S. Colored Troops.” Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.
Perhaps the most dramatic such celebration, one that became for many African Americans emblematic of the meaning of black service and sacrifice, was the
New Orleans funeral of Captain André Cailloux in August 1863. The Christian Recorder judged the event “one of the most extraordinary exhibitions brought forth by this rebellion.” And exhibition it was: of black courage, accomplishment, and solidarity, as well as the strength of a black claim to citizenship in a restored American nation.
Cailloux was one of approximately 11,000 free people of color in antebellum New Orleans. A literate artisan and a property owner, he served as secretary of one of the city’s many Afro-Creole mutual benefit societies. After the fall of New Orleans to federal forces in the spring of 1862, Cailloux helped recruit a company for the Union army. Founded upon a long tradition of military service by New Orleans’s free people of color, including a critical role in aiding Andrew Jackson against the British in 1815, the Louisiana Native Guards claimed distinctions denied other units of nonwhite soldiers, such as the right to serve under company officers from their own community. Killed as he led his men in a charge at Port Hudson on May 27, 1863, Cailloux was the first of only a few black officers to die in the war. For all his courage and respectability, André Cailloux was in the eyes of the Confederates simply a man who deserved not just death but dishonor for his presumption in taking up arms against a superior race. Despite a truce called to permit the removal of the dead and wounded, rebel sharpshooters prevented Union troops from retrieving the bodies of black soldiers. Cailloux lay on the field until July 8, when Port Hudson surrendered. After forty-one days exposed to the elements, his body could be identified only because of a ring he still wore.29