Was the exercise of leadership tyranny? The prosecution of the war demanded order, centralization, command. Passed in the spring of 1862 by the Confederate Congress on behalf of President Davis, the first Conscription Act required every white man between eighteen and thirty-five to join the army. There were some exceptions: those who had served in previous wars, those who occupied such professions as miners, telegraph operators, clergymen, or teachers; those who could hire a substitute for as much as the absurd price of $4,000. (By comparison, substitutes in the North cost $300—and even that was a significant sum.) And the Twenty Negro Act exempted from military service men who owned twenty or more slaves. This was a rich man’s war, it was said over and over, and a poor man’s fight.
Yet the poet Henry Timrod, himself a poor man, urged his fellow Southerners to put down the “bloodless spade,” to torch “the books of trade,” and to vanquish the Northern “despot.” Timrod had enlisted. Said to be as delicate as a mimosa, the fragile Timrod was soon discharged from the army, and his stint as a correspondent was likewise short. He did continue to fight—in words, that is, praising the South as an “endless field” of white (cotton as well as men)—inviolable though violated. Soon Timrod was the unofficial poet laureate of the Confederacy.
Timrod had long complained that the Southern author was the pariah of contemporary literature, which, he insisted, was dominated by a Northern cabal. And though his poems had been published by Ticknor & Fields—the Boston house of Hawthorne and Longfellow—Timrod was calling for Southern independence from a Northern rule that extended even into the arts. Southerners needed to look to their own poets, not to those of the snooty North with its antislavery presumptions. As the Virginian secessionist Edward A. Pollard told Northerners, you “vaunt over our heads a rotten and phosphorescent literature, you even sneer at us over self-assertions of your puritanical virtues.” And so, during the war, poems flooded the offices of magazines and newspapers, which began to print more and more original verse about homeland, triumph, and Northern aggression. “Are we to bend to slavish yoke?” asked the former editor John O’Sullivan, who became a Confederate poet. Not at all: “For home, for country, for truth and right / We stand or fall in freedom’s fight.”
Much of this poetry was a form of martial propaganda camouflaged as tributes to the agrarian ideal. Ruffians of the North had violated the “sacred sands,” as Timrod had written, and if “ten times ten thousand men must fall,” so be it. In his poem, “Maryland, My Maryland,” the belligerent, Baltimore-born James Ryder Randall called his neighbors to “Avenge the patriot gore / That flecked the streets of Baltimore / And be the battle-queen of yore, / Maryland! My Maryland!” This was the bloody dawn of a new day; dally not. Northerners were “codfish poltroons.” A very popular call to arms, published just days after Sumter in the New Orleans Daily Delta, “Maryland, My Maryland,” was sung to the tune of “O Tannenbaum,” and in 1939 the state of Maryland made Randall’s poem its state song.
The unofficial anthem of the South, “Dixie,” had originally been sung in a Northern minstrel show, and it too told of old times not forgotten and seeped with sentimental nostalgia about those old times, long before war’s beginning; it looked back to what the war, presumably, was being fought for. But at night, it was “When This Cruel War Is Over” that Confederate soldiers sang. The Union soldiers sang it too, and so did those sitting at the piano back home.
ON MAY 6, 1862, just days before General David Hunter brashly issued his proclamation freeing the slaves of the Sea Islands, Henry David Thoreau died of consumption at age forty-four in Concord, Massachusetts. Three days later, a service was held in Concord’s First Parish Church. Thoreau would have disliked that, for he’d spurned the church and all other institutions. But Emerson had insisted. He wanted as many people as possible to mourn Thoreau, for his friend’s death marked the end of an era.
It was certainly the end of the kind of phosphorescent literature, transcendentally lit, that Pollard detested and had included the vatic poems of Jones Very, Hawthorne’s haunted early tales, the exhortations of Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau’s lapidary tale of an experiment in living at Walden Pond, away from mills and industrialists. Thoreau’s was a life devoted to the higher laws incarnated in men such as John Brown—and Stonewall Jackson.
Northerners called Jackson a “species of demon.” That was praise. He was the man who inflicted more damage than he sustained, who lifted Southern morale with his daring, capturing supplies and arms, easily it seemed, and outwitted large forces. At the Second Battle of Manassas (Bull Run), in August 1862, he had outflanked General Pope and cut the telegraph lines between the Union forces and Washington; at Antietam, he had again been firm and resolute: he was a hero, a legend, a star, indeed a demon.
Mythologized as a plain man (an orphan, no less) and a humble, God-fearing, modest one (which only increased his fame), Jackson was just the sort of man the North needed. “We should be, like the South, penetrated with an idea, and ready with fortitude and courage to sacrifice everything to that idea,” Wendell Phillips goaded his Northern audiences. “No man can fight Stonewall Jackson, a sincere fanatic on the side of slavery, but John Brown, an equally honest fanatic on the other. They are only chemical equals, and will neutralize each other. You cannot neutralize nitric acid with cologne-water. You cannot hurl William H. Seward at Jeff Davis.”
In his way, Stonewall Jackson was another transcendentalist, as Thoreau had called John Brown—a hero ready for the times, especially since morale was sinking low in the North, too. Washington was flooded with wounded and half-dead soldiers in the aftermath of one or another battle. “Nothing here nowadays,” reported Edmund Stedman, “but smallpox and congressmen, and mud.” There were also soldiers and diplomats, war correspondents and spies, nurses, office seekers, wire pullers, traitors, parents looking for their sons, and men such as Hawthorne and his editor, who had come from Boston to see the war for themselves, jamming the cigar-smoked corridors of hotels. Generals vied with generals, the radical Republicans wanted to oust Seward, conservatives wanted to oust Chase, the Northern public craved scapegoats on whom they could blame military fiascos. Fat generals looked like stuffed fowls, said Louisa May Alcott. They seemed complacent, with nobody aggressing pursuing victory. In Europe, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx had been monitoring events in America, with Marx often writing for Greeley’s Tribune. But Engels wrote to Marx privately that “I must say I cannot work up any enthusiasm for a people which on such a colossal issue allows itself to be continually beaten by a fourth of its own population and which after eighteen months of war has achieved nothing more than the discovery that all its generals are idiots and all its officials rascals and traitors.”
Elections in November 1862 had not gone well for Republicans. Anti-Lincoln Democrats such as New York’s Horatio Seymour and Fernando Wood swept into office. Lincoln, vexed yet again at McClellan’s caution, particularly after Antietam in September, seemed almost desperate when he chose Ambrose E. Burnside to replace him as commander of the Army of the Potomac.
Burnside was dubious about whether he could lead an army of more than 100,000 men, but since the popular, ruddy-faced general Joseph Hooker thought the honor should have gone to him instead, Burnside might have accepted the post partly to prevent Fighting Joe from getting it. Bewhiskered, bald, decent, and dignified, a West Pointer and an inventor of the breech-loading rifle, Burnside was a capable man. But the Army of the Potomac needed more than mere competence. And Burnside could be as reckless and stubborn as McClellan was cautious and slow.
Burnside wanted to prove himself, and to do so, he planned to take the huge Army of the Potomac to Fredericksburg, Virginia, after crossing the Rappahannock, and launch a surprise attack on Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, which was located around Culpeper, from the east. To do this, he would build pontoon bridges somewhere near the city of Fredericksburg, and his army would cross the Rappahannock there—undetected, he hoped. (“It seemed foolha
rdy to attempt the passage of a river in the presence of such an antagonist as Lee, yet that was what our general decided to do,” recalled one soldier.) The campaign went awry from the start. The bridge engineers and equipment were delayed. It rained and rained. The river rose, the roads grew impassably thick with ugly brown mud. The pontoons were delayed even longer. And Lee had a good idea of what was going on, so that by the time the pontoons were ready, so was he; Longstreet had arrived, and Stonewall Jackson, and A. P. Hill’s and D. H. Hill’s divisions.
As soon as they began constructing the bridges, the Union soldiers had been fired on ceaselessly by the Mississippi sharpshooters who had remained in Fredericksburg to protect it. Frustrated, Burnside reacted with overwhelming force, sending infantrymen over the newly erected bridges on December 11 and unleashing a cannonade that pounded the city into rubble. After the cannonade, the Union soldiers went into Fredericksburg like vandals, throwing chairs and sofas and cooking utensils into the front yards of the charred houses. They ripped keys from pianos and tore pages out of books, and, decked up in the clothes of Confederate women, they danced in the streets.
Why did the Union bombard this nearly undefended town? a correspondent asked a Union officer. There was no answer until a private piped up, “They want us to get in. Getting out won’t be quite so smart and easy.”
Burnside had made other mistakes. After the sacking of Fredericksburg, he did not attack the Confederates for two more days, during which Lee was able to bring Jackson’s corps into position. He dispatched unclear orders to his men, and he divided his forces. When Burnside did finally order an attack, he sent seventeen brigades to storm the heavily fortified hill known as Marye’s Heights. In front of the hill was a stone wall, about four feet in height; behind it were Longstreet’s riflemen, waiting. “A chicken could not live on that field when we open on it,” said one of Longstreet’s men. The bluecoats walked into a killing field.
They never got within thirty yards of Lee’s and Longstreet’s men. “We might as well have tried to take Hell,” said one Federal soldier. Union general Darius N. Couch recalled that under the pitiless fusillade, brigade after brigade “coming up in succession would do its duty and melt like snow coming down on warm ground.” Each one bravely, tenaciously, hopelessly rushed into the wall of artillery fire regardless of who had fallen before their own eyes, assuming, that is, that they could see what was going on in the smoke and commotion. Fresh Union soldiers kept coming, per Burnside’s orders, boys sent to the slaughter. General Longstreet later said, “The spectacle we saw on the battlefield was one of the most distressing I ever witnessed.” General Hooker, who was waiting for a breach in the Confederate lines, wanted to stop the assault but didn’t have the authority. “It can hardly be in human nature for men to show more valor,” noted one war correspondent, “or generals to manifest less judgment, than were perceptible on our side that day.”
This was no battle, said a nurse back at Union Hotel Hospital in Washington. This was murder. The cold field in front of the stone hill at Marye’s Heights was carpeted with corpses, naked, their uniforms and shoes stolen by ill-clad Confederates. Over nine hundred men had been killed there, and in all there were more than 13,000 Federal casualties and about 5,000 on the Confederate side. Nothing had been accomplished. On December 15, Union troops withdrew to the northern side of the river. “If there is a worse place than Hell,” Lincoln declared when he heard what had happened, “I am in it.”
MANY OF THE wounded soldiers were transported into Washington by steamer. At Union Hotel Hospital, a fetid, poorly ventilated tangle of noxious odors and noise, Louisa May Alcott waited.
Had she been a boy, she said, she would have marched off to war, shouldering a musket, but as it was, when she had insisted on leaving Concord to serve as an Army nurse, her father, Bronson, said he was losing his only son—and, as it happened, the family breadwinner. Louisa was thirty years old, competent, a plain young woman with luxurious chestnut hair, and she hadn’t been in Washington long before the battered young men of Fredericksburg began to arrive. She washed young faces with brown soap, she dressed wounds, sang lullabies, wiped brows, and scribbled letters to the mothers and sweethearts of the damaged men, some without arms or legs, who lay in excruciating pain in the hotel’s ballroom. “Horrid war,” Bronson Alcott cried. “And one sees its horrors in hospitals, if anywhere.”
Apathy, embezzlement, mismanagement—all plagued the Union Hotel Hospital. When Hannah Ropes, its head nurse, went to file a complaint, little was ever done. Women belonged in the kitchen. And when she discovered one of the stewards stealing, the male surgeons closed ranks. “I think through all this troubled water the men have been much less clear in the sense of right than the women have,” Ropes said. “Is it that they hate to give up one of their club to the law?” She eventually had to apply to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who listened to her only because he disliked the hospital’s chief surgeon.
Six weeks after Alcott’s arrival in Washington, Hannah Ropes was dead of typhoid pneumonia, and Alcott herself, infected with the same illness, said her head felt as heavy as a cannonball. So sick was she that her father traveled to Washington to carry his delirious daughter home—when the nurses fell ill, said Alcott, the doctors departed. She woke up in Concord only to find that her beautiful hair had been lopped off. For the rest of her life, she suffered from headaches, stomach ailments, boils, and joint pain, possibly caused by the calomel (a mercury compound) administered during her recovery. But now, back with her family, she was writing about the boys cut to pieces at Fredericksburg and her experiences while nursing them in a series of stories, Hospital Sketches.
Most of the stories were moneymaking pabulum about the fortitude of the wounded knights who suffered in silence as they lay on their narrow iron cots, their faces damp, their legs roughly amputated—the boys who, “when the great muster roll was called,” would bravely answer. Yet underneath the heroic glitter that Alcott sprinkled over what she’d seen, she recounted the desperate conditions that had made her, like many others, so sick: not just the fetid water and the poor ventilation and scant or inedible food, not just the clammy foreheads and agonized deaths, but also the inescapable racism of those, including her fellow nurses, who never thanked the black men or black women who served them their meals. When Alcott voluntarily touched a small black child, she was labeled a fanatic.
She also wrote about “the barren honors” that these dying boys had won. Such “carelessness of the value of life” astonished and dismayed people such as Alcott, who had devoted herself to abolition, as her family had done, and very much needed to believe no one had been sacrificed in vain.
THE WAR, AS Mary Chesnut had said, would not stop. Nor would the killing, the backbiting, the suffering, the grief, the hunger, the fear. Men deserted in droves from both the Union and Confederate forces. And those not killed on the battlefield were dying of scurvy, dysentery, malaria, or smallpox.
An indefatigable reformer of prisons and insane asylums, the small, energetic Dorothea Dix was appointed superintendent of nurses in 1861, and, when given authorization to recruit, she promptly advertised for homely white women over thirty who wore no jewelry and whose dresses were without bows and hoops. Surprisingly, Dix managed to appoint 3,200 nurses before the aggressive surgeon general took over their hiring and allowed women to enter the field regardless of age, size, or looks. Undefeated, Dix then turned her attention to the conditions faced by prisoners of war; the crusade for prison reform would occupy her long after the war.
Women wanted to serve the war effort. Working in the Patent Office in Washington, Clara Barton, when she first learned of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, went to a shooting range with her gun and put nine balls within six inches of a target at a distance of fifty feet. Distrusting bureaucracy, the compact Massachusetts woman not only did not wear hoopskirts but also wanted permission to go to the front, which was not easy to secure. (Some few females, dressed in blue or gray uniforms,
had passed themselves off as soldiers in order to fight for their country.) “The field is no place for a woman,” Barton had been told. Yet on the field there were no trained ambulance corps, few supplies or bandages, hardly any fresh water or clean surgical instruments, and no system of emergency relief.
Declining to join Dix’s group of nurses, Barton decided to go out on her own and use her Massachusetts connections to collect money and supplies from charitable women’s groups and then deliver food and medical equipment to the soldiers by herself. Soon she was sorting canned goods and clothes in her boardinghouse and then in rented warehouses, all the goods ready for distribution. Not until the next year, 1862, did she receive the coveted passes from the quartermaster’s office to go to the front.
In her plain brown frock, she and several other volunteers boarded the railway cars for Culpeper, Virginia, near the site of the battle of Cedar Mountain, where in the summer heat the wounded were taken to private houses or the Main Street Hospital, their legs and arms blistered and broken, their jaws blown away. A few weeks later, on August 31, 1862, after the Second Battle of Bull Run, Barton clambered aboard a train to Fairfax Station to take the wounded whatever she could: brandy, wine, soup, jellies. She was not ready for what she encountered—a huge field of burnt-over grass blanketed with men, thousands of them. With little more than the sanction of the quartermaster’s office and a chain of wagons stocked with candles, cotton bandages, lanterns, and bread—more goods donated from New England women—Barton trekked out to Sharpsburg, Maryland; she rode not far from the army and set up a crude hospital at the farm of a German immigrant near the battlefield. She brought drafts of water, she extracted a bullet, she held the tables so the patients wouldn’t wiggle while the surgeons operated, she comforted the dying for twenty-four hours straight, and she returned to Washington with typhoid fever.
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