Living Hell

by Michael C. C. Adams

  Sam still did not crack, even when, after Murfreesboro, he witnessed the execution of a juvenile named Wright. The boy had to sit two hours on his coffin in a wagon while watching his grave being dug. “He had his hat pulled down over his eyes, and was busily picking at the ends of his fingers.” Finally, the lad was tied to a post. As the volley hit him, he cried, “O, O, God.” Sickened, Watkins “turned away and thought how long, how long will I have to witness these things.” In the Army of Tennessee, quite often. But Watkins held onto his sanity, fighting steadily through bloodbaths like Shiloh, Murfreesboro, and Kennesaw Mountain. Only infrequently did he fall into a dreamlike state, suffering mild dissociation. Nevertheless, he did show symptoms of PTSD after the war. By 1881, the butchery at Franklin remained so vivid that, he admitted, “My flesh trembles, and creeps, and crawls when I think of it today. My heart almost ceases to beat at the horrid recollection.” Still, he had beaten the devil, managing to live a normal life.41

  We can isolate some positive and negative coping factors. Youth could prove a liability. Eighteen-year-olds formed the largest single cohort in both armies, a crucial manpower pool, yet adolescents often lacked the emotional and intellectual maturity to cope with brute experience. They accounted for a disproportionate share of desertions and temporary absences. Religion offered many soldiers, young and old, a positive coping mechanism when confronting fear of death. Captain Thaddeus J. Hyatt, 12th Ohio, wrote home before the Third Battle of Winchester, 1864: “Sometimes, when I think how you will miss me at home it is hard to be entirely willing never to see you and the boys again but … we will meet again in the better land.” Faith in God’s will could help rationalize the slaughter. “I hope for the best and trust in Him who wields the destiny of all,” wrote Sergeant Hamlin Alexander Coe, 19th Michigan.42

  But, for many, the finality of sudden, unnatural death left small room for comfort. “I shall never forget how awfully I felt on seeing for the first time a man killed in battle,” wrote Sergeant Leander Stillwell, 16th Illinois. “Only a few seconds ago that man was alive and well, and now he was lying on the ground, done for, forever.” Prolonged butchery proved hard to reconcile with divine providence or benevolent human agency. “I long to go to some quiet place to rest body & mind,” wrote Private James M. Bimford, 21st Virginia, reflecting on the August 1862 slaughter. “I am sick of seeing dead men, and men’s limbs torn from their bodies.” Killing hardly seemed sacred work. Captain Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, 5th Kentucky Artillery (U.S.), described a group of officers watching a sharpshooter take down a handsome young enemy officer sitting on a roof sketching their dispositions, noting weaknesses. The sniper drills the boy through the head: “As the face / Slips out of sight, we see the startled look / That comes upon it when the man knows death.” This killing looks much like assassination, murder. The marksman stalks away, taking care “he does not look / Into our eyes,” and the officers, too, “Keep eyes from others’ faces and seek out / Some trifling thing to do.” In Shaler’s lexicon, fighting seems neither holy nor noble, but “Hard, brutal might, that bears the soul right down.” War is hell’s part, not heaven’s, insists the captain: “Sherman was right—he knew.”43

  In the early stages of conflict, the chivalric ethic sanctified the cause, bracing men for combat. On the eve of Antietam, Colonel George Freeman Noyes, on the staff of General Abner Doubleday, could still depict a moonlit march as magically transforming the army: “No longer Yankee soldiers of the nineteenth century, we were for the nonce knights of the ancient chivalry, pledged to a holier cause and sworn to a nobler issue than Coeur de Lion [King Richard I of England] himself ever dreamed of.” But muck and blood eventually blotted out Arthurian images. Only the most romantic, like Jeb Stuart, clung to rhetorical gallantry. When a young favorite, John Pelham, commanding his horse artillery, died in action, Stuart admitted to his wife, “You know how his death distresses me.” Yet he could still rationalize the loss as transcendent: “He fell, the noblest of sacrifices, on the altar of his country, to whose glorious service he had dedicated his life from the beginning of the war.”44

  Loyalty to one’s comrades could act as a cement holding a mentally ragged man together (even though, as we have seen, the glue might become unstuck when a whole group bolted). Joseph Hooker understood the importance of bonding. Inheriting the Army of the Potomac after the disastrous winter of 1862–63, he faced a continuous AWOL rate of 25 percent. The general borrowed a leaf from the British army’s morale book. Small redcoat forces patrolled an immense empire by maintaining unit cohesion. They instilled regimental pride or esprit de corps through special badges and other unique regalia. Hooker followed suit, giving his corps and divisions their own distinctive insignia.45

  He also regularized the furlough system, the arbitrary nature of which became a universal source of grievance in the armies. Ahead of his time, Hooker realized that prior intervention could prevent radical breakdowns. A limited rest proved efficacious in mentally rehabilitating men rendered temporarily exhausted by combat. The alternative, waiting until they needed permanent committal to a mental hospital, squandered manpower and meant personal disgrace in an era when mental illness equaled a shameful lack of character. (Some nurses observed that deserters on their wards tended to die, having lost self-respect and the will to live. Cornelia Hancock wrote with unusual perception: “The mind has such an effect upon the body, we cannot get them to rally a mite.”) Unfortunately, Hooker’s leadership confidence buckled at Chancellorsville and, after he left army command, unfairness in furloughing returned, leaves being used as a blunt instrument to reward reenlistment, while denied to men who refused to soldier another term.46

  Desire not to let down the home folks, and fear of exposure if one failed, also kept some boys in the ranks. H. J. Hightower, 20th Georgia, serving under Longstreet, wrote, April 1863: “I had rather dye on the battle field than to disgrace my self & the hole family.” Thus, when Private James Newton’s company commander, 11th Connecticut, skulked in battle, men branded the officer a coward in letters home. After a lieutenant from a prominent family deserted his men in the storming of Fort Donelson, he received a knee wound as he bolted. His bitter father wrote the boy in hospital that he would be better dead, having publicly shamed the family. Cognizant of his disgrace and having no moral recourse, the son refused all medical treatment and died of septic poisoning. The surgeon speculated that the boy’s stoic demonstration of character while in hospital redeemed him from the charge of cowardice. Combat had temporarily undone his resolution, a lapse for which he had now atoned. Feigning illness to avoid action also brought the offender into contempt with the service and the community. Captain Richard Lee, 8th Virginia (U.S.), described as “battle weary,” used noxious substances to pretend violent nausea. Court-martial and local disgrace followed his exposure.47

  Desperate men resorted to self-mutilation. After a soldier in Parson’s Texas Cavalry Brigade shot his own hand off “to get to go back home,” Sergeant Edwin Fay summed up the general feeling: he had not been “thought by most persons to be in his right mind.” Usually, such acts resulted in dramatic consequences. A culprit might be paraded before his regiment and degraded, then turned away to face the censure at home. Sam Cobb of Illinois ran in his first battle and then allegedly wounded himself. His reputation lost, he moved west. By early 1863, deliberate self-mutilation became common enough to stop the Union from granting discharges. At the same time, sympathy among civilians for men resisting service actually began to increase as casualties ballooned and injustices in the recruiting system became apparent. In some communities, potential draftees might blow their trigger finger off without facing ostracism.48

  Alcohol could help a “played out” soldier hang on, but this habit also fostered dependence and debilitation. Drink could be dangerous for men in the ranks, releasing violent currents running below the surface of angry and frustrated combat veterans. Private Dennis Lanaghan, 4th Pennsylvania, resented being ordered to march in the dus
t behind a wagon as punishment for intoxication. When he balked, a major ordered him roped to the vehicle. Later, still under the influence, Lanaghan killed the officer, a crime for which he received the death penalty. Finally, boozing to hold up under stress often proved to be a double-edged blade, turning into an agonizing form of suicide. Bob James, brother of Henry and William, served as an officer in the 55th Massachusetts. He saw hard fighting and ended as an alcoholic, unable to surmount his combat experience.49

  Drawing enemy fire afforded a quicker end to the misery. Winslow Homer caught this in his 1864 painting Defiance: Inviting a Shot before Petersburg, Virginia. In the picture, a Rebel has climbed onto a trench parapet, exposing himself to a sniper. Such death-seeking acts became quite common in the trenches. Despite cultural and religious sanctions against self-murder, soldiers escaped through suicide. Men lay in front of trains or blew their heads off. On December 12, 1864, General Patrick recorded the death of a soldier in the 184th New York: “He seemed to have laid himself down, intentionally, about 50 feet in front of the locomotive—He was terribly mashed to pieces of course.” A sergeant in Harker’s Union brigade, ordered into the assault on Kennesaw, entered his tent and shot himself.50

  A commissioned officer who could stand no more might resign. Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. averred during the 1864 Virginia fighting that “many a man has gone crazy since this campaign begun from the terrible pressure on mind & body.” He refused promotion and resigned, saying worry about his survival “demoralizes me as it does any nervous man—and now I honestly think the duty of fighting has ceased for me.” Conversely, rankers had no such choice. They might not want to re-enlist when their terms expired, but their service could be arbitrarily extended, and they faced pressure to carry on from officers and community leaders. For many, then, running away appeared to offer the only escape from ongoing mental torture. But this could end badly as high commands, faced by steeply rising desertion rates, resorted to drastic measures.51

  By February 1863, General Henry W. Halleck, at Union headquarters in D.C., calculated that one-third of all military personnel were absent, some on furlough but most without permission. By 1864, Grant estimated that 80 percent of recruits never made it to the front. Many who did arrive, he told Meade, quickly surrendered: “The ease with which our men of late fall into the hands of the enemy would indicate that they are willing prisoners.” Confederates in the west began surrendering at least by Chattanooga, if not before. The hemorrhaging continued in all theaters. By May 1864, the Confederate Bureau of Conscription confessed it could no longer cope with the legions infesting the countryside; 10,000 had gone AWOL from Leonidas Polk’s command alone. Finally, the Rebel forces melted like snow. After Cedar Creek in the east and Franklin in the west, Southern armies simply disintegrated.52

  Authorities did what they could, inflicting carefully orchestrated rituals of humiliation and pain, grim theatricals to awe the troops. They lashed prisoners or branded them with the letter D. Private Benjamin Jackson, 33rd Alabama, wrote from Tupelo, Mississippi, in July 1862, about one punishment parade: “I saw three men who, after their shirts were taken off, were tied to a post with their hands stretched as high as they could reach, were given thirty-nine lashes on their naked backs with a leather strap tacked onto a stick. After their beating, the left side of their head was shaved and they were drummed out of the service to the tune of ‘Yankee Doodle.’ It was a bad looking sight. They had deserted and gone home.”53

  Increasingly, the punishment exacted became death by firing squad. As we have seen earlier, executions afforded grisly spectacles, open-air theaters of the macabre. There exist many descriptions of these occasions. Walt Whitman, for example, recorded the shooting of William Grover, a nineteen-year-old boy who ran after fighting through twelve battles had made him “simple.” The killing, adjudged Whitman in a telling phrase, appeared a “horrid sarcasm.”54

  To understand official acts that appear to us as inhuman, we must remember the Victorians had no field of adolescent psychology: they thought juveniles should act as adults. Wearing the uniform imposed all the obligations of manhood. In 1842, Commander Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, on the U.S. training brig Somers, hanged from the yardarm Midshipman Philip Spencer, eighteen, son of the then Secretary of War, along with two seamen. After a peremptory drumhead court-martial found them guilty of mutiny because of their silly fantasy talk about piracy, the three stood atop cannons, there to be strung up to the mainmast and choked to death. Today, we might consider the victims’ behavior merely sophomoric, meriting counseling and a stiff reprimand. In the Civil War, Sherman demonstrated a similarly harsh attitude to deserters and stragglers under his command, representing the common position of senior officers. In Special Field Order No. 17, the general asserted: “The only proper fate of such miscreants is that they be shot as common enemies to their profession and country.” Sherman’s own breakdown under pressure early in the war, requiring a period away from active duty, failed to make him sympathetic to those who could not get leave for emotional duress.55

  Harsh punishment failed as a deterrent. Ella Lonn, an early analyst, noted in 1928 that severity of penalty and desertion rates increased concurrently. A 2003 study concurs. It notes that, of several hundred thousand deserters, authorities seized about a third. The capital punishment inflicted upon many of these had no practical effect on the desertion rate and may have fostered disaffection through inciting resentment. A separate analysis has examined the increased number of capital punishments in 1863. Desertion made up 147 of 267 capital cases. Yet the rate of running accelerated; the study conjectures that repetitive executions probably dulled the impact on witnesses.56

  For boys who died tied to a stake or seated on a coffin, the road to war, often embarked on exuberantly and in hopes of earning distinction, ended in a dishonorable death none had anticipated. If news of their true fate reached home, the burden of family grief at their loss now bore an added incubus of dishonor, accompanied by bewilderment at what could have gone wrong in the soldier’s course to warrant such harsh judicial retribution.

  — CHAPTER SIX —

  DEPRIVATIONS AND DISLOCATIONS

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  IN THE EARLY DAYS OF CONFLICT, AS THE SOLDIERS PREPARE to march off along the road to war, we hear bands playing jaunty melodies; we see boys grinning in their new uniforms; girls waving flags; and older relatives standing stiffly proud. Yet even in these heady times a subdued murmur of stress begins, as the dusty columns disappear into the distance, because families remain to face economic and emotional deprivation. The fighting will impose universal strains, even on comfortable middle-class households. For instance, college professor Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain fails to consult his wife about volunteering. In retaliation, she travels abroad while he fights. Lesser folk have more pragmatic reasons to resent war’s interference. When, in July 1861, young Elisha Rhodes tells his mother he wants to enlist, she begs him not to go, arguing that he brings in the only family income. “My mother went about with tears in her eyes, while I felt disappointment that I could not express and therefore nursed my sorrow in silence.” She finally breaks down and lets him go, a domestic drama acted out repeatedly in America’s homes. In this chapter, we shall look at the many hardships inflicted by the war on civilians of all ages and classes, of both races and genders, in North and South.1

  War’s allure diminished significantly for many when the fighting unexpectedly dragged on. In November 1863, Confederate government clerk John B. Jones wrote candidly: “How often have I and thousands in our youth expressed the wish to have lived during the first Revolution, or rather to have partaken of the excitements of war!” But reality had checkmated romance: “Now we see and feel the horrors of war, and we are unanimous in the wish, if we survive to behold again the balmy sunshine of peace, that neither we nor our posterity may ever more be spectators of or participants in another war.”2

  Wartime shortages and consequent price inflation quickly undercut the b
uying power of privates’ pay, fixed by the prewar national government at a ceiling of $13 per month. One estimate suggests the Northern cost of living soared 200 percent just between April and December 1861. In November 1862, Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana unsuccessfully petitioned Congress to raise soldiers’ wages, arguing that over the preceding fifteen months food prices had risen 60 percent and other necessities 120 percent. Black families found their predicament dire because soldiers of color initially earned about half that of whites.3

  In both sections, chronic arrears in pay worsened want. One poor widow complained to President Lincoln: “I haint got no pay as was cummin toe him and none of his bounty munney.” Confederate General Patrick Cleburne, serving in the Army of Tennessee, remonstrated with General Braxton Bragg, in September 1862, that his brigade had received no pay in nine months. Family distress weighed on soldiers. Herman Clarke, 117th New York, asserted that “men often after getting a letter from home go to the officers and enquire if there isn’t some way to get pay. Their families write they are suffering for want of money; some are turned out of doors.” State and local governments, along with private associations such as churches and women’s groups, tried with differing success to help the destitute. Chronic inflation in the Confederacy drove Mississippi in 1862, for example, to appropriate $500,000 for soldiers’ families, while Arkansas spent $62,000. Unfortunately, potential recipients often did not know they could get aid or how to apply for it. This problem particularly affected those in isolated rural counties with low literacy rates or areas cut off by the Yankees.4