Leading socialites in both sections frequently headed relief agencies. They unintentionally discouraged applications by patronizing the poor. Aristocratic lawyer George Strong, an officer of the civilian U.S. Sanitary Commission, working to keep soldiers in the field and their families above water, nevertheless blamed much of the want on soldiers’ dissolute habits. Instead of sending money home, he said, wages got “expended in the purchase of bad pies and gut-rot whiskey.” Strong, who had bought a substitute to avoid service, would not know how such small treats and consolations cheered up troops in the field. In fact, research suggests that most men with dependents did in fact send pay home. But, notes one study ominously, being without money meant soldiers “blithely relying on foraging and pillage to supply what extra comforts they hoped to enjoy.” Since ancient times, armies had been obliged to plunder the populace to augment their pay, ironically adding to the people’s misery.5
In a brief conflict such as most expected, deprivation would have been temporary. But in a long war of attrition, shortages cut deep, particularly in the Confederacy. Unlike the North, where economic hardship fell mainly on the poor, all Southern classes suffered materially. The South lacked an advanced industrial base, the region being primarily an exporter of agricultural products, importing manufactured goods in return from the North and Europe. The requirements of the military, together with the cutting off of supplies from outside markets, created civilian scarcity, driving up prices astronomically. Captain Robert Kean, a Richmond bureaucrat, calculated in 1863 that his $3,000 salary had the equivalent buying power to a $700 income in 1860. Fresh meat had leapt from 10 cents to $1.00; bacon 20 cents to $1.00; coal $1.00 a bucket, up from 20 cents. As early as May 1861, a prosperous Charleston girl noted that butter, usually imported from the North, had grown too expensive to purchase. Clothing fabric, along with much else, nearly left the shelves.6
Blockade runners made up some deficiencies, importing luxuries for consumers who could afford them, but many, even of the better classes, simply made do. Emma LeConte, daughter of a Columbia, South Carolina, chemistry professor, wrote that, as late as January 1865, bazaar “tables are loaded with fancy articles—brought through the blockade, or manufactured by the ladies.” However, she kept her own dress modest: “My underclothing is of coarse unbleached homespun, such as we gave the negroes formerly, only much coarser.” She knit stockings and wore calico dresses, save for two old silks, “carefully preserved for great occasions and which do not look shabby for the simple reason that all the other old silks that still survive the war are in the same state of decay.”7
Shortages deepened when retreating Rebel soldiers cleaned out shops to deny the Yankees anything. Whatever they overlooked fell to the enemy. Private Thomas F. Dornblaser, 7th Pennsylvania cavalry, noted in Dalton, Georgia, in May 1864, that “a number of infantrymen, unrestrained by their officers, were bursting open stores and rifling them of their scanty contents.” It might appear trivial for us to dwell on dress but many societies use fashion to define individual identity and class status. Although some citizens and soldiers made butternut and coarse cloth a proud symbol of endurance, to constantly wear threadbare and homespun became demoralizing.8
Scarcities of medicines, reserved first for the army, quickly became acute in the South. Only in 1864 did the Confederate government order blockade runners to devote 50 percent of cargo space to necessities, including pharmaceuticals. The Lincoln government listed medicines as contraband, their confiscation intensifying civilian deprivation. Emma Holmes, from a prominent Charleston family, endured, without anesthetic, the extraction of a rotten tooth that came away in fragments. She also talked frequently of child deaths from convulsions, probably brought on by malnutrition and a lack of prophylactics against disease. An anonymous woman complained that infants sick with fevers died for want of remedies, when twenty grams of quinine could save them.9
The diet of nonfarming households, like the Holmes family, quickly suffered. “Hominy, cornbread, & occasionally a little peas or eggs & still more rarely a scrap of bacon, is our ordinary bill of fare,” wrote a girl in May 1864. “We live tolerably poorly. Two meals a day,” recorded Miss LeConte, living through the last days of war. “Dinner consists of a very small piece of meat, generally beef, a few potatoes and a dish of hominy and a pone of corn bread.” But, she added gamely, “We have no reason to complain, so many families are so much worse off.” Country folk might fare better, but their produce became subject to government conscription, and soldiers ruthlessly plundered farmers. The primary victims lived in the major war zones, the South and Border States. (Only rarely, as in Lee’s 1863 invasion of Pennsylvania, did Northern citizens feel the full brunt of military scavenging.) For example, cavalry from both armies stripped Kentucky’s horse farms to replace clapped-out mounts slaughtered each night like so much “night soil,” in E. L. Doctorow’s phrase. An anonymous Marylander in 1864 complained to Surgeon Thomas F. Wood, 3rd North Carolina, that “the Yankees come and take my horses and the Rebels come and take my wheat, and I do not know who is my friend.” As sectional allegiance eroded, farmers tried to hide their stock from marauding soldiers of both governments, often unsuccessfully.10
In theory, military authorities instructed army units to pay for what they took and leave families enough to live on. But, despite chivalric rhetoric about protecting the weak and defenseless, soldiers often acted less like noble knights than callous mercenaries. Private Frank Wilkeson, 11th New York Battery, remembered, in spring 1864, a pale-faced Virginia woman “whose little children clung to her skirts as she stood in her kitchen door appealing to the Union soldiers not to strip her of stores as she had children to feed.” Her plea fell on deaf ears. In spring 1862, Lucy Buck, nineteen-year-old daughter of a leading merchant and farmer, recorded her father’s despair when Union forces stripped his Front Royal, Virginia, farm of food, fencing, and livestock. “He could only walk the pavement with folded arms and drooping head looking helplessly on the scene of desolation.” Private William A. Fletcher, 5th Texas, in March 1864 witnessed a Southern woman trying to defend her larder of corn and bacon against soldiers from her own side. Wielding an axe gained her nothing: she lost every morsel.11
Civilians hated cavalry, deemed the worst predators because their mobility allowed them to sweep a whole region. Lieutenant Benjamin F. McIntyre, 19th Iowa, serving in Missouri, late in 1862, complained of the license allowed cavalry: “go in any direction you may for miles you will find their horses hitched near every dwelling. They scour the country in every direction and generally help themselves to anything they wish.” James Brownlow, commanding the 1st Tennessee Cavalry (C.S.A.), operating around Chattahoochee, Georgia, in July 1864, admitted that his unit “live on the ‘fat of the land.’ We have potatoes, berries, honey, and chickens for nearly every meal.” William Davidson, 5th Texas Mounted, said the troopers “ransack the whole country for ten miles around,” taking pigs, poultry, “sheep, goats, and even old ganders.”12
Sherman’s “bummers” provided the most lasting images of licensed looting. Yankee foragers stripped a zone fifty miles wide after the general decided to live off the land during his march from Atlanta to the sea. Lieutenant Charles A. Booth, in Union General Peter J. Osterhaus’s XV Corps, witnessed a bummer returning to camp, loaded with “first a bundle of fodder for his mule; second, three hams, a sack of meal, a peck of potatoes;” and then some household utensils. Union Soldiers took not only enemy property; they also stripped friendly black families of all they owned. The Rebels also denuded their own people. By an act of March 26, 1863, the Confederate government made all articles necessary for the war effort subject to impressment, overriding local objections. The victims usually received less than market value in compensation, if anything at all. Disillusioned Robert Patrick, 4th Louisiana, seeing a Southern woman stripped of her dairy and poultry products, May 21, 1864, wrote: “They talk about the ravages of the enemy in their marches through the country, but I do not think th
at the Yankees are any worse than our own army.”13
Whether by deliberate policy, as during Sherman’s western and Sheridan’s eastern operations in 1864, or by simple attrition through repeated foraging, many areas in active theaters of operations became deserts, barren of resources. Soldiers impounded draught animals and their forage, then burned the barns and seed stocks. Famine stalked in the wake of armies. Major Thomas Osborn, chief of artillery, Union Army of the Tennessee, wrote on December 17, 1864, after Sherman reached the sea at Savannah, that the army had “cleaned up the country generally of almost every thing upon which the people could live.” The march had ruined many previously prosperous planters, along with a host of ordinary people who had little to start with. Now, he concluded, “as we have left the country I do not see how the people can live for the next two years.”14
Many noncombatants did die, starting with the old and very young. In March 1863, Sarah Morgan Dawson, a Southern girl, wrote that her mother had been ground down; a couple more months of “danger, difficulties, perplexities, and starvation will lay [her] in her grave.” The family put the children to bed early, “to make them forget they were supperless.” But a grown-up who “followed their example, could not sleep herself, for very hunger.” Many people could not leave a ruined area, having no choice but to hang on where they lived. Others, who could travel and had relatives elsewhere, fled the countryside for the safety of towns and cities. But this also increased urban overcrowding, sanitation problems, and stress on food reserves, so that many refugees had to move on again. Such widespread social and geographic dislocation created a new class of Southern homeless migrants. A Confederate government policy of confiscating abandoned properties, intended to keep the population in place, actually made the situation worse, creating demoralization and war weariness.15
Often, refugees could not be sure of their reception. In April 1863, Kate Stone’s family reluctantly left their plantation “Brokenburn” in Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, traveling to Tyler, Texas: “A year ago, would we have thought of going even to the house of a friend to spend some time without an invitation?” Now, seven of them set off, “to stay an indefinite time with a lady we have seen only once, and without any invitation, trusting only that, as she is a lady, she will be kind to us in our distress.” Sarah Morgan, whose family refugeed from New Orleans to Clinton, Louisiana, September 1862, found they had jumped from frying pan to fire. The family had trouble obtaining basic supplies, such as soap, candles, matches, and wheat flour. Their daily diet consisted of a one-dish meal: “If any one had told me I could have lived off corn bread, a few months ago, I would have been incredulous.”16
The unhygienic temporary shanties and extemporized shelters of refugees duplicated the miserable dwellings patched together by displaced persons all around the world, in all times, in major war zones. One Southern wife, named Kirksey, could not hold onto her home after Union troops captured her husband. But she obtained a roof over herself and her children in an abandoned car at the Augusta, Georgia, train depot, where her spouse had been a conductor. “My husband was such a good man,” she sadly told Ella Thomas, a neighbor. “Every Christmas he filled the children’s stockings with something for Santa Claus presents.” Sad as her situation might appear, many fared even worse.17
In Vicksburg, 1863, citizens and fugitives from the surrounding area crowded into caves while Grant’s shells pounded the city. The inhabitants dug a large and complex underground system, with living chambers connected by passages, but people hated trying to work or sleep in the damp, dark dugouts. Going out to get water, or for air and light, posed grave dangers. A young girl, tired of confinement, went outside, only to be hit by a shell fragment. She rushed back to her mother, dying. An anonymous diarist wrote that they had only a little spoiled bacon and musty pea flour for food. Butchers in Vicksburg and other overcrowded urban centers finally dressed cats, dogs, and rats to hang in meat markets. An omnipresent fear of famine and disease hung over all Confederate cities. John B. Jones, working in the Richmond bureaucracy, suffered constant anxiety about how to feed his family and find fuel. He wrote in March 1863 that the city verged on famine. The previous December he had recorded the onset of disease: “The small-pox is spreading in this city to an alarming extent.”18
Folk who felt abandoned by their government and communities eventually resorted to a desperate expedient: they determined to get their soldiers home. Bureaucrat Robert Kean described women journeying to Richmond in September 1864, to petition the Conscription Bureau for release of their male kin: “appeal after appeal and all disallowed. Women come there and weep, wring their hands, scold, entreat, beg, and almost drive me mad. The iron is gone deep into the heart of society.” Indeed, it had. Civilian desperation and official intransigence brought about a radical dislocation of civic relations, as noncombatants finally urged their men to desert. A provocative recent study argues the breakdown of the established order in the Confederacy represented a revolution in the political and social structure of the South, helping to bring about the downfall of the planter hegemony.19
Many soldiers’ dependents no longer had the strength or the tools to plant and harvest a crop. Winter meant famine for a great number lacking salt to preserve their meager meat reserve. As early as 1862, with the Confederacy’s infrastructure crumbling, the vital public salt ration failed in states like Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, and Louisiana. Without men to hunt fresh game, families would die. A careful modern study of Georgia desertions suggests convincingly that the failure to distribute salt, along with crop losses, provoked a wave of desertions in the northern counties a year before Sherman’s invasion. The people’s desperation crystallized in their ache-filled language. Edward Cooper’s wife wrote to him in the Army of Northern Virginia: “I would not have you do anything wrong for the world, but before God, Edward, unless you come home, we must die.” The night before, their little boy cried out, “O Mamma! I am so hungry,” and wept inconsolably. The North did not experience such widespread desperation, but the poor there often faced a similarly bleak prospect, forcing soldiers to seek discharges or desert. A case study of two New York townships determined that fewer soldiers absconded from the ranks when a tightly knit community offered support for their families; more frequent desertions indicated loose social bonds and a lack of public aid to soldiers’ dependents.20
The plight of many noncombatants tore holes in the fabric of conventional patriotism, threatening the foundations of society. In the North, angry citizens fomented riots in urban areas like Detroit, Chicago, and New York. In the South, too, cities became flash points where soldiers’ dependents collectively expressed their grievances, particularly in bread riots. In March 1863, in a wave of armed protest, women broke into food stores from Atlanta to Salisbury, North Carolina. The biggest mob gathered in Richmond in early April, where women evoked specters of the French Revolution, flooding the streets, crying “Bread or Blood.” One historian dubs the riots “spectacular and numerous,” going so far as to say, “It was truly a Confederate spring of soldiers’ wives’ discontent.” In extremity, women in both sections rejected the cause. “What do I care for patriotism?” cried out a desperate Southern woman. “My husband is my country. What is country to me if he is killed?” The wife of Valentine Bechler, 8th New Jersey, urged him to bribe a surgeon to get a medical discharge: “If you will give one of the doctors a couple of dollars you can be home here with us.”21
After the war, some Southern men blamed women’s encouragement of desertion for Rebel defeat. Confederate veteran Robert Stiles asserted in 1893 that many a wife told her husband to desert, and “that if he come not at once, he need never come—that she will never see him more, never recognize him again as the husband of her heart or the father of her children.” But, countered retired Confederate nurse Kate Cumming, “if the truth was wholly known, the rich people who remained at home and did nothing for the soldiers’ families, are greatly to blame,” not the soldiers’ wives. Under
necessity, women challenged conventional belief that working outside the home undermined their modesty. North and South, they applied for government clerking posts that, according to anxious male relatives, removed them from the safety of the home and placed them in danger of seduction. Susan Leigh Blackford, wife of Captain Charles Blackford, 2nd Virginia Cavalry, took in boarders for money, starting in 1862. He agreed but, by October 1863, demanded she go live with relatives instead: “The war has so demoralized the people that a woman as young as you are must be very careful to keep under the guardianship of her natural protectors.”22
The war did indeed produce breakdowns in the social code. The Reverend Thomas Girardeau, boarding with Mrs. Henry Lucas, the wife of a soldier, got her pregnant. Men in the ranks threatened vengeance. Orin West, a Berdan sharpshooter, about to go on furlough in April 1864, gave fair warning “that those men who were intimate with his wife had better look out.” Children had to grow up fast, working to help family survival. In the country, young boys picked berries, cut wood, and trapped small game. Infant girls learned early to sew and cook. When, in rural Michigan, Anna Howard’s father and brothers joined the army, she got drafted, too, helping with chores, serving boarders, even teaching other children to read and write to earn money. In cities, children did factory jobs, swept streets, and anything else that turned a coin. Comedian Eddie Foy recalled dancing and fiddling outside New York bars for pennies.23
The volume of female prostitution rose radically amid the social dislocation produced by war. Many women entered the trade reluctantly. But with male breadwinners distant or dead, pay and pensions in arrears, what asset finally did a poor woman have to use in trade beside herself? In this context, the word “whore” is unfairly pejorative. A city woman might take in sewing, but inflation hugely outpaced wages. What then? Or what when no food remained in a rural woman’s pantry, her meager stores taken by soldiers? If charity failed, what awaited the plain, respectable widow with three young children, whose husband died in hospital the night she got there, and who “could not indulge in the luxury of Grief” because she must struggle to live? What options faced the widow of Private Fleming, 71st New York, who left her with five children when he succumbed to inflamed bowels in September 1861? As social historian Dixon Wecter observed, when Northern factories paid women under $2.50 a week, they inevitably “became prostitutes in considerable numbers,” serving the barracks and camp.24
Living Hell Page 17
