Living Hell

by Michael C. C. Adams

  Evidence of toughening attitudes included a series of general orders issued by John Pope to his Union Army in Virginia, July 1862. They authorized the expulsion from their homes of all who refused to take the oath of allegiance, along with seizure of their property and the summary execution of irregulars caught under arms. The Confederate government threatened retaliation, an example of escalating extremes of conduct. The situation in New Orleans, occupied by Union forces under General Benjamin F. Butler, provides a second illustration. Female residents persistently insulted bluecoats, culminating in a housewife throwing the contents of a chamber pot over Admiral David G. Farragut. “Such venom one must see to believe,” asserted General Thomas Williams. “I look at them and think of fallen angels.” Goaded into a response, on May 15, 1862, Butler ordered that a woman abusing the uniform “shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation” of prostitution. Inevitably, the South retaliated, targeting Yankee property for destruction.2

  In fact, from the very beginning of the war, the conventions of proportionality that supposedly protected civilians from harm had been bent to the breaking point. In listing contraband of war subject to seizure, the Lincoln administration had in 1861 singled out medicines, a direct attack on the health of civilians and soldiers already rendered hors de combat by wounds or sickness. When opponents of this measure, such as Dr. W. H. Gardner, a Union army surgeon, tried to protest, they were shouted down. Partly because of this policy, chloroform and ether became scarce in Confederate hospitals. According to Southern nurse Fannie Beers, who served in both eastern and western theaters, “the surgeon relied on the manly fortitude of the patient” alone.3

  Lincoln also claimed a special “war power” to take unilateral extralegal action against those he deemed a threat to public safety. “The Constitution,” he argued, “invests its commander-in-chief with the law of war, in time of war,” allowing for such radical measures as suspending the writ of habeas corpus in large areas of loyal territory. Through this method, Lincoln arbitrarily silenced much political opposition, imprisoning antiwar spokesmen in states with divided loyalties, such as Kentucky and Maryland. He also put constant irritants like Ohio Democrat Clement L. Vallandigham beyond the Union lines, to be taken in by embarrassed Confederates. Generals who widened hostilities to include civilians found increasing government support. In August 1863, General Quincy A. Gillmore received tacit approval to lob incendiary shells into Charleston, South Carolina, punishing the initiators of rebellion with fire. Once again, the action led to escalation, the Confederates positioning Union POWs near landmarks likely to be bombarded.4

  Civilian or guerrilla violations of the conventions of war, requiring combatants to be regularly enlisted and in uniform, served as the pretext for ruthless reprisals. On May 2, 1862, for instance, Ohio troops sacked Athens, Alabama, in retribution for a raid by men out of uniform. And, on August 6, after irregulars wounded General Robert McCook, men of the 9th Ohio hanged a number of civilians and burned properties for miles around. In another 1862 incident, bushwhackers fired from the Mississippi shoreline at the gunboat Cairo. The frustrated captain, Lt. Commander Thomas O. Selfridge, retaliated by directing shellfire to demolish a neighboring plantation house.5

  From the start, bad behavior by individual soldiers, who killed livestock for food or just to have fun, struck an ominous note for the future safety of vulnerable civilians. Gangs of soldiers quickly progressed to abusing noncombatants. Rebel Joshua Callaway confided to his wife that his comrades stole from the people. In the army, he admitted, “I learned more of human nature and deception than I ever cared to know.” Junior officers joined their men in terrorizing the powerless. Violating one Baton Rouge home in August 1862, Union officers slashed women’s underwear, shouting, “I have stuck the damned Secesh!” and “that’s the time I cut her.” Another put his revolver to the head of an old gentleman who protested their conduct, declaring, “I’ll blow your damned brains out.”6

  Soldiers with higher professional standards, outraged by such behavior, blamed the army commanders for tacitly condoning the perpetrators. General Marsena Rudolph Patrick, Provost Marshal General of the Army of the Potomac, responsible for policing the troops, believed the rot had started early in the army’s history. He fumed that Pope’s orders had initiated the demoralization of men who “now believe they have a perfect right to rob, tyrannize, threaten & maltreat any one they please.” On the other side, Rebel officer C. Franklin complained in November 1863 from Columbus County, Arkansas, “All here goes wrong.” On every cavalry raid by Generals John S. Marmaduke and Joseph Shelby, troopers had been “beating, shooting at & otherwise putting in fear & dread” their own people.7

  As it dawned on the population at large that the same roads that had taken their men to war now brought armed columns bent on hurting them, they could succumb to numbness born of shock and horror. When the Yankees approached Augusta, Georgia, Ella Thomas wrote that a strange kind of apathy crept over her, a helplessness in knowing “it must come.” War correspondent Charles Carleton Coffin noted the same phenomenon in Pennsylvania in July 1863: people “were strangely apathetic,” he recalled. Realizing their complete vulnerability, they begged the organized forces not to leave them, fearing Lee’s troops and the mass of stragglers that lurked in the rear areas of both armies.8 General Abner Doubleday remembered that, in the Gettysburg campaign, “pale and frightened women came out” of their houses and “implored us not to abandon them.” Observers noted vacant expressions on the faces of Southern refugees. False hopes of rescue from the Yankee invaders often built up hopes that left people flat and lifeless when the bubble burst. And, like Northerners, Southerners begged and berated the soldiers who prepared to leave them. When John C. Pemberton’s beaten troops retreated into the Vicksburg fortifications on May 17, 1863, witness Mary Ann Loughborough heard deserted rural women cry out, “Oh! shame on you!” One added bitterly, “and you running!”9

  Anxiety and stark terror often followed initial shock. “The life we are leading now is a miserable, frightened one—living in constant dread of great danger, not knowing what form it may take, and utterly helpless to protect ourselves,” wrote Kate Stone from Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, in March 1863. Fear fed on rumor and half-truth. “People are in an awful state of excitement,” wrote Virginian Henrietta Burr in July 1862. “They are just about ready to believe anything they hear provided it is horrible.” Unknown threats bred nightmares. Sallie Hunt, a Southern youngster, thought Northern troops would act like painted savages: “My hair ‘stood on end’ when I thought of the Yankees tying the children up in bags and knocking their brains out against a tree.”10

  The inexorable hardening of the conflict into total war heightened loathing of the enemy in an ever-intensifying spiral of bitter emotion. Angered by his impotence to prevent Yankee invasion of the sacred homeland, a Texas captain, Elijah P. Petty, in May 1863 urged his wife to inculcate in their children “a bitter and unrelating hatred to the Yankee race” that had “invaded our country and devastated it.” There should be no quarter for an enemy that had placed “his unhallowed feet upon the soil of our sunny South.” Many north of the Mason-Dixon Line reciprocated the animus. In 1863, visiting British writer Catherine Hopley registered shock when well-bred Northerners asserted during polite conversation that “we must annihilate them,” meaning the Rebels. This was said “with as little remorse as they have before displayed in destroying the Indians.” Toying with genocide had achieved respectability.11

  The decades before the war had seeded fertile ground for the escalation of sectional enmities, with all their destructive consequences. Ignorant of how other people lived beyond their own region, Americans’ perceptions of each other crystallized in a series of stereotypes that filled the vacuum in knowledge. To begin with, the slave population largely lacked individual identity in white eyes. Popular images of the plantation people turned them into happy “sambos,” putting up a smiling front f
or the master class, minstrels in blackface. However, on the rare occasions when they rose in defiance, they immediately became fiends incarnate, depraved savages just a step from the blood-drenched jungle. This scenario fomented nightmares of slave revolt in the beleaguered Confederacy. When, in September 1861, sixteen-year-old Clary Ann, a house servant, killed her mistress, Eveline Colbert, in Culpepper County, Virginia, the sister of the dead woman wrote to Governor Letcher, asking for release of her nephew from military service so he could protect the family from the expected servile rebellion.12

  White Southerners in the antebellum period perceived Northerners largely as engaged in commerce and manufacturing, ignoring the huge belts of farmland in the rural free states. They gave Yankees credit for business acumen but also held them in contempt as capitalist money-grubbers without ethics or higher values, and certainly not gentlemen. Southerners professed a Jeffersonian distaste for the industrial city with its factory workers, often typed as slum dwellers, immoral and brutalized denizens of bars and bordellos. The usually phlegmatic General Lee once remarked candidly that the killing off of these proletarians in the war signified no great loss, “as in all large cities there is a population which can well be spared.”13

  Southerners also branded Yankees as hypocrites who, prior to the war, denounced the Peculiar Institution while profiting from cotton manufacture and acting as factors for Southern planters. Worse, Northern radicals seemed bent on destabilizing plantation culture, calling for abolition that conjured up images of miscegenation. In 1864, Charleston diarist Emma Holmes wrote that a Mrs. Hunter of New York reported racial intermingling rife in the city: “One of the latest dances of Yankeedom, she says, is for two females to be harnessed & driven around the room by a man, who whips them as they go. What a fearful picture of degradation and iniquity.”14

  Yankee spite and hypocrisy, said Southern critics, could be traced back to the Puritans who settled much of New England and became infamous for ruthless witch-hunting. This practice seemed to find a modern reincarnation in such zealous spirits as John Brown, who slaughtered proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie, Kansas, in 1856, and then tried to inaugurate a slave war by raiding the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Union troops marched off to war singing that Brown’s “soul goes marching on.” Increasingly, to Rebel eyes, Union generals like Sheridan and Sherman incarnated the dead crusader’s fierce avenging spirit, destroying all in their path and unleashing a depraved mob. Emma LeConte, expecting Sherman’s advance on Columbia, South Carolina, in December 1864, wrote bitterly, “All that is between us and our miserable fate is a handful of raw militia.” According to rumor, “Sherman the brute avows his intention of converting South Carolina into a wilderness. Not one house, he says, shall be left standing, and his licentious troops—whites and negroes—shall be turned loose to ravage and violate.” Caricature magnified a very real threat into a cataclysm.15

  For their part, Northerners usually acknowledged that the South had spawned an aristocracy of sorts, with surface manners. But the polish of plantation culture relied on the oppression of others. Surely, said Northern critics, this inherent violence must produce a vicious character in the master class. “Their civilization is a mermaid,” editorialized Harper’s Weekly in 1860, “lovely and languid above, but ending in bestial deformity.” Some Northerners who spent time in the prewar plantation states agreed. General Sherman mainly liked the cadets he taught at a Louisiana military academy on the eve of war. But, in general, he had no time for the “young bloods” he had known since the 1840s, declaring their pretension to chivalry “all trash.” This opinion paved the way for his late-war attitude that they might productively be swept from the earth. Preston Brooks, who in 1856 beat Charles Sumner senseless on the floor of the Senate for remarks critical of slavery, seemed to typify the breed.16

  Plantation mistresses, though portrayed in much of American popular culture as delicate and charming, nevertheless struck some Northerners as Janus-faced because they shared in the cruel oppression of slaves. Consequently, the vituperation shown by Rebel women did not surprise all Union soldiers. Chaplain A. M. Stewart, 102nd Pennsylvania, wrote from Meade’s army in 1864: “Fully, fiercely, terribly, malignantly have they entered into this conflict.” Some Union officers held Confederate females equally responsible, along with their generals, for prolonging the war, because they shamed men into fighting. This accusation of warmongering set up a scenario of Federal officers winking at the abuse of women. During Sherman’s 1864 campaign, Union General Smith D. Atkins told Virginia Wade of Lancaster, South Carolina: “You women keep up this war. We are fighting you.” And New York lawyer George Templeton Strong, a leading figure in the humane U.S. Sanitary Commission, nevertheless wrote on November 28, 1864, that he could not sympathize with Southern women forced into prostitution to survive. Their pernicious role deserved such a just retribution.17

  Outside observers generally failed to understand that the bulk of Southerners fit neither the simple category of planters nor poor white, belonging instead to the middling yeomen class. Union soldiers often depicted Dixie’s ordinary folk as shiftless, illiterate, dirty, immoral trash, and clay eaters, a portrait that helped the invaders look callously on the plain people’s sufferings. General Alpheus S. Williams, in November 1863, called the ordinary folk of Tennessee “disgusting; the mere scum of humanity, poor, half starved, ignorant, stupid, and treacherous.” The stereotypes employed by both sides dehumanized whole categories of people and, once bereft of a shared identity, they could be brutalized with moral impunity.18

  It has become commonplace to refer to the conflict as a “brothers’ war,” but perhaps a majority on both sides envisaged the struggle as one against foreigners, alien beings from another planet. “This is a queer country and queer people,” wrote Sergeant Numa Barned, 73rd Pennsylvania, about Virginia. “I sometimes wonder if I am not in a foreign country,” wrote another soldier, Edward Henry Courtney. Just as antagonists in the Pacific theater in World War II took body parts as trophies from the enemy they demonized, a trooper in the 10th Virginia cavalry dismembered the corpse of a Union soldier killed at Brandy Station, Virginia, in June 1863. According to his brother, John O. Collins, he “is now making a ring of Some portion of the leg bone of the dead yankee.” Edward Burrus, 21st Mississippi, wrote to his parents in September 1862, “Tell Miss Anna that I thought of collecting her a peck of Yankee finger nails to make her a sewing basket of as she is ingenious at such things but I feared I could not get them to her.”19

  As the war lengthened, atrocities multiplied. Psychopaths committed some crimes, the military then as now containing on average about the same number of those violently disturbed as in civil society. But people we might consider normal also committed human rights violations. Often, they had become subject to a range of negative emotional phenomena that we may loosely cluster under the umbrella term “war psychosis.” When a war, with all its loss and pain, drags on, rage grows against the enemy held responsible for all the extended suffering, the outrage building upon previously held negative caricatures already demonizing the opponent.

  The continued loss of comrades and friends in the deepening slaughter becomes a frequent trigger of the rage that feeds war psychosis. We can see this factor at work as far back as the Trojan War described in Homer’s epic poem The Iliad. Here, the Greek champion Achilles feels lukewarm toward the war until Hector slays his friend Patroklos. Homer depicts him then filled with towering rage: “Achilles the warrior was once gallant and chivalrous; since the death of Patroklos he is a different, murderous man.” He pursues Hector with venom and abuse, stripping his mutilated body of armor and refusing even to give up the battered corpse for proper burial. Psychiatrist John Shay applies the same analysis to modern combat, noting that, in Vietnam, grunts’ anger at the seeming unreasonableness of their predicament escalated rage at the enemy to an almost berserker state. One G.I. recalled, “Got worse as time went by. I really loved fucking killing, co
uldn’t get enough. For every one that I killed I felt better.”20

  Roughly a century before, on October 5, 1863, Texas officer Thomas H. Coleman wrote to his parents, after inspecting “black and swollen” Union bodies at Chickamauga: “it actually done me good to see them lying dead, and every one else that I heard expressed [that] opinion.” Maryland Colonel Osmund Latrobe, on General Long-street’s staff, said of the mutilated Union corpses at Fredericksburg, “Doing my soul good.” On the other side, Indiana soldier William Bufton Miller wrote after a skirmish, “We captured about a hundred prisoners and killed about thirty of them. It was fun for us to see them Skip out.” Wisconsin Lieutenant Frank Haskell, aide to General John Gibbon commanding Union I Corps, retained his humanity but worried about the escalation of passions generated by the slaughter. Contemplating a communal grave at Gettysburg with a chalk marker, “75 Rebils berid hear,” he remarked sadly, “Oh, this damned rebellion will make brutes of us all, if it is not soon quelled.”21

  Not only traumatic individual battlefield experiences, but those policies of enemy authorities that appeared to violate accepted norms of conduct, could provoke the rage of war psychosis. Let us take two examples. First, the Lincoln government’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 declaring slaves in rebellious areas free, coupled with African American recruitment, made many Confederates see red because it appeared to invite servile insurrection, unleashing the jungle savage in the Southern black population. Southern soldiers went berserk, denying POW status to, and murdering, soldiers of color, along with their white officers. Rebels usually remanded into slavery those rank and file not executed out of hand. After the assault on Fort Wagner, July 1863, Confederates denied medical aid to the 54th Massachusetts’ wounded, leaving them to die and burying them face down in insult. In gestures reminiscent of Achilles’ treatment of Hector, Confederate authorities refused to return Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s body to his family, stripped off his uniform, and buried him anonymously “with his niggers.”22