Living Hell

by Michael C. C. Adams

  After engaging a black regiment near Monroe, Louisiana, a Texas officer wrote: “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.” Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry allegedly carried out one of the most ferocious massacres, at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, on April 12, 1864. Inevitably, atrocity bred atrocity. John Probst of the 25th Wisconsin told his sweetheart that, in fighting on May 23, 1864, “twenty-three of the rebs surrendered but the boys asked them if they remembered Fort Pillow and killed them all.”23

  Our second example begins with the perception of Northern generals that Rebel commanders prolonged the war inexcusably, long after they had any reasonable chance of winning independence. Thus, they bore the guilt of needlessly adding to the destruction. (Union generals dismissed as immaterial the Rebel leaders’ conviction that they still had a legitimate shot at victory: how Union generals interpreted the case determined their actions.) Ulysses S. Grant, commanding general of the Union armies, contemplating the Confederacy’s refusal to quit, determined that the Federal strategy in 1864 must be to use superiority in personnel and resources to grind the Rebels down in an unremitting war of attrition. This would entail constant contact with the enemy, denying him a breather to rest and replenish, and initiating some of the most concentrated slaughter in American history.

  Also, in August 1864, Grant ordered General Benjamin Butler, now a special exchange agent, to suspend further prisoner exchanges. The commanding general cited the Confederacy’s refusal to accord POW rights to black soldiers as the primary reason for this move. But the end of captive swaps also served Grant’s strategy of attrition, blocking Confederates’ return to action. Grant later admitted he hoped to deny the enemy the services of 30,000 to 40,000 veteran troops. The intransigence of both sides regarding POWs condemned thousands of miserable victims to continuing mental and physical misery, resulting in debilitation and death.24

  Grant authorized the downgrading of Virginia’s infrastructure as part of the same attrition. The Shenandoah Valley became a particular target. The Valley’s farmland had been a breadbasket for the famished Rebels. It also served as a corridor through which Confederate generals from Stonewall Jackson to Jubal A. Early could march to threaten the Union’s lines of communications, and even the capital itself, Rebels penetrating Washington’s outer fortifications in 1864. General David Hunter showed zeal in punishing rebellion in the Valley, burning Governor John Letcher’s home and the Virginia Military Institute. This academy, said Hunter’s aide, Colonel David Hunter Strother, had become “a most dangerous establishment where treason was systematically taught.” But a conundrum arose: when you started to root out the cancer, where did you stop as your anger fomented? Hunter’s appetite for burning disturbed Strother after the destruction even encompassed the home of a man called Leftwich, whose only crime was spreading pro-Confederate rumors.25

  General Philip H. Sheridan, acting under Grant’s authority, carried out the most thorough ravaging of Virginia. He systematically destroyed mills, farms, livestock, and crops, driving the inhabitants into exposure and starvation. The general reported, on October 7, 1864, that he had destroyed more than 2,000 barns filled with grain and seventy mills with their stocks of flour. His troops also killed or drove 4,000 cattle and 3,000 sheep. Sheridan boasted that “the Valley, from Winchester up to Staunton, ninety-two miles, will have but little in it for man or beast.”26

  As the Army of Northern Virginia fell back, yielding ground to the enemy and unable to protect the civilian population in occupied territory, the job of contesting the invaders fell to Partisan Rangers. Even though they were regularly enlisted troops, they provoked Federal ire, the high command categorizing them as guerrillas because they only wore uniforms on raids, disguising themselves as noncombatants when pursued. Thus, they became subject to summary execution under the usages of war. Colonel John Hunt Mosby’s rangers had the most impact in Virginia, engendering Union fear and hatred; they therefore became the most hounded.27

  Grant ordered Sheridan to execute Mosby’s men without trial, codifying a practice in use as early as April 1863, when one of General George Armstrong Custer’s troopers, following a bushwhacking, swore: “We take no prisoners after this.” Custer, who had Southern friends at West Point, nevertheless became vicious in hunting down and killing rangers, even in front of their families, perhaps an example of psychotic fury. In an inevitable escalation, Lee announced in November 1864: “I have directed Colonel Mosby to hang an equal number of Custer’s men in retaliation for those executed by him.” Still, some of this mutual savagery might have been avoided. In a recent study, Daniel E. Sutherland argues that partisan and guerrilla warfare became extremely vicious partly because the top authorities on both sides failed to fully integrate unconventional forces into their military establishments. Without clear guidelines defining their role, troops on both sides in the shadow war became increasingly independent, ungovernable, and ruthless.28

  Sherman remains perhaps the most controversial of the generals who made hard war. He believed from early in the conflict that all of Southern society had been complicit in rebellion, and that civilians sustained continuation of the war through their moral and material support of their troops. Therefore, he reasoned, the North needed to break not only the will of the Rebel armies to fight, but the spirit of the population as well. “We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war,” he wrote in 1864. As early as a year previously, he had adopted the policy of cleaning a region out, creating famine in the countryside to deny the produce of the area to the enemy.29

  But he intensified the destruction in 1864, extending his policy to removal of population clusters from farms and factories, even whole cities in the war zone, such as Atlanta, Georgia, and Columbia, South Carolina, that he intended to burn. His strategy of cutting free from his line of communications and living off the land on the famous march to the sea received official sanction. The march left a massive trail of misery and ruin in its wake. Inevitably, in the mutual bitterness of the closing months of the war in the west, neither side gave much quarter to opponents who fell into their hands; conventions of proportionality were rubbed out.30

  The extreme severity of Sherman’s actions and the general’s often intemperate words have led some authors to question his sanity in the latter stages of the conflict. The distinguished essayist and literary critic Edmund Wilson, for example, suggested that Sherman exuded a “manic elation.” Evidence for this view occurs in comments such as these, made in late 1863: “To secure the safety of the navigation of the Mississippi I would slay millions. On that point I am not only insane but mad.” Professional chemist and controversial popular author Otto Eisenschiml analyzing Sherman from a medical viewpoint, declared him a war criminal with a split personality, a bon vivant and maniacal killer.31

  We need not go quite so far. Let us say that, despite his latter success, the general had a stressful and painful war, at an early point suffering a mental breakdown after the press mocked his anxious predictions of a long and enormously costly war. He became increasingly angry at those he held accountable for his personal humiliation and the collective pain of America. His grim pleasure in the suffering of the enemy affords an example of war psychosis, but it seems no different from that exhibited by countless thousands on both sides. Watching South Carolina burn by night, for example, Federal Major Thomas Osborn, chief of artillery in the Federal Army of the Tennessee, rhapsodized, “I wish I had the power of describing the grandeur of this scene.” The destruction struck him as “magnificently grand.”32

  Official hard war policies of the generals gave tacit encouragement to unofficial, individual acts of terror by soldiers preying upon civilians. Depredations reached epic proportions in the last months of hostilities. Provost Marshal General Patrick railed against Grant for failing to condemn lo
oting of the population: “Grant had expressed himself strongly against protecting these people, and I learned that his Staff, were, themselves, engaged in sheep stealing, fowl stealing and the like.” Patrick included Meade in his indictment, charging that “this army is nearly demoralized.” A minority of scholars challenge this view of limitless war, arguing that, despite some unauthorized violations, official Union hard war policy did not go beyond a “directed severity” that sought to minimize civilian suffering. However, the bulk of evidence does not seem to support such a conclusion. We must also wonder about the efficiency of such a destructive policy: might the Confederacy have quit earlier if there had not been fear of total ravaging of the Southland?33

  Besides official foragers, clouds of unauthorized stragglers fanned out from Sherman’s marching columns to strip the countryside and harass the people. Corporal Harvey Reid, 22nd Wisconsin, wrote near the end of the march to the sea that “the cruelties practiced on the campaign towards citizens have been enough to blast a more sacred cause than ours.” The huge extent of vandalism has led one historian to surmise that Sherman’s severing of his communications freed the soldiery psychologically from the moral restraints of contact with home and community, giving them license to act outside the bounds of normally accepted behavior.34

  The South’s fierce intransigence and the North’s ruthless determination resulted in thousands upon thousands of civilians being beaten, starved, economically ruined, their mental and physical health destroyed. Reports endlessly document the suffering. Thus, the Cincinnati Daily Commercial, July 20, 1864, noted the arrival of homeless Southern refugees: “Four hundred weeping and terrified Ellens, Susans, and Maggies,” deprived of their factory employment by Sherman, driven “away from their lovers and brothers of the sunny South, and all for the offense of weaving tent-cloth and spinning stocking yarn!” John H. Hight, unit historian of the 58th Indiana, described civilians huddling together as Sherman’s soldiers prepared to burn their homes: “Some of the women are crying, some wringing their hands in agony, some praying to the Almighty.”35

  In the wake of Sheridan’s torching of the Valley, Confederate Major Henry Kyd Douglas witnessed the misery of the refugees there: “I saw mothers and maidens tearing their hair and shrieking to Heaven in their fright and despair,” while a beautiful girl was “shrieking with wild laughter, for the horrors of the night had driven her mad.” Terrified out of their wits by the invasive behavior of soldiers from both armies, pregnant women miscarried. “Poor Aunt Sallie suffered dreadfully, and her babe was born dead,” wrote Emma LeConte, January 1865, “the result of the fright she experienced when the enemy passed through [Columbia, South Carolina].” Older people succumbed to shock. Virginian Cornelia McVeigh described how her mother died in 1864 when Yankee troopers “destroyed everything we had.” After their raid, “She lived only one week.” Lucy Buck recorded in her diary on November 15, 1864, that her Aunt Lizzie had died after bluecoats burned their Front Royal farm in the Shenandoah and destroyed the livestock. Lucy stopped writing, too numb for words. “My diary was laid by. Those sad autumn days my heart was too sad.”36

  Bad as conditions might be in the major theaters of war, none suffered more than the people caught between contending parties in the contested borderlands of the conflict, unstable zones where guerrilla warfare predominated: the mountains of eastern Kentucky and western Virginia, the ravaged communities of Kansas and Missouri, where violence had raged for most of a decade. One historian of border warfare notes that grand strategies and notions of limited engagement never drove the fighting there. The struggle “was instead a very personal war, a war among neighbors, a war of theft and arson, a war of midnight murder and torture—a vendetta.”37

  The bitter personal hatreds between contending parties in border badlands, where divisions thrived, produced special cruelties, such as the burning alive of enemy civilians thrown into flaming buildings, as well as random torturing and killings accompanied by taking grisly trophies, including ears, genitals, scalps. In exasperation at their inability to prevent such atrocities and massacres, perpetrated by guerrillas sheltered by proslavery settlers, Federal authorities resorted to creating free-fire zones, necessitating forced population removal and relocation, sometimes to unhygienic and crowded refugee camps where hungry people quickly sickened. After guerrillas massacred the free-soil citizens of Lawrence, Kansas, Federal forces cleared the border counties, driving the people away and destroying crops that sustained irregulars. Hard-bitten Union Colonel Bazel Lazear, 1st Missouri Cavalry, who had summarily executed bushwhackers, nevertheless confessed, “It is heart sickening to see what I have seen. A desolated country and women and children, some of them almost naked. Some on foot and some in old wagons. Oh God.”38

  Shooting men in front of their families became a common terrorist act of guerrilla bands. Several authors have suggested that, in this way, irregulars acted out a symbolic form of rape, demonstrating that wives and daughters could be violated at any time and with impunity. This argument seems persuasive. But, ironically, in trying to expose an underlying motive hidden in this murderous practice, writers have unintentionally contributed to the myth that mock rape largely took the place of actual sexual assault in the Civil War. We frequently hear that very little rape took place in any sector of the fighting at any time during the conflict. However, a wide range of sources suggests otherwise: women suffered sexual assault frequently throughout all theaters of the conflict.39

  Cases occur, for example, in official documents such as the papers of the Adjutant General’s office regarding the proceedings of military courts. Federal records yield most evidence, as many Confederate archives did not survive the chaos of the final weeks. Thus, we read that Union Sergeant Charles Sperry and members of his squad tried to rape fifteen-year-old Annie Nelson in Langley, Virginia, in the summer of 1864. Again, Private James Preble, 17th New York, attempted several sexual assaults, including the brutal rape of a fifty-eight-year-old spinster. Sergeant Arthur Nood, the arresting officer, testified to Preble’s drunken state, “with his Privates hanging out, his pants and shirt in that region all covered with blood.”40

  Accounts of sexual attacks found their way into the newspapers. The Missouri Democrat reported on October 13, 1864, the attempted rape of a Mrs. Schmich by Rebel cavalry. A month later, on November 12, the paper noted the gang rape of three black servants by partisans. Correspondence also documents the brutal abuse of women. On January 3, 1865, an unidentified Rebel soldier wrote that, after the evacuation of Savannah, Georgia, by Confederate forces, you could hear the shrieks of women attacked by “the skulkers of our army who had commenced to pillage and destroy.” Knowledge of violence to women became so commonplace that it could be talked about in official unit histories. In the narrative of the 72nd Indiana, Sergeant Benjamin Moge was quoted as saying that at Marietta, Georgia, on July 10, 1864, Union cavalry got liquored up and molested refugee female factory workers removed to that city on Sherman’s orders. “Upon this occasion,” the vet recalled of his fellow soldiers, “their delirium took the form of making love to the women.”41

  Individual memoirs also talked of the crimes committed. After the war, terrible memories haunted Philip Daingerfield Stephenson, a veteran of the 13th Arkansas (C.S.A.). He finally found healing by joining the Christian ministry. In his recollections, he wrote of many awful incidents. The following may particularly chill us: “one of the dark places of army life.” He described a young woman, “once pretty no doubt, but now bedraggled and befouled, little more than a girl, and yet a hag in looks, with garments scant and ragged and filthy.” This poor sick creature dragged herself along beside the column of marching Rebel soldiers. Her wits appeared addled, probably because of gross sexual abuse, either through prostitution or repeated rape. More than likely, she had contracted venereal disease. Bereft of sense, she shouted filth at the passing troops, “her mouth full of foul talk and ribaldry.” That night, soldiers threw her off a bridge to her death in
the gorge below. “It was the talk of a day among us and then forgotten.”42

  Many sexual assaults failed to be officially reported in part because junior officers colluded with their men in believing that taking advantage of women came as a perk of the uniform. Lieutenant George O’Malley, 115th Pennsylvania, assaulted a Mrs. Whippey, who was tending her wounded son in hospital. Union Major Thomas Jordan routinely threatened gang rape to cow Southern women into forced labor. He told a group in Sparta, Tennessee, that they must cook for six hundred troops or “he would turn his men loose upon them and would not be responsible for anything they might do.” Later, at Selma, he warned women that if they failed to provide food for the soldiers, “they had better sew up the bottoms of their petticoats.”43

  Soldiers on both sides considered women of the slave cabins especially fair game. African Americans bore a large brunt of male lust, frequently diverting rapists’ attention away from potential targets in white women. As early as August 1861, an official Union report from Missouri warned that General John Pope’s men had become so habituated to “committing rapes on the negroes and such like things” that they stood in danger of permanently alienating free-soil sentiment. General Oliver Otis Howard wrote angrily from Beaufort, South Carolina, to one of his subordinate commanders, on January 10, 1865, expressing shock “that many depredations have been committed near this place, and certain things done that would disgrace us even in the enemy’s country, e.g., the robbing of some negroes and abusing their women.”44