Living Hell
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Soldiers often sympathized with their comrades arrested and punished for sexual assault, indicating again that many in uniform did not consider taking advantage of women a crime. When, on June 28, 1864, General Patrick hanged two men for rape, he felt obliged to harangue the assembled troops on the seriousness of their offense because of “feeling expressed by some of the Troops in regard to the Sentence.” He stood on the scaffold and uttered “such words of warning, of reproof & correction as seemed proper in the presence of … the dead hanging beneath my feet.”45
The statistics for officially recorded rapes can sometimes mislead us, contributing to our underestimation of the incidence of sexual assault. Union military archives, for example, note only 350 trials for rape, and less than 10 percent of those convicted received the death penalty. But clearly many cases never went through formal channels, being dealt with summarily in the field, the incidents going unreported. Also, sexual assaults often lie buried under other categories of misbehavior—“conduct unbecoming” (1,506 convictions) or “conduct prejudicial to the service” (11,834). Thus, Captain F. M. Caldwell of the 157th Pennsylvania faced court-martial for drawing his pistol and accosting a woman at a train depot, insisting: “God damn you must sleep with me tonight.” The service dismissed him for conduct unbecoming. A military court tried Lieutenant Francois Wallenus, New York Independent Battery, also accused of attempted rape. He faced the same charge as Caldwell and the service cashiered him.46
In a rage-filled war, rape allowed hostile men to exert power over categories of the most vulnerable and helpless. Sexual assault appears an overwhelmingly male on female crime; the evidence does not suggest widespread sodomy. Male on male abuse of the powerless tended to take the form of killing opponents, either wounded or captive, and in the brutal treatment of POWs. No military justification can be advanced for assault on the human rights of females or POWs. Both sides treated their military captives appallingly: 30,000 or 18 percent of 127,000 Union POWs died in Rebel captivity, 26,000 or 12 percent of 222,000 Confederates in Northern camps. At the worst prisons, such as Andersonville, Georgia, with a 30 percent death rate, and Elmira, New York, with 25 percent fatalities, the risk of dying proved worse than in battle.47
In extenuation, the argument can be made that military authorities proved unable to adequately provide for their active units in the field, so disease ravaged the armies also. It became particularly hard for Confederate authorities to get provisions and fuel to the prison camps as the Southern infrastructure and economy crumbled. But this offers only a partial excuse; many lives could have been saved on both sides through a modicum of effort. North and South practiced malignant neglect at best, callous inhumanity at worst.
The nightmare began when a soldier realized he would become a prisoner, subject to all the miseries of detainment. Expecting Pemberton’s surrender of Vicksburg, Lieutenant William A. Drennan, 31st Tennessee (C.S.A.), wrote: “Oh! It is heart-sickening, for should Vicksburg be surrendered and we be taken prisoners, I have no idea that we shall see outside prison walls for months—perhaps not during the war.” Captors usually stripped their charges of boots, watches, and other coveted belongings. Prisoners might then be abused on the way to confinement. A Union major named Potter, 40th New York, recalled that, after capture at Bull Run, the Rebels reduced him to his shirt, then marched him and other famished prisoners five miles under a burning sun, pushed forward by bayonets. “They were half starved, plundered of everything, and closely confined like hogs in a pen.”48
Civilians tormented captives as they passed by. Major Abner Small, 16th Maine, recalled that, as he and fellow POWs passed through the streets of Petersburg, Virginia, in July 1864, “The sidewalks were lined with old men, boys, and decrepit women who vied with one another in flinging insults and venom. The women were the worst of the lot; they spat upon us, laughed at us and called us vile and filthy names.” African American prisoners suffered further deliberate humiliation by being chained in a slave coffle. Charleston belle Emma Holmes wrote, on July 16, 1863, that black soldiers taken during the assault on Fort Wagner should be shot, for “it is revolting to our feelings to have them treated as prisoners of war as well as injurious in its effects upon our negroes.” Still, she had the consolation that the prisoners “were brought to the city barefoot, hatless & coatless & tied in a gang like common runaways.”49
Temporary accommodations on the road to permanent prison facilities invariably grew overcrowded and provided little shelter. John H. Brinton, a Union brigade surgeon, wrote candidly in 1864 that about 1,200 Rebels, penned behind railings in Winchester, Virginia, had little cover and meager rations because Mosby’s men had wreaked havoc on the lines of communication, stopping supplies getting through. One stopover pen at Salisbury, North Carolina, a converted warehouse and yard, gave no shelter for the massive overspill of bodies. Thinly clad, barefoot Union prisoners suffered from exposure, not one in twenty possessing a blanket.50
The POWs received a further shock when they got to their ultimate destinations and found these enclosures no better, with gross overcrowding and lack of shelter from the elements. The claim, made by both sides, that manpower shortages prevented clearing further ground lacks credibility. Camps often could not boast even the most rudimentary sanitary arrangements. Men lived in giant cesspools, digging holes in the filth for living quarters. They also had to drink rainwater that collected in contaminated puddles. At Andersonville, where such conditions reached an extreme, one man died every ten minutes during the heat of August 1864; the death rate in the ill-equipped hospital climbed to 75 percent.51
Most camps had inadequate fuel supplies for heat and cooking. At the notorious Johnson’s Island prison on frigid Lake Erie, two officers shared a thin blanket and huddled to keep warm. Even then, the coupled men would wake speechless with cold and had to break out of a covering of crackling ice. Still, officers largely fared better than enlisted men, who often had no cover and got worse rations. William A. Fletcher, 5th Texas, incarcerated in Chattanooga, Tennessee, swore that “the rack and stake of centuries passed were not more brutal than the confinement in the cold, slowly but surely starving.”52
Food allowances often dropped beneath subsistence levels, dished out in filthy communal buckets, contaminated by legions of bacteria, insects, and rodents. At Elmira, Rebel prisoners discovered rodents in the well that provided their drinking water. On a December 1863 day in Richmond, Virginia, Union POWs, imprisoned in a tobacco warehouse used as an annex to Libby Prison, had to discard a boiled rat they found at the bottom of their pail of bean soup. Prisoners finally became so desperate they ate the vermin, along with feral cats they trapped. Virginia captain Isaac Coles recalled eating a feline while imprisoned at Hilton Head, South Carolina. “She was deliciously fat, she must have been a notoriously fine mouser.”53
Evidence exists that, as the war went on, Union authorities deliberately reduced the ration allotted Southern captives so that, in the words of Commissioner of Prisons Colonel William Hoffman, “these prisoners might not be returned to the rebel army in better condition for service than when they were captured.” By the end of 1863, food had on average been cut 10 to 20 percent from where the allowance had started, roughly on a par with military field rations. Prison officials also refused inmates permission to buy from civilian merchants extra food to eke out their diet. Issues of fresh vegetables dwindled, guaranteeing the outbreak of scurvy.54
Given the filth and excrement, battalions of flies thrived in prison as in army camp, alighting in clouds on waste, food, and bodies alike. They drowned in the water. Rebel Henry Rudasill, incarcerated at Fort Delaware, said he received two meals a day but “in summer too thick with flies for use.” A Confederate medical officer inspecting conditions at Andersonville hospital had the integrity to report that “millions of flies crawled over everything and covered the faces of sleeping patients and crawled down their open mouths and deposited their maggots in the gangrenous wounds.”55
The i
mmune systems of men suffering from exposure and malnutrition, assaulted by millions of bacteria, succumbed to typhoid, dysentery, pneumonia, scurvy, and smallpox. Prison surgeons had too few medicines to combat the spread of disease. The environment degraded the spirit as well as the body. Again, enlisted men faced the worst situation. Officers often had yard space to exercise and play games; they could sometimes purchase pens and paper, even borrow books and journals from well-intentioned citizens, an understanding between gentlemen.56
Without intellectual stimulus, the rank and file could even lose the powers of speech and memory, or endure dementia. Sidney Lanier, imprisoned in Point Lookout, Maryland, described the harrowing antics of the insane: “A man would rise and start across the floor. Suddenly he would yell like a fiend, and, as if the inspiration of a howling dervish had rushed upon him, would set up a furious jig in which feet, arms, legs, and head strove in variety and wild energy of movement.” Other sufferers withdrew into despair and expired, often victims of nostalgia.57
While the degradation of some led to their mental eclipse, others sank to an animalistic state, forming gangs to tyrannize their fellow prisoners, stealing what little others had in the way of shelter, clothing, and food. They beat up resisters, even committing murder. At Andersonville, bullyboys terrorized the camp for months. Finally, prisoners formed a vigilance committee and, in league with the prison authorities, brought the thugs to book, the ringleaders receiving the noose.58
The end of hostilities brought the steady repatriation of POWs. In late April 1865, Walt Whitman went down to a pier on the Potomac River in Washington to greet a boatload of several hundred returning prisoners. The state of the men appalled him. He estimated that, of the whole contingent, not more than three could disembark unassisted; most had to be carried ashore. “Can those be men?” asked the shocked former hospital attendant, who thought he had become accustomed to seeing the bodies of soldiers wasted by disease, mangled by wounds. The bloodiest battlefields, Whitman said, could not show worse sights: “those little livid-brown, ash-streak’d, monkey-looking dwarfs?—are they really not mummified dwindled corpses? They lay there, most of them quite still, but with a horrible look in their eyes and skinny lips, often with not enough flesh on the lips to cover their teeth.”59
At best, these shattered men faced a long road to physical and mental recovery after the brutal treatment meted out to them. Many would lead painful, demon-haunted, impoverished lives. Some would never make it back from the terrible war experience, their life path into the postwar world foreshortened, reminding us that the consequences of wars do not dissipate when generals proffer dress swords in surrender and statesmen sign official papers ending formal hostilities.
— CHAPTER EIGHT —
STATE OF THE UNION
×
THE ROAD THAT TOOK US THROUGH THE CONFLICT NOW brings us to the fretful postwar years. Not surprisingly, the texture of the peace echoes the complexity, even confusion, of the causes that inaugurated the fighting. Of the issues on the table, only one perhaps had been settled with certainty: the war had preserved the geographical integrity of the Union. Probably by the late 1880s, a fair majority of Americans would have said this had been a good thing. Periodically, others around the world have wondered if the United States became too big and clumsy for its own or anyone else’s good. Domestically, we take occasional renewed calls for secession mainly as political rhetoric, intended for the ears of extremist voters, especially in Texas. The Union appears a fact, so that those who oppose allegedly radical social initiatives undertaken by the Federal government resort to demonizing the central authority, trying to undo it from within. Beyond this verity of national unity, the picture begins to resemble a kaleidoscope: some gains resulted, and a few groups became outright winners, but many suffered loss and setback. Much that mattered still remained undecided. In this chapter, we try to assess the war’s outcomes, including its high human and material costs.
By 1865, the ex-Confederacy, which had lost its bid for independence, lay in ruins and would take about a century to recover. The destruction wrought by invasion had created a shambles. New York journalist, John Townsend Trowbridge, touring the war zone in summer 1865, described the defeated states as a vast, stinking charnel house. A leading authority on the war estimates that, by war’s end, Union forces had “destroyed two-thirds of the assessed value of Southern wealth, two-fifths of the South’s livestock,” and, perhaps most devastating, “one-quarter of her white men between the ages of twenty and forty.” Further, “More than half the farm machinery was ruined, and the damage to railroads and industries was incalculable.” The South’s total wealth from all sources had probably dropped by 60 percent.1
Defeat had depleted the South’s emotional resources. Losing the war, with all that entailed, left many initially too stunned for action, literally in a stupor. Northern journalist Whitelaw Reid said that many Rebel veterans “stared stupidly” and had a “played out manner.” General Josiah Gorgas, formerly chief of Confederate ordnance, wrote: “I am as one walking in a dream, & expecting to awake. I cannot see its consequences, nor shape my own course, but am just moving along until I can see my way at some future day.” At first, just eking out survival took maximum effort. According to his niece, Rose, one ruined Charleston aristocrat, Julius Pringle, sold off his library of rare books in order to eat. She recalled: “We could not understand why as each novel was sold Uncle Julius was so sad. It seemed to make him sick, ill.”2
The ex-Confederacy became trapped in a colonial relationship to the victors, an internal American economic empire in which the South had to sell its raw materials and labor dirt cheap to attract Northern wealth into the capital-strapped region. Even those who tried to build a New South on a Yankee industrial-commercial model remained within the cycle of exploitation. Wages inevitably stayed depressed in mines and factories, while Northern owners rigged prices, so that Birmingham steel, for example, could not compete with the product of Pittsburgh mills.
Slave states that had remained loyal still suffered. By the 13th Amendment, slave property converted into free labor, a great human advance but a huge loss of capital when a prime field hand in 1860 cost around $1,300. Border state planters had cause to regret their blindness in rejecting earlier proposals for compensated voluntary emancipation. In Kentucky, the requisitioning of cavalry mounts by both sides ruined the Commonwealth’s lucrative horse-breeding industry. The losses suffered by one leading horse-farm owner, R. A. Alexander, brought him to numb despair. He confessed, “I have become careless in almost everything that requires exertion,” and “I feel little interest in any form of business.” He died prematurely in December 1867.3
Rebel raiders destroyed much of Kentucky’s developing infrastructure of roads and railways. Ironically, the perpetrators became local heroes as emancipation and the enforcement by U.S. troops of black civil rights through “Readjustment” turned whites into neo-Confederates. In 1860, the national census placed Kentucky in the top ten states by per capita income; since 1870, the state lists in the bottom ten. The resultant lack of funds showed up in every area of life. For example, in the 1850s the state had gone a long way toward completing a free universal basic education system. By 1865, over seven hundred school districts had closed; in 1861–62 alone, 130,000 pupils lost their classrooms. Lack of capital forced Kentuckians to sell off natural resources in minerals and timber cheaply to Northern buyers, ensuring disastrous strip mining and land erosion.4
As Southerners adjusted to their situation, some showed great ingenuity in overcoming difficulties and creating a new future. Emma LeConte, a young war widow in Columbia, South Carolina, successfully ran her own plantation, became a suffragette, and taught a Sunday school for black children. But the vastness of the South’s problems foiled large-scale solutions. Trapped in abject poverty, much of the population subsisted close to the starvation point. Federal Major Thomas W. Osborn, stationed in South Carolina early in 1865, described ragged, filthy, and h
ungry poor whites living in shanties worse than pigsties. Later that summer, Albert Gallatin Browne Sr., wrote bitterly to New England progressive Wendell Phillips that in South Carolina and Georgia black freedmen went without food and clothing, “covering themselves with nothing but pieces of rags, held in front & rear as strangers approached.”5
During Reconstruction, 1865–77, Northern “carpetbagger” and Southern “renegade” reformers tried to improve the situation of the poor of both races through social engineering. Conservatives North and South vilified this effort at public intervention as meddling in local affairs. Yet the nation needed to make a far greater investment in time and money than even progressives could accept to seriously improve the condition of poor Southern workers of both races, giving them a shot at economic independence. A model existed in the Union wartime agricultural experiments that allowed ex-slaves to run abandoned plantations on a profit-sharing basis. Large-scale redistribution of land, along with grants to buy seed and tools, conceivably might have produced a middle-class yeoman society encompassing both black and white. But President Andrew Johnson’s 1865 amnesty proclamation returned most confiscated acres to their original owners. Northern policymakers had no taste for a radical reallocation of resources that smacked of communism.6