Living Hell

by Michael C. C. Adams

  By 1898, those missing boys had become a faded memory, their corpses buried in rags of uniform, crumbled to dust. And the women’s tears had dried long ago, their pain wrapped away in a deep and abiding sense of emptiness and loneliness. Now, all the heartbreak would happen again. A new generation of boys had donned uniforms, hellbent on going off to see the elephant and win mighty war laurels. The old women knew that many would die of sickness and wounds, or return distant and abstracted. But that would be later. In this moment, the gray-haired ladies could only stand quietly by the tracks and watch. For what could they possibly say?

  — Notes —

  OPENING. JIM CONKLIN AND GENERAL SHERMAN

  1. Michael C. C. Adams, Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861–1865 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). The book won the 1978 Jefferson Davis Prize, awarded by the Museum of the Confederacy. Lillian Ross, Picture (New York: Limelight, 1984), pp. 26, 28.

  2. Ohio State Journal, August 12, 1880. Also, Lloyd Lewis, Sherman: Fighting Prophet (1932, repr. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960), p. 635.

  3. Allan Nevins, “The Glorious and the Terrible,” in Nicholas Cords and Patrick Gerster, eds., Myth and the American Experience (New York: Glencoe, 1973), vol. 2, p. 365.

  4. Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present (1855, repr. New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 87; Joan Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 169.

  5. Charles East, ed., Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman (New York: Touchstone, 1992), pp. 335, 345, 406; Jean V. Berlin, ed., A Confederate Nurse: The Diary of Ada W. Bacot, 1860–1863 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), p. 172, on the child’s death.

  6. For sanitation problems in New Orleans and New York, Otto L. Bettmann, The Good Old Days—They Were Terrible (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 138, 35; Robert K. Krick, “The Parallel Lives of Two Virginia Soldiers: Armistead and Garnett,” in Gary W. Gallagher, ed., The Third Day at Gettysburg & Beyond (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 105, on Fort Riley.

  7. Charles Dickens, American Notes (Philadelphia: Peterson, n.d.), p. 45; Alan Huffman, Sultana: Surviving Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History (New York: HarperCollins-Smithsonian Books, 2009), pp. 1–4.

  8. Mary E. Walker, HIT: Essays on Women’s Rights (Amherst, NY: Humanity, 2003), pp. 103, 107 on tobacco use and homes ruined by alcohol; Stephen W. Berry II, All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 47, for congressional brawling.

  9. Alonzo Calkins, Opium and the Opium-Appetite (1871, repr. New York: Arno Press, 1981), p. 36 on opium consumption Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 231, considers escape from pain and boredom via drug use; Leon Edel, ed., The Diary of Alice James (New York: Penguin, 1982), pp. 5–6, 149; C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), e.g., pp. 247, 286, 291.

  10. Margaret Armstrong, Fanny Kemble: A Passionate Victorian (New York: Macmillan, 1938), p. 88, on Victorian stardom; James A. Ramage, Rebel Raider: The Life of General John Hunt Morgan (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), pp. 1–7, for example, describes idolization of a popular soldier.

  11. Carol Bleser, ed., The Hammonds of Redcliffe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 68.

  12. Thomas P. Lowry, The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 1994), p. 97, abortion statistics.

  13. George Templeton Strong, Diary of the Civil War, 1860–1865 (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 4.

  14. James M. McPherson, “Was It More Restrained Than You Think?,” New York Review of Books, February 14, 2008, p. 44. Demographic historian J. David Hacker, by careful analysis of census data to establish male deaths 1860–1870, believes that losses have been underestimated by at least 20 percent. Between 750,000 and 850,000 probably died, an even grimmer percentage of the population than previously thought. Cited in Guy Gugliotta, “New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Toll,” New York Times, April 3, 2012.

  CHAPTER ONE. GONE FOR A SOLDIER

  1. Virginia Ingraham Burr, ed., The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1848–1889 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 184.

  2. Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1861) 1, “Poetry & Incidents,” p. 31; “Rumors & Incidents,” pp. 123–24.

  3. Daniel E. Sutherland, The Expansion of Everyday Life, 1860–1876 (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), p. 3; Stephen W. Berry II, All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 170; Theodore Winthrop, “Washington as a Camp,” Atlantic Monthly 8 (July 1861): pp. 106, 109.

  4. Peter Burchard, One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), p. 21; Bliss Perry, Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921), p. 142.

  5. Emry E. Werner, Reluctant Witnesses: Children’s Voices from the Civil War (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), p. 10; J. G. deRoulhac Hamilton, ed., The Papers of Randolph Abbott Shotwell (Raleigh: North Carolina Historical Commission, 1929), p. 40.

  6. Gwynne Dyer, War (Homewood, IL: Dorsey, 1985), p. 108; Joseph E. Crowell, The Young Volunteer: The Everyday Experiences of a Soldier Boy in the Civil War (Paterson, NJ: Joseph E. Crowell, 1906), p. 10.

  7. Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), p. 38; Sutherland, Expansion of Everyday Life, pp. 1–2; Michael J. Varhola, Everyday Life during the Civil War (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 1999), p. 119.

  8. Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 274; Werner, Reluctant Witnesses, p. 23.

  9. Spencer B. King Jr., ed., Rebel Lawyer: Letters of Theodorick W. Montfort, 1861–1862 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1965), pp. 71–72.

  10. William H. Hastings, Letters from a Sharpshooter: The Civil War Letters of Private William B. Greene, Co. G 2nd United States Sharpshooters (Berdan’s) Army of the Potomac, 1861–1865 (Belleville, WI: Historic Publications, 1993), pp. 146, 172, 184, 198, 75.

  11. Milo M. Quaife, ed., From the Cannon’s Mouth: The Civil War Letters of General Alpheus S. Williams (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press & Detroit Historical Society, 1959), p. 221; Mills Lane, ed., “Dear Mother: Don’t Grieve about Me; If I Get Killed I’ll Only Be Dead”; Letters from Georgia Soldiers in the Civil War (Savannah, GA: Beehive, 1977), p. 260; Robert W. Johannsen, The “Wicked Rebellion” and the Republic: Henry Tuckerman’s Civil War (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1994), pp. 31–32.

  12. Susan Leigh Blackford, Letters from Lee’s Army (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1962), p. 144; Stephen W. Sears, ed., For Country, Cause & Leader: The Civil War Journal of Charles B. Haydon (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993), p. 300.

  13. Thomas P. Lowry, Don’t Shoot That Boy! Abraham Lincoln and Military Justice (Mason City, IA: Savas, 1999), p. 23; Burr, Secret Eye, p. 209; William T. Lusk, War Letters of William Thompson Lusk (New York, 1911), p. 189.

  14. Crowell, Young Volunteer, pp. 59–60; Robert F. Harris and John Niflot, eds., Dear Sister: The Civil War Letters of the Brothers Gould (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), p. 2; Martin Hardwick Hall, ed., “The Taylor Letters: Correspondence from Fort Bliss, 1861,” Military History of Texas and the Southwest 15 (Fall 1980): p. 56.

  15. Lane, Dear Mother, p. 40; John H. Brinton, Personal Memoirs of John H. Brinton, Civil War Surgeon, 1861–1865 (1914, repr. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), pp. 43–44.

  16. Joshua Kendall, “A Minor Exception,” The Nation, April 4, 2011, pp. 32–33.

  17. Robert Knox Sneden, Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey (New York: Free Press, 2000
), p. 121; Frank Wilkeson, Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac (1886, repr. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1972), p. 33; Allan Nevins, ed., A Diary of Battle: The Personal Journals of Colonel Charles S. Wainwright 1861–1865 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), p. 116.

  18. Gerald J. Prokopowicz, All for the Regiment: The Army of the Ohio, 1861–1862 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 139; Sneden, Eye of the Storm, p. 4.

  19. Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds., The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), p. 73; Lowry, Don’t Shoot That Boy, p. 24; Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, From Old Fields: Poems of the Civil War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), pp. 20–26.

  20. R. Gregory Laude, Madness, Malingering, and Malfeasance: The Transformation of Psychiatry and the Law in the Civil War Era (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2003), p. 60; Hedrick, Stowe, p. 299.

  21. C. F. Boyd, “The Civil War Diary of C. F. Boyd,” Iowa Journal of History 50 (1952): pp. 59, 66. Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches (1863, repr. Bedford, MA: Applewood, 1993), p. 65.

  22. Fred J. Hood, Kentucky: Its History and Heritage (St. Louis, MO: Forum, 1978), p. 135; Kenneth Radley, Rebel Watchdog: The Confederate States Army Provost Guard (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), pp. 56, 182.

  23. Henrietta Stratton Jaquette, ed., South after Gettysburg: Letters of Cornelia Hancock from the Army of the Potomac, 1863–1865 (1937, repr. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1971), p. 141.

  24. Alfred Jay Bollet, Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (Tucson, AZ: Galen, 2002), pp. 313, 292–93, 315.

  25. Varhola, Everyday Life during the Civil War, p. 110; David Herbert Donald, ed., Gone for a Soldier: The Civil War Memoirs of Private Alfred Bellard (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), p. 256; Blackford, Letters from Lee’s Army, p. 23.

  26. Emil Rosenblatt and Ruth Rosenblatt, eds., Hard Marching Every Day: The Civil War Letters of Private Wilbur Fisk, 1861–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), pp. 213–14; Sears, Country, Cause & Leader, p. 4.

  27. Larry M. Logue, To Appomattox and Beyond: The Civil War Soldier in War and Peace (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), p. 39; Thomas P. Lowry, The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 1994), pp. 104–6; James I. Robertson Jr., General A. P. Hill: The Story of a Confederate Warrior (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 11–12; David Evans, Sherman’s Horsemen: Union Cavalry Operations in the Atlanta Campaign (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 35.

  28. Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 6; Peter Messent and Steve Courtney, eds., The Civil War Letters of Joseph Hopkins Twichell: A Chaplain’s Story (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), p. 299.

  29. Richard Holmes, Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (London: HarperCollins, 2002), pp. 249–50; Bollet, Civil War Medicine, p. 17; Byron Farwell, Stonewall: A Biography of General Thomas J. Jackson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 276.

  30. Boyd, “Civil War Diary,” p. 56; Donald, Gone for a Soldier, p. 5.

  31. John S. D. Eisenhower, So Far from God: The War with Mexico, 1846–1848 (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1990), pp. xviii, xxii; Ann R. Gabbert, “ ‘They Die Like Dogs’: Disease Mortality among U.S. Forces during the U.S.-Mexican War,” Military History of the West 31, no. 1 (Spring 2001): pp. 27–28; Ira M. Rutkow, Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine (New York: Random House, 2005), pp. 8, 14; K. Jack Bauer, ed., Soldiering: The Civil War Diary of Rice C. Bull, 123rd New York Volunteer Infantry (San Rafael, CA: Presidio, 1977), p. 8.

  32. Prokopowicz, All for the Regiment, p. 64.

  33. J. B. Gordon, Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1905), p. 49.

  34. Bollet, Civil War Medicine, p. 283; Rutkow, Bleeding Blue and Gray, pp. 8, 14; Stewart Brooks, Civil War Medicine (Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1966), pp. 114–15; Brinton, Personal Memoirs, p. 61.

  35. Harris and Niflot, eds., Dear Sister, pp. 4, 14; Bollet, Civil War Medicine, p. 233; Prokopowicz, All for the Regiment, p. 64.

  36. Eric T. Dean Jr., Shook over Hell: Post Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 52.

  37. Berlin, Confederate Nurse, pp. 83–87; Alcott, Hospital Sketches, pp. 77–78; George Templeton Strong, Diary of the Civil War, 1860–1865 (New York: Macmillian, 1962), pp. 467–68.

  38. Richard A. Gabriel, No More Heroes: Madness & Psychiatry in War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), p. 58; Franklin D. Jones, “Future Directions of Military Psychiatry,” in Richard A. Gabriel, ed., Military Psychiatry: A Comparative Perspective (New York: Greenwood, 1986), pp. 181–89; George Rosen, “Nostalgia: A ‘Forgotten’ Psychological Disorder,” Psychological Medicine 5 (1975): pp. 340–54; The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1888), vol. 1, pt. 3, p. 885.

  39. Werner, Reluctant Witnesses, p. 12.

  40. Guy R. Everson and Edward W. Simpson Jr., eds., “Far, Far from Home”: The Wartime Letters of Dick and Tally Simpson, Third South Carolina Volunteers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 24–25; Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, p. 331.

  41. De Witt C. Peters, “The Evils of Youthful Enlistments, and Nostalgia,” American Medical Times, February 14, 1863, pp. 75–76.

  42. Messent and Courtney, Civil War Letters, p. 80.

  43. Boyd, “Civil War Diary,” p. 53; Crowell, Young Volunteer, p. 309; Werner, Reluctant Witnesses, pp. 120–21.

  44. D’Ann Campbell and Richard Jensen, “Gendering Two Wars,” in Gabor Boritt, ed., War Comes Again: Comparative Vistas on the Civil War and World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 107.

  45. Varhola, Everyday Life during the Civil War, p. 123.

  46. James M. McPherson, What They Fought For, 1861–1865 (New York: Anchor, 1995), p. 16; Mark A. Weitz, A Higher Duty: Desertion among Georgia Troops during the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. 122, 163.

  47. James W. Geary, We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 4, 29–30; Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 7.

  48. New York Times, June 30, 1864.

  49. John Michael Priest, ed., Captain James Wren’s Civil War Diary (New York: Berkley, 1991), p. 129.

  50. Sneden, Eye of the Storm, p. 5.

  51. Laude, Madness, Malingering, and Malfeasance, pp. 134–35.

  52. Ella Lonn, Desertion during the Civil War (1928, repr. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966), pp. 3, 13–14; Radley, Rebel Watchdog, p. 30.

  53. Barnet Schecter, The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America (New York: Walker, 2005), pp. 1, 180, 134; Sutherland, Expansion of Everyday Life, pp. 220–21.

  54. Edward K. Spann, Gotham at War: New York City, 1860–1865 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002), pp. 96–97.

  55. Bernstein, New York City Draft Riots, pp. 23–24, 28–30; Spann, Gotham at War, p. 96.

  56. S. Smith, Doctor in Medicine, and Other Papers on Professional Subjects (New York: William Wood, 1872), p. 192; Also S. Smith, The City That Was (New York: Frank Allaben, 1911), p. 36. Schecter, Devil’s Own Work, p. 203.

  57. Schecter, Devil’s Own Work, pp. 166–67, 177, 157.

  58. Schecter, Devil’s Own Work, pp. 251–52. Spann, Gotham at War, p. 101.

  59. Schecter, Devil’s Own Work, pp. 210–11, 255–56; Bernstein, New York City Draft Riots, p. 65; Lonn, Desertion during the Civil War, p. 151.

  60. Walter Lowenfels, ed., Walt Whitman’s Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), p. 208; Radley, Rebel Watchdog, p. 204.

  61. John David Smith and William Cooper Jr., eds., A Union W
oman in Civil War Kentucky: The Diary of Frances Peter (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), p. 44.

  62. Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 173.

  63. Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), pp. 46, 80; Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: Meridian, 1991), p. 7.

  64. Cornish, Sable Arm, pp. iv, 24, 29, 230.

  65. Geary, We Need Men, pp. 18–19, 76; Jim Cullen, The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1995), p. 147.

  66. Virginia Matzke Adams, ed., On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier’s Civil War Letters from the Front (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), p. 19; Geary, We Need Men, pp. 29–30; Burchard, One Gallant Rush, p. 151.

  67. Lonnie R. Speer, War of Vengeance: Acts of Retaliation against Civil War POWs (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2002), p. 58; Daniel E. Sutherland, Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861–1865 (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 360.

  68. Brooks D. Simpson, Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 44; John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), p. 185; Bollet, Civil War Medicine, pp. 287–89; Cullen, Civil War in Popular Culture, p. 147; Donald Yacovone, ed., A Voice of Thunder: A Black Soldier’s Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), p. 277.

  69. Cullen, Civil War in Popular Culture, p. 147; Cornish, Sable Arm, pp. 46, 183, 194–95; Ira Berlin, “Fighting on Two Fronts: War and the Struggle for Racial Equality in Two Centuries,” in Gabor Boritt, ed., War Comes Again: Comparative Vistas on the Civil War and World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 134–35.