Living Hell

by Michael C. C. Adams

  56. Chauncey E. Burr, “The Soldier’s Baby,” in The Student and Schoolmate 12 (August 1865): p. 239; Jean V. Berlin, ed., A Confederate Nurse: The Diary of Ada W. Bacot, 1860–1863 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 182–83.

  57. Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York: Knopf, 1972), pp. 238, 240, 366.

  58. Don E. Fehrenbacher, “Epilogue: Two Casualties of War,” in Gabor Boritt, ed., War Comes Again: Comparative Vistas on the Civil War and World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 245–46.

  59. Walt Whitman, Memoranda during the Civil War: Journals, 1863–1865 (1875, repr. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010), pp. 75–76.

  60. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead, pp. 108, 128, 134; see also, Ric Burns, dir., Death and the Civil War, in the PBS American Experience series, 2012. Though a trifle sentimentalized, this program has excellent visuals. Harry Smeltzer, “ ‘Squire’ Bottom Founds a Confederate Cemetery,” Civil War Times 49, no. 3 (June 2011): pp. 27–28; Ishbel Ross, Angel of the Battlefield: The Life of Clara Barton (New York: Harper, 1956), p. 87.

  61. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Random House, 1993), pp. 103, 105; J. Matthew Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994), p. 76.

  62. Emory Upton, The Military Policy of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1917), pp. 216–18; Sproat, “The Best Men,” p. 171; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine, 1988), pp. 443, 447.

  63. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 447; Varhola, Everyday Life during the Civil War, p. 108.

  64. Vinovskis, ed., Toward a Social History, p. 74; Dixon Wecter, When Johnny Comes Marching Home (1944, repr. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1976), p. 163.

  65. Frank A. Boyle, “Common Soldier: Adjutant Anthony McDermott, 69th Pennsylvania Infantry,” Blue & Gray Magazine 20, no. 4 (Spring 2003): p. 46.

  66. Vinovskis, Toward a Social History, pp. viii, 23; Gallman, North Fights the Civil War, p. 183.

  67. Werner, Reluctant Witnesses, p. 149.

  CLOSING. GENERAL LEE AND THE GRAY LADIES

  1. Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 1934), vol. 2, p. 462.

  2. J. B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, at the Confederate States Capital (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1866), vol. 2, pp. 88, 183, 214, 235, 424.

  3. Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking, 1988), p. 207.

  4. See also Dixon Wecter, When Johnny Comes Marching Home (1944, repr. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1976), pp. 183–89.

  5. Edward A. Moore, The Story of a Cannoneer under Stonewall Jackson (1907, repr. New York: Time-Life, 1983), p. 254. John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant (New York: American News Company, 1879), vol. 2, p. 451.

  6. Stephen E. Ambrose, Americans at War (New York: Berkley, 1998), p. 60.

  7. Ambrose, Americans at War, pp. 65, 69.

  8. Michael C. C. Adams, Echoes of War: A Thousand Years of Military History in Popular Culture (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), p. 152.

  9. See Richard Allan Fox Jr., Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle: The Little Big Horn Reexamined (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).

  10. Adams, Echoes of War, pp. 160–62.

  11. Esther Shephard, Walt Whitman’s Pose (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), p. 109.

  12. Michael C. C. Adams, “Poet Whitman and General Custer,” Studies in Popular Culture 18, no. 2 (April 1996): pp. 1–17.

  13. Thomas L. Connelly, The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 101; Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 102.

  14. Carol K. Bleser and Lesley J. Gordon, eds., Intimate Strategies of the Civil War: Military Commanders and Their Wives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 172, 174, 176–77; Alice Rains Trulock, In the Hands of Providence: Joshua L. Chamberlain and the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), p. 374; Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, The Passing of the Armies: An Account of the Final Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac, Based upon Personal Reminiscences of the Fifth Army Corps (1915, repr. New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 295.

  15. G. Edward White, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 19; Also, Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), p. 179.

  16. Gerald F. Linderman, The Mirror of War: American Society and the Spanish-American War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), p. 106.

  17. Michael C. C. Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 47–49; Michael C. C. Adams, “ ‘Anti-War’ Isn’t Always Anti-War,” Midwest Quarterly 31 (Spring 1990): pp. 297–313.

  18. Émile Zola, The Debacle, trans. Leonard Tancock (1892, repr. New York: Penguin, 1972), pp. 150–54, 347–49.

  19. Zola, The Debacle, pp. 300, 279–80, 347, 405.

  20. Zola, The Debacle, pp. 434, 481.

  21. Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (New York: Vintage, 2004), p. 5; Hess, Union Soldier in Battle, p. 186; Connelly, The Marble Man, p. 111.

  22. Elizabeth Preston Allan, ed., The Life and Letters of Margaret Junkin Preston (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), pp. 158–59.

  23. G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), pp. 65–66; David Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), p. 173.

  24. Marcus Cunliffe effectively challenged the martial South myth in Soldiers & Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America 1775–1865 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), chap. 10; Sharyn McCrumb, She Walks These Hills (New York: Signet, 1995), p. 239.

  25. Peter Messent and Steve Courtney, eds., The Civil War Letters of Joseph Hopkins Twichell: A Chaplain’s Story (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), pp. 316–17.

  26. Thomas, The Marble Man, p. 392.

  27. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, p. 109.

  28. William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948, repr. New York: Vintage, 1972), pp. 194–95.

  29. On the Spanish-American War as an invigorating masculine endeavor, see Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

  30. Russell F. Weigley, “The Necessity of Force: The Civil War, World War II, and the American View of War,” in Gabor Boritt, ed., War Comes Again: Comparative Vistas on the Civil War and World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 232–33.

  31. Robert G. Athearn, William Tecumseh Sherman and the Settlement of the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), p. 99.

  32. Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (1902, repr. New York: Da Capo, 1990), pp. 52–53.

  — Suggested Further Reading —

  LIVING HELL DEALS IN DEPTH WITH MILITARY CONFLICT during the Civil War era. For readers who would like to explore further the broad nature of war, including combat, many helpful sources are available. I recommend Gwynne Dyer, War (Homewood, IL: Dorsey, 1985) and Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1985). John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (New York: Viking, 1976) set a new standard for exacting analysis of the character of combat, focusing on three periods: the high medieval (Agincourt), the horse and musket (Waterloo), and the advanced industrial (the Somme). Stephen E. Ambrose’s Americans at War (New York: Berkley, 1998) is both provocative and entertaining.

  The Civil War occurred at a transitional moment when advances in weaponry were shifting the tactical ad
vantage from the offense to defense. A succinct analysis of this shift is found in Paddy Griffith, Forward into Battle: Fighting Tactics from Waterloo to the Near Future, rev. ed. (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1992). Also see Thomas B. Buell, The Warrior Generals: Combat Leadership in the Civil War (New York: Three Rivers, 1997) and Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983). Richard Allan Fox charts the belated transition to tactics appropriate to the new fast-firing weapons, and George Armstrong Custer’s failure to implement them properly, in Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle: The Little Big Horn Reexamined (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).

  People sometimes assume that historians are in agreement on all that has gone before, their task being simply to relate the past through a generally agreed-upon narrative. In fact, history is a continuing conversation with no definitive answers or conclusions. One debate particularly concerns us as we look at the dark side of the Civil War—the extent to which the conflict went beyond acceptable boundaries of military behavior, both because of war psychosis (a rising anger at the enemy) and as a result of deliberate “hard war” policy aimed at breaking the opponents’ will to fight. Harry S. Stout assesses the gap between the claims of both sides to be fighting a just war with God on their sides and the actual conduct of hostilities in Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (New York: Penguin, 2007). George R. Burkhardt looks at the intensifying savagery of the conflict in Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath: No Quarter in the Civil War (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007). Charles Royster’s The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Vintage, 1993) takes a close look at two men who advocated a ruthless attitude toward enemy people.

  How successful were such strategies that violated just war conventions? We addressed this issue in the text, but readers might want to explore further facets of the subject. After examining Union firebombing of Charleston, South Carolina, August 1863, the result of deploying a weapon of mass destruction against civilians, Stephen R. Wise concluded that the tactic actually raised Rebel morale by increasing hatred of the Yankees. See Gate of Hell: Campaign for Charleston Harbor, 1863 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994). This finding is consistent with conclusions from studies of recent tactics that harm civilians, from World War II carpet bombing to current unmanned drones; they also suggest that resistance to the enemy increases when people are subjected to attacks deemed unreasonable and unfair. It was long assumed that Sherman’s highly destructive march to the sea broke the backbone of Rebel resistance in the heartland. But in a brilliantly original analysis, Mark A. Weitz showed that the loyalty of many ordinary Georgia civilians and soldiers dissipated a year before Sherman’s invasion, due to the failure of the salt ration and congruent agricultural failures. Thus, a preservative rather than a blitzkrieg started the erosion of morale: A Higher Duty: Desertion among Georgia Troops during the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).

  The psychological consequences of combat have received increasing attention since the Great War of 1914–18. Two American contributions from the World War II era stand out: S. L. A. Marshall, Men against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (Washington, DC: Infantry Journal, 1947), and Samuel A. Stouffer et al., The American Soldier (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949). More recently, Jonathan Shay studied the psychological cost of modern warfare in Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). Dave Grossman argues we are more successful at overcoming soldiers’ initial repugnance to killing than we are at reinstalling moral sanctions against violence once the slaughter officially stops (hence, we may extrapolate, the wild behavior of some Civil War veterans). See On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996). John Talbott applies recent psychological insights to the experiences of Billy Yank and Johnny Reb in “Combat Trauma in the American Civil War,” History Today (March 1996).

  Medicine in general has tended to be neglected in mainstream histories of the Civil War. For those who wish to know more about diseases, wounds, and their treatment, a good, balanced introduction is provided by Alfred Jay Bollet, Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (Tucson: Galen, 2002). For an interesting study of medical concerns affecting the African American soldier, see Margaret Humphreys, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). To understand how a simple natural phenomenon can affect military operations and undermine soldiers’ health, take a look at C. E. Wood, Mud: A Military History (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006).

  For those who would like to read more of the words written by participants in the conflict, the chapter endnotes provide a comprehensive guide to the letters, diaries, reports, and memoirs of eyewitnesses. We are fortunate that both parties to the conflict spoke English, were relatively literate, and there was no official censorship. Consequently, our access to the thoughts of the 1860s generation is almost limitless. A huge number of sources have been printed. Many may now be read on-line, while volumes printed in the nineteenth century remain relatively easy to obtain from public and academic libraries. For starters, try sampling Bell Irvin Wiley’s two magnificent compendiums, The Life of Johnny Reb (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943) and The Life of Billy Yank (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952).

  We all have our favorite sources. Mine include Joseph E. Crowell, The Young Volunteer: The Everyday Experiences of a Soldier Boy in the Civil War (Paterson, NJ: Joseph E. Crowell, 1906); Peter Messent and Steve Courtney, eds., The Civil War Letters of Joseph Hopkins Twichell: A Chaplain’s Story (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); and Sam R. Watkins, “Co. Aytch”: A Side Show of the Big Show (1881, repr. New York: Collier, 1962), all of which give candid insights into soldier life. Perhaps because their destinies were so profoundly affected by the collapse of their society, Southern civilians have left us particularly arresting accounts of the war’s impact on ordinary lives. Good examples include Charles East, ed., Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) and John Q. Anderson, ed., Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861–1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1955). John B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, ed. Earl Schenck Miers (New York: Sagamore, 1958), is a mine of information on life in the beleaguered Confederate capital. From the other side, Charlotte Forten, a well-educated African American, left her cogent thoughts on North and South in Ray Allen Billington, The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten (New York: Dryden, 1953).

  Late in the process of producing Living Hell, we made a decision not to illustrate the book. However, many collections of contemporary pictures are available. Hirst D. Milhollen and Milton Kaplan, picture eds., Divided We Fought: A Pictorial History of the War, 1861–1865 (New York: Macmillan, 1961) contains a fine selection of photographs and sketches from the Library of Congress collection. An excellent text by David Donald, General Editor, accompanies the illustrations. For more of the war artists’ work, see Earl Schenck Miers, The American Civil War: A Popular Illustrated History of the Years 1861–1865 as Seen by the Artist-Correspondents Who Were There (New York: Golden Press, 1961).

  We did not illustrate Living Hell because none of the pictures seemed to match the stark honesty of written eyewitness accounts. This leads to the question: how truly revelatory were pictures from the front? The 1860s were an age of public engagement with camera use as intense as that of today’s cell phones and other popular communications technology. See, for instance, William C. Darrah, Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth Century Photography (Gettysburg, PA: W. C. Darrah, 1981). Also, Ronald S. Coddington’s three volumes, Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories; Faces of the Confederacy: An Album of Southern Soldiers and Their Stories; and African American Faces of the Civil Wa
r: An Album. All are published in Baltimore by the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, 2008, and 2012, respectively. Moreover, war pictures, including those of the dead, could be seen in three dimensions thanks to the Holmes Stereoscope. See Bob Zeller, The Civil War in Depth: History in 3-D (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1997).

  But perhaps the photographers only partially pulled aside the veil that covered the sights of the killing fields. We see bloated corpses, but we do not witness charred bodies, dismembered carcasses, guts hanging out, decapitated heads in close-up, shredded flesh hanging from trees. Some of the corpses were even artfully posed by the cameramen to appear as if in repose, with muskets arranged neatly nearby. Perhaps battle photography did not go much beyond what civilians might have learned from being unable to get Uncle Fred under ground quickly enough in high summer, or from fishing out of the village pond a reeking, decomposing body. And is it possible that visual repetition of similar battlescapes blunted the impact on the sensibilities?

  A scholar who studied the work of the war artists, W. Fletcher Thompson Jr. argued in The Image of War: The Pictorial Reporting of the American Civil War (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1960) that renditions of men at war became more realistic as the war went on. But this judgment seems to have applied mainly to such matters as showing dirt, crumbling uniforms, dejected countenances. Artists largely continued to draw a line at too candid a rendering of smashed flesh, crippled and maimed bodies, the hopelessly insane. In short, we may wish to conclude that photographers and artists colluded in stopping short of the complete disclosure of combat’s brutal truths.

  Film has not been particularly helpful in providing audiences with a visual sense of the carnage. Gone with the Wind (1939) showed terrified refugees fleeing Atlanta, giving a good sense of their panic and desperation. The panoramic view of Confederate wounded lying out on the railroad tracks waiting for attention has never been equaled in its depiction of acres of prolonged suffering. But, through the amputation scene, the movie also promoted the myth of surgeons sawing away, as if at the woodpile, while the unanesthetized patient screams and begs for the hacking to stop. Glory (1989) showed us a burst of blood (it should have included bone fragments and gray matter) as an officer’s head explodes. And there is a nice touch when Robert Gould Shaw jumps and spills his drink as a servant slams a window. But the movie copies the “please don’t cut” moment from Gone with the Wind, an instance of film imitating film purveying a myth.