What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  Union policy toward slaves and slavery evolved out of the interplay between pragmatic practices adopted in the field and official legislation passed by Congress. In May 1861 three slaves fled to Union Gen. Benjamin Butler’s lines at Fortress Monroe, Virginia. When the owner, a Confederate colonel, demanded their return, Butler refused, calling the slaves “contraband of war,” which he was under no obligation to give back. 109 On August 6, Congress codified the refusal to return some slaves by passing the First Confiscation Act, which allowed the Union Army to divest disloyal owners of any slaves used to serve Confederate Army officers, build Confederate fortifications, or otherwise aid the Confederate cause. Illinois private Andrew Walker gladly heralded the First Confiscation Act as “something extraordinary in the history of America.” 110

  The First Confiscation Act marked an important milestone, because it was the first time the U.S. Congress passed a law injurious to the slave-owning rights of slaveholders; however, many soldiers and even some officers remained dissatisfied with what they regarded as a weak gesture where a vigorous blow was needed. The First Confiscation Act, after all, targeted the property rights of select individuals without dislodging the institution of slavery or affecting all slaveholders. Gen. James Lane, an opportunist already notorious for his fierce activity in the Kansas border wars, paid no attention to official distinctions drawn by the First Confiscation Act, and instead actively liberated slaves and intimidated their owners throughout much of western Missouri. 111 Taking a somewhat less aggressive approach, Gen. John C. Frémont of the Western Department issued a controversial proclamation on August 30, 1861. Frémont’s proclamation liberated the slaves of any disloyal residents in Missouri, whether or not masters were using their slaves to aid the rebellion. Statesmen in other border states, especially Kentucky, warned President Lincoln that such a radical policy could shake the loyalty of slave states still in the Union, and Lincoln requested that Frémont bring his proclamation more into line with the terms of the First Confiscation Act. Frémont refused to do so, and then proceeded to lose a series of engagements with Confederate Gen. Sterling Price. Lincoln responded by removing Frémont from command. 112

  Frémont’s proclamation and his removal elicited strong reactions. Some Union troops objected to any action against slavery; President Lincoln worried that Kentucky soldiers in particular would balk. Others fretted about the practical implications of Frémont’s proclamation. One soldier, E. P. Kellogg, thought the proclamation excessively rash, and feared that it saddled the Union Army with too many jobs to do at once. The “question of the disposal of the negroes after their emancipation” would be complicated, Kellogg warned. Better to “have but one Gordian Knot at a time. If you give us more we shall have to cut them all, and perhaps cut our fingers if not our throats.” 113

  Kellogg urged caution from hundreds of miles away in Virginia, but in Missouri itself, many soldiers cheered for Frémont and his bold measure. A. G. Dinsmore of the Thirteenth Missouri praised Frémont, “whom we all esteem, and in whose integrity, courage, patriotism and good judgment we all have the utmost confidence.” Dinsmore reported that “our troops were very much enraged when we heard the news that Frémont was to be Court Martialed and superseded.” The countermanding of Frémont’s bold stroke “would certainly have a bad effect on the army in the western department.” 114 E. C. Hubbard wrote of soldiers’ support for Frémont’s proclamation and their worry over the general’s fate. “Considerable anxiety is evinced here to know whether Frémont will be removed or not,” he explained to his brother. “If he is not sustained by the Government and is removed it will be a heavy blow to his department.” 115

  Numerous soldiers outside Missouri also took heart from Frémont’s actions. Though William Dunham was stationed in the eastern theater, he speculated that Frémont “has done more for to infuse energy into the Western Division of the service than all others together.” 116 When he learned of Frémont’s removal, Dunham resented that a leader whom he considered to be decisive and effective had “been slaughtered by fogy politicians.” 117 Pvt. Adam Marty, a Swiss immigrant who fought with the First Minnesota in the Army of the Potomac, wondered why the administration “interfered” with Frémont at all, “who if he could have his way would soon end this war by removing the cause of it.” 118 In discussing Frémont, Marty echoed the more general refrain (sounded throughout the Union rank and file) that since slavery caused the war, it would take the elimination of slavery to win the war.

  Enlisted Union soldiers came to the conclusion that winning the war would require the destruction of slavery partly because soldiers’ personal observations of the South led many to decide that slavery blighted everything it touched. “If it were not for the curse of slavery [the South] could not be beat,” one northern corporal told a friend. As it was, southern whites lacked “the thrift and energy that we see in the free States and the baneful effects of slavery are visible everywhere in the lack of enterprise and universal indolence of the inhabitants…white men do not work…. The land is excellent, but there is little raised.” 119 Pvt. Leigh Webber admired the “reddish loam” of Tennessee, which, “if inhabited by Yankees would bloom like Eden.” Instead, to Webber’s eyes, “everything generally wears an aspect of neglect, shiftlessness and decay” thanks to “the blighting effect of slavery and secession.” 120 Serving right next door to his own state, Illinoisan E. C. Hubbard determined that Missouri should have been “one of the richest states,” instead of “the poorest.” It was too close and climatically similar to the Midwest for distance or weather to account for the differences, so the cause, decided Hubbard and others who drew similar conclusions, had to be slavery. 121

  Soldiers who insisted that slavery impoverished southern society did not simply mean that slavery reduced wealth; in 1860, the nation’s twelve wealthiest counties were in the South, and one of the country’s greatest sources of wealth, slaves, was concentrated almost entirely below the Mason-Dixon line. 122 Soldiers were also commenting on what they saw as poor social health. “Books and newspapers are very rare, and schools and churches are like angels’ visit—few and far between,” complained one soldier. 123 William Gibson, a chaplain with the Forty-fifth Pennsylvania, wrote to his children about the South’s failings as he saw them. For one thing, “Southern refinement does not pay much respect to the difference between male and female,” reported Gibson. In Pennsylvania, Germans were sometimes viewed as lacking “due consideration for the female sex” when they “sen[t] their wives and especially their daughters in to the harvest field,” but at least among German Pennsylvanians, female labor stayed within the family. On South Carolina plantations, “these Southerners work other men’s wives and daughters,” Gibson marveled. “Here we have the boasted refinement of America employing [slave] females in all kinds of plantation work, in common with the males.” A second failing according to Gibson, who saw the middle class as a repository of social virtue, was that “so far as I can see there has been no middle class” in the South. Instead, “there was the Southern planter having nothing to do for the greater part of the year, but to devise means how he might best enjoy himself.” Next came “the overseer,” and finally, slaves “but little removed from a state of barbarism.” Rather than civic equality, Gibson saw “the extremes of luxury and poverty, refinement and barbarism.” Even among nonslaveholding whites, he found “nothing but a set of toadies for the rich planters: and what the South wanted to make the whole North—slave catchers for the South.” 124

  To some extent, diagnoses (like Gibson’s) of southern cultural woes arose from attitudes soldiers brought south with them. 125 While staple-crop commercial agriculture in plantation districts did differ from diversified agriculture on northern family farms, the attribution of all differences to slavery came partly from white middle-class Northerners’ own assumptions and from popular travel literature. In The Cotton Kingdom, for example, Connecticut-born New Yorker Frederick Law Olmsted depicted a listless South deprived by slave
ry of virtues prized by white middle-class Northerners, including thrift, self-discipline, and an ethic of civic improvement. 126 Because northern soldiers (especially from New England and the upper Midwest) expected to see certain characteristics, of course they did. 127

  Yet more influential than Union soldiers’ preexisting notions, or even their firsthand observations of the South, were their interactions with actual slaves, which led many to view slavery as a dehumanizing and evil institution that corroded the moral virtue necessary for a population to govern itself. Like Southerners, Northerners believed in the power of moral contagion, but where white Southerners identified abolitionism as an agent of moral infection, Northerners pointed to slavery as a poison contaminating the South with “social, intellectual and moral degradation.” 128 Nothing made slavery’s toxicity more obvious to Union troops than its effect on the fundamental unit of society, the family. For one thing, slave sales separated families. In the Upper South, where many Union soldiers were stationed in 1861, about one in three first marriages was broken by sale, and about half of all slave children were separated from at least one parent. 129 With their own eyes, soldiers saw slavery snap bonds between parents and children. The men of the Seventh Wisconsin were awakened by gunshots one November night. The following day, soldiers “learned, and saw the cause of the alarm in the form of two negro women—a mother and a daughter.” The pair had fled to Union lines to avoid the proposed sale of the “goodlooking” daughter into the so-called fancy trade, which soldiers viewed as a form of concubinage. Outraged by the plight and moved by the vulnerability of the mother and daughter, “every private in the ranks” cursed “that system which tramples on the honor of man, and makes merchandise of the virtue of women,” according to one member of the regiment. 130 When an Iowan encountered a young child about to be sold by her own father, who was also her master, he vowed, “By G–d I’ll fight till hell freezes over and then I’ll cut the ice and fight on.” 131

  To be sure, not even the most compelling evidence of slavery’s cruelty could persuade every soldier to support emancipation. Pvt. Henry Bandy was not alone when he cheered, “hooraw for the union and not for the nigar,” but more common were the soldiers who decided that the Army must either get rid of slavery or prepare to fight the same battle all over again. 132 As a New York soldier put it, “as long as we ignore the fact (practically) that Slavery is the basis of this struggle so long are we simply heading down a vigorously growing plant that will continually spring up and give new trouble at very short intervals. We must emancipate.” 133

  Hostility to slavery did not necessarily mean support for racial equality. In fact, white Union soldiers strove mightily to keep the issues of slavery and black rights separate. “I have a good degree of sympathy for the slave,” one private admitted, “but I like the Negro the farther off the better.” 134 Many Union troops used demeaning terms like “nigger” and “darky” and trotted out stereotypes such as “woolly-headed, good natured, with a tongue that never stops” to describe blacks. 135 These and other expressions of patronizing views toward African Americans did not necessarily indicate tolerance of slavery (the same soldier who derided a black boy as “woolly-headed” also raised money to help the boy escape to freedom), but neither did they suggest a belief in racial equality. The coexistence of antislavery sentiment and racism among northern troops may seem contradictory from a modern point of view, but many Union soldiers did in fact hold antislavery and racist views at the same time. Pro-emancipation sentiment did not banish racism; nor did continued racism invalidate support for emancipation. White Union soldiers’ assiduous distancing of slavery from more complicated questions of racial equality allowed many to call for an end to slavery regardless of their own ambivalent racial attitudes and therefore heightened support for emancipation in the Union Army; it also limited the rank and file’s willingness to face complicated questions about racial justice.

  IN SHORT, contact with slaves and southern society convinced many Union troops that the immoral and blighting institution of slavery was antithetical to republican government, and that any republican government that tried to accommodate slavery was doomed to eventual failure. The recognition was not universal among the entire Union Army, nor was it shared by most civilians, political leaders, or high-ranking military officers. Yet clear demands for the destruction of slavery plainly emerged among enlisted Union soldiers, especially those stationed in the slave states who were witnessing slavery with their own eyes for the first time. Even some border state Union soldiers joined the clamor, either because they had witnessed for years the violence that slavery could engender or out of shock and anger that slaveholders in their home states valued the peculiar institution over the Union. Slaves themselves did the most to force emancipation onto the Union agenda, but the first and most important way they did so was by winning over enlisted Union soldiers, who, in the first year of the war, became the first major group after black Americans and abolitionists to call for an end to slavery, and who expected their views to influence the prosecution of the war. 136

  Confederate soldiers noticed the Union Army’s actions against slavery, but they regarded them as confirmation of the suspicions that drove the southern states to war rather than as a change or a surprise. Many even derived grim satisfaction from measures like Frémont’s proclamation: it cleared things up by crystallizing issues that had long been present, but held in a state of uneasy suspension. Mississippi private John Foster, for instance, wrote to his aunt that “Frémont has done more for us than any General we have save [Sterling] Price,” because his proclamation reminded all southern whites that the North wished “to annihilate us by turning loose a servile population with arms in hand to commit the most outrageous acts of cruelty & barbarism.” 137 Less than one year earlier, Foster had “hated to give up the idea of the Union,” but he changed his mind because the North’s true intentions toward slavery were now transparent. 138 Reminders of northern abolitionism should prove just the thing, believed Foster and others, to unite the South into an indomitable fighting force capable of ending the war before another year passed. Yet rather than conclude the war, 1862 would confound expectations for everyone.

  Confederate soldiers with visiting family members outside Richmond, Virginia, 1862. Johnson-Jones Family Portrait, Courtesy of Special Collections, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University

  Confederate dead in front of Battery Robinette, Corinth, Mississippi, 1862. Courtesy of Library of Congress

  Union soldiers encamped on the Pamunkey River during the Peninsula Campaign, Virginia, 1862. Courtesy of Library of Congress

  CHAPTER 2

  “Richmond Is a Hard Road to Travel”:

  Gaps Between Expectation and Experience*2

  IN FEBRUARY 1862 in Mobile, Alabama, James Boyd and other Georgia soldiers grew impatient with a war and an army that did not fit their expectations. Boyd’s regiment had not been paid, and its weapons were so outdated that the Georgians regarded them as insults. Even worse, officers seemed to think that the pressures of war gave them the right to treat members of the enlisted ranks as less than equal white men. Boyd and his friend Jesse Jones had had enough. One Monday, they persuaded the members of their company to stack the decrepit arms and threaten “to do nothing more until they paid us and gave us other guns.” The protest continued until “the Colonel came around and…scared them all back but myself and a few others,” Boyd reported. He held out stubbornly and refused to drill for half a day, resuming arms only when threatened with the guardhouse. All the while he insisted, “we were only rebelling against those haughty officers for not giving us our rights.” 1 Ordinary white southern men like James Boyd had been persuaded of the necessity for an independent South largely by assurances that a southern Confederacy would better serve the interests (including the preservation of slavery) of themselves and their families and better honor their rights and identities as white men. Now many troops faced conflicts between their needs and those o
f the Confederacy. Meanwhile, the intensification of the conflict turned the war itself into something quite different from what most recruits had anticipated. Boyd’s small rebellion showed that the gaps between the war that soldiers expected and the one they experienced strained but did not dislodge ordinary men’s commitment to the war or to the side for which they fought.

  In 1862, the war’s mounting demands and the steps taken to meet them introduced dissent and disillusionment into both armies, which soldiers withstood chiefly by reminding themselves that the enemy’s victory and all it stood for were unthinkable. The gulf between expectation and experience created problems for both Union and Confederate soldiers, but it created bigger ones for Confederates, partly because of the nature of the demands placed on the South, but even more because Confederate patriotism was more centered on white families’ self-interest than Union patriotism was. By bringing the requirements of the Confederacy into conflict with the needs of soldiers and their families, the war in 1862 ushered Confederate patriotism’s latent tensions to the surface; it also revealed the importance of white Southerners’ opposition to emancipation and fears of race war in resolving those tensions. 2

  “I love my country but I love my family better”

  In 1862, the experience of warfare bore so little resemblance to most Confederate soldiers’ early imaginings that a soldier’s “glory” now consisted of “rain, mud, want-wickedness-exposure-danger-death and oblivion,” as one Alabama man told his wife. 3 For the first half of the year, the military progress of the war did little to cheer white Southerners. In the West, Confederates suffered defeats in Missouri and Arkansas, surrendered Forts Henry and Donelson (valuable posts on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers), and lost major cities like Nashville, New Orleans, and Memphis. Just as devastating, when Confederates moved in April to thwart the Union Army’s approach to an important rail junction at Corinth, Mississippi, by striking federal forces in Tennessee, they succeeded only in precipitating the ghastly battle of Shiloh. Shiloh generated more casualties than all previous United States wars combined, but it did not prevent Confederate withdrawal from Corinth on May 25. In the East, Confederates enjoyed springtime victories in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, but federal movements elsewhere in the Old Dominion gave cause for alarm. The Union General George McClellan’s elaborately planned Peninsula Campaign involved sailing the Army of the Potomac to Fortress Monroe at the tip of the peninsula between the York and James Rivers, and then moving it up toward the Confederate capital. After taking Yorktown and Williamsburg, Union forces steadily progressed, arriving within six miles of Richmond by the end of May. Aided by the weather and a new leader, Gen. Robert E. Lee, Confederates stopped the Union advance and saved the capital in a series of battles (culminating in the Seven Days battles) that resulted in even more casualties than Shiloh. Through it all, the intensity of the fighting mounted ferociously. “Manassas…was mere child’s play compared with those [battles] in which we have been lately engaged,” explained one South Carolinian after the Seven Days. 4 Some Confederates responded to the escalation with increased hatred toward the enemy. Hoping to push Union troops out of Arkansas and Missouri, Texas cavalryman John Wall desired to see “the edges of the we[s]thern states be paved with the yankey’s and duches [foreign-born soldiers] bons and drenched with ther blud.” 5 Displaying his own hardening attitudes in Virginia, a North Carolinian who made a Yankee soldier “acquainted with powder & lead” in his “Thoracic viscera,” took particular satisfaction in noticing that his victim’s “carcass as also the carcass of his fine steed” were being left to rot in the sun. 6 At the opposite extreme, some troops lost their appetite for fighting. Bone-weary and badly on edge from constant skirmishing around Corinth, an Arkansan lamented, “Oh! What suffering, what misery, what untold agony this horrid hell-begotten war has caused. I wish all the misery…might be turned from the mass of humanity and entailed upon the prime movers, the instigators of this war.” As for himself, he admitted that he was “awful tired of being a soldier.” The war was a “wild Goose Chase,” and he wanted Confederate leaders to “dry it up and let us go home.” 7