Even more important, all white Southerners knew that what mattered most was even more endangered by the prospects of Union and abolition than by the Confederate government or their fellow white Southerners, no matter how unsatisfactory the latter two entities proved. Confederate patriotism was interwoven with material interests and private aspirations, but more than just the barn, corncrib, and hearthstone was on the line, and soldiers knew it. An entire social order was at stake, and it could be preserved only by isolating it from northern influence. As soldiers like Pvt. William Bellamy saw things, if white Southerners wanted to achieve “blessings of independence and prosperity,” they had to separate themselves from the North first, and southern flaws could be worked out later. 33
In short, conflicts between personal interests and Confederate necessities were troubling but resolvable as long as Confederate troops remembered that no matter how disappointing the Confederacy was, the Union under an antislavery president would be worse. Statesmen and clergy had long preached the sinfulness and fanaticism of the North, and while few southern soldiers exactly echoed the words of their civil or religious authorities, they had clearly internalized the assumptions that the South was a better place than the North and that Southerners were better people than Northerners. 34 Pvt. James Manahan feared that Northerners would meddle with the South’s “social and political framework.” He hated the idea of victorious Yankees dividing “the large estates into ten acre lots with a two story framed house on each with ginger bread and apples in the window.” Worse, they would probably try to impose their own “laws morality philosophy and philantropy.” Manahan dreaded the northern middle-class order (symbolized in his description by farmhouses of modest equality and his reference to philanthropic reform movements) because he believed that it replaced respect for a proper social order designed by God with an unorthodox, presumptuous, and just plain sinful belief that reform-minded Northerners knew better than God how to make the world a better place. 35
If Confederate soldiers needed proof of nefarious Yankee intentions to unravel the southern social fabric, the Union general Benjamin Butler’s notorious “Woman Order” of May 15, 1862, provided more than enough. In response to the abusive treatment heaped (or, in the case of chamber pot contents, thrown) by New Orleans women on Union soldiers, General Butler issued General Order No. 28, declaring that any woman caught demeaning a Union soldier “shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.” 36 Women who insulted Union troops, in other words, would be assumed to be prostitutes.
Few things could more effectively make nineteenth-century white men, North or South, feel that their society was under attack than questioning the behavior or morality of white women. Americans in the nineteenth century placed great value on the moral sense of women. Ostensibly removed from the competitive values of the marketplace, free women were supposed to safeguard the upstanding moral virtues on which republics relied. At the same time, assumptions that women’s true sphere was a domestic one effectively absolved women of responsibility for actions committed in public, since the public was supposedly not the arena in which women really belonged or could be expected to understand the ramifications of their own actions. Female innocence entitled women to immunity and protection by white men when the southern social order founded on male mastery over subordinates like women and African Americans was working properly. 37 New Orleans white women’s public displays of contempt for Union soldiers flouted the South’s traditional gendered order, but did not jettison it, because white southern men approved of the behavior. In fact, by smiling at the actions as evidence of women’s emotionalism or even endorsing them as signs of southern female spirit, white southern men could still claim to be in control of them. But to have white ladies’ behavior corrected by northern men was intolerable. By holding women accountable for what they did and said in public, Butler’s order discarded the idea of female innocence and made white southern male protectors superfluous. Further, doubting white women’s claims to moral goodness challenged the moral righteousness of all of southern society and also announced that white southern men had not been exercising their authority over subordinates properly. On top of all else, Butler’s order did not question just any female virtue; it explicitly disparaged white women’s chastity, which was supposed to fall under the sole authority of white southern men as hallmarks of their true manhood. An insult of that magnitude could not be taken calmly. Butler’s Woman Order blatantly violated the strictly defined gender roles that helped maintain the South’s orthodox social order, impugned white southern men’s demonstration of authority, and insulted the honor and true manhood of every white southern man. In so doing, it threatened white men’s very identities as men.
The immediate result of Butler’s Woman Order was that the women of New Orleans stopped spitting on and otherwise mistreating Union troops, but Confederate soldiers felt the impact of the order differently. Union forces never acted on the Woman Order. Anxious to protect their reputations as ladies rather than street women, New Orleans females policed their own behavior and the order enforced itself, but that was hardly the point to Confederate soldiers. When Butler’s order cast aspersions on white southern women’s moral purity, white southern men’s fitness for mastery, and the entire southern social order, it dispelled any lingering doubts about northern moral turpitude or the Union’s intention to overthrow the southern social structure. North Carolinian Tristrim Skinner believed that Butler’s “devilish order in New Orleans” justified nearly any severe measure the Confederate government saw fit to take. In particular, Skinner wanted Confederates to institute a “policy” of “having such fiends secretly assassinated.” 38 Pvt. John Street wrote about how Texas troops were outraged by the “insolent proclamation” which likened “brave, virtuous and patriotic” women to the common “street whore,” but he also revealed how Butler’s order helped unify the Confederate rank and file, which had been sinking into disunity and malaise. Now, every “soldier in the Confederate army,” no matter how disgruntled, could rally to the “watch word of ‘Our Mothers, our wives, our daughters, our sisters, Our God & our country.’” 39 As Street’s reaction revealed, Butler’s Woman Order reminded southern soldiers that they fought for a purer society based on clear social roles and an orthodox social structure which, whatever its shortcomings, had to be better than a society that produced the despicable “Beast” Butler. Losing a war to such a society would be simply intolerable.
Most of all, losing to the Union was unthinkable, according to Confederate soldiers, because it would mean abolition, and abolition would destroy the southern social order even more completely than Butler’s Woman Order did. The tautly woven tapestry of southern life had been “rent asunder by fanaticism,” according to an Arkansas soldier, merely by northern opposition to slavery’s expansion into the western territories. Imagine how much more frayed southern society would become if Northerners succeeded in imposing abolition on the Confederacy itself. 40 If that happened, a Mississippi private predicted, “we would be slaves to the Yanks and our children would have a yoke of bondage thrown around there neck that never could be moved during time.” 41 “Lincolns fanatical rule” would bring “abolition laws” that turned the world upside down, warned James Williams. White families would be made to submit to “a master from new England,” and wives and sisters throughout the South would be demeaned, as New Orleans women had been by Butler’s order, to the level of “town-women.” 42
Abolition would destroy the South’s social order, in other words, by reversing it, freeing blacks and degrading whites, and the dread of that certain disaster invigorated Confederate troops no matter how disenchanted they had become with every other aspect of the Confederacy and its war effort. As one soldier put it shortly after the failure of the Union’s Peninsula Campaign, if the Yankees had taken Richmond, white Southerners could have expected to see “the Negro population set free and the white population bound by fetters.” 43
When John Street received a letter from his wife asking why he could not just come home, he replied that failure to fight the Yankees would be the same as lying “supinely upon our backs” while “we are all bound hand and foot & the fair daughters of the south reduced to a level with the flat-footed thick-liped Negro.” 44 If white Southerners stood idly by while abolition dismantled the South’s racial hierarchy, the purity of white women would be destroyed and white men’s masculine identity would be lost. Unless they resisted, southern whites of all classes could expect to live in degraded circumstances that they recognized all too well as the conditions endured by slaves every day.
With more Yankees making their presence felt among southern whites and blacks, and with wartime conditions disturbing the absolute control white Southerners felt they needed over African Americans, Confederate soldiers confronted constant reminders that the world as they knew it would not be safe until they won the war. A southern poem claimed that once Yankee troops appeared in Williamsburg, Virginia, black slaves dared to walk alongside whites in city streets as if they were equals. The sight of blacks and whites walking side by side “put everything out of order,” and left white Southerners “utterly at a loss” as to “how to bear with such a cross.” 45 Suddenly, black Southerners acted on alarming ideas about their own independence and status, and they overtly threatened the authority of white southern men. Macon Bonner was furious when he learned from a neighbor that his wife’s house had been taken over as “negro quarters” for “negroes in town who have left their owners,” and that his mother’s house could fall prey to the same fate. The turbulence of war churned up new ways for slaves to claim freedom, assert their own wills, and reject the authority of white masters. The slaves who did so by choosing Bonner’s wife’s house as living quarters made him so angry, he wished his “prayers could consign them in the depths of hell.” 46
Bonner and others felt such rage because a world in which slaves acted assertively, the Confederate Army lost battles, and the Confederacy turned out to be nothing like soldiers had imagined it would be felt like a world spinning out of control. If a soldier owned slaves, he could try to regain some semblance of order by dominating every aspect of his slaves’ lives, even from afar. In Tennessee, Robert Snead reacted angrily when a letter from his wife informed him that his slave Ellen wished to get married back home in Virginia. At first, he refused to allow “any one to marry on the place,” for fear that the slaves would expect a celebration. As for Ellen, “she ought not to want it nor can I consent for any thing of this kind.” Eventually, Snead reluctantly permitted Ellen to exchange her vows as long as she agreed to “not create any fuss or trouble.” 47 Just days after the fall of nearby Fort Henry, with Federals poised to capture the supposedly invincible Nashville, a Confederate soldier’s world might have seemed to be whirling into chaos, but by retaining mastery over the life of a black slave woman, Snead could keep his own senses of social order and individual manhood intact.
Another way to cope with the turmoil created by the weakening of slavery’s strictly enforced racial hierarchy was to blame the Yankees who caused it, and despise them all the more for it. Hatred for the Union soldiers who would destroy life as white Southerners knew it aided the Confederate cause once the war entered its second year by ensuring that even soldiers who were out of sorts with the war in general or the Confederacy in particular directed most of their rage at the enemy. Henry Graves found satisfaction in the thought of “many a Yankee carcass now rotting in the mud of the chickahominy swamp” because of “his pity & love for the poor slave.” 48 To Graves, gruesome deaths were fitting recompense for soldiers who threatened the foundation of all southern society by meddling with slavery. No matter how war-weary an Alabama soldier became, he continued to believe that “we are ruined if we do not put forth all our energies & drive back the invaders of our slavery South.” 49
Confederate unity relied so heavily on soldiers’ shared commitment to fending off abolition that one soldier worried more about possible lapses in proslavery solidarity than he did about military defeats. Rudolf Coreth, whose family owned slaves, saw the necessity of fighting to keep them, but he worried about what would happen if one day nonslaveholding soldiers no longer shared that view. In February 1862, Coreth mentioned that “there was a report from Washington that the [U.S.] Congress had decided to get rid of slavery,” which, if true, would “arouse a little spirit in the Confederate soldier again.” Yet he worried that the benefits of abolition rumors might be short-lived if other rumblings of southern dissatisfaction were not addressed soon. The rumors “won’t help for long,” he warned, because nonslaveholders were “already asking now what they are fighting for anyway.” 50 His fears increased in the following months when he heard that the Houston Telegraph was circulating rumors about Richmond considering the “founding of a monarchy” in order to protect slaveholders’ interests. Coreth noticed that local slaveholders “loudly declared themselves in favor of it, and the kind of shock that a report of that kind ought to call forth was not seen at all.” If elites were not more careful, he worried that they would provoke a revolt on the part of nonslaveholding common-folk. 51
Coreth need not have worried; non-slave-owning soldiers still regarded all whites’ shared interest in preserving slavery as more vital than any class differences. Nonslaveholding cavalryman William Wilson’s favorite result of a recent campaign in the Shenandoah Valley was that “many negroes were also taken while attempting to escape with the Yankees.” 52 Meanwhile, a Texas corporal believed that the best way to motivate enlisted Confederate soldiers was to entice them with the prospect of slave ownership. He told of a fellow soldier named Barker, who “caught sight of a couple of darkies in blue uniforms, armed and equipped for battle.” Since the Union Army had not yet authorized the enlistment of black soldiers, these African Americans probably worked for the Army as laborers or officers’ servants, but their exact occupation did not matter to Barker. “Never a slave-owner but always wishing to be, he decided then and there to make use of his opportunities and capture and confiscate both of the likely fellows.” Reports that “prisoners taken were to be held as the private property of their respective captors” inspired the “common rank-and-file” to prepare to attack with more than usual “spirit and zeal.” As it turned out, the episode did not lead to a battle, but it did emphasize the value of “laurels and ethiopians” as restorers of the proper social order and inducements for Confederates, including those who owned no slaves, to fight. 53 In the face of disappointment in a Confederacy that did not correspond to soldiers’ expectations, the Confederate rank and file remained sure of the benefits and necessity of slavery. Even as disaffection about other matters spread, soldiers did not dispute the idea that they must fight to resist abolition, or else lose everything that mattered to them.
“Arguing on the Negro question”
Although the war did not treat the Union as severely as it did the Confederacy in the first half of 1862, the conflict still differed from what troops had first envisioned. Rather than elevating men to glory, it whipped them back and forth between the extremes of boredom and terror. After a day of washing his clothes in a creek, Nathan Parmater quickly learned that soldiering contained more drudgery than heroics. With his hands sore because scrubbing “ware the bark off” his fingers, Parmater reflected, “I should never blame the women for being ‘cross’ on washing day for it was more of a task than I was aware of.” 54 Cyrus Boyd would likely have agreed that camp life lacked glamour, but even dull chores were better than what his Iowa regiment experienced when it was “thrown into this hell of battle” at Shiloh in April. Two days of utter confusion, showers of bullets, exploding shells, and murderous cannonballs left “pieces of clothing and strings of flesh” hanging from battle-scarred trees. The stench from the piles of dead and dying overwhelmed the fragrance of April blossoms, much as the “pall of death” overpowered romantic notions of war. 55 Shiloh, at least, ended in ostensible Union victory, sin
ce federal forces retained the field of battle and eventually pressed on toward the Confederate rail junction at Corinth, Mississippi. The tedium, carnage, and eventual failure of the Peninsula Campaign proved even more demoralizing.
Like their Confederate counterparts, Union troops responded to the unexpected nature of the war in a variety of ways, sometimes developing attitudes they could scarcely have imagined before the war. Cyrus Boyd noted that the relentless violence and confusion that his regiment experienced in the spring of 1862 “brutalizes men and crushes out all human feeling.” 56 Some troops grew angry at the military brass, or “shoulder straps” as the enlisted men called officers, especially after costly defeats. When the Peninsula Campaign failed, one volunteer complained that General McClellan’s “boasted great military talents consist in old woman like imbecility joined to bombastic self-confidence, and foolish reliance on strategy, and obsolete tactics.” 57 Others saved their rage for the rebels. In the tension preceding the Seven Days, the Fifth New York’s nerves were worn thin by anticipation of the impending clash, and by Confederate pickets who were “constantly murdering our men in cold blood.” Finally, when a picket shot a member of the Irish brigade, the dead man’s comrades hanged the unfortunate Southerner, bayoneted his body, and left him in the road for wagons to make “a jelly of the remains.” 58 Some troops were simply too weary to be outraged at anyone. In the middle of the Peninsula Campaign, Pvt. Moses Parker looked around at “a field strewn with dead and dying men” and “pretty much concluded that I have seen all the rebels all the fighting, war, dead men, etc. that I want to see at present.” 59
The Union government did not disillusion its soldiers as much as the Confederate government alienated its troops, but sometimes it disappointed them. Minnesota soldier George Brookins criticized the Union government for not treating the war seriously enough. Humiliated by the capture of his regiment at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Brookins had “no great anxiety to be exchanged till our government” replaced its “milk and water” approach to the war and to Confederates with sterner measures designed to break the back of the rebellion. 60 A hot-tempered soldier named Roland Bowen, on the other hand, could not abide what he saw as sniveling and bickering among legislators who seemed to spend all their time criticizing the Army and arguing about slavery. Apologizing to his mother for his harsh language, Bowen wished the “Damned set of Politicians” were “all in hell Rolling and Pitching upon the firey coals.” 61
What This Cruel War Was Over Page 9
