What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  Northern civilians did not always measure up to soldiers’ expectations either. Profiteering accompanies all wars, and the northern experience in the Civil War proved no exception, much to the revulsion of soldiers who assumed that anybody at home making money sinned twice, first in the failure to join the Army and second in the exploitation of war for personal gain. New York private Caleb Beal complained, “I am afraid this is getting to be too much of a money-making war now,” and hoped that the property of “the money making and miserly leeches on our government” would be “confiscated.” 62 Meanwhile, to soldiers’ families relying on the low and unreliable pay of an army private, the war was anything but a money-making opportunity, and hard times frayed tempers. The men of the Seventy-ninth Pennsylvania were distressed to learn that soldiers’ wives had appealed publicly to city leaders for free flour since their husbands’ army wages had not been paid. After reading about the incident “in one of the lancaster papers,” one private wrote to his wife to let her know that “drag[ging] sutch things into poloticks” was “not thought mutch of out hear by the soldiers.” Although he agreed to “rite down to the mill for som flour for you,” it bothered him that soldiers’ families and mill owners had not been able to rise above personal pettiness to arrive at a magnanimous solution. 63 The Pennsylvania wives, like most northern civilians, were sheltered from many of the hardships afflicting southern families, but they still coped with an escalating war, higher casualty counts, and the social disruption caused by the absence of many men from home, and they did not always respond with cheerful selflessness.

  Yet for all the ill temper, Union soldiers were not as seriously demoralized as Confederates were, and only partly because northern families suffered less and the war went better militarily for the Union than the Confederacy until the failure of the Peninsula Campaign. The Union rank and file faced fewer challenges than Confederate soldiers did, but more important, their version of patriotism proved more resilient and made weathering setbacks easier. Individual Northerners did not possess inherently more selfless personalities than Southerners did, but they envisioned the function of government differently, and they understood the benefits of the Union to transcend rather than serve self-interest, which equipped them to withstand the challenges of the war’s second year more easily.

  Far from sharing the Confederate idea of government as an outside imposition, necessary but best kept distant from people’s lives, Union troops retained their view of legitimate government in general and the Union government in particular as the creation of the people who composed it. The camp newspaper Seventh Brigade Journal summarized this view when it declared, “the President has sworn to sustain the Constitution and enforce the laws. And for this purpose come the thousands of soldiers whom he has called to aid him in the enforcement of the laws they helped to make.” 64 The Union government could not betray its citizens, as Confederates suspected their government of doing, because it consisted of those citizens. When soldiers of the Second Delaware received the “acceptable and very timely present” of warm gloves from a knitting society back home, they met as a regiment to express their appreciation in a set of written resolutions to be sent back to the women of the knitting society. The list of resolutions thanked the knitters, but just as important, it identified the women’s efforts as contributions to a shared “just and holy cause,” and it recognized the women themselves as constituent parts of “this noble Union” that soldiers and civilians made sacrifices to preserve. 65 Union soldiers’ conviction that individuals, families, home communities, and the federal government were all parts of the same whole minimized disillusionment with the Union government, even when the war grew more difficult than anticipated.

  Union soldiers were also better prepared to withstand the vicissitudes of war because from the beginning they saw the stakes of the war differently from Confederate soldiers. The rebellion must be put down not because it endangered the material welfare or aspirations of individual soldiers and their families, but because the defeat of the Union would lead to “a long farewell to Republican Liberty and self-government throughout the world!” 66 Confederate soldiers fought a war for the benefit of themselves, their families, and white Southerners, but the rest of the world ought to be left to its own devices, according to the Confederate rank and file. Union troops, in contrast, continued to echo the American millennialist tradition that infused much of the nineteenth-century North when they insisted that “the defense of the rights of humanity, and the well-being of unborn generations” depended upon the survival of the American Republic, which made personal setbacks less damaging, because less central, to the Union cause and the point of the war. 67 After a deadly skirmish in Kentucky, a Wisconsin soldier who lost friends there vowed that the blood of the fallen would “flow and mingle…to nourish and water the tree of liberty, whose leaves are the healing of the nations.” When Confederate soldier Thomas Davidson had summoned Thomas Jefferson’s image of blood nourishing the tree of liberty, he insisted that both the blood and the tree be purely southern; the Wisconsin soldier expected the blood and the tree to foster “the healing of the nations,” even when it meant personal loss. 68

  Before other nations could be healed, the United States had better save its own republican government, and Union soldiers knew that meant more than beating the Confederate Army or even dismantling the Confederate government in Richmond. If republics survived only among populations of sufficient independence, equality, and virtue, it meant restoring those qualities to a southern society that northern soldiers claimed lacked them. 69 A white slave catcher in South Carolina who tried to seize the Forty-fifth Pennsylvania’s cook (a free black from Baltimore) unwittingly embodied many of what enlisted Union men saw as the South’s social failings, which were of course far easier to diagnose in the enemy’s society than in one’s own. The Pennsylvanians assumed that the slave catcher chose to make his living by delivering fugitives to local nabobs in order to curry favor with the wealthy elite, and to exercise power over someone lower than himself on the South’s social ladder. Neither motivation was compatible with the ideal of a republican citizenry characterized by independence, equality, and virtue. The hapless slave catcher’s fate illustrated the rank and file’s enthusiasm for straightening out all they saw as unrepublican about southern society. The colonel in command collared the would-be slave catcher, and, in front of the assembled enlisted men, told him, “if you were treated as you deserve, you would be kicked down the whole line of the regiment.” As soon as the colonel turned his back, “first one soldier and then another lifted his foot and give him [the slave catcher] a kick on the posterior and so on till he passed beyond the line of the regiment, every soldier giving him a kick.” Soldiers gleefully complied with the officer’s thinly veiled order partly because it was not every day they got the opportunity to kick the enemy in the backside, but also because the slave catcher represented the hated cause of the war, slavery, and punishing him gave troops the chance to attack what they viewed as social qualities that had brought the war and threatened to destroy the United States’ experiment in republican government. 70

  Union troops saw additional reasons to worry about southern virtue when they observed southern women. Like white Southerners, Union soldiers believed that women’s sheltered status and their natural inclinations made them into moral arbiters who safeguarded the virtue on which a republic’s survival depended. Yet when soldiers like George Landrum viewed the South, they saw violations of gender roles that were certain to undermine the moral sensibilities of women and therefore of everyone. Once Landrum realized that southern “money comes from the labor of [slave] women of all ages, from fifteen to fifty years and upwards, in the field hoeing, plowing, and planting,” his “opinion of the southern character” began “changing for the worse rapidly.” 71 Even white women who did not trudge out to the field every day seemed to have lost the decency on which the survival of republican society depended. General Butler issued his famous Woman Orde
r to curb the spiteful actions of New Orleans women, but reprehensible female behavior was hardly confined to New Orleans. New York private Constant Hanks was distressed by white Virginia women who insulted Union soldiers in such uncouth language that Hanks concluded, “they must have picked [it] up in a fish market. They give a fellow invitations to kiss them in localities that I never thought of applying that token of affection.” 72 When women abandoned moral standards, all of society followed suit, and republican government became impossible.

  The source of the infection sickening the virtue necessary to sustain a republic was not hard to spot, according to the Union rank and file: it was “that corrupt and festering curse of slavery.” 73 Because of slavery, Vermont soldier Rufus Kinsley explained, even respectable men like “merchants, lawyers, and doctors and preachers” were encouraged to indulge their lustful passions by exploiting female slaves, who were in turn robbed of their chastity. Children resulting from such unions could be shamelessly sold for profit, which “the moral sense of the South” placidly regarded as “a matter of course business transaction.” Kinsley briefly wondered, “O, womanhood, how art thou fallen so low, as not to be sensitive here,” before determining that “no where but to Slavery can we look for the cause” of such “dehumanizing.” 74 In short, Union soldiers continued to regard slavery as the gravest threat to the virtue that the United States’ experiment in republican government required for its success and, for that and other reasons, as “the prime cause of this great sectional conflict.” 75

  Even as Union troops remained quite certain in 1862 that the war happened because of the “perpetuation of human Slavery,” and that slavery was “the first last, and only cause of the present rebellious war,” they disagreed over what to do about it. 76 In contrast to the Confederate Army, in which the issue of slavery provided the most reliable point of agreement among the rank and file, soldiers in the Union Army were more likely to find themselves “arguing on the Negro question” than about any other issue, and dissent over the slavery question actually increased in the first half of 1862, compared to the last four months of 1861, when a swelling chorus demanded an end to the institution that caused the war. 77 In the camp of the Tenth Massachusetts, Lt. Charles Brewster reported, the men were “divided into two parties on the question, and most bitter and rancourous feelings have been excited,” between high-ranking officers who approved of restoring slaves to their owners and men of lower rank who did not. On one side, the captain and major advocated the return of slaves to their masters, but junior officers and enlisted men refused to “be instrumental in returning a slave to his master in any way shape or manner.” Tempers flared so badly that the regiment was “almost in a state of mutiny.” 78

  Union troops became more divided on the issue of slavery in the first half of 1862 than they had been in late 1861 for several reasons. Except for a break between April and June, when the federal government suspended recruiting in the mistaken belief that the war would end before more troops were needed, new men streamed into the Union ranks. Newcomers influenced the tone of the Army for a number of reasons. The earliest volunteers might have been more likely to come from the most idealistic segment of the northern population, in which men predisposed to favor emancipation might have been overrepresented, although more conservative soldiers insisted that they had been just as quick to enlist as their abolitionist counterparts had been. Most important, the fresh volunteers had not yet witnessed as much of the South or of slavery as the veterans of 1861 had done, and therefore had not yet drawn the conclusion that only eliminating slavery could end the war and prevent its recurrence. Until they saw things for themselves, many of these new recruits diluted, though they did not neutralize, the support for emancipation that had crystallized among the rank and file in late 1861. Further, prospects looked bright for the Union war effort in the first half of 1862. Western armies achieved key victories, and until the Seven Days battles at the end of June, Northerners confidently expected that the Army of the Potomac’s Peninsula Campaign would capture Richmond and end the war. With victory in sight, the need for drastic measures like abolition seemed less acute to some soldiers.

  Despite skepticism on the part of some newcomers and cold feet on the part of some veterans, slavery policy continued to evolve on the ground and in legislative halls. In May 1862, Gen. David Hunter issued General Order No. 11, which declared martial law and freed slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida; President Lincoln revoked the measure on grounds that only the president possessed the authority to issue such an edict, but Hunter’s tactic clearly signaled that changes were afoot. Also that spring, Congress abolished slavery in Washington, D.C., and the western counties of Virginia took steps toward ending slavery as part of the process of entering the Union as the state of West Virginia. 79 In July, the Second Confiscation Act became law, allowing for the confiscation of all property, including slaves, held by individuals disloyal to the Union, whether or not that property was being used to aid the Confederate war effort directly. 80 Though clumsy and difficult to enforce, the Second Confiscation Act represented a clear step in the direction of de facto emancipation, even as developments in the District of Columbia and West Virginia signaled important de jure changes.

  Union troops reacted in a variety of ways to these transformations, and to the countless other ways the war undermined slavery. Kansas soldier George Mowry, for one, was delighted. “We got the Papers yesterday [reporting] that the Confiscation bill had become a law and that we were to fight the Rebles as if we were fighting for something,” Mowry told his sister. “There is nothing that would give the soldiers more joy in this Division than it did to hear that.” 81 Meanwhile, from Tennessee, Lt. P. V. Wise reported, “the vote for emancipation in New Virginia and the passage and approval of the bill abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, are hailed as the greatest victories for the cause of freedom and humanity of the age.” 82 Yet others opposed dramatic measures. Sgt. Henry Hubble complained that Hunter’s General Order No. 11 was “foolish and can do no good, but will create a great deal of trouble.” After all, General Frémont had been deposed just months earlier for issuing a similar order. In Hubble’s view, “this sweeping proclamation of Hunters” failed to “do justice to the loyal masters” or to “provide for the future of the slave.” 83

  As Hubble, Wise, and Mowry suggest, Union soldiers occupied a broad spectrum of opinion on slavery in the second year of the war. Some impatient souls grew restless because they thought change in slavery policy was coming too slowly. “Some of us were led to take up arms in this contest on the grounds that we were going to fight for the restoration and maintenance of republican institutions, menaced by a slaveholding aristocracy in open rebellion,” one soldier began. Unless direct action against slavery came soon, the Union Army “had better disband at once, and go home,” he advised, because there was no point in trying to win the war without attacking “the manifest and acknowledged cause of the rebellion.” 84 In contrast, others cited pragmatic reasons to avoid dramatic changes to slavery. Pvt. Phillip Hacker, whose regiment arrived in the South in time to join the Peninsula Campaign, resented the inconveniences caused by newly freed slaves. “They would eat our bread and ears [of corn] up,” Hacker complained, and besides that, fugitive slaves “take up a great deal of time for our hed men,” who ought to be concentrating on the war. 85 Beyond practical or strategic considerations, some troops simply despised the idea of abolition out of sheer racism. A Maine soldier who joined the Army in March 1862, for instance, claimed that men in his regiment “hate a ‘nig’ as they do the great enemy of mankind.” Far from freeing a slave, they would “shoot one as quickly as they would a snake.” 86 For others, it was a question of priorities, and quibbling about slavery while the Union was in danger was like worrying about a single piece of furniture while the whole house burned. Pvt. Roland Bowen fumed that “here we poor Soldiers are dying by scores from disease and hardships…and pouring out our blood like so much wor
thless water,” while Congress wasted its time “everlastingly fighting it out about a Damned Nigger or some General.” If Lincoln declared “all Slaves are hereafter Forever Free—Amen. And on the other hand if he says not one shall be freed. Amen. If this can be done then this War will come to a Speedy and Happy termination.” 87 Ending the war and saving the Union stood as his primary objectives, and he viewed national unity as more indispensable than slavery policy to those goals.

  Yet even while dissent persisted, many troops continued to believe (and others, especially newer recruits, came to the conclusion for the first time) that ending the war and saving the Union required the destruction of slavery. As one Kansan described Confederates, “there is nothing that they seem to feel so much, and care so much about, as to lose their slaves. I honestly believe that many of them would rather have us kidnap their children, than to let their niggers go off with us.” Either wipe out slavery, he insisted, or “the same difficulty in an aggravated form will soon rise again.” 88 Anti-abolition sentiment thickened the cacophony in the Army in 1862, but demands for emancipation provided a steady drumbeat amidst the din, even if the strength of its pulse varied in response to the changing progress of the war and composition of the ranks.