What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  Soldiers in 1862 demanded an end to slavery for many of the same reasons as in 1861, including slavery’s influence on southern agriculture and its impact on slave families. “The soil has been exhausted by the system of slave labor, which taxes it to the utmost without rendering an equivalent in manure,” Massachusetts private Edwin Wentworth reported to his father, while a Wisconsin volunteer added that the availability of an exploitable slave labor force discouraged advances in “agricultural implements” like plows that would lead to healthier harvests. 89 The breakup of slave families moved even more soldiers. Pvt. Constant Hanks believed that the cases he witnessed “would wring the tears out of anyone’s eyes.” Hanks met an elderly slave grandmother running away with her three-year-old granddaughter because the little girl’s mother had been sold, and the grandmother was about to be. The story of the feeble old woman who would rather risk the open road than leave her granddaughter with no family “started the apple sauce out of my eyes,” admitted Hanks. How could anyone who missed his own family help but ask himself, “suppose that was your mother and little one, instead of poor miserable niggers?” 90 Abolitionist propaganda had long broadcast the evils of forcible separation of slave families, but witnessing the phenomenon firsthand influenced soldiers more than any sermon, sensationalist pamphlet, or sentimental novel ever could have done.

  Soldiers’ wartime experiences also gave them additional reasons to turn against slavery. An unpopular policy requiring Union troops to guard the property (including slaves) of southern civilians made many men “tired of fighting the Rebels and guarding and protecting them at the same time.” 91 Wasting resources and manpower to safeguard the possessions, including slaves, of the very people whom soldiers identified as architects of secession and instigators of war made no sense, and “still, our Government handles slavery as tenderly as a mother would her first born,” one soldier grumbled. “When shall it be stricken down as the deadly enemy of freedom, virtue, and mankind?” he demanded to know. 92 Meanwhile, as the Union Army guarded the belongings of hostile white Southerners who “look as if they would like to kill us,” black slaves welcomed and helped the soldiers in blue. 93 “Language cannot express the joy depicted in the countenance of the negroes,” Byron Strong told his family when his regiment arrived at Falmouth, Virginia. “One of them afterwards told me he was as happy as if the Lord hisself had come.” 94 Slaves provided far more than flattery. One company owed a narrow escape to the alertness of “a slave giving them notice that they were to be attacked early in the morning.” 95 It seemed absurd to mollycoddle secessionists while behaving heartlessly toward black Southerners who aided Union troops.

  The more time soldiers spent in the South, the more they cited the physical abuse suffered by slaves as a reason to end the institution of slavery. One soldier scathingly listed “beneficent effects” of slavery he had seen with his own eyes, including a young boy “all black and blue with red stripes” who couldn’t lift his arms over his head because of what his master deemed a “slight correction,” a man covered in “great welts, and callous stripes…[and] great scars” applied by his “perfect Simon Legree” of an owner, and a young slave woman who had just given birth to a white man’s child and was now starving in the woods in order to escape the deathly flogging she could expect if her master recaptured her. “I have been so saddened by the miseries I have seen that I can hardly enjoy my own blessings,” the soldier admitted. In response, he and his fellow soldiers fed and sheltered as many contrabands as they could, spirited slaves to freedom whenever the opportunity arose, and developed great disdain for the Union government’s “disgraceful” negligence in allowing slavery to persist. “They may court martial me and be———,” he proclaimed, as he defiantly carried on his aid to runaways. 96 A Pennsylvanian who had little patience with radical abolitionism before the war now assured his brother that anyone who saw the things he had seen in Virginia “will be more of an Abolishnest than any person could make him believe to be posible.” 97

  The sexual abuse of slave women by white men also influenced many Union troops’ views, though in complicated ways. Walking down the street in Washington, D.C., Pvt. Constant Hanks watched slave and free children playing and reflected, “you can see also the intervening shades, from white to black that would leave one to think that perhaps larger children have played together sometime.” 98 Lt. George Landrum was haunted by the sight of a young slave boy “as white as ever I was; light curly hair, blue eyes…not the first sign of the negro about him except in manner.” The unfortunate little boy was about to be sold away from his mother by his master, who was also his father. To make matters worse, the boy was far from unusual. “There are many such here,” Landrum continued. “I have seen them in every town we have come through, slaves as white as any white man can be” because they had been fathered by white masters whose complete control over their female slaves left the bondwomen vulnerable to exploitation. 99 As men from a society that prized female chastity, some Union troops were repelled by undeniable evidence that sexual coercion by white men was a fact of life for many slave women. Other soldiers reacted strongly because their own racial sensibilities were offended by the very idea of sexual relationships between whites and blacks. Still others recoiled at the sight of enslaved human beings whose complexions resembled their own. Whatever their rationale, many soldiers regarded racial mixing as inherently wrong; they reasoned that since slavery led to sexual relations between white men and black women, it too was wrong, and toleration of it weakened the American Republic.

  While personal interactions with mixed-race slave children might seem to make it hard to ignore the links between the issues of slavery and race, white Union soldiers did their best to overlook those very connections. Confederate soldiers and black Americans north and south knew that slavery and race were woven too tightly together for one issue to be extricated from the other. Nonetheless, white Union troops continued to separate the institution of slavery from the more complicated question of black rights, which could then be brushed aside. William Dunham, for instance, admitted, “it is a matter of great concern to many what disposition will be made with the Colored race” after emancipation, but he did not intend to be “troubled much about that question.” 100 His dismissive attitude illustrates the limits of much of the Union Army’s pro-emancipation sentiment in 1862. Ending slavery was one thing, but caring for or about freed black Americans was something else altogether. Even Union troops who hated the whole idea of allowing one human being to own another often held their own racist assumptions of black inferiority. One self-congratulatory soldier cheered the fact that “negroes have had more liberties since the army has invaded the State than ever before,” but in the same breath he used the derogatory term “coonnesses” to refer to slave women working in the fields. 101 Other soldiers, like Lewis Jones, proved they could be hostile to both slavery and slaves at the same time. Jones hoped for prompt Union victory because “I don’t want my cildern to have eney trouble with rebels or niggers,” and he assumed that a successful end to the war would shield future generations from having to worry about secessionists or black Americans. 102 Even as soldiers matter-of-factly adopted stances on slavery they would once have considered radical, they continued to hold ambivalent or prejudiced views of black Americans, and therefore preferred to keep the topics of slavery, racial equality, and black rights hermetically separated. As William Dunham expressed it, “nigger is a great bugger boo to the delicate and refined American,” and most simply tried to sidestep the uncomfortable subject. 103

  Yet both the war’s demands and its differences from what soldiers expected began to force some troops to confront their own racist attitudes, which most so fervently avoided facing. Such was the case in Cyrus Boyd’s regiment, the Fifteenth Iowa, when soldier Thomas Jeffries, who was “without doubt half Negro,” enlisted. Boyd profiled Jeffries in the “Sketches of Lives” he compiled about his fellow soldiers in the back of his diary, noting that Jeffries,
a twenty-two-year-old born in Orange County, Indiana, had enlisted on January 13, 1862, at Knoxville, Iowa. At the time of Jeffries’ death of typhoid fever in June 1862, Boyd remembered:

  considerable prejudice was excited against him when he first came to our Co. But a majority decided to allow him to remain and he in spite of his negro blood was a gigantic and powerful man and proved a good soldier—for he was always willing to do his duty. He was most of the time employed as a Cook. He was in battle of Pittsburgh Landing and fought well. He was very dark. Was also a private. 104

  Boyd’s reflections show that at first Jeffries endured hostility and menial service because of his fellow soldiers’ racism, but the demands of battle finally overruled the rank and file’s animosity. Few regiments had a Thomas Jeffries to influence their thinking quite as directly as was the case for the Fifteenth Iowa, but nonetheless, this striking new direction in the thinking of even a handful of soldiers came about because of the changing nature of the conflict. The war was so different from anything soldiers anticipated that it led some to think in ways that had never occurred to them before.

  SOLDIERS in both armies in the first half of 1862 struggled to adapt to a war that differed enormously from their expectations, relying on coping strategies that were shaped by the values and attitudes of their home societies. Union troops remained convinced that responsibility for upholding a nation governed by the people and founded on the core ideals of liberty and equality rested with them. Many also believed that slavery posed the greatest threat to the success of the United States’ experiment in republican government, and therefore had to be destroyed in order to save the Union and encourage it to live up to its ideals. Yet antagonism toward slavery rarely meant support for equal rights for African Americans, as most Union troops still sought to separate the issue of slavery from the more complicated questions of black rights and racial equality. At the same time, new arrivals who had not yet witnessed slavery or the South firsthand frequently brought anti-emancipation sentiments with them when they enlisted, which increased Union dissent on the topic of slavery.

  Meanwhile, Confederate discord escalated on virtually every topic except slavery. Soldiers and civilians objected vehemently to impressment, tax-in-kind, and conscription. Troops’ commitment to a Richmond government that conflicted with rather than advanced their interests was weak, and many grew contemptuous of a civilian population that failed to live up to early expectations of a purer, morally superior population. Yet as disappointed as troops were with the Confederacy, they accepted the logic that the Union was worse because it meant abolition, and abolition meant disaster because it would destroy the social order, undermine men’s very identities, and unleash race war on unprotected families. As soldiers everywhere coped with a changing (and often disillusioning) war, slavery, a source of dissent in the Union Army, proved more powerful than any other single factor in overriding dissent in the Confederate ranks. It continued to define the war.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Kingdom Coming in the Year of Jubilo”:

  Revolution and Resistance*3

  ONE JANUARY night in 1863, Arkansas soldier James Harrison dreamed of a big dinner at his Aunt Polly’s house. Suddenly, the dream turned sour when Harrison realized, “I had too eat by the side of a negro.” Even worse, the black man “had a plate to eat on and I had none.” Harrison had his dream just days after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, as bondmen and bondwomen continued to chip away at slavery and the Union Army enlisted black soldiers. Harrison’s nightmare encapsulated much of what Confederate soldiers feared all those changes would mean. Blacks would not only “eat at table with white folks,” but they would also enjoy new rights and benefits at the expense of ordinary whites like small farmer James Harrison, who sat helplessly without a plate while a black man used a plate that Harrison regarded as rightfully his. 1 The Emancipation Proclamation and black enlistment in the Union Army pushed Confederate discontent into the shadows and steeled resolve in the Confederate Army by providing soldiers like James Harrison with fresh reminders of precisely why they must keep up the fight.

  Emancipation and black enlistment in 1863: “Journey of a Slave from the Plantation to the Battlefield,” James Fuller Queen, 1863. Courtesy of Library of Congress

  Meanwhile, the impact of the Emancipation Proclamation and black enlistment also reverberated among the Union ranks, changing a war to preserve the Union into a war to reform it. That shift revolutionized the American Republic. While the revolution clarified war aims for Confederates, it complicated things for many Union soldiers, because it required them to admit painful truths about the Union they had revered all their lives, confront the uncomfortable reality of slavery as a national rather than sectional issue, and face difficult questions about what the place of former slaves within the Union should be. Yet despite lingering ambivalence and some resistance to the revolution that 1863 constituted, the men of the Union rank and file on the whole continued to serve as advocates of emancipation, partly because they knew that emancipation was necessary to save the Union, but also because they now recognized that it was necessary to make the Union worth saving.

  “This peculiar institution…has become so deeply rooted that [removing] it will shake the nation”

  From the summer of 1862 through the spring of 1863, the men in blue sustained major defeats on the battlefield, just as the Union withstood its most profound revolution since the nation’s founding. For the first year and a half of the conflict, Union soldiers had stressed the need to save the republic inherited from the founders in order to demonstrate to the rest of the world that a self-governing republic founded on ideals of liberty and equality could survive and flourish. For over a year, many had identified slavery as the cause of the rebellion and the greatest threat to the success of the American experiment, and therefore demanded the destruction of slavery as the only way to end the war and prevent its recurrence, but before the Peninsula Campaign, most had assumed that eventual Union victory was assured, and emancipation would demand little of northern whites other than their abstract approval. Once the Peninsula Campaign failed to take Richmond, military setbacks forced federal soldiers to reexamine basic assumptions. President Lincoln appointed Henry Halleck general in chief in the hopes that Halleck would be able to coordinate the Army of the Potomac (under Gen. George McClellan) and the Army of Virginia (under Gen. John Pope) into a renewed offensive against Richmond. Instead, rivalry between McClellan, Pope, and their allies led directly to another Union defeat at Manassas at the end of August, which in turn permitted Confederate forces to threaten Washington, D.C. Confederates then seized the momentum to launch an ambitious invasion of Union territory in September. Left with little choice, President Lincoln restored McClellan to command. With Little Mac at the helm, the Army of the Potomac stemmed the invasion at the battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, but at the cost of the single deadliest day of the war. Grim as it was at the time, Antietam stood out as a relative Union highlight compared to what followed. Under a new commander, Gen. Ambrose Burnside, the beleaguered Army of the Potomac endured a devastating loss at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December, and then suffered humiliation under yet another commander, Gen. Joseph Hooker, at Chancellorsville in May 1863. Even in the West, things looked bleak. Confederate invasions designed to affect the fall 1862 elections rattled Northerners and cost soldiers’ lives, though the Confederate advances were checked at places like Perryville, Kentucky. A bogged-down and disease-ridden campaign for the Mississippi River further weakened confidence. Meanwhile, all the changes in high command combined with discontent on the home front to create more upheaval. By the spring of 1863, Massachusetts private Charles Tubbs was not alone when he feared “the Union is a thing that was and we might as well lay down our armes at once.” 2 In short, in 1862 and 1863, some Union soldiers began to suspect that saving the Union might not be possible.

  Others decided that merely saving the Union was not enough. In 1863, mem
bers of the 102d Illinois still believed that “the best interests of the human race” were at stake, because the failure of the Union would prove “fatal to all human freedom, independent of color or race,” but they began to suspect that they could not truly save the Union or vindicate its ideals of liberty and equality until they made sure those ideals meant something. 3 In 1863, soldiers started to realize that turning the nation’s ideals into realities would require fighting to reform rather than simply preserve the Union. “If all this untold expense of blood and treasure, of toil and suffering, of want and sacrifice, of grief and mourning is…to result in no greater good than the restoration of the Union as it was, what will it amount to?” Pvt. Leigh Webber wondered. All the hardship and heartache would “result in no real and lasting good” unless the war transformed principles like “the rights of human nature and universal human freedom” from hollow platitudes (or worse, blatant hypocrisies) into actual achievements. 4 Fighting for “the Union under the old construction” was just not enough anymore, Pvt. Thomas Covert told his wife. “We now want a new one, that knows nothing about slavery.” 5

  From the harvest of 1862 through the 1863 planting season, Northerners struggled to come to grips with a revolution that would ask far more of them than even soldiers who had been demanding emancipation since 1861 had previously supposed. This revolution demanded that white Northerners admit that they had been mistaken about the nature of their beloved Union, which they once assumed was sacred and stainless, but was instead badly marred. It forced them to see slavery not as a sectional oddity, comfortably removed from them by geography, but rather as a national institution. Even more painful, the revolution also forced white Northerners to see that they were partly to blame for the Union’s ugliest defects. “Any country that allows the curse of Slavery and Amalgamation as this has done, should be cursed,” an Illinois soldier confided to his sister and brother-in-law, “and I believe in my soul that God allowed this war for the very purpose of clearing out the evil and punishing us as a nation for allowing it.” 6 In short, white Northerners had been wrong about the Union, and by 1863, it had become much more difficult to deny their mistakes or hide from their culpability.