What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  The Emancipation Proclamation might look like a weak and insubstantial piece of paper issued by a government that Confederates did not even recognize as legitimate, but it proposed to do nothing less than destroy the foundation of the only society white Southerners had ever known. The logical implications of emancipation horrified Confederate soldiers. Just weeks after the preliminary proclamation was issued, Antoine Prudhomme was convinced that civilization as white Southerners had known it was falling apart in Union-occupied New Orleans. “A perfect reign of terror pervades all hearts—the negroes have the right of citizenship,” he claimed. Rumor also had it that “the colored population have turned traitors to our cause they excite the negroes by public demonstrations to insurrection and destruction.” 108 An Arkansas soldier also assumed that emancipation could only lead to violence. He readily believed false rumors that the Union general Samuel R. Curtis “had freed all the negroes in Phillips County [Arkansas],” and that freed slaves immediately began hanging innocent whites, killing livestock, ransacking property, and otherwise destroying every vestige of society. 109 A clever Texas soldier described the logical outcome of the proclamation by writing a song. One verse began:

  They howl the sin of slavery and curse us for the crime,

  Of traficking in human flesh in this enlightened time

  They threaten now to signalize the next new calendar

  By setting every bondman free beneath the Southern Star.

  Black freedom would be a disaster, the song went on to say, because it would lead “the blacks to mad revolt to murder and to char / With conflagration every home beneath the Southern Star.” 110 Emancipation amounted to a direct attack on every aspect of white southern society, and not a single white household was safe.

  Even something so basic as a white man’s individual identity seemed to come under siege in the wake of emancipation. Before John Williams became a soldier, he lived on his father’s struggling farm and helped raise just enough corn to keep the family afloat. The family owned no slaves. Yet Corporal Williams wholeheartedly believed in the necessity of a war to separate from the Union and prevent the abolition that the Emancipation Proclamation threatened to impose. A story that he told his sister explains why. Two white Virginians, Williams claimed, were arrested by “an armed band of negroes and carried before one whome they styled the President,” who had them “condemned to be shot.” The murder accounted for only part of the story’s horror. After the shooting, the mortification continued when the victims “were striped of all their clothing and thrown into the river.” 111 Racial role reversal, humiliation, powerlessness before an authority of a different race, summary and autocratic justice, and the loss of individual identity and basic dignity could all be expected under the black- and Yankee-controlled regime that emancipation was sure to introduce. The Confederate camp newspaper The Vidette made this same point more concisely when it called emancipation “Slavery for the White Man!” 112

  In igniting white Southerners’ long-smoldering fears, the Emancipation Proclamation roused many Confederate soldiers to fury. “The proclamation of Lincoln has filled every one with indignation, and we are all now in favor of raising the ‘black flag’ and asking and showing ‘no quarter,’” a member of the First South Carolina announced when his regiment learned of the preliminary proclamation. 113 A Texan denounced “the proclamation of Lincoln” as “the crowning infamy of all his diabolical schemes for our ruin.” 114

  Confederates might be outraged, but they were not surprised. In fact, Confederate morale actually improved because the Emancipation Proclamation raised troops’ hackles, giving them more energy than they had shown in months. By clarifying the war, the proclamation brought the struggle back into focus and reminded soldiers why they had to fight even when scarcity threatened loved ones, or the Confederacy fell short of their expectations. 115 According to Pvt. John Street, the proclamation called the bluff of any remaining Union soldiers who claimed (deceptively, in his opinion) that they fought for the Union and not emancipation. “The cry of Union is now no longer made a pretext for carrying on the war,” he argued. “By their resent acts the Lincoln government have shown plainly what they have in reality been fighting for all the time vis: the abolition of slavery.” 116 Scathing as The Reveille was toward the Confederate government, it rallied around the cause when abolition appeared on the horizon. Nothing motivated the southern soldier in the weeks before the Emancipation Proclamation was due to take effect, according to The Reveille, quite like thoughts of “the chains of slaves, forged in a Northern furnace, with which to mangle his free limbs.” 117 Because it provided a clear rallying point, the proclamation renewed the resolve of soldiers like Pvt. Jonathan Doyle, who reminded his sister, “we must never despair, for death is preferable to a life spent under the gaulling yoke of abolition rule.” 118

  When the final Emancipation Proclamation came in January, it did more than just declare slaves free; it also proposed to arm them against their former masters. As a result of the Haitian revolution of 1791–1804, the Denmark Vesey plot of 1822 in South Carolina, the 1831 Nat Turner revolt in Virginia, and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, nothing terrified white Southerners more than the specter of armed blacks. When David Ballenger learned that “the Yankees are drilling the negroes to fight us,” he warned his wife that the Confederacy now faced “the bloody year of the war.” Yankee use of black soldiers, he believed, “will almost surpass anything recorded in the annals of history for war and blood shed.” 119 In addition, African American soldiers would carry firearms, just like white men, and would be dressed in the same uniforms as white men. In the minds of Confederates, making soldiers of black men implied racial equality, and that prospect could not be allowed to pass without a fight. James Branscomb had been downhearted and disillusioned with the Confederacy for months, but the news of black Union soldiers propelled him out of his gloom. For the first time in a long while, he predicted “success for our army” because “the negro army of the north is only adding fuel to [the] fire of our soldiers.” 120 One Virginian suggested a practical way in which Confederate authorities could use black soldiers to boost the morale of war-weary troops. “If our Congress would only pass a bill giving each soldier all the negroes whom he could capture,” new soldiers would flood the ranks and existing soldiers would perk up again. “Opportunities for speculating in ‘human flesh,’ as the Abolitionists say,” would renew the Confederate Army’s enthusiasm like nothing else, the private predicted. 121

  As the war, emancipation, and black enlistment continued to grind away at slavery, enslaved men and women took advantage of opportunities the war uncovered to gain freedom any way they could. For some enslaved Southerners, liberation meant fleeing to the Union Army. “Many negroes are lost by…desertion to the enemy,” one Florida sergeant noticed. 122 A North Carolina soldier learned that friends of his, the Brown family, lost two slaves when their mammy “went to the Yankees carrying with her, one of her grandchildren, one that Mrs. Brown had raised in the house.” When Mrs. Brown sent word to have the child returned to the family’s possession, the mammy suddenly became an “old hag” who replied that she would “stand a law suit in h–ll first.” 123 Actions like these added to Confederates’ motivation by stoking white southern fears of assertive blacks who refused to recognize white authority.

  Other slaves found ways to assert their growing autonomy without leaving home, which disturbed Confederate soldiers at least as much as the runaways did, because it reminded them that disruptions to slavery disturbed the stable and reliable order of things, even in the domestic sanctuary of white southern homes. When Leander Parker saw slaves in Mississippi dressing themselves in their masters’ “best apparels” and “valuables,” and parading about town presuming to the status usually associated with such finery, it seemed as if he was living in a nightmare. 124 Texas chaplain Robert Bunting sought to horrify Confederate civilians and soldiers alike with stories of marriages between slave women and w
hite Union soldiers taking place in the homes of the slaves’ helpless white mistresses. “It is no unusual thing,” Bunting claimed, “for the mistress to be compelled to witness, in her own parlor, the marriage of her likely house-maids to officers and privates of the army.” After the ceremony, shameless brides helped themselves to articles from the home, and then departed from their rightful mistress “with the taunt that now they are as free as she.” 125

  No evidence suggests that marriages between white Union soldiers and slaves occurred at all, let alone became commonplace, but Bunting’s stories were powerful despite their falsehood. In fact, the stories helped explain why the defense of slavery continued to rally nonslaveholding soldiers whose families needed them at home, especially when measures like the twenty-slave law could have soured the rank and file on a war for slavery. The twenty-slave law made plain exactly how little direct material interest nonslaveholders had in an institution that so clearly privileged the wealthy, but tales like the ones Bunting spun revealed that for nonslaveholders, slavery’s importance had little to do with its pecuniary benefits. The intimacy and social parity between black and white implied by Bunting’s stories of interracial marriages, along with the brazenness displayed by black house servants laying claim to their mistresses’ belongings and social status, tapped deeply into white Southerners’ fears. For one thing, protecting white women from insults and depredations by blacks ranked high on the list of duties that entitled a white Southerner to honorable status as a true man. Moreover, the women whose servants were (according to Bunting) insulting their dignity enjoyed no political rights that abolition could usurp, yet the erosion of slavery still compromised them. Nonslaveholders might be just as economically distanced from slavery’s financial profits as women were marginalized from its political benefits, but they would still lose safety, personal dignity, and identity if slavery disappeared. White men who enlisted in the Confederate Army believed that they and their families needed the institution of slavery to survive, as Robert Bunting’s fabrications both demonstrated and shrewdly exploited.

  ONE MAJOR source of consolation remained available to Confederates: the Emancipation Proclamation could destroy slavery only if the Union won the war. After the dreary winter and spring of 1862, Confederate military fortunes had improved. By early 1863, a Virginian noticed the “difference in our army now and this time last year.” For much of 1862, Confederate troops had been “demoralized, discouraged by repeated defeats and retreats,” but after Fredericksburg, he believed “the yankees are getting very tired of [the war]…and they are quite willing to get out of it.” 126 A Texas private grew increasingly sure that the Confederate Army would “whip [the Union] at vixburge,” and that would only be the beginning. “Their own papers…said that we had whipped them in evry big fight and…that they would loos men and cost them a heap and we would still whip them…and now was the time for them to make a proposial to us.” 127 Other troops sought to capitalize on Confederate morale and momentum with invasions of the North. Autumn incursions into Maryland, Ohio, and Kentucky had not worked out as planned in 1862, but by the summer of 1863, the Confederacy’s star army, the Army of Northern Virginia, was ready to try again. Looking toward Pennsylvania, North Carolinian John Kinyoun could hardly wait to repay “that Grand old Quaker abolisionist State for all that she has caused our Confederacy to suffer.” 128 In short, prospects looked encouraging at the end of June 1863, when the Army of Northern Virginia took the war to Union territory, intent on breaking northern will and rolling back the wheels of revolution.

  Gettysburg casualties. Courtesy of the National Archives

  Union soldiers on the lawn of Vicksburg Courthouse after the Union capture of Vicksburg, July 1863. Courtesy of the Old Courthouse Museum, Vicksburg, Mississippi

  Log church built by the Fiftieth New York Engineers, Poplar Grove, Virginia. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

  CHAPTER 4

  “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory”:

  The War and the Hand of God*4

  ON JULY 4, 1863, Lt. Quincy Campbell of the Fifth Iowa had plenty to “feel good over.” The “glorious Fourth” was “made doubly glorious” by news that just a few miles away in the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, “the rebel army marched out and stacked arms and then marched back as prisoners of war.” The long campaign for the Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River finally ended in Union victory on one of the most significant days of the year. “The victory is too important to not be followed by important results,” Campbell reflected, “but I cannot recognize the fall of Vicksburg as the fall of the Confederacy.” Victory would come eventually but not immediately, he expected, because “the chastisements of the Almighty are not yet ended.” Two years of war had convinced Campbell that “the Almighty has taken up the cause of the oppressed and…will deny us peace until we ‘break every yoke’ and sweep every vestige of the cursed institution [of slavery] from our land.” 1 Victory at Vicksburg on July 4 was no accident, Campbell concluded, but rather the hand of God at work.

  By the Civil War’s midpoint, the ferocity of its wrath had stripped away romantic visions, forcing soldiers to explain not only why it began, but also why it became the horrible convulsion that it did. The explanations that seemed to fit increasingly had to do with God. Specifically, from the middle of 1863, many troops in both armies saw the war as God’s punishment for “our sins,” though Northerners and Southerners differed in who they meant by “our” and what they meant by “sins.” The prolonged and punishing nature of the war reiterated the Union’s evident failure to comply with God’s will, and forced many white Union men to confront what Quincy Campbell called “every vestige” of slavery: northern complicity in the sin of slavery through the widespread racial attitudes that enabled the existence of the institution. Black Union soldiers’ belief in God’s presence in the war bolstered their hopes that a transformed nation would emerge from the struggle, ready to honor the humanity, dignity, and equality of all Americans. Meanwhile, Confederates struggled to cope with military setbacks, incessant suffering, and growing divisiveness, but most remained certain of the superiority of their own society and its institution of slavery, and assumed that God would reward them with victory as soon as individuals made adjustments in their own behavior. As soldiers everywhere listened for the voice of God, what most Confederates heard confirmed preexisting beliefs, and what black Union troops heard gave them courage to stay the course, but what Union troops heard contained the potential to change the war and the nation.

  “The salvation of our country and…the removal of an enormous sin”

  Celebration and reverence reverberated through many Union camps on the Fourth of July, not just Quincy Campbell’s. As news traveled downriver from Vicksburg, an Illinois surgeon in Louisiana greeted it with the biblical acclamation, “Glad tideings of Great joy.” Together with his regiment, he gave thanks that “our Grand Nations birth day has been doubly consecrated by the fall of the last stronghold of the so called southern Confederacy[,] Vicksburg.” 2 As if victory on the Mississippi on the Fourth of July were not providential enough, troops everywhere learned that Lee’s seemingly unstoppable army had been defeated at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and had begun its retreat south on the very day that Vicksburg fell. In Virginia, Lewis Bissell watched “rockets and fireworks” herald the news that “the rebel army [is] demoralized and retreating toward Richmond.” 3 Large pictures of U.S. flags and the words “GETTYSBURG” and “VICKSBURG” adorned the front page of The Union Volunteer, while every column of the camp paper recounted “the glorious events…[which] have sent a thrill of joy to every patriotic heart.” 4

  The victories could not have come at a better time. Since late 1862, northern confidence had been eclipsed by the clouds of doubt that settled in with the piles of Fredericksburg dead, clustered around the unhealthy swamps of the Mississippi, and thickened in the humiliation of routs like Chancellorsville. Now twin rays of light, Vicksburg and Gettysburg, sliced throu
gh the gloom. From his hospital bed, one soldier hoped that the “star of the republic may again shine brightly, and become more than ever the luminary of freedom.” 5 Another volunteer speculated, “the light of Liberty is soon to shine.” 6

  The occurrence of the two signal triumphs on Independence Day struck Quincy Campbell and Union troops everywhere as more than coincidence: July 4, 1863, announced divine intervention and reawakened Union soldiers’ millennial understanding of the war. 7 Young men who fought in the Civil War had grown up hearing their parents’ generation recount the Fourth of July, 1826, when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, architects and signers of the Declaration of Independence, both died on the fiftieth anniversary of American independence. The nation had regarded the two founders’ passings as an act of the Almighty. In 1863 it looked to Union troops as though God had once again used the Fourth to send a message. More than ever, soldiers had reason to believe that “the hand of God is in this” struggle, and the hand would not be stilled until the Union complied with God’s will. 8

  While the apparent interest of the Almighty gave Union troops reason to hope, it also reminded them of their personal and collective responsibility to make the United States fit for God’s blessing. In fact, as strategically significant as the Gettysburg and Vicksburg victories were, the response consisted more of soul-searching and less of jubilation than might be expected. In many ways, Union soldiers were already behaving admirably, at least by their own lights. They made great sacrifices to defend the legacy of the American Revolution as they interpreted it. In fighting for “this glorious Union,” Ohioan Sam Evans explained, the men of the rank and file put their lives on the line for “the Constitution and Law…grace and God…[and] the majestic images of our revolutionary sires.” 9 Further, Union soldiers acted selflessly; they risked their lives and their families’ happiness not just for their own advancement, but also for the benefit of humanity. The Iowa soldiers who created the camp paper The Corinth Chanticleer insisted that upholding “the eternal principles of justice [and] freedom” mattered, because the “grand results” would be “felt all over the world.” 10