What This Cruel War Was Over
Page 16
Yet despite soldiers’ fidelity to the founders, or even their noble (as they saw it) concern for humanity, God allowed the war to continue. As it intensified, many men could not help but conclude that God had sent the war as punishment. The sin that brought the punishment, many decided, must be the sin of slavery, for which both North and South were responsible, and for which both North and South must pay until the evil that brought the war was dispelled. God designed the war as “a curse…upon the country for the toleration of that inhuman practice, Human Slavery,” James Jessee reasoned, and “not till the last slave is freed need we expect Peace.” 11 Another soldier saw God at work in similar ways. “Where our nation has failed to act in putting the abomination away from them[,] God has allowed war and carnage to operate.” 12 Robert Winn, an English-born Kentucky Union soldier, decided that “the Americans are a sort of chosen people, a people who will ultimately lead the nations in their forward march toward a kind of millenium,” but toleration of slavery halted American progress. “This war brought about by the agent of the Slave Power” must “in the end emancipate the last slave.” Until it did, war would continue. 13
To soldiers who thought abolition constituted repentance, the Emancipation Proclamation should have persuaded God to end the war, but in the immediate aftermath of the proclamation, the war not only continued, it got worse. The first half of 1863 brought little but failure and humiliation to Union arms. Even when the July 4 victories came, they exacted a high and horrible cost, especially on the bloody Gettysburg battlefield. One young farm boy simply could not bring himself to discuss Gettysburg, leading his parents to fear he had been killed until they prevailed upon his captain for information about their son’s death or capture. When ordered by the captain to write a letter home, the shaken soldier described the “one vast slaughter pen” that was Gettysburg. He told of how a dead companion nearly fell on top of him, and admitted that only dumb luck could explain how he escaped the “carnage unhurt.” 14 Cornelia Hancock, a nurse who tended the wounded at Gettysburg, emerged from the experience unable to find “words in the English language to express the sufferings” of soldiers. Death and agony “robbed the battlefield of its glory,” she reflected. 15 God’s plan might guarantee a Union victory in the long run, but apparently it also included a vision for the nation that Northerners had not yet achieved.
Further evidence that Northerners did not comply with God’s vision seemed to abound in the summer of 1863. Just two weeks after Gettysburg and Vicksburg, New York City erupted in one of the ugliest riots in U.S. history. Within New York’s crowded streets, many whites, especially immigrants and workers, resented blacks as labor competitors and as the cause of the war. The $300 commutation clause brought long-simmering class resentment to a boil. When the draft began on July 11, New York lacked adequate guards and patrols, since the militia units ordinarily present were at Gettysburg. Although the first day of the draft passed quietly, riots engulfed the city for the rest of the week. Mobs composed largely of Irish immigrants began by sacking draft offices, federal property, and Republican Party buildings and symbols, but soon turned their vengeance on black New Yorkers. 16 Rioters tortured and killed African American civilians, destroyed black homes, and burned the Colored Orphan Asylum to the ground. In all, at least 105 people, including 11 black victims, 8 soldiers, 2 policemen, and 74 rioters died. 17 Throughout the summer, other northern cities experienced draft riots. Although none surpassed New York’s, most contained similar combinations of class resentment and racial animosity. If riots were not trouble enough for one summer, Clement Vallandigham resurfaced. After being transported to the Confederacy, Vallandigham had fled to Canada, and from there launched his bid to be elected governor of Ohio, running on a platform that combined opposition to the war with racial propaganda. The vicious summer riots and the reappearance of Vallandigham added to soldiers’ worries that the North lacked sufficient virtue and righteousness (and possibly good sense) to earn God’s favor.
A backlash of anger at the rioters whipped through the Union ranks. If draft riots had taken place the previous winter, when all looked gloomy for the Union, the riots might have damaged morale even further, and the rioters themselves might even have found sympathizers among a small number of soldiers like Phillip Reilly who disapproved of commutation. 18 Timing made a difference. Because they erupted at a time when Northerners felt that God had clearly indicated divine favor for the Union cause (and while many northern mourners grieved for loved ones who had died in that cause), the riots provoked outrage. If Lewis Bissell and his friends had been allowed to go after the riot instigators, the Connecticut soldier claimed, they “would have used canister shot and (as the boys say) made guts fly about the streets.” 19 Most soldiers attributed their anger to one (or both) of two reasons. Many saw the riots as little short of treason. A volunteer from upstate New York frankly called rioters “traitors” in cahoots with the Confederacy. 20 Other troops were horrified by rioters’ brutal treatment of black men, women, and children. Wisconsin soldier Chauncey Cooke regarded white rioters’ violence against African Americans as a humiliation for the entire North. 21 Some troops were angry about both the perceived disloyalty of the rioters and the vicious attacks on black New Yorkers. One black soldier railed against the “bloody, atrocious assaults on my countrymen,” and at the same time deplored rioters’ willingness to “subvert the government by popular violence” at a time when “the services of every citizen or denizen of the country are imperatively required to defend it.” 22
A similar tide of anger and resentment at Copperheads in general and Clement Vallandigham in particular also swelled up in the ranks. Legislative changes since 1862 permitted Ohio soldiers to cast their votes in the 1863 gubernatorial contest from the field. In the weeks before the election, an Ohio private called Vallandigham “that hell born pup of Cerberus,” and even Chauncey Welton identified Vallandigham as “a traitor and an enimy to this government,” who deserved “a seat in the lowest, darkest, & hottest pit of Hell.” 23 Private Welton was not notable for his verbal restraint whatever the topic, but even though few soldiers matched him in intensity of language, many used their ballots to deliver a stinging rebuke to Vallandigham, who lost decisively to his opponent, War Democrat John Brough. 24 As results came in, a Virginia-born Ohio sergeant wrote triumphantly that Vallandigham had not carried a single company in his regiment, not even a company of Irish Democrats from Cincinnati. 25 John Inskeep rejoiced that in the Seventeenth Ohio, only one soldier had voted for Vallandigham. Even better, he judged that “this is a fair index of the vote for the whole army.” 26 The results in George Cadman’s regiment supported Inskeep’s claim: 9 votes for Vallandigham and 530 for Brough. 27 When a telegram announced Brough’s victory to the Ninety-seventh Ohio cooped up in Chattanooga, it sent “a feeling of gladness throughout the entire army, and three times three cheers are given with a will by the Ohio boys and are caught up by other regiments until the hills ring with the echo of patriot voices.” 28 The lopsided returns and soldiers’ reactions testified not to the rank and file’s rejection of two-party politics or of the Democratic Party, but rather that soldiers regarded the issues of Union and emancipation as national issues that transcended party and were vital to victory.
Angry as Union troops were at the rioters and Vallandigham, many realized that blame for every northern flaw could not be comfortably assigned to two convenient scapegoats. Instead, many soldiers recognized the ugly urban outbursts and the persistence of Copperheadism as humbling evidence that the whole North had some real soul-searching to do before it could meet God’s demands. Many soldiers felt sure that destroying slavery was necessary to gain God’s favor, but in the summer of 1863, they ran head-on into the recognition that emancipation was not, by itself, enough to appease the Almighty. Many in the rank and file began to consider the possibility that God cared about the how and the why of emancipation, not simply about slavery’s destruction. More soldiers started to insist on full, immedi
ate emancipation rather than a gradual approach that might have proven popular before the war, or even in the early days of the conflict. As Kentucky soldier Robert Winn saw it, “the benefits of the gradual system are a good deal like the benefits accruing to the dog who had his tail condemned to be cut off by the ‘Humane Surgeon.’…only cut off about an inch per day.” Similarly, an “inch per day” approach to slavery merely prolonged the nation’s misery. Only immediate, total emancipation would cure the malady of civil war. 29
Even more striking, many Union troops began to reexamine the reasons why they advocated emancipation. From the time of God’s perceived intervention at Gettysburg and Vicksburg through the rest of the war, soldiers dwelt increasingly on the explicitly moral necessity of destroying slavery, not merely because of slavery’s blighting effects on agriculture, or its potential to disrupt the political system, or even its ability to excite the ambitions of southern elites to the detriment of ordinary farmers and laborers, but because it was so evil that it destroyed the moral health of the nation and angered God. 30 “As sure as God is God and right is right, so sure may we look for the war to end…in the accomplishment of its glorious object,” the “liberation of this oppressed and down trodden race,” prophesied James Jessee. “To doubt this would Be to doubt God.” In fact, Jessee claimed, “I would prefer ten years war yet and no more slavery, than Peace tomorrow, with slavery. Such is my abhorance of that Barberous institution.” 31 Some soldiers, of course, had railed against the immorality of slavery from the very beginning, but after Gettysburg and Vicksburg more of them did so, and with more urgency. Pvt. Levi Hines condemned slavery as a “curse” which “hung like an incubus to tarnish” the nation’s very soul. Slavery was more than a regrettable or inexpedient embarrassment; it was a sign of the Devil. It needed to be purged as a matter of righteousness, not merely expedience. 32 Emancipation, one Illinoisan explained, constituted “the salvation of our country and in a moral point the removal of an enormous sin.” 33
For many soldiers, slavery’s violation of women’s virtue and its disregard for slave family relationships continued to provide the most dramatic and affecting proof of the need to destroy the immoral institution. Ransom Bedell wrote passionately about the need to eradicate an institution in which “a slave dealer can complacently sell his own children as chattle property,” and a master’s white children had the right to “Barter, whip, buy and sell, and hold in chains” their own siblings. 34 “Public sentiment is so corrupt,” Cpl. James Miller claimed, that nobody in a Virginia town “seems to think that there is anything wrong with” a wealthy, well-respected community leader selling his own child. Miller went on to compare what he saw in the South to the book that Union soldiers mentioned more often than any other except the Bible. “Uncle Toms Cabin bad as it was fell far short of portraying the evils of slavery,” Miller claimed. 35 Soldiers like Miller had grown up in a culture that idealized female chastity as sacred and romanticized the family as a sentimental unit that should be impervious to the slings and arrows of the outside world. Meeting slave women who had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of their masters and then suffered again as they watched those same masters sell any children who resulted—to serve the interests of the marketplace from which the family ought to provide safe haven—repulsed many soldiers more than anything they had ever witnessed. 36
The presence of light-skinned slave children also reinforced Union soldiers’ growing moral objections to slavery. Since first arriving in the South, many white northern men had found the sight of mixed-race children unsettling for many reasons, including discomfort with the idea of racial mixing and abhorrence at the sexual coercion of slave women. Now many also saw fair-skinned slaves as evidence of “moral contagion,” or the ability of vice and depravity to float through society’s atmosphere and sicken the virtue of the upright. 37 Slaves who shared light complexions with Union soldiers made the wickedness of slavery seem so contagious that it would eventually infect everyone in the nation, and they shattered soldiers’ comfortable notions that skin color quarantined the evils of slavery. Pvt. Chauncey Cooke experienced an epiphany when a fair-skinned slave woman whose children had been fathered and sold by her master told the young Wisconsin boy that her children looked like him, and that she missed them dreadfully because she loved them “just likes you mammy loves you.” 38 Startled, Cooke realized that he physically resembled some enslaved human beings who shared with their mother the same emotions that he and his mother experienced, and suddenly the reassuring boundary between slavery and predominantly white northern society disintegrated. If the color line constituted a weak and permeable barrier to the horrors of slavery (as so many soldiers learned), how could a geographic line between slave and free states contain the moral corrosion that threatened the entire American Republic? And how could any nation earn God’s favor until it self-consciously rooted out the moral, not simply political or economic, infection?
Purposeful wrestling with moral aspects of slavery led many troops in two new directions: expanded consideration of what should become of slaves after emancipation, and examination of northern complicity in slavery through white Northerners’ racial bigotry. Whereas in the early days of the conflict, most troops had been content to press for the destruction of slavery while giving minimal thought to the fates of former slaves, from the summer of 1863 onward, a number of Union soldiers began to realize that genuine emancipation would mean more than releasing bondpeople to fend for themselves. It would “take years to right the wrongs that slavery has produced,” New Englander Edward Bartlett recognized. 39 How could four million men, women, and children systematically deprived of resources and education suddenly make their way in a hostile world? As a Kentuckian put it, emancipation unaccompanied by remedial measures was about as effective as “the Pope’s Bull against the Comet” in solving the problems created by slavery. 40
Recognizing that emancipation alone could not cure the ills of slavery did not mean that white Union troops or white Northerners in general suddenly grew willing to make personal sacrifices for racial justice. “I should be glad if the Union people were able and willing to employ and protect the contrabands one and all,” explained Pvt. Leigh Webber, “but we have to deal with facts as they are, not as we would wish them.” The facts did little to encourage. “I know full well,” he continued, “that the people are not willing to do this, and I doubt some whether they are fully able.” 41
Evidence of the racism that Webber identified within his fellow white Northerners continued to surface in the ranks, as it had done throughout the war. New York sergeant John England was sick of the war, the South, and African Americans. Much as he detested the challenge to U.S. authority posed by the New York draft riots, he took sadistic pleasure in reports of violence against black New Yorkers. He hoped the “dose of physical whipping” would “keep the great darkey within the limits of his own proper sphere, and to let him know at least that he is only a negger.” 42 In some cases, racism led beyond vicious thoughts to malicious actions. In Bowling Green, a group of Kentucky Union soldiers destroyed an African American church out of sheer spite. 43 Meanwhile, in Louisiana, a white soldier shot a black man and got away with it because, as a disgusted Union soldier admitted, “a negroes life is little more regarded than that of a dog” by some troops. 44 Continued racism did not mean that most white Union enlisted men were willing to let slavery survive. Pvt. William Lewis wanted “slavery put out of the united states of American and not onley but I want to see those who have bin made slaves of put out also.” 45 Like many of his comrades in arms, Lewis viewed both slavery and slaves as burdens that he wished the nation could shed.
Yet for the first time, some Union soldiers began to suspect that attitudes like William Lewis’s angered God, and were therefore partly responsible for the continuation of the war. Men who had not previously shown any inclination to examine beliefs and practices predicated on white supremacy now took critical looks at their own habits. In a camp p
aper, a group of Ohio soldiers noticed that the widespread practice of “calling all negroes boys,” which it had never occurred to them to question, “sounds rather strangely.” 46 Others increasingly recognized that few white Northerners were innocent of racist attitudes and assumptions. When Pvt. Wilbur Fisk heard about the draft riots, he knew that white Northerners could no longer duck their own sinfulness. By harboring “wholly wrong, unnatural and unjustifiable” racial prejudices, northern whites had kept “the souls of the African…down,” and now they must face up to their “fearful responsibility” before an angry God. 47
Especially after Gettysburg and Vicksburg, many Union troops began to interpret the duration and severity of the war as necessary atonement for white Northerners’ racist attitudes, which had helped make the survival of slavery possible. The only way to repent, a number of soldiers concluded, was to settle for nothing short of what an Ohioan called “the equal freedom of all men in this country regardless of color.” 48 Joseph Scroggs agreed, and pledged to do his part by fighting “to assist in removing the unreasonable prejudice against the colored race.” 49 Stationed in Vicksburg, Illinoisan J. G. Nind felt confident that “the nation will be purified” and “God will accomplish his vast designs,” because “prejudice against color is fast going away” among soldiers who interacted daily with “negroes, anxious to…show themselves men” and “prove to the white race that they are not such an inferior race as they been represented to be.” 50 With less optimism, but with equal conviction, Pvt. Constant Hanks insisted that the war would be wasted if it did not place the nation firmly “on the broad firm base of eaqual right” for black Americans. 51 Few soldiers could have imagined, let alone advocated, fighting for equal rights for black Americans at the beginning of the war. Yet now, hard fighting and the Fourth of July reminder that God held definite expectations for the United States led otherwise very ordinary white northern men to conclude that fighting for anything less than Hanks’s “broad firm base of eaqual right” would betray soldiers’ sacrifices, impoverish the Union cause, and disappoint God.