In many ways, the tensions of 1863 come as no surprise. Strain was bound to show when the needs of a government like the Confederacy, which white Southerners supported in the belief that it would promote the interests and aspirations of themselves and their families, clashed with the needs and priorities of individual white Southerners. Cavalryman Samuel Cameron wanted the war over “before night” if possible, because hard service was about to kill his prized horse. When the demands of the Confederacy endangered his own possessions (especially his horse), Cameron did not “care a Copperdam” about the “so called Confederacy.” 140 As conflicts like the one Cameron gave voice to became more and more prominent, they led to specific results, including low morale, political upheaval, and the growth of a formal peace movement.
Yet the pressures and disappointments of the second half of 1863 did not lead to a clamor to rejoin the Union. It would be a mistake to downplay the disunity or the seething distaste with which many soldiers and civilians regarded the Confederacy in the second half of 1863, but it would be equally inaccurate to read the widespread discontent as a willingness to give up on an independent Confederacy or to go back to the United States. In fact, soldiers like Sgt. Edward Brown lambasted the “poor patriotism” of the down-at-the-mouths who declared “they would never fire another gun.” “We ought to be more determined and fight the harder,” he urged, no matter how discouraging present prospects might seem. 141 Class conflict raged, families suffered, armies faltered, and state and Confederate governments infuriated the public, yet continued belief in the necessity of the war proved stronger than even the fierce combination of reasons for discontent. Understanding the Confederacy in the second half of 1863 requires understanding what forces contributed to that continued belief.
In part, Confederate soldiers’ devotion to the material aspirations of themselves and their families, along with the internal logic generated by the war itself, sustained men’s convictions of the necessity of the war. A Missouri Confederate who called himself “the lucky owner of a bald-hill in Missouri” worried that federal victory would endanger his personal property rights and allow German immigrants to gain land at his expense. The prospect of “a raw Dutchman who can’t speak our language” taking over his land gave the soldier reason enough to stay in the ranks. 142 The worse the war got, the more likely Confederate troops were to describe their enemies with terms like “vandals,” “cruel foe,” and “brutal horde.” “Spoliation and murder committed by Federal soldiers” who turned “stately residences of southern gentlemen” into stables led Robert Bell to declare that Yankee wickedness “exceed[s], if possible, the vandalism of the barbarians.” 143 The hatred he and others felt turned into its own variety of war motivation. We have suffered too much, reasoned some soldiers, to give up now. All the sacrifice and loss had to be for something, but to return to the Union with nothing gained would make everything soldiers and their families had endured pointless. As Pvt. John Price succinctly put it, “we have been out in This Thing so long that we don’t want to give it up with out we can get what we come out for.” 144
The most powerful motivator remained Confederate troops’ certainty that they must fight to prevent the abolition of slavery, the worst of all possible disasters that could befall southern white men and their families. Over and over, soldiers repeated the same refrains about the necessity of fighting for slavery that they had been sounding since the war began. Abolitionist tyrants would “force the yoke of slavery” onto white men and their loved ones if Confederates ever gave up the struggle, one Texas chaplain warned. 145 Similarly, Alabama private Thomas Taylor insisted that his sister recall that if Northerners succeeded in emancipating black slaves, they would “place upon [white Southerners] the chains of slavery.” 146 Far from indulging in rhetorical flourish, Taylor genuinely feared that abolition would destroy southern society and his place within it, and, like most of his fellow soldiers, he sincerely believed in the urgency of fighting to avoid such a fate.
As they had done since the war began, Confederates reminded themselves that challenges to slavery undermined the southern social order by defying God and threatening the family. “Contrary to the injunctions of our Savior,” Pvt. Ivy Duggan admonished, “servants have been induced to disobey their masters, abuse the family that raised them, take what they wished and run away.” Neither families nor property, two of the very foundation stones of society, were safe without slavery. 147 Even the structure of domestic relations, right down to the definition of ideal womanhood, would come undone if anything happened to the South’s distinctive domestic institution. As slavery frayed, a southern society that strove to uphold the ideal of the submissive, dependent lady unequipped to take care of herself, and whose hands remained unsoiled by household labor, unraveled along with it. A Louisiana private lamented that the South’s image of itself and its women must now center on the figure of a practical, capable manager, skilled in workaday chores like “culinary cience” and less reliant on the control and protection of white men. 148 The change he described marked no change at all in most women’s actual experiences, which had always included hard work. Nonetheless, the shift in the way that soldiers idealized the South and the southern women they claimed to defend still mattered, because it testified to forced changes in a whole society’s self-definition at the very deepest and most basic levels. Union challenges to slavery amounted to assaults on the absolute rightness of black Americans’ prescribed places within the South’s social structure; those assaults in turn threatened domestic security and attacked everybody’s place in society and very identity. 149
While most Confederate troops remained firm in their commitment to the necessity of slavery, for the first time a small number of nonslaveholders began to question the wisdom of a war to uphold an institution that disproportionately benefited the wealthy. The only Southerners to gain from the war, according to James Zimmerman, were “slave holder[s] or [those who had an] interest in slaves.” Since his family owned no slaves, he saw no material advancement to be gained by prolonging the struggle. 150 Zimmerman did not suddenly decide that slavery was morally wrong or that emancipation was a good idea, but he did question the wisdom of fighting for an institution that profited the wealthy and brought no material advantage to his own family. Struggling to survive and worried for her husband’s safety, a nonslaveholding Alabama woman named Martha Warrick voiced similar concerns. She urged her husband to avoid fighting any way he could because his death would ruin the family, which “hant got no nigero to fite for.” 151 In December 1863, U.S. President Lincoln’s “Ten Per Cent Plan” for Reconstruction enticed Alabama Private Richard Ledbetter. “By freeing the negroes we can save our land and other prosperity and go back into the union where we ought to be,” Ledbetter theorized. 152
Zimmerman, Warrick, and Ledbetter resented fighting to protect rich families’ property while their own families suffered, but in the end they found themselves in untenable positions. They did not want to free slaves; they were merely tired of making sacrifices so that other people could keep slaves. Yet when it came down to it, neither they nor their fellow Confederates could really envision a South without slavery, and they fell short of proposing any real alternative to continued war. Martha Warrick admitted that former slaves could not simply be freed and then allowed to remain in the South, because they would “sun destero [soon destroy]” the place. 153 Similarly, an Alabama lieutenant worried that a South without slavery would become a “desert waste.” 154 Consequently, while the doubts voiced by Zimmerman, Warrick, and Ledbetter contrasted strikingly with the early days of the conflict, when nobody questioned the institution, they did not amount to serious challenges in 1863 because even the discontented could not imagine a South without slavery, and after brief flirtations with the idea of giving up fighting for it, found themselves forced to admit little option but to continue to fight to save the institution.
Doubts about slavery also proved fleeting because in the second half of 1863, Con
federates believed they received renewed evidence of Northerners’ intent to undermine the southern social structure, white southern men’s identities, and safety in the white South. Many reacted with violence. As the number of black Union troops grew, Union authorities stipulated that black Union soldiers captured in the line of duty be exchanged exactly like white soldiers. The demand infuriated Confederate troops, because it equated a white Confederate with a black man. Grant Taylor, a farmer who had never owned a slave, regarded the prospect of equal exchange as unthinkable. When some of his companions were captured at Marietta, Georgia, he expected Confederate authorities to let the prisoners languish in northern prison camps for the duration rather than allow “the Confederates [to] exchange negroes for white men.” 155 Alabama soldier Edmund Patterson saw only one acceptable response: the Confederate Army must avoid the possibility of exchange by killing all black soldiers, leaving no African American prisoners of war to be bartered for free white Southerners. “If we lose everything else, let us preserve our honor,” he insisted, apparently concluding that implied equality with a black man was more dishonorable than murdering one. 156 After defeating black troops at a fort near Charleston Harbor, a Georgia soldier reported with satisfaction that black prisoners were “literally shot down while on their knees begging for quarters and mercy.” 157 Violence against black prisoners of war allowed weary, frustrated Confederate troops to lash out at the literal embodiments of their worst fears, served warning to any local slaves who might consider running away to join Union regiments, and helped reinvigorate soldiers’ commitment to the war.
Along with reliable commitment to slavery, Confederates also drew encouragement from a new source in the second half of 1863: religion. Many soldiers had believed in God even before the war began, of course, but their turn to religious reflections increased in the wake of Gettysburg and Vicksburg. While the incessant suffering brought by the war made a resort to religious consolation almost inevitable, the timing in the summer of 1863 resulted mainly from events on the battlefield. The reversal of Confederate fortunes at Gettysburg and Vicksburg had been so startling and sudden that many Confederate soldiers, like their Union counterparts, concluded that God must have played a role. Since the Yankees could not have engineered such a remarkable turnaround, the twin disasters must have been a part of God’s plan. Although Gettysburg and Vicksburg were favorable developments for the Union and setbacks for the Confederacy, Confederate troops’ convictions about God’s role in the war caused them less anxiety than similar realizations brought to Union soldiers. Even after Gettysburg, Thomas Taylor had no doubt that “the tide will turn again in our favor” because “we are in the right & we are bound to prevail as God is true.” 158 Meanwhile, a South Carolinian reassured his fiancée, “However dark and gloomy our cause may now appear, I feel assured that the God of Hosts is on our side,” which meant that “our struggle must end” in victory as long as we “look to Him for succor.” 159 Since God controlled the outcome of the war, all would be well eventually, because God was certain to side with the Confederates. 160
Yet it was not simply fatalism that led Confederates to feel less anxious than their Union counterparts when contemplating God’s role in the war. Much like Union troops, white southern soldiers interpreted the continuation and the intensity of the war (including the losses at Gettysburg and Vicksburg) as God’s punishment for “our sins.” As a Virginia corporal summed it up, “Man’s wickedness is great and our Heavenly Father is determined to punish sin that a nation might be saved.” 161 Yet Confederates understood both “our” and “sins” differently from Union troops, and therefore envisioned a different and less radical road back to God’s favor than the one imagined by the Union rank and file. Religious reflections forced many Northerners to envision an entirely new and unprecedented United States without its central foundation stone of slavery, and to confront the personal and collective moral implications of recognizing that slavery was a national, not simply sectional, institution for which they must take partial responsibility. No parallel line of reasoning appeared among Confederates like Louisianan Al Pierson, who reflected, “God is with us & will carry us through safe if we will only prove ourselves worthy.” 162 Many Union troops thought so too, but they also began to suspect that proving themselves worthy would require them to admit that because they shared the racial attitudes that made slavery possible, both slavery and the war it caused were partly their fault. Confederates thought differently.
Repentance as Confederate soldiers interpreted it in 1863 and beyond had less to do with reorganizing the very foundation of the nation than with individuals modifying their own behavior in ways that neither required nor created fundamental change. As Pvt. John Brightman put it, the beleaguered Confederacy was “cursed by the Supreme Ruler above for miscreant conduct” on the part of individuals, not for deep-seated flaws in its society. 163 The differences in how Union and Confederate troops thought about repentance grew in part from the distinctive impact of the Second Great Awakening on the antebellum South, which encouraged white Southerners to focus on individual salvation more than social or national reform. Much as Confederate troops grounded their interpretations of liberty in the aspirations and well-being of white individuals and their families, they also experienced religion as something primarily concerned with the welfare of individual souls. 164 In fact, white Southerners tended to view most reform movements as heretical, because tampering with social relations that they believed had been ordained by God, such as slavery or the subordination of women to men, amounted to tampering with the will of God. 165 As one Arkansas lieutenant explained, the problem with Northerners was their insistence on “an antislavery Bible and an antislavery God.” 166 Confederate troops responded to the events of 1863 by calling for individuals to reform their own daily behavior, but they did not call on white Southerners to examine the very underpinnings of their whole society, as Union soldiers reconsidering their own complicity in the sin of slavery did.
Confederate troops often identified particular sorts of individual wrongdoing that must be corrected before God would favor the Confederacy with victory. Price gouging and predatory lending by “speculators and extortioners,” which had infuriated Confederate troops since the first year of the war, had to be stopped. Josiah Patterson despised all “greedy avaricious money makers,” and William Stillwell blamed “speculators and extortiorners” whose “grasping behavior” turned the Confederate cause into “a curse and not a blessing.” 167 Other soldiers determined that venal habits among the troops accounted for God’s displeasure. James Lineberger was troubled because “the men is groing very wicked and thoutless” and seemed to ignore the Ten Commandments. 168 Soldiers courted “the anger & the judgements of an offended God,” warned William Davis, through their heedless behavior. Only “our deep & ernist repentanc” for personal weaknesses such as drinking and swearing could soothe God’s indignation. 169 Soldiers’ tendency to look to individual behavior in need of correction was no short-lived fad, but rather a habit that persisted for the rest of the war. In 1865, Charles Fenton James identified debauchery and frivolity as Confederate transgressions that angered God. “Dancing parties are heard of every where, and the people seem to have lost sight of the fact that a war was going on and given themselves up to pleasure and dissipation,” he lectured his sister. Unless Southerners learned “to lay aside present pleasure,” they could expect “direst curses upon the nation.” 170
Another way in which Confederate soldiers differed from their Union counterparts in their reflections on the necessity of repentance was that Confederate troops did not include slavery as they contemplated the wrongs for which God demanded atonement. Before the war, some proslavery clergy had counseled white Southerners to curb the abuses that happened within slavery so that the institution lived up to God’s civilizing intentions for it. Antebellum movements to spread the Gospel to slaves or to legalize slave marriage grew from such efforts, and during the war itself, a number of cl
ergy or other proslavery spokesmen echoed similar refrains. 171 Yet Confederate soldiers did not share these concerns. They agreed that since God’s plan for society included slavery, they ought to fight to preserve it, but for the most part, their religion remained a personal matter, and it did not lead them to question the institution of slavery. 172
Even as a personal concern, religion could have a collective impact (if enough individuals changed their behavior, the Confederacy would eventually benefit), but the focal point remained the individual soul, as a wave of revivals in the winter of 1863–64 made clear. James Lineberger enjoyed the “fine meetins” full of “singing & praying” led by a Methodist preacher. 173 Pvt. Grant Taylor, meanwhile, attended an emotional series of revivals in which “strong men…with tears streaming down their cheeks” testified that “they have found the Lord precious to their souls.” 174 Soldiers welcomed revivals because they helped individual sinners repent of their sins, and because they provided individuals with comfort and reassurance even when the war looked bleak. 175 John Street decisively located the benefits of revivals in the souls of the believers, not the policy of a nation. After a revival meeting, Private Street spent time with a fellow soldier so “deeply concerned about his soul’s salvation” that he was suffering “great mental distress.” Street and the anguished soldier regarded the revival as “the providence of God,” not because it inspired the reform of the Confederacy, but because it would “aid [the distressed soldier] in finding Christ.” 176
What This Cruel War Was Over Page 19
