What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  57. Lt. Chesley Herbert, Third S.C., to wife, July 3, 1861, Fairfax Courthouse, Va., Chesley Worthington Herbert Papers, SCL.

  58. Georgia soldier A. H. Mitchell to father, May 17, 1861, Jackson Co., Ga., in Lane, “Dear Mother: Don’t Grieve About Me,” 11.

  59. For the “crisis of the family” in the nineteenth century, see Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). See also Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Much of the literature on the nineteenth-century cult of “true womanhood” also treats the centrality of the family. See, for instance, Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women: “Civilizing” the West? 1840–1880 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18:2 (summer 1966), 151–74.

  60. The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of Northern Abolitionists (Philadelphia, 1836), 180. Although the pamphlet was published anonymously, William Drayton of South Carolina has long been identified as the author. See William Sumner Jenkins, Pro-slavery Thought in the Old South (Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1960, first published 1935), 319. For many additional examples of proslavery sermons that made this point, see Snay, Gospel of Disunion; and John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay, eds., Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). For a classic exposition of the same argument by a white southern woman, see Louisa McCord’s 1852 essay, “Enfranchisement of Women.”

  61. See Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Lee Ann Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia 1860–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995). For the application of McCurry’s and Whites’s ideas to south-central Georgia, see Wetherington, Plain Folk’s Fight. McCurry emphasizes the tensions between insistence on white male equality and the vast inequality of wealth more than Whites does, but both note that white men were united in what Whites calls a “common social construction of manhood as largely autonomous and self-directing household heads,” and therefore regarded northern attempts to interfere with slavery, a facet of many though not most households, as “a challenge to the independence of all male householders, whether or not they actually held slaves” (Whites, Civil War as a Crisis in Gender, 17–18).

  To some extent, this conception of social order correlates with what Rogers Smith in Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) calls the “ascriptive inegalitarian” tradition of American political thought. Smith argues that throughout U.S. history, several ways of thinking about membership in the American nation have vied with each other, including the liberal tradition, the civic republican tradition, and the ascriptive inegalitarian tradition. The ascriptive inegalitarian tradition assumed that traits that people were born with, especially race, gender, and sometimes religion, determined their eligibility for membership within the American nation as citizens, and their proper place within the social order. On page 68, Smith specifically discusses the domination of men over women as a central feature of the ascriptive inegalitarian tradition. It is too simple to say that Northerners adhered to liberal and civic republican traditions while Southerners hewed to the ascriptive inegalitarian tradition. (Southerners also exhibited liberal qualities, such as attachment to property rights, as well as republican ones, such as the insistence that white equality depended upon black slavery, while most northern men also adhered to ascriptivism where women’s lack of the right to vote was concerned.) Still, qualities that Smith associates with the ascriptive inegalitarian tradition were much more central to Confederate soldiers’ views of their own identity, and of the social order, than was the case for most Union troops. In fact, much of what white Southerners feared about Northerners was Northerners’ presumed infidelity to a divinely ordained social order in which everyone’s place in the family, society, and nation was permanently fixed by God, and in which racial purity, social harmony, and maintenance of one’s manhood depended upon all individuals abiding by their appointed social roles.

  62. John G. Crowley shows that church concern with policing women’s sexual behavior increased during the Civil War. See Crowley, Primitive Baptists, 93.

  63. “The Irrepressible Conflict,” Richmond Enquirer, October 2, 1860, p. 1.

  64. Thomas, private in a Ga. regiment, to mother, May 10, 1861, Ringold, Ga., Confederate Miscellany, Officers’ and Soldiers’ Letters, DU. W. B. Overstreet of Coffee County, Ga., similarly wrote to Governor Joseph Brown, “the negroes is choosing out the young [white] damsel for wives as soon as the war is over.” Overstreet to Brown, April 26, 1862, Box 42, Governor’s Incoming Correspondence, GDAH, as cited in Wetherington, Plain Folk’s Fight, 155.

  65. The Tenth Legion, June 6, 1861, Woodstock, Va., ISHL. The Tenth Legion was the camp newspaper of a Virginia militia regiment.

  66. Michael F. Holt in The Political Crisis of the 1850s claims that slavery meant something “abstract” to Southerners (258). He argues that antebellum Southerners used the language of slavery to dramatize perceived threats to “self-government” and “rule of law,” and fears of being made to seem less prestigious than the North. See esp. ch. 8 and pages x and 242. White southern elites may have talked about slavery in the sense Holt describes, but when enlisted Confederate soldiers voiced fears of “enslavement” or worried about what would happen if black slavery were abolished, they were talking about much more basic, gut-level fears. They dreaded that their lives and conditions might come to resemble the lives and conditions of black slave men, who lacked independence, who could not pursue their own ambitions, and who could do nothing to prevent the sale, physical punishment, or even sexual violation of their own family members.

  67. For love, especially romantic love, as a characteristic of manhood (along with ambition), see Berry, All That Makes a Man.

  68. For discussion of the links between firearms, hunting, and white manhood, see Nicolas W. Proctor, Bathed in Blood: Hunting and Mastery in the Old South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), esp. chs. 3 and 6. Exclusion of women from a masculine culture of hunting and arms bearing is discussed on pp. 50–55.

  69. Pvt. Frederick Taber, Eighteenth La., to parents, December 9, 1861, near Carrollton, La., Frederick R. Taber Papers, CMM Ser. B, Reel 8.

  70. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Edward L. Ayers, and Kenneth Greenberg, among others, have discussed the importance of the theme of honor to southern society. Wyatt-Brown explicated the concept in Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) and again in Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985). Both volumes emphasize the centrality of individual reputation and right to respect to southern honor and southern society. Wyatt-Brown demonstrates the preferability of violence over slights to honor to many Southerners and shows how sensitivity to insult distinctively characterized the South. Despite its importance, this work has been convincingly challenged or qualified. Although Wyatt-Brown nods toward the link between southern honor and slavery, noting briefly that honor depended upon “the racially elitist concept that all white men were equal in their hegemony over blacks” (Southern Honor, 203), he downplays the connection by arguing that the ideal of honor both predated and postdated slavery, and therefore did not depend upon it. One problem with this interpretation is its reliance on the concept of hegemony, which implies consent between dominant and subordinate, whereas slavery rested not on implicit agreement between white and black, but on force and violence, as Walter Johnson in Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Ante
bellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press., 1999) and countless others have demonstrated.

  Edward L. Ayers provides a more persuasive analysis of the concept of honor in Vengeance and Justice. Ayers’s depiction of the interdependency of honor and slavery in ch. 1 of Vengeance and Justice roots the somewhat amorphous concept of honor within the “economic, ideological, and religious context—especially slavery” that set the South apart from the North. He therefore more compellingly explains why the concept of honor (or one’s worth and status in others’ eyes) pervaded the South, while the concept of dignity (or the belief in the inherently equal worth granted by God, not other humans) distinguished the North, especially when the two regions were more alike than dissimilar in other cultural, political, religious, and historical aspects. Without the existence of slavery, the concept of honor would have withered in the South, Ayers shows, because “honor presupposes undisguised hierarchy, and a slave society builds an incontrovertible hierarchy into basic human relations” (26). Without this distinctive social ranking, the aggressive white egalitarianism of the South could not have sustained the ideal of honor. In addition, slavery codified honor by granting it to one visually obvious group while denying it to another, and offered it to poor whites who could share in the collective honor of the “master class” as long as a slave class existed to act as an enabling foil to a master class (26). In other words, since “slavery generated honor,” taking away slavery took away white southern honor (26–27), or so antebellum white Southerners believed, since they did not yet have the benefit of postwar history to show them that race could replace slavery as an enforcer of honor.

  Kenneth Greenberg has also qualified aspects of Wyatt-Brown’s interpretation. Although more narrowly focused on the southern leadership class, Greenberg concurs with Wyatt-Brown’s focus on a distinctively southern compulsion for personal honor, but lays more stress on the importance of slavery when he defines honor as the coexistence of “personal autonomy and a distrust of power” with “assertion of power over others.” See Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) and Honor and Slavery (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). The quotation is from Masters and Statesmen, xi.

  71. “The Fight,” a popular antebellum story by Georgia writer Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, illustrates important points about southern honor among nonslaveholding white men. “The Fight” is about two close friends, Billy Stallings and Bob Durham. One day, Billy unwittingly insults Bob’s wife, without knowing who she is. Despite the friendship between the two men, both recognize that the insult cannot be allowed to pass, because it would question Bob’s right and ability to control his wife and protect her reputation. Consequently, Billy and Bob engage in an eye-gouging, biting, poking, and kicking brawl, by the end of which Bob has lost his left ear and one of his fingers, and Bill has lost the tip of his nose. See Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, “The Fight,” in Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents &c in the First Half Century of the Republic, By a Native Georgian (New York: Harper, 1851), 53–64. Though fictional, this story commented on a social reality: the incidence of personal violence among white southern men exceeded national rates, and fights often arose from perceived insults or slights. For a scholarly look at the importance of the fight to securing honor among the southern white yeomanry, see Elliott J. Gorn, “Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch”: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry,” American Historical Review 90:1, supplement to vol. 90 (February 1985), 18–43. For the extraordinarily high rates of interpersonal violence in the ante-bellum South, see Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 9–33. For the connection between violence, honor, secession, and the Civil War, see Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  72. Charles Trueheart to sister, March 1, 1861 (misdated: the letter followed Lincoln’s Inaugural Address, so must have been written after March 4, 1861), Charlottesville, Va., in Edward B. Williams, ed., Rebel Brothers: The Civil War Letters of the Truehearts (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1995), 21–22.

  73. Lt. James Langhorne, Fourth Va., to father, June 5, 1861, Maryland Heights, Va., Langhorne Family Papers, VHS.

  74. Pvt. Ivy Duggan, Fifteenth Ga., to Central Georgian, September 13, 1861, Camp Taylor, Centreville, Va., Ivy W. Duggan Letters, GDAH. Duggan was specifically referring to the doctrines of Hinton Rowan Helper, a white North Carolinian who, in his 1857 book The Impending Crisis, argued that slavery harmed the economic interests of southern non-slaveholding whites, who should seek peaceful ways to abolish it gradually. For his trouble, Helper was run out of the South, but as Duggan’s comments show, many southern whites remained disturbed by his ideas.

  75. “The Irrepressible Conflict,” Richmond Enquirer, October 2, 1860, p. 1.

  76. Pvt. Thomas Taylor, Sixth Ala., to father, December 19, 1861, Manassas Junction, Va., Thomas S. Taylor Letters, ADAH.

  77. Liberator, May 10, 1861, quoted in James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (New York: Pantheon, 1965), 20.

  78. “An Appeal to the Seventh,” Lauman’s Own, 1:1, August 21, 1861, Ironton, Mo., CHS. Lauman’s Own was the newspaper of the Seventh Iowa.

  79. “The Advance into Virginia,” The American Union, July 5, 1861, p. 3, AAS. The American Union was the camp newspaper of the First R.I., R.I. Artillery, First Wis., and Second, Third, Eighth, Eleventh, and Twenty-first Pa.

  80. “The Results of this War,” The American Union, July 5, 1861, Martinsburg, Va., AAS.

  81. Capt. Alphonso Barto, Fifty-second Ill., to father, May 27, 1862, near Corinth, Miss., Alphonso Barto Letters, ISHL; The Illinois Fifty-Second, 1:1, January 15, 1862, Stewartsville, Mo., p. 3, ISHL.

  82. The First Kansas, 1:1, Oct. 16, 1861, Chilicothe, Mo., p. 1, KSHS.

  83. Lt. Charles Haydon, Second Mich., journal, October 20, 1861, near Mt. Vernon, Va., in Stephen W. Sears, ed., For Country, Cause and Leader: The Civil War Journal of Charles B. Haydon (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1993), 112.

  84. Pvt. W. D. Wildman, Twelfth Ind., to teacher, Miss Susan Griggs, November 2, 1861, near Sharpsburg, Md., Virginia Southwood Collection, UMOC.

  85. Soldier, Third Battery Wis. Artillery, to Wisconsin Patriot, November 30, 1861, Camp Utley, Wis., Quiner Papers, Reel 1, vol. 2, p. 77.

  86. Pvt. Leigh Webber, First Kans., to friends, the Brown family in Kansas, April 24, 1862, Tipton Mo., John S. Brown Family Papers, Reel 2, KSHS. Wracked by violence during the Kansas border wars, Kansas still experienced internal violence in the early days of the war itself.

  87. Pvt. Terah Sampson, Sixth Ky., to mother, December 29, 1861, Camp Siegel, Ky., Terah W. Sampson Letters, FC.

  88. As Robert Bellah explains in his classic explication of American millennialism, The Broken Covenant, nineteenth-century Americans, like their eighteenth-century fore-bears, “interpreted their history as having religious meaning” (2). More specifically, Old Testament and New Testament ideas of covenant influenced a particular brand of “strongly social, communal, or collective emphasis” in New England political thought that spread throughout the North in the antebellum era (17). See also Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 170–87, 205; Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), esp. 186; Miller, Stout, and Wilson, Religion and the American Civil War, esp. the Introduction; Moorhead, American Apocalypse, ix–x, chs. 2 and 3; and Philip Paludan, “Religion and the American Civil War,” in Miller, Stout, and Wilson, Religion and the American Civil War.

  89. For Robert Bellah’s discussion of reform (including abolitionism) inspired by the Second Great Awakening as “millennial republican idealism,” see The Broken Covenant, 49–52. Antebellum reform movements in the North have generated a
n entire subfield of historical literature reaching far beyond Bellah. Some good starting points include Robert H. Bremner, The Public Good: Philanthropy and Welfare in the Civil War Era (New York: Knopf, 1988); Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender & Fraternalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); and Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class. For the impact of associationist habits on the northern home front’s experiences of war, see George Fredrickson, “The Coming of the Lord: The Northern Protestant Clergy and the Civil War Crisis,” in Miller, Stout, and Wilson, Religion and the American Civil War; Judith Ann Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000); and J. Matthew Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front (Chicago; Ivan R. Dee, 1994), esp. ch. 7. Quotation from Gallman, 109.

  90. Joseph Scroggs Diary, May 10, 1861, West Point, Ohio, Joseph Scroggs Diary, CWTIC; “Charley of Nimrod,” First U.S. Sharpshooters, to Gazette, December 31, 1861, Washington, D.C., Quiner Papers, Reel 1, vol. 2, p. 52; “Wherefore are you Here Among Us?” The Ohio Seventh, July 4, 1861, Weston, Va., p. 2, WRHS. Some historians, such as Susan-Mary Grant in North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era, have argued that neither Northerners nor Southerners felt an emotional attachment to the government, instead feeling sentimentally disposed toward a particular idea of the “nation,” which for Northerners merged with the government during but not before the Civil War. Union recruits’ own words, however, display considerable emotional attachment to the Union government, as soon as (or in Scroggs’s case, even earlier than) they joined the Army, before the war had time to work the transformation for which Grant argues. In contrast, claims about the “best government on earth” are wholly absent from Confederate soldiers’ writing; Confederate troops could be just as sentimental as Union soldiers, but not about government.