What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  91. Phillip S. Paludan, “The American Civil War Considered as a Crisis in Law and Order,” American Historical Review 77:4 (October 1972), 1020–21. For further elaboration on this theme, see Paludan, “A People’s Contest”: The Union and the Civil War 1861–1865, esp. part 1. White northern men’s heightened participation in local government should not obscure the important truth that the right to vote was just as widespread among most white Southerners, and that voting rights constituted a critical element of white southern men’s identities as men. Nonetheless, a significant distinction remains: participating in government in ways beyond voting was more possible in the North because there were more local governments and therefore more offices with more impact on daily life than in the South, where most seemed to prefer a more hands-off attitude toward local government.

  92. For the importance of soldiers’ political identities to their wartime service, see Joseph Allan Frank, With Ballot and Bayonet: The Political Socialization of American Civil War Soldiers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998).

  93. The Advance Guard, August 28, 1861, Ironton, Mo., p. 2, AAS. The Advance Guard was the paper of the Seventeenth Ill. Leigh Webber made an almost identical point. See Leigh Webber to friend, January 31, 1861, Page Co., Iowa, John Stillman Brown Family Collection, Reel 2, KSHS. Webber enlisted in the First Kans. the following spring.

  94. Sgt. John Quincy Adams Campbell, Fifth Iowa, diary, July 9, 1861, Burlington, Iowa, in Mark Grimsley and Todd D. Miller, eds., The Union Must Stand: The Civil War Diary of John Quincy Adams Campbell, Fifth Iowa Volunteer Infantry (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), 2–3.

  95. Pvt. Jerome Cutler, Second Vt., to fiancée Emily, November 11, 1861, Camp Griffin, Va., Jerome Cutler Letters, VTHS; Chaplain A. C. Barry, Second Wis., to S. C. Tuckerman, Baltimore, published in Wisconsin State Journal, July 28, 1861, Quiner Papers, Reel 1, vol. 1, p. 74.

  96. “How Will it End?” The Advance Guard, August 28, 1861, Fredericktown, Mo., AAS.

  97. See, for example, “The Results of this War,” The American Union, July 15, 1861, (also July 5 and 6 issues), Martinsburg, Va., AAS. See also The Clinton Journal, July 4, 1861, Clinton, Mo., KSHS. The Clinton Journal was the paper of the First and Second Kans. In addition, see Gen. George McClellan, memorandum to President Lincoln, August 2, 1861, Washington, D.C., in Stephen W. Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860–1865 (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), 72. In The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. ch. 2, Mark Grimsley discusses how Northerners’ assumptions that most (or at least many) white Southerners were actually unionists at heart influenced conciliatory policy toward civilians, including noninterference with slavery.

  98. Liberator, August 30, 1861, in McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War, 40.

  99. A-A, May 11, 1861, p. 1. The Anglo-African, published in New York, was the most prominent black newspaper in the United States immediately prior to and during the Civil War.

  100. Sgt. Andrew Walker, Fifty-fifth Ill., to parents, Henderson, Ill., April 1861, Andrew J. Walker Papers, LC.

  101. Capt. John Callis, Seventh Wis., to Wisconsin State Journal, October 3, 1861, Camp Lyon, Md., Quiner Papers, Reel 1, vol. 1, pp. 276–77.

  102. The Cavalier, July 30, 1863, Williamsburg, Va., p. 2, VHS. The Cavalier was the newspaper of the Fifth Pa. Cavalry.

  103. Pvt. Jerome Cutler, Second Vt., to fiancée, August 17, 1861, Washington, D.C., Jerome Cutler Letters, VTHS.

  104. Chaplain A. C. Barry, Fourth Wis., to Wisconsin State Journal, November 1861, eastern Va., Quiner Papers, Reel 1, vol. 1, p. 198.

  105. Sgt. E. C. Hubbard, Thirteenth Ill., to brother, August 9, 1861, Rolla, Mo., E. C. Hubbard Letters, UAR.

  106. See, for example, Hubbard’s December 1861 letter to his sister in which he complained that policies that did not strike at slavery were prolonging the war. Sgt. E. C. Hubbard, Thirteenth Ill., to sister, December 3, 1861, Rolla, Mo., E. C. Hubbard Letters, UAR.

  107. “Enlisted soldier,” Third Wis., to Wisconsin State Journal, October 1861, near Harpers Ferry, Va., Quiner Papers, Reel 1, vol. 1, p. 176. This soldier, and the many others who agreed with him, call into question the received wisdom that says that Union soldiers in general either did not care about or opposed the eradication of slavery, and that Democratic soldiers in particular were hostile to the suggestion of emancipation because slavery was viewed as a partisan issue. Certainly, in 1860, the Democratic platform of popular sovereignty (or allowing white male voters in a territory to vote on slavery there) contrasted with the Republican platform of nonextension, and before and during the war Republicans would be more likely to advocate aggressive action against slavery while Democrats would be more likely to resist such actions out of both racism and constitutionalism. Yet the experience of soldiering, more than their party affiliation, began to shape troops’ views on slavery from a very early date. Throughout the war, Democratic soldiers would proudly retain their political identification as Democrats, but they would also increasingly see two issues—Union and emancipation—as transcending political party. For this reason, while Republican and Democratic soldiers would always differ on some points (strict or broad construction of the Constitution, the suspension of habeas corpus, fiscal policy), many Democratic as well as Republican soldiers would push for an end to slavery as the only way to end the war, some from the very beginning of the war and even more as the war progressed.

  108. Pvt. John Boucher, Tenth Mo., to wife, December 7, 1861, Camp Holmes, Mo., Boucher Family Papers, CWMC, 2d Ser.

  109. For a discussion of Butler’s “contraband” policy, see Berlin, Fields, Glymph, Reidy, and Rowland, Destruction of Slavery, 70–75.

  110. Pvt. Andrew Walker, Fifty-fifth Ill., to father, December 2, 1861, Camp Douglas, Chicago, Andrew J. Walker Papers, LC. For the First Confiscation Act see Silvana Siddali, From Property to Person: Slavery and the Confiscation Acts, 1861–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), esp. chs. 3 and 4.

  111. In September 1861, for instance, Lane burned the town of Osceola, Mo. For Lane’s activities during the war, see Castel, Civil War Kansas.

  112. For the text of Frémont’s proclamation, see War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (hereafter Official Records) (Washington, D.C.: 1880–1901), ser. 1, vol. 3, pp. 466–67. See McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 352–54, and Grimsley, Hard Hand of War, 123–24, for discussions of Frémont’s proclamation.

  113. Lt. E. P. Kellogg, Second Wis., to editor of Wisconsin State Journal, November 12, 1861, Camp Tillinghast, Va., Quiner Papers, Reel 1, vol. 1, p. 155.

  114. A. G. Dinsmore, Thirteenth Mo., to unidentified friend, who had the letter published in the Wisconsin State Journal, October 14, 1861, Benton Barracks, Mo., Quiner Papers, Reel 1, vol. 2, p. 11.

  115. Sgt. E. C. Hubbard, Thirteenth Ill., to brother, September 18, 1861, Rolla, Mo., E. C. Hubbard Letters, UAR.

  116. Capt. William Dunham, Thirty-sixth Ohio, to wife, October 28, 1861, Summersville, Va. William Dunham Letters, CWMC.

  117. Capt. William Dunham, Thirty-sixth Ohio, to father-in-law, November 15, 1861, Summersville, Va. William Dunham Letters, CWMC.

  118. Pvt. Adam Marty, First Minn., to friend, October 10, 1861, Camp Stone, Va., MNHS.

  119. Cpl. S. H. Helmer, Tenth Wis., to a friend, November 1861, Camp Abercrombie, Shepherdsville, Ky., Quiner Papers, Reel 1, vol. 2, p. 32. See also Sgt. C. Frank Shepard, First Mich. Cavalry, to wife, October 14, 1861, Washington, D.C., C. Frank Shepard Papers, Schoff; Pvt. George Baxter, Twenty-fourth Mass., to brother Jim, December 14, 1861, near Annapolis, Md., George H. Baxter Correspondence, MHS.

  120. Pvt. Leigh Webber, First Kans., to Brown family, June 27, 1862, Trenton, Tenn., John S. Brown Family Papers, Reel 2, KSHS.

  121. Sgt. E. C. Hubbard, Thirteenth Ill., to brother, October
18, 1861, Linn Creek, Mo., E. C. Hubbard Letters, UAR.

  122. Oakes, The Ruling Race, 39.

  123. M., Eighth Wis., to Wisconsin State Journal, November 15, 1861, Pilot Knob, Mo., Quiner Papers, Reel 1, vol. 2, p. 22. A Wisconsin soldier similarly claimed that slavery led to a society with “no church bells, no schools, no education,” and forced Southerners to live “in a state of mental darkness.” C. McD, Eighth Wis., to Gazette, November 18, 1861, Pilot Knob, Mo., Quiner Papers, Reel 1, vol. 2, pp. 22–23.

  124. Chaplain William Gibson, Forty-fifth Pa., to children, March 25, 1862, Otter Island, S.C., William J. Gibson Letters, HCWRTC.

  125. A vast literature exists on the “middle-class culture” of the antebellum and Civil War–era United States, particularly the North. As Mary Ryan has shown in Cradle of the Middle Class and historians too numerous to mention have confirmed, a middle class that encompassed much more than simply the middle-income brackets was imbued with what Ryan and others depict as “middle-class values.” These values included literacy, self-discipline, domesticity and family life, and especially the value of work. As Charles Sellers put it, “The so-called middle class was constituted not by mode and relations of production but by ideology…. A numerous and dispersed bourgeoisie…mythologiz[ed]class as a moral category. Scorning both the handful of idle rich and the multitude of dissolute poor, they apotheosized a virtuous middle class of the effortful.” See Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 237. That middle-class ideology and values pervaded even western and frontier states in the North is demonstrated by Jeffrey, Frontier Women, esp. the Introduction and chs. 1 and 4. For the applicability of northern middle-class ideology to Union soldiers, see esp. Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers and The Vacant Chair; and Hess, Liberty, Virtue and Progress.

  126. For example, Olmsted described pigs wandering around a southern neighborhood because dissipated owners could not be bothered, as he saw it, to build a respectable pen. Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States (New York: Knopf, 1953), first published as installments in the New York Times, and then as three volumes: A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey Through Texas (1857), and A Journey in the Back Country (1860). The pig passage appears in The Cotton Kingdom, 31. For the impact of travel literature, especially that of Olmsted, on northern readers, see Grant, North Over South, ch. 4.

  127. Jonathan Wells has shown in The Origins of the Southern Middle Class 1800–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) that a southern middle class that shared many attributes of the northern middle class, but differed in its staunch support of slavery, did in fact exist and had been growing stronger since the 1850s, especially in towns and cities. Yet Union troops in 1861 proved more inclined to comment on the aspects of southern society that looked most unfamiliar to them, but that they had been most conditioned to look for in the “exotic South.”

  128. M., Eighth Wis., to Wisconsin State Journal, November 15, 1861, Pilot Knob, Mo., Quiner Papers, Reel 1, vol. 2, p. 22. For the theme of moral contagion, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); and Charles E. Rosenberg, Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

  129. Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 126. Soldiers might not have had the statistical information available, but observation of and conversation with slaves told them that family separation was a common fact of slave life.

  130. W.D.W., Seventh Wis., to his hometown newspaper, December 16, 1861, Arlington Heights, Va., Quiner Papers, Reel 1, vol. 2, pp. 4–5. On the “fancy trade” aspect of the slave market, see Johnson, Soul by Soul.

  131. Sgt. Cyrus Boyd, Fifth Iowa, diary, February 10, 1863, Providence Lake, La., Cyrus F. Boyd Collection, KCPL.

  132. Pvt. Henry Bandy, Ninety-first Ill., to brother and sister, January 12, 1862, Ky., Henry Bandy Letters, ISHL.

  133. Q.M. Sgt. Thomas Low, Twenty-third N.Y. Artillery, diary, March 29, 1862, Washington, D.C., Thomas Low Papers and Diary, DU.

  134. Pvt. Adelbert Bly, Thirty-second Wis., to Anna, November 9, 1862, Memphis, Tenn., Adelbert M. Bly Correspondence, SHSW.

  135. Chip, Eleventh Wis., to hometown newspaper, December 21, 1861, Sulphur Springs, Ky., Quiner Papers, Reel 1, vol. 2, p. 47.

  136. The discussion here contributes to the long-running debate about “who freed the slaves.” Ira Berlin and his coauthors have argued that slaves themselves were primarily responsible for linking emancipation and the Union war effort, ensuring that a war for Union also became a war for freedom. See Berlin, Fields, Glymph, Reidy, and Rowland, Destruction of Slavery, 1–56. James M. McPherson has countered with “Who Freed the Slaves?,” where he emphasizes Abraham Lincoln’s key role in shaping slave policy, a slightly different proposition from freeing individual slaves. I argue that enlisted Union soldiers proved to be the crucial link between the two halves of the emancipation equation. Enlisted Union soldiers provided the mechanisms slaves used to push the phenomenon of individuals freeing themselves into the accomplishment of emancipation as war policy, which required the cooperation of military leaders and policy makers, all under the leadership of President Lincoln. Slaves convinced enlisted soldiers, who modified both their beliefs and their behavior. Meanwhile, enlisted men used letters, camp newspapers, and their own actions to influence the opinions of civilians and political authorities. These civilians, lacking soldiers’ direct contact with slaves, the South, and the experience of living on the front lines in a war that most people wanted over, lagged behind soldiers in their stances on emancipation. Enlisted troops also often outpaced their superior officers in the speed with which they came to oppose slavery. The point is not really that slaves convinced soldiers, and then soldiers turned around and dutifully repeated their new views to officers. Instead, through a series of overlapping experiences and interactions with slaves, enlisted men changed their ideas and then their behavior, leaving their officers with little choice but to sanction the new behavior with policy shifts. In a similar fashion, as Mark Grimsley has argued in The Hard Hand of War, interactions with white Southerners led Union soldiers to change their attitudes and behavior regarding property policy, which in turn required officers to implement policy shifts. I would like to thank Aaron Sheehan-Dean for pointing out the parallel with Grimsley’s argument.

  137. Pvt. John Foster, Second Miss. Battalion Cavalry, to aunt, October 14, 1861, Richmond, John Foster and Family Correspondence, CMM Ser. B, Reel 5.

  138. John Foster to father, January 11, 1861, New Orleans, John Foster and Family Correspondence, CMM Ser. B, Reel 5. In May 1861, Foster enlisted as a private in the Second Miss. Battalion Cavalry.

  2: “Richmond Is a Hard Road to Travel”: Gaps Between Expectation and Experience

  1. Georgia soldier James Boyd to brother, February 16, 1862, Mobile, Ala., in Lane, Dear Mother: Don’t Grieve About Me, 98.

  2. Analyses of the composition of Confederate nationalism include Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism; Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South; John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860 (New York: Norton, 1979); and Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868. McCardell focuses on the writings of elites to argue that a separate southern cultural nationalism predated the war. Faust depicts Confederate patriotism as a work in progress, forced to respond to events (especially the travails of wartime), but expressed mainly through cultural expressions such as print media and symbols. The relationship between self-interest and Confederate patriotism is not a central concern of McCardell’s or Faust’s work. Escott sees the diverging interests of elite an
d nonelite Southerners as strong factors that militated against the development of an effective Confederate patriotism. Rubin’s work, the most recent, struggles to explain self-interested behavior by white Southerners as aberrational and much-regretted exceptions to an emotional commitment to the Confederacy that always existed but sometimes got momentarily eclipsed by self-interest. This analysis differs in its emphasis on self-interest, or more specifically, commitment to the needs and interests (both material and ideological) of white southern families, as central to (and not a detraction from) Confederate patriotism.

  3. Lt. James Williams, Twenty-first Ala., to wife, June 20, 1862, Gun Town, Miss., in Folmar, From That Terrible Field, 81.

  4. Pvt. Charles Kerrison, Second S.C., to cousin, July 19, 1862, Camp McLaws, Va., Kerrison Family Papers, SCL.

  5. Pvt. John Wall, Eleventh Tex. Cavalry, to brother, January 7, 1862, Washington Co., Ark., John Wall Letters, CWMC.

  6. Pvt. William Bellamy, Eighteenth N.C., diary, June 10, 1862, near Richmond, Va., William James Bellamy Papers, SHC.

  7. Lt. James Harrison, Fifteenth Ark., to brother, May 26, 1862, near Corinth, Miss., James M. Harrison Letters, UAR.

  8. Pvt. James Branscomb, Third Ala., to sister, April 11, 1862, in Va., Branscomb Family Letters, ADAH.

  9. Pvt. George W. Peebles, Prince George Rifle Rangers, diary, January 7, 1862, near Hardy’s Bluff, Va., George W. Peebles Diary, CMM Ser. A, Reel 39. Peebles noted the near accuracy of his predictions the following month, after the “unjust drafting” law passed. “Stirring times abound[ed]” among his fellow soldiers, with several of them defying the law and “refusing to re-enlist,” he reported. See Peebles, diary, February 11–12, 1862, near Hardy’s Bluff, Va., George W. Peebles Diary, CMM Ser. A, Reel 39.