What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  10. Predictably, loopholes led to fraud; state militias were suddenly filled with suspiciously high numbers of officers, while the number of Confederate teachers immediately multiplied. Draft dodgers would anger soldiers later in the war, but in the spring of 1862, the enlistment extension aspect bothered them the most. On the draft, see Albert Burton Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), esp. ch. 2. Later drafts eventually extended the age range of conscription to seventeen to fifty-five.

  11. Pvt. Benjamin Tamplin, Eleventh Tex., to wife, March 28, 1862, Houston, and Tamplin to wife, May 5, 1862, Camp Lubbock, Tex., William Tamplin Letters, CMM Ser. B, Reel 18. George Peebles, who had described the impact of conscription in Virginia on soldiers from the Old Dominion, noted that Confederate conscription was similarly “denounced by all.” See Pvt. George W. Peebles, Prince George Rifle Rangers, diary, April 13, 1862, Strong Wharf, Va., George W. Peebles Diary, CMM Ser. A, Reel 39. Peebles’s comments are important because they show that soldiers’ dissatisfaction was with the enlistment extension itself, rather than with the source of the extension. Virginia troops had objected just as strongly to state as to Confederate conscription, revealing that to them the matter was not one of states’ rights, but of their own rights, which they did not want violated by Virginia any more than by a national government.

  12. Emory Thomas, in The Confederate Nation (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), demonstrates that 1862 was a “revolutionary” year for the Confederate government. He credits “the creative efforts of Davis’ government” and “the statecraft of the Richmond government” with building a strong centralized government, and (less convincingly) equates the construction of such a government with the emergence of a strong, clear Confederate nationalism (ch. 7, esp. 165). Paul Escott details Davis’s attempts to build a stronger government (After Secession, ch. 3), but portrays the results as less successful, attributing Davis’s “failure” to his own imperious personality, his inept dealing with state leaders, and to social divisions within the southern population (detailed in chs. 4, 5, 7). In The Elements of Confederate Defeat: Nationalism, War Aims, and Religion (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), Beringer, Hattaway, Jones, and Still find that the Confederate government achieved remarkable success in its nationalization of railroads and industries, all of which contributed logistically to the war effort, but that the steps required to do so exerted a “debilitating effect on public morale” (22).

  13. In Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), Mark Neely challenges the characterization of white Southerners as “obsessive about liberty” (79). He also demonstrates that a strong desire for social order pervaded southern society, as evidenced in civilians’ request for the imposition of martial law to control the use of alcohol among rambunctious soldiers (ch. 2) and the lack of outcry at infringements on liberties such as the passport system requiring passes, ordinarily required only of blacks, of southern whites who wished to travel (pp. 1–6). Neely effectively shows that white Southerners did not place a high priority on universal civil freedoms or strict constructionist constitutional principles, and persuasively demonstrates that they seceded in part to uphold rather than undermine good order, but he does not address citizens’ resentment of policies that directly affected their own welfare. Specifically, he does not examine responses to impressment, tax-in-kind, or conscription, all of which Confederates did protest.

  14. For discussion of policies adopted by southern state governments and the Confederate government regarding the burning of cotton crops, stipulation that farmers grow food crops, impressment, and tax-in-kind, see Thomas, The Confederate Nation; Escott, After Secession; and Georgia Lee Tatum, Disloyalty in the Confederacy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000; first published in 1934), 17–20, 74.

  15. Lt. George Blakemore, Twenty-third Tenn., diary, June 2, 1862, Bowling, Miss., George Blakemore Diary, TSLA.

  16. Mississippi soldier taken prisoner at Fort Donelson, to Richmond Enquirer, April 1862, Camp Chase, Ohio, Richmond Enquirer, April 29, 1862, 1.

  17. Sgt. Frank Richardson, Second La., to mother, October 8, 1862, Hospital No. 2, Knoxville, Tenn., Frank Liddell Richardson Papers, ser. 1, SHC.

  18. Thomas Lawrence Connelly, Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 134–38, esp. 136.

  19. Pvt. James Williams, Twenty-first Ala., to wife, March 9, 1862, Fort Pillow, Tenn., in Folmar, From That Terrible Field, 45. Lawrence N. Powell and Michael S. Wayne emphasize elite slaveholding planters’ calculations of their best interests as factors in the shifting loyalties of residents of the Mississippi Valley in 1862 and 1863 in “Self-Interest and the Decline of Confederate Nationalism,” in Harry P. Owens and James J. Cooke, eds., The Old South in the Crucible of War (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1983), 29–45.

  20. Sgt. John French White, Thirty-second Va., to wife Martha, November 30, 1862, Fredericksburg, Va., John French White Papers, CMM Ser. A, Reel 42.

  21. See Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism, ch. 3, esp. pp. 44–45.

  22. Pvt. Theodore Honour, Twenty-fifth S.C., to wife, October 6, 1862, Camp Stono, S.C., Theodore Augustus Honour Papers, SCL.

  23. Louis Branscomb, Third Ala., to sister, December 2, 1862, near Fredericksburg, Va., Branscomb Family Letters, ADAH.

  24. Pvt. E. N. Brown, Forty-fifth Ala., to wife, June 9, 1862, Chickasaw Co., Miss., Edward Norphlet Brown Letters, ADAH.

  25. Lt. Marcus Willis, Thirteenth S.C., to parents, October 15, 1862, Danville, Va., Willis Family Papers, SCL.

  26. Georgia soldier James Boyd repeated Jesse Jones’s colorful remark in a letter to his brother, February 16, 1862, Mobile, Ala., in Lane, Dear Mother: Don’t Grieve About Me, 92.

  27. Books making the argument that class conflict led to the downfall of the Confederacy include Bailey, Class and Tennessee’s Confederate Generation; Escott, After Secession; Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage; Williams, Rich Man’s War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley; and Williams, Williams, and Carlson, Plain Folks in a Rich Man’s War: Class and Dissent in Confederate Georgia.

  28. See Roderick Henry Harper Letters, GDAH. Harper never did succeed in finding a substitute; his efforts to do so were cut short when he was killed in the Seven Days battles in June 1862.

  29. Confederate soldiers began to comment on desertion in 1862. See, for instance, Pvt. George Warfield, Seventeenth Va., to mother, May 29, 1862, near Richmond, George Warfield Letters, SHC. Although comparatively few secondary sources on desertion exist, later scholars have verified soldiers’ observations, showing that by 1862 bands of deserters roamed through parts of western North Carolina, northwestern South Carolina, northern Georgia, northeastern Alabama, and eastern Tennessee. In Desertion of Alabama Troops from the Confederate Army: A Study of Sectionalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), Bessie Martin demonstrates that the first of three periods of high desertion among Alabama troops began in February 1862 and lasted until February 1863. The other two periods ran from June 1863 through April 1864 and from the autumn of 1864 through April 1865. According to Ella Lonn’s Desertion During the Civil War (New York: Century, 1928), factors like physical hardships and anxiety for families inadequately provided for led many northeastern Georgia soldiers to desert, even before the enforcement of the Conscription Act. Mark Weitz’s discussion of desertion among Georgia troops, A Higher Duty (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), focuses on desertion after 1863 when the Union Army–generated “Register of Deserters” came into existence, and therefore adds little to Lonn’s discussion of 1862, but Weitz’s more comprehensive More Damning Than Slaughter: Desertion in the Confederate Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005) argues that both threats to home and a persistent undercurrent of southern localism contributed to making des
ertion a problem for the Confederacy in 1862 (see esp. chs. 4 and 5). Concern over the desertion rate prompted the Arkansas legislature to declare any discouragement of military service a crime in March 1862. In April, the Confederate War Department generated explicit measures for the arrest and return of deserters for the first time, as Moore discusses in Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy, esp. 129.

  30. Pvt. Thomas Warrick, Thirty-fourth Ala., to wife, June 15, 1862, Thomas Warrick Letters, ADAH.

  31. Pvt. E. N. Brown, Forty-fifth Ala., to wife, July 1862, near Tupelo, Miss., Edward Norphlet Brown Letters, ADAH.

  32. Sgt. Thomas Davidson, Nineteenth La., to sister, July 24, 1862, Tupelo, Miss., Thomas Benjamin Davidson Papers, SHC.

  33. Pvt. William Bellamy, Eighteenth N.C., diary, July 1862, near Richmond, William James Bellamy Papers, SHC.

  34. Southern clergy in particular decried sins like greed, avarice, and extortion as Yankee sins from which only southern independence could provide immunity. See, for example, Chesebrough, “God Ordained This War”; Faust, Creation of Confederate Nationalism, chs. 2 and 3; and Snay, Gospel of Disunion. Ironically, in 1862 Confederate soldiers began to complain about extortion and greed among Southerners, and such complaints would grow as the war progressed. Nonetheless, Confederate soldiers believed that southern society was superior to northern society, and Southerners were superior to Northerners; they based these convictions on the belief that southern society was more orthodox and respectful of a social order ordained by God than freewheeling northern society, where all manner of dubious reform movements reigned and where citizens seemed to evince little respect for the proper order of things.

  35. Pvt. James Manahan, Fourth Tex., to friend “Miss Willie,” April 4, 1862, Camp Wigfall, Va., James H. Manahan Letters, CAH.

  36. For the text and a discussion of General Order No. 28, Butler’s “Woman Order,” see Chester G. Hearn, When the Devil Came Down to Dixie: Ben Butler in New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 101–09; and Faust, Mothers of Invention, 207–13.

  37. For an introduction to the literature on “woman’s sphere” and women’s role in guarding the morals of the republic, which emerged in the wake of the American Revolution and which grew as the “market revolution” encouraged the development of an ideology (if not always reality) of “separate spheres,” see Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press 1977); Jeffrey, Frontier Women; Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experiences of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980); Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Sellers, The Market Revolution; Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966), 151–74. In Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), Elizabeth Varon examines the impact of the Civil War on the idea of female innocence, esp. on pp. 60–61. For a discussion of how all these ideas applied to white elite southern women during the Civil War, see Faust, Mothers of Invention.

  38. Capt. Tristrim Skinner, First N.C., to wife, May 25, 1862, Goldsboro, N.C., Skinner Family Papers, SHC.

  39. Pvt. John Street, Eighth Tex., to wife, May 20, 1862, Corinth, Miss., John K. and Melinda East Street Papers, SHC.

  40. Lt. James Harrison, Fifteenth Ark., to brother, September 5, 1862, Camp Priceville, Miss., James M. Harrison Letters, UAR.

  41. Pvt. W. H. Williams, Miss., to family, May 19, 1862, Corinth, Miss., W. H. Williams Letters, TSLA.

  42. Capt. James Williams, Twenty-first Ala., to wife, June 28, 1862, near Tupelo, Miss., in Folmar, From That Terrible Field, 92–93.

  43. Pvt. Willilam Bellamy, Eighteenth N.C., diary, July 1862, near Richmond, William James Bellamy Papers, SHC.

  44. Pvt. John Street, Eighth Tex., to wife, February 25, 1862, Tishomingo Co., Miss., John K. and Melinda East Street Papers, SHC.

  45. Confederate poem found by Union soldiers at Williamsburg, Va., reprinted in The Cavalier, July 16, 1862, Williamsburg, Va., p. 2, VHS.

  46. Lt. Macon Bonner, Co. B, N.C. Artillery, to wife, May 23, 1862, Fort Fisher, N.C., Macon Bonner Papers, SHC. The phenomenon Bonner described has been well documented by scholars since the 1980s, who have shown the central role that slaves played in using the circumstances created by Lincoln’s election and the war to free themselves. See, for example, Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 13–115; Berlin, Fields, Glymph, Reidy, and Rowland, Destruction of Slavery; and Berlin, Slaves No More.

  47. Capt. Robert Snead, Fiftieth Va., to wife, February 11, 1862, Clarksville, Tenn., Robert W. Snead Papers, CMM Ser. A, Reel 39.

  48. Pvt. Henry Graves, Macon (Ga.) Volunteers, to mother, June 13, 1862, Drewry’s Bluff, Va., Graves Family Correspondence, SHC.

  49. Pvt. Thomas Taylor, Sixth Ala., to parents, March 4, 1862, Manassas Junction, Va., Thomas S. Taylor Letters, ADAH.

  50. Pvt. Rudolf Coreth, Seventh Tex. Cavalry, to family, February 22, 1862, Camp Winston, Tex., in Minetta Altgelt Goyne, ed. and trans., Lone Star and Double Eagle: Civil War Letters of a German-Texas Family (Texas Christian University Press, 1982), 43.

  51. Pvt. Rudolf Coreth, Seventh Tex. Cavalry, to family, March 20, 1862, Camp Winston, Tex., in Goyne, Lone Star and Double Eagle, 48.

  52. Pvt. William Wilson, Twelfth Va. Cavalry, diary, May 25, 1862, between Newtown and Winchester, Va., in Festus Summers, ed., A Borderland Confederate (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962.)

  53. Cpl. Joseph Polley, Fourth Tex., to “Charming Nellie,” April 5, 1862, near Fredericksburg, Va., in Harold Simpson, ed., A Soldier’s Letters to Charming Nellie By J. B. Polley of Hood’s Texas Brigade (Gaithersburg, Md.: Butternut Press, 1984), 28–30. No battle occurred, according to Polley, because Union forces fled before the Texans reached their camp.

  54. Cpl. Nathan Parmater, Twenty-ninth Ohio, diary, February 25, 1862, Winchester, Va., Nathan Parmater Papers, OHS.

  55. Sgt. Cyrus Boyd, Fifteenth Iowa, diary, shortly after April 6, 1862, Pittsburg Landing, Tenn., in Mildred Throne, ed., The Civil War Diary of Cyrus F. Boyd, Fifteenth Iowa Infantry 1861–1863 (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint, 1977), 27–39. For an account of the severity of Shiloh and an analysis of soldiers’ reactions to it, see Joseph Allen Frank and George A. Reaves, Seeing the Elephant: Raw Recruits at the Battle of Shiloh (New York: Greenwood, 1989).

  56. Sgt. Cyrus Boyd, Fifteenth Iowa, diary, May 24, 1862, Corinth, Miss., in Throne, Civil War Diary of Cyrus F. Boyd, 52.

  57. Pvt. Leigh Webber, First Kans., to Miss Brown, August 12, 1862, Gibson Co., Tenn., John S. Brown Family papers, Reel 2, KSHS.

  58. Sgt. Felix Brannigan, Fifth N.Y., to sister, June 17, 1862, Fair Oaks, Va., Felix Brannigan Papers, PAW, Coll. 22, Reel 4.

  59. Pvt. Moses Parker, Third Vt., to Friend Eliza, May 26, 1862, seven miles from Richmond, in Jeffrey D. Marshall, ed., A War of the People: Vermont Civil War Letters (Hanover N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999), 80.

  60. Cpl. George Brookins, Third Minn., to brother, July 30, 1862, Benton Barracks, Mo., Brookins Family Letters, MNHS.

  61. Pvt. Roland Bowen, Fifteenth Mass., to mother, July 19, 1862, near Harrison’s Landing, Va., in Gregory A. Coco, ed., From Ball’s Bluff to Gettysburg…and Beyond: The Civil War Letters of Private Roland E. Bowen, 15th Massachusetts Infantry, 1861–1864 (Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, 1994), 115.

  62. Pvt. Caleb Beal, Fourteenth N.Y. Militia, to parents, February 4, 1862, Upton Hill, Va., Caleb Hadley Beal Papers, MHS.

  63. Pvt. Lewis Jones, Seventy-ninth Pa., to wife, February 12, 1862, Bar[r]en Co., Ky., Lewis Jones Papers, CWMC.

  64. Seventh Brigade J
ournal, 1:2, April 8, 1862, Columbia, Tenn., p. 1, TSLA. Soldiers from many regiments contributed to this newspaper, including soldiers of the First Wis. and the Twenty-ninth Pa.

  65. The Regimental Flag, 1:1, January 16, 1862, Accomac Co., Va., p. 3, UVA. The Regimental Flag was the camp newspaper of the Second Del. A similar incident occurred the following month among Indiana soldiers. When the soldiers of the Twelfth Ind. received socks and gloves from the Woldcotville Knitting Society, Pvt. A. W. Cummings wrote a thank-you note from the regiment linking civilians and soldiers in a shared struggle for “Liberty and Union.” See Pvt. A. W. Cummings, Twelfth Ind., to Knitting Society, Woldcottville, Ind., February 10, 1862, Washington, D.C., Virginia Southwood Collection, UMOC. For discussion of ties between northern men and their communities, see Mitchell, The Vacant Chair.

  66. “State Sovereignty, National Union,” The Federal Scout, 1:1, March 11, 1862, Columbus, Ky., p. 3, ISHL.

  67. Pvt. Jerome Cutler, Second Vt., to fiancée, January 5, 1862, Camp Griffin, Va., Jerome Cutler Letters, VTHS.

  68. Pvt. L.C.N., First Wis., to the Motor, September 9, 1862, Bowling Green, Ky., Quiner Papers, Reel 1, vol. 2, p. 181; Sgt. Thomas Davidson, Nineteenth La., to sister, July 24, 1862, Tupelo, Miss., Thomas Benjamin Davidson Papers, SHC.

  69. Although most white southern families worked their own modest farms, many northern soldiers perceived differences between their homes and the South, and claimed that nonwealthy southern whites were treated as inferior. George Landrum, for example, described Alabama poor whites as “really more enslaved than the negroes,” and “nearly in a starving condition, can get no work nor pay for what little they do.” Lt. George Landrum, Second Ohio, to sister, April 23, 1861, Huntsville, Ala., George W. Landrum Letters, WRHS. As Oakes in The Ruling Race and Wells in The Origins of the Southern Middle Class have shown, southern society was not as stratified as Northerners interpreted it (at least among whites), but Union soldiers’ perceptions of differences nonetheless influenced the conclusions they drew about the South and the War.