What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  26. Pvt. Robert Pitts, Twenty-first Iowa, diary, January 5, 1863, Houston, Mo., Robert Pitts Diary, Union Army Boxes, NYPL.

  27. Sgt. William Parkinson, Eleventh Ill., to wife, April 13, 1863, Providence Lake, La., William Parkinson Papers, EU.

  28. Cpl. Mitchell Thompson, Eighty-third Ill., to wife, April 10, 1863, Ft. Donelson, Tenn., Mitchell Andrew Thompson Letters, TSLA. Statements like Thompson’s contradicted what I had expected to find, since like many others, I had been taken in by McClellan’s (and later historians’) claims about soldiers’ antipathy to emancipation. Surprised when I continued to read soldiers repeating Thompson’s point, I decided to see if I was spotting a reliable pattern, or if I was just taking more notice of what I had not expected. To determine if there really was a predominant view, I categorized the statements of the first approximately one hundred (actually, 104, reason below) Union soldiers I encountered who explicitly mentioned the Emancipation Proclamation and clearly expressed an unequivocal opinion about it between September 1862, when the preliminary proclamation was issued, and June 1863, six months after the final proclamation. Of these, seventy-nine actively supported the proclamation while twenty-five opposed it. Subsequent soldiers did not change the proportion established by this set, so I saw no further need to inflate the numbers. While I make no pretense of having created a statistically valid sample, these first 104 soldiers consisted of ordinary enlisted men and junior officers who came from every region of the Union and served in every theater of the war. In other words, they were average soldiers, not men preselected on the basis of likely views. The idea was to look for a pattern in the full knowledge that a perfect statistical ratio is impossible (or at any rate, of dubious validity) at this remove; that is why I have not expressed the pattern in falsely precise-sounding terms such as “75.

  96 percent of soldiers supported and 24.

  04 percent opposed the proclamation.” Nonetheless, the proportions are decisive enough to establish a convincing pattern of support (though certainly not unanimity) for the Emancipation Proclamation among the rank and file. Obviously, many more soldiers wrote about slavery, mainly to demand its destruction as the only way to end the war, and many others treated the related topic of black enlistment, but only these 104 individuals who specifically named the Emancipation Proclamation (or an obvious synonym, such as “the President’s Proclamation”) in their writings in this specific time frame and took a stance on it are included in this total. Other troops mentioned or noted the proclamation with no objections, but they are not included in the total. Most of the 104 wrote about the proclamation more than once, and many claimed to express the views common to their whole regiments. No matter how many times an individual brought up the proclamation, he is only counted in this total once, except if he changed his mind, in which case he is counted once in both columns. That is why the number is 104 rather than 100.

  29. Pvt. Jasper Barney, Sixteenth Ill., to brother-in-law, October 24, 1862, Mound City Hospital, Kans., John C. Dinsmore Letters, ISHL.

  30. Gen. George McClellan to President Abraham Lincoln, July 1862, Harrison’s Landing, Va., in Sears, The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, 344–46.

  31. Pvt. Chauncey Welton, 103d Ohio, to parents and siblings, January 13, 1863, near Frankfort, Ky., Chauncey B. Welton Letters, SHC.

  32. Cpl. John Ellis, 111th Pa., to nephew, February 1863, Acquia Creek, Va., Ellis-Marshall Family Papers, HCWRTC.

  33. Pvt. Chauncey Welton, 103d Ohio, to uncle, March 5, 1863, Benson Bridge, Ky., Chauncey B. Welton Letters, SHC.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Pvt. Edwin Wentworth, Thirty-seventh Mass., to Argus, April 4, 1863, near Falmouth, Va., Edwin O. Wentworth Papers, LC.

  36. Sgt. Cyrus Boyd, Fifteenth Iowa, diary, February 9, 1863, on steamer Maria Downing, La., Cyrus F. Boyd Collection, KCPL.

  37. Sgt. John Babb, Fifth Md., to parents and siblings, October 3, 1862, near Harpers Ferry, Va., John D. Babb Family Papers, EU.

  38. Pvt. Phillip Reilly, Twenty-ninth Mo., to brother, March 31, 1863, before Vicksburg, Miss., Philip A. Reilly Letters, UMOR.

  39. Pvt. David Massey, Thirty-third Mo., to father, January 11, 1863, and to sister, January 26, 1863, near Helena, Ark., David T. Massey Letters, MOHS.

  40. Pvt. Terah Sampson, Sixth Ky., to mother, January 9, 1863, near Murfreesboro, Tenn., Terah W. Sampson Letters, FC.

  41. Sgt. Cyrus Boyd, Fifteenth Iowa, diary, February 9, 1863, on board steamer Maria Dowling, La., Cyrus F. Boyd Collection, KCPL.

  42. Pvt. Chauncey Welton, 103d Ohio, to parents, March 7, 1863, Benson Bridge, Ky., Chauncey B. Welton Letters, SHC.

  43. Pvt. Fred. Pettit, One Hundredth Pa., to parents and siblings, March 12, 1863, Newport News, Va., in William Gavin, ed., Infantryman Pettit: The Civil War Letters of Corporal Frederick Pettit, Late of Company C 100th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer Infantry Regiment, “The Roundheads” (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane, 1990), 65. Despite the title of this collection, Pettit was not promoted to corporal until June 23, 1864, just before his death.

  44. Sgt. David Nichol, Pa. Light Artillery, to parents and siblings, January 4, 1863, near Fairfax Station, Va., David Nichol Papers, HCWRTC.

  45. Pvt. Leigh Webber, First Kans., to Brown Family, July 24, 1862, Gibson Co, Tenn., John S. Brown Letters, Reel 2, KSHS.

  46. Capt. Amos Hostetter, Thirty-fourth Ill., to sister and brother-in-law, January 29, 1863, Murfreesboro, Tenn., ISHL.

  47. Sgt. James Dodds, 114th Ill., to friend Miss Lake, March 18, 1863, Helena, Ark., John L. Harris Papers, ISHL.

  48. Pvt. William Lewis, Twenty-sixth Mo., to wife and children, March 18, 1863, near Helena, Ark., William Emmerson Lewis Letters, UMOC.

  49. Pvt. John Nesbitt, 105th Ohio, to family, February 18, 1863, Murfreesboro, Tenn., James Nesbitt-Isaac Raub Papers, WRHS.

  50. A private in the Ill. Cavalry, to Editor, March 26, 1863, Germantown, Tenn., Quincy Whig and Republican, November 11, 1863, ISHL.

  51. Sgt. Sam Evans, Seventieth Ohio, to father, February 8, 1863, Lagrange, Tenn., Evans Family Papers, OHS.

  52. Sgt. William White, Tenth Vt., to friend Jacob, January 14, 1863, Whites Ford, Md., William White Civil War Letters, VTHS.

  53. Pvt. John Strayer, Twelfth Ind., to Miss Griggs, March 23, 1863, Camp Bayard, Va., Virginia Southwood Collection, UMOC.

  54. Sgt. Maj. Stephen Fleharty, 102d Ill., to Rock Island Argus, January 23, 1863, Gallatin, Tenn., in Reyburn and Wilson, “Jottings from Dixie,” 100.

  55. Pvt. and clerk Jacob Seibert, Ninety-third Pa., to father and all, January 10, 1863, near Falmouth, Va., Seibert Family Papers, HCWRTC.

  56. The Banner of the Ironsides, 1:1, April 4, 1863, Thibodaux, La., p. 1, WRHS. The Banner of the Ironsides was written by the 176th N.Y. to be “the official journal of the parish of Lafourche.”

  57. Pvt. Stephen Emerson, First Mass., to mother, March 24, 1863, Falmouth, Va., Stephen G. Emerson Correspondence, MHS.

  58. Pvt. James Brewer, Twenty-eighth Ill., to brother-in-law, April 16, 1863, Memphis, Tenn., Alley-Brewer Family Letters, UMOC.

  59. Pvt. Leigh Webber, First Kans. Cavalry, to Brown Family, May 10, 1863, Providence, La., John S. Brown Family Collection, Reel 2, KSHS.

  60. Pvt. John Benson, Fifth Kans. Cavalry, to Editor, April 15, 1863, Helena, Ark., Rock Island Weekly Union, May 6, 1863, p. 1, ISHL. Lt. Peter Eltinge, 145th N.Y., used similar logic in a letter to his father written from Port Hudson, La., on May 30, 1863 (Eltinge-Lord Family Papers, DU). A Michigan soldier claimed that western troops looked more favorably than the Army of the Potomac did on the use of black soldiers because Westerners, in his view, were generally more practical than Easterners. See Capt. Charles Haydon, Second Mich., journal, June 20, 1863, near Jackson, Miss., in Stephen W. Sears, ed., For Country, Cause and Leader: The Civil War Journal of Charles B. Haydon (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993), 333.

  61. Cpl. Charles Musser, Twenty-ninth Iowa, to father, June 29, 1863, Helena, Ark., in Popchock,
Soldier Boy, 58.

  62. Lt. Anson Patterson, One Hundredth Ill., to aunt, June 8, 1863, near Murfreesboro, Tenn., Anson Patterson Papers, ISHL.

  63. Pvt. Orra Bailey, Seventh Conn., to wife, March 13, 1863, Fernandina, Fla., Orra B. Bailey Papers, PAW, Coll. 10, Reel 2. The importance of black soldiers in battle in changing whites’ opinions on black soldiers is a main argument of Dudley Cornish’s classic study, The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1987), esp. ch. 13; and of two works by Joseph Glatthaar. Glatthaar’s Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: Free Press, 1990) documents changing attitudes among white officers of black regiments, while The March to the Sea and Beyond notes the views of enlisted men in Sherman’s army in 1864 and 1865.

  64. Cpl. Samuel Storrow, Forty-fourth Mass., to parents, April 13, 1863, Washington, N.C., Samuel Storrow Papers, MHS.

  65. Lt. Henry Kircher, Twelfth Mo., to father, April 19, 1863, Young’s Point, La., Engleman-Kircher Papers, ISHL.

  66. Joseph Williams, First N.C. Colored Volunteers, to Editor, June 23, 1863, Camp Wild, N.C., CR, July 4, 1863, p. 1. Published in Philadelphia, the Christian Recorder was an influential African American newspaper put out by the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

  67. Pvt. William D. Matthews, First Kans. Colored Infantry, to James Lane, January 12, 1863, Leavenworth, Kans., in Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, Black Military Experience, 70.

  68. Pvt. Terah Sampson, Sixth Ky., to mother, February 19, 1863, Readyville, Tenn., Terah W. Sampson Letters, FC.

  69. Pvt. Lucius Wood, 121st Ohio, to parents, March 5, 1863, Franklin, Tenn., E. G. Wood Family Papers, WRHS.

  70. Pvt. Chauncey Welton, 103d Ohio, to parents, June 15, 1863, Camp Stirling, Ky., Chauncey B. Welton Letters, SHC.

  71. See Voegeli, Free but Not Equal, for an account of this event.

  72. Samuel Cox, “Emancipation and its Results—Is Ohio to Be Africanized?” June 3,

  1862, Congressional Globe, Thirty-seventh Congress, Second Session, 1862, Appendix, 242–49.

  73. Pvt. George Cadman, Thirty-ninth Ohio, April 5, 1863, Corinth, Miss., George Hovey Cadman Letters, TSLA. Continuing in the same vein, Cadman later sent a copy of a poem he called “Ode to Copperheads.” The poem lists among Copperheads’ sins their efforts to provoke disquiet among soldiers by reducing the war effort to one purpose, and then impugning that purpose. He wrote, “Then to the soldiers they appealed / And tried to make them see, Sir, / That they were only in the field, / To set the Nigger free, Sir.” See Cadman to wife, April 12, 1863, Corinth, Miss.

  74. Philip Paludan attributes Republicans’ lackluster performance in 1862 to “wartime malaise,” (“A People’s Contest,” 101), much as the New York Times did in an editorial of November 5, 1862, and as Abraham Lincoln did in a letter of November 10, 1862, to Carl Shurz, in Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 5:493–95.

  75. Pvt. Constant Hanks, Twentieth N.Y. Militia, to mother, October 18, 1862, hospital in Washington, D.C., Constant Hanks Papers, DU. See also Lt. Henry Hubble, Fortieth N.Y., to mother, October 22, 1862, Lexington, Ky., Henry Hubble Papers, Folder 5, NYHS; Pvt. Theodore Skinner, 112th N.Y., to parents, November 2, 1862, Suffolk, Va., Theodore Skinner Letters, CWMC.

  76. Pvt. James Miller, 111th Pa., to brother, November 24, 1862, Harpers Ferry, Va., Miller Brothers Papers, Schoff.

  77. Pvt. John Garriott, Eighteenth Mo., to sister, November 1, 1862, in Mo. awaiting exchange, John Garriott Letters, UMOC; Capt. Maschel Manring, Fifty-sixth Ohio, diary, November 6, 1862, Helena, Ark., Maschel Manring Papers, UMOKC.

  78. When men registered for the Union draft, they fell into one of two categories. Class One consisted of all single men aged twenty to forty-five and all married men aged twenty to thirty-five. Class Two consisted of married men over thirty-five. No names would be drawn from Class Two until Class One had been exhausted. In practice, that meant that Class Two was virtually never called upon, because Class One was never completely emptied. See Peter Levine, “Draft Evasion in the North During the Civil War, 1863–1865,” Journal of American History 67 (1981), 816–34; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 600–01; and Eugene C. Murdock, One Million Men: The Civil War Draft in the North (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971).

  79. Pvt. John England, Ninth N.Y., to friend, March 28, 1863, Newport News, Va., John England Letters, Union Army Boxes, NYPL. See also Sgt. David Nichol, Battery E, Pa. Light Artillery, to folks at home, March 28, 1863, Acquia Landing, Va., David Nichol Papers, HCWRTC; Pvt. William Pedrick, 115th N.Y., to parents, June 1, 1863, Hilton Head, S.C., Benjamin Pedrick Papers, DU.

  80. Pvt. Phillip Reilly, Twenty-ninth Mo., to brother, March 31, 1863, before Vicksburg, Miss., Phillip A. Reilly Letters, UMOR.

  81. For figures on the draft, see McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 601; and Levine, “Draft Evasion in the North.”

  82. “The Constitution-Peace-Reunion,” Speech of Hon. Clement L. Vallandigham in the House of Representatives, January 14, 1863, Congressional Globe, Thirty-seventh Congress, Third Session, Appendix, 52–60, quotations from 57, 56. The speech was also reprinted as The Great Civil War in America (Washington, D.C.: no publisher, 1863).

  83. Sgt. Wilbur Hinman, Sixty-fifth Ohio, to friends, May 20, 1863, near Murfreesboro, Tenn., Wilbur F. Hinman Papers, WRHS. See also Sgt. Sam Evans, Seventieth Ohio, to father, February 8, 1863, Lagrange, Tenn., Evans Family Papers, OHS. President Lincoln commuted Vallandigham’s prison sentence to transportation to the Confederacy. Soon after being escorted under flag of truce to Confederate lines, Vallandigham discovered that the Confederacy did not suit him after all, and he headed for Canada, from which he launched his campaign to be elected governor of Ohio in 1863.

  84. Pvt. Chauncey Welton, 103d Ohio, to parents, June 15, 1863, Camp Stirling, Ky., Chauncey B. Welton Letters, SHC.

  85. Sgt. Aaron Beck, First Ohio, diary, April 5, 1863, Murfreesboro, Tenn., Aaron Beck Diary, KSHS.

  86. Pvt. Rohloff Hacker, Second Mich., to mother, January 6, 1863, near Falmouth, Va., Hacker Brothers Papers, Schoff.

  87. Sam Evans, for example, insisted to his father that emancipation was not a Republican or Democratic issue, but rather one that good Democrats should support just as heartily as Republicans, though they remained free to disagree on other points. See Sgt. Sam Evans, Seventieth Ohio, to father, February 8, 1863, LaGrange, Tenn., Evans Family Papers, OHS. Joseph Glatthaar discusses the evolving political views of and relationship between Sam and his father, Andrew Evans (both Democrats), in “Duty, Country, Race, and Party: The Evans Family of Ohio,” in Joan E. Cashin, ed., The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 332–57. In “‘A Viler Enemy in Our Rear’: Pennsylvania Soldiers Confront the North’s Antiwar Movement,” in Aaron Sheehan-Dean, ed., The View from the Ground (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006), Timothy Orr examines soldiers’ hardening attitudes toward Copperheads, but Orr interprets such sentiments as evidence of troops’ rejection of partisan politics generally. Men like Evans and many others suggest that soldiers actually retained a more sophisticated view of Democrats and of politics than Orr allows.

  88. Pvt. Jacob Behm, Forty-eighth Ill., to sister and brother-in-law, February 18, 1863, Bethel, Tenn., Jacob Behm Correspondence, CWTIC. See also Pvt. Ed Griswold, First Conn. Light Artillery, to brother, March 24, 1863, Beaufort, S.C., Edward, Charles, and Joel Griswold Papers, DU; Capt. R. M. Lyons, 126th Ohio, to friend, March 22, 1863, Martinsburg, Va., Shotwell Family Papers, OHS.

  89. Pvt. Jacob Behm, Forty-eighth Ill., to sister and brother-in-law, February 18, 1863, Bethel, Tenn., Jacob Behm Correspondence, CWTIC.

  90. Pvt. David James, Sixteenth Wis., to parents, March 23, 1863, Lake Providence, La., David Goodrich James Correspondence, SHSW.

  91. Pvt. Chauncey Welton, 103d Ohio, to parents, June 15, 1863, Camp Stirling, Ky., Chauncey B. Welton Letters, SHC.

  92.
Pvt. Edwin Wentworth, Thirty-seventh Mass., to father, fragment from summer 1862, Papers of Edwin O. Wentworth, LC.

  93. Cpl. Samuel Storrow, Forty-fourth Mass., to father, October 12, 1862, Boston, Samuel Storrow Papers, MHS.

  94. See Hadden, Slave Patrols.

  95. James Hemby to Governor Vance, September 4, 1863, Green Co., N.C., Zebulon Baird Vance Papers, Governor’s Papers, Box 6, NCDAH.

  96. A Soldier, Jonesboro, Ga., to Atlanta Southern Confederacy, October 30, 1862. Later, the number of slaves required for the exemption did drop to ten, but at the time the Georgia soldier wrote this letter, the exemption applied only to plantations holding twenty or more slaves.

  97. Sgt. Joseph Polley, Fourth Tex., to Nellie, March 20, 1863, Falling Creek, Va., in Simpson, A Soldier’s Letters to Charming Nellie, 99–100.

  98. Pvt. Thomas Warrick, Thirty-fourth Ala., to wife, March 4, 1863, Tenn., Thomas Warrick Letters, ADAH. See also Warrick’s letter of June 23, 1863.

  99. Pvt. Daniel Brown, Third N.C., to wife, April 12, 1863, Camp Roil, Va., Isaac Brown Collection, NCDAH. Most accounts claim that Davis threatened to order troops to fire on the crowd, but the most thorough recent biography of Davis, William J. Cooper’s Jefferson Davis, identifies the governor rather than Davis as the source of the threat (p. 448). As Private Brown’s remarks show, soldiers assumed the president had given the order, and they resented him for it.

  100. The Reveille, December 4, 1862, Shelbyville, Tenn., p. 1, TSLA. The Reveille was the paper of the Eighth Ark.

  101. Sgt. Felix Buchanan, First Tenn., to father, March 13, 1863, Richmond, Buchanan-McClellan Family Papers, SHC.

  102. Sgt. E. N. Brown, Forty-fifth Ala., to wife, February 27, 1863, Shelbyville, Tenn., Edward Norphlet Brown Letters, ADAH.

  103. Sgt. William Chunn, Fortieth Ga., to wife, January 17, 1863, Vicksburg, Miss., William A. Chunn Letters, EU.

  104. Sgt. E. N. Brown, Forty-fifth Ala., to wife, February 21, 1863, Tullahoma, Tenn., Edward Norphlet Brown Letters, ADAH.

  105. Pvt. J. C. Daniel, Thirtieth Ga., June 29, 1863, Miss., Confederate Miscellany, EU.