What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  33. Sgt. E. C. Hubbard, Thirteenth Ill., to brother, April 12, 1864, Woodville, Ala., E.C. Hubbard Letters, UAR. Hubbard is especially interesting because he explicitly admitted that the war had changed his views on slavery. In this same letter he told his brother that before the war, he “respected slavery,” and saw “a negro [as] a parallel case of a dog,” but that by spending time in the South and witnessing slavery, he had “seen its practical workings,” and had been “forced to change my opinion.” For more on emancipation as a moral imperative, see Pvt. John Cate, Thirty-third Mass., to wife, March 20, 1864, and April 24, 1864, Lookout Valley, Tenn., in Jean M. Cate, ed., If I Live to Come Home: The Civil War Letters of Sergeant John March Cate (Pittsburgh: Dorrance, 1995), 266, 269–70; Pvt. Edwin Wentworth, Thirty-seventh Mass., to wife, May 3, 1863, Brandy Station, Va., Edwin O. Wentworth Papers, LC; Pvt. Jacob Behm, Forty-eighth Ill., to sister and brother-in-law, February 1, 1864, Scottsboro, Ala., Jacob Behm Correspondence, CWTIC. Similarly, Charles Henthorn wrote to influence his sister, whose resolve on the slavery question was faltering: “We cannot hope for a permanent change until the fruitful cause of all this evil that is so vividly apparent all around and about us throughout all our land is removed.” See Pvt. Charles Henthorn, Seventy-seventh Ill., to sister, March 7, 1864, on furlough in Quincy, Ill., Charles Henthorn Letters, Schoff.

  34. Pvt. Ransom Bedell, “American Slavery,” an essay written for his cousin, summer 1863, Ransom Bedell Papers, ISHL.

  35. Cpl. James Miller, 111th Pa., to brother, September 7, 1863, near Ellis Ford, Va., Miller Brothers Papers, Schoff. Outrage at the sight of light-skinned slave children at the mercy of their master-fathers persisted as a popular theme during this period. For other examples see Capt. Alphonso Barto, Fifty-second Ill., to father, July 7, 1863, Corinth, Miss., Alphonso Barto Letters, ISHL; Pvt. Constant Hanks, Twentieth N.Y. Militia, to mother, August 5, 1863, near Warrington, Va., Constant Hanks Papers, DU; Sgt. Henry Crydenwise, Ninetieth N.Y., to parents and all, October 22, 1863, Bayou Boeuf, La., and June 2, 1864, Port Hudson, La., Henry Crydenwise Papers, EU; Sgt. Adelbert Bly, Thirty-second Wis., to sweetheart, October 29, 1863, Memphis, Tenn., Adelbert M. Bly Correspondence, SHSW; The Corinth Chanticleer, July 31, 1863, Corinth, Miss., p. 1, MNHS. References to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (usually claiming that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel did not go far enough in portraying the evils of slavery) abounded in late 1863 and early 1864. See, for example, Pvt. Constant Hanks, Twentieth N.Y. Militia, to mother, September 13, 1863, eastern Va., Constant Hanks Papers, DU; Q.M. Uberto Burnham, Seventy-sixth N.Y., to parents, October 29, 1863, Bristoe Station, Va., U. A. Burnham Papers, NYSL; Pvt. James Horrocks, Fifth N.J. Artillery, to parents, November 26, 1863, Washington, D.C., in A. S. Lewis, ed., Dear Parents: An Englishman’s Letters Home from the American Civil War (London: Victor Gollancz, 1982), 48–49; Pvt. Edwin Van Cise, Forty-first Iowa, diary, July 30, 1864, between Moscow and Memphis, Tenn., Edwin Van Cise Diary, LC; Pvt. Justus Silliman, Seventeenth Conn., to mother, May 30, 1864, St. Augustine, Fla., in Edward Marcus, ed., A New Canaan Private in the Civil War. Letters of Justus M. Silliman, 17th Connecticut Volunteers (New Canaan, Conn.: New Canaan Historical Society, 1984), 72.

  36. For a succinct treatment of nineteenth-century ideas about the family as a haven from the marketplace and women as upholders of morality within that haven, see Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18:2 part 1 (summer 1966), 151–74.

  37. The moral contagion theme proliferated in antebellum periodicals, popular literature, and even church sermons. For discussion of the theme of “moral contagion,” see Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women; and Rosenberg, Cholera Years.

  38. In response, Cooke fumed, “to think that these slave-holders buy and sell each other’s bastard children is horrible”; he then compared life in the South to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Pvt. Chauncey Cooke, Twentieth Wis., to sister, September 10, 1864, western Ga., Wisconsin Magazine of History 5:1, 98.

  39. Edward Bartlett, formerly private in Forty-fourth Mass., now recruiter of black troops, to sister, November 19, 1863, Nashville, Tenn., Edward J. Bartlett Correspondence, MHS.

  40. Pvt. (acts as Ass’t Sgn.) Robert Winn, Third Ky. Cavalry, to sister, October 2, 1863, Bowling Green, Ky., Winn-Cook Papers, FC.

  41. Pvt. Leigh Webber, First Kans. Cavalry, to Sarah Brown, July 12, 1863, Lake Providence, La., John S. Brown Family Papers, KSHS.

  42. Sgt. John England, Ninth N.Y., to fiancée, July 24, 1863, Fort Monroe, Va., John England Letters, Union Army Boxes, NYPL.

  43. Robert Winn, full of disgust and shame, reported on this event to his sister. Pvt. (acts as Ass’t Sgn.) Robert Winn, Third Ky. Cavalry, to sister, July 15, 1863, near Russellville, Ky., Winn-Cook Papers, FC.

  44. Lt. Henry Crydenwise, Seventy-third U.S. Colored Troops, to parents and all, December 22, 1863, Bayou Boeuf, La., Henry Crydenwise Papers, EU. Bell Wiley in The Life of Billy Yank and Leon Litwack in Been in the Storm so Long both emphasize Union Army cruelty to blacks. While mean and hateful acts were committed, the evidence suggests that they were not as widespread, nor were the attitudes that gave rise to them so uniformly dominant, as Wiley and Litwack suggest. In ch. 5 of Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers, Joseph Glatthaar discusses instances of racism and cruelty toward black soldiers on the part of some white officers, but he also shows that cruelty was not universal. Instead, treatment varied widely.

  45. Pvt. William Lewis, Twenty-sixth Mo., to wife, July 11, 1863, Big Black River, Miss., William Emmerson Lewis Letters, UMOC. While Lewis did not specifically mention colonization, or schemes for the transportation of African Americans outside of the United States to a colony in Africa or Latin America, such plans did circulate in the 1860s, as they had for much of the nineteenth century, and may have been what Lewis had in mind.

  46. The Mail Bag, March 28, 1864, Lexington, Ky., Private collection of Donna Casey. The Mail Bag was the newspaper of the Seventy-ninth Ohio and Fifth Ohio Battery. Sometimes also called The Army Mail Bag.

  47. Pvt. Wilbur Fisk, Second Vt., to Green Mountain Freeman, August 13, 1863, near Warrenton, Va., in Emil and Ruth Rosenblatt, eds., Hard Marching Every Day: The Civil War Letters of Private Wilbur Fisk, 1861–1865 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992), 135. That Fisk wrote this letter to a public forum, his hometown newspaper, suggests that he may have hoped to help change the attitudes he wrote about so dolefully.

  48. Capt. Carlos Lyman, One Hundredth U.S. Colored Troops, to sister, February 12, 1865, Camp Foster, Tenn., Carlos Parsons Lyman Papers, WRHS.

  49. Lt. Joseph Scroggs, Fifth U.S. Colored Troops, diary, March 30, 1864, near Norfolk, Va., Joseph Scroggs Diary, CWTIC.

  50. Sgt. J. G. Nind, 127th Ill., November 1863, Vicksburg, Miss., in Lydia Minturn Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters from Camp, Battle-field and Prison (New York: Bruce and Huntington, 1865), 291.

  51. Pvt. Constant Hanks, Twentieth N.Y. Militia, to mother and sister, April 1, 1864, near Brandy Station, Va., Constant Hanks Papers, DU.

  52. Pvt. Willliam Lewis, Twenty-sixth Mo., to wife, July 11, 1863, Big Black River, Miss., Willliam Emmerson Lewis Letters, UMOC. New York soldier Haven Putnam commented that many Irish troops opposed black enlistment because “it makes the ‘d——d,’ dirty black nagur as good as a white man.” Since to Putnam that was exactly the point of black enlistment, he merely noted that he could make “no reply.” Pvt. G. Haven Putman, 176th N.Y., to Mary Loines, August 23, 1863, Bennet Carre, La., Papers of the Low-Mills Family, LC.

  53. Pvt. Arthur Van Horn, Seventy-eighth Ohio, to wife, December 31, 1863, Coliersville, Tenn., Arthur Van Horn Family Papers, LC.

  54. Recruiter Thomas Webster to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, July 30, 1863, Philadelphia, in Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, Black Military Experience, 96–98. Webster exaggerated when he called black enlistment the most popular measure, but it was certainly more popular than it had been a year pr
eviously.

  55. Lt. Henry Fike, 117th Ill., to wife, see letters of May 16, 1863, May 25, 1863, August 28, 1863, all from Memphis, Tenn., Henry Fike Correspondence, KU.

  56. Commissary Sgt. Richard White, Fifty-fifth Mass., to editor, January 27, 1864, Folly Island, S.C., CR, February 13, 1864, p. 2.

  57. Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, Black Military Experience, 104. Excerpts from Blunt’s report also appeared in recruiting posters targeting black volunteers. See Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, Black Military Experience, 104.

  58. Edward Augustus Wild, Report on raid against guerrillas on December 5, 1863, in N.C., written December 18, 1863, from Norfolk, Va., and Col. Draper’s Report of December 24, 1863, HQ N.C. Colored Volunteers, Portsmouth, Va., Edward Augustus Wild Papers, SHC.

  59. The Port Hudson Freemen, July 15, 1863, Port Hudson, La., p. 2, MOC. The Port Hudson Freemen was the paper of the Second R.I. Cavalry. Other references to growing support for black soldiers due to African Americans’ performance in battle include recruiting posters praising black valor reprinted in Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, Black Military Experience; Sgt. Hermon Clarke, 117th N.Y., to father, August 9, 1863, Folly Island, S.C., in Jackson and O’Donnell, Back Home in Oneida, 100. The role of black performance in battle as an agent in changing white opinion is a major theme of Dudley Cornish, The Sable Arm, and also appears in ch. 7 of Glatthaar, Forged in Battle.

  60. Capt. M. M. Miller, Ninth La. Volunteers of African Descent, to aunt, June 10, 1863, above Vicksburg, Miss., published in The Galena (Ill.) Advertiser, reprinted in the Anglo-African, July 11, 1863, p. 1.

  61. For more, see Glatthaar, Forged in Battle, esp. 81–84.

  62. Capt. Charles Berry, Tenth La. Volunteers of African Descent, to citizens of Bath, Mason Co., Ill., November 9, 1863, Goodrich’s Landing, La., Peoria Daily Transcript, December 19, 1863, p. 2. See also Pvt. Leigh Webber, First Kans. Cavalry, to Miss Brown, July 12, 1863, Lake Providence, La., John S. Brown Family Papers, KSHS. Webber was angry with the U.S. government because it had “not kept faith or been honest with the negroes.” The fact that black soldiers who performed comparable duties were paid less than white soldiers bothered Webber, who, after nearly a year of serving near black regiments, regarded the discrimination as disgraceful. See Chapter 5 for discussion of black soldiers’ equal pay struggle. See also Lt. Henry Crydenwise, First Corps d’Afrique, to parents and all, November 28, 1863, Bayou Boeuf, La., Henry Crydenwise Papers, EU.

  63. Ten Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism, and Race in Louisiana, 1862–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 71–73.

  64. Orderly Sgt. Isaiah Welch, Fifty-fifth Mass., to Editor, December 2, 1863, Folly Island, S.C., CR, December 19, 1863, p. 2.

  65. H. J. Maxwell, soldier turned recruiter, to Editor, January 30, 1864, Gallatin, Tenn., A-A, April 27, 1864, p. 4; Commissary Sgt. Richard White, Fifty-fifth Mass., to Editor, January 27, 1864, Folly Island, S.C., CR, Feb. 13, 1864, p. 2.

  66. G.E.S., Fifty-fourth Mass., to Editor, August 7, 1863, Morris Island, S.C., A-A, August 24, 1863, p. 1.

  67. Cpl. Henry Harmon, Third U.S. Colored Troops, to Editor, October 23, 1863, Morris Island, S.C., CR, November 7, 1863, p. 1.

  68. H. J. Maxwell to Editor, January 30, 1864, Recruiting office, Gallatin, Tenn., A-A, April 27, 1864, p. 4.

  69. Cpl. James H. Gooding, Fifty-fourth Mass., to President Lincoln, September 28, 1863, Morris Island, S.C., in Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, Black Military Experience, 385.

  70. H. J. Maxwell to Editor, January 30, 1864, Recruiting office, Gallatin, Tenn., A-A, April 27, 1864, p. 4. See also Sgt. Isaiah Welch, Fifty-fifth Mass., to Editor, December 2, 1863, Folly Island, S.C., CR, December 19, 1863, p. 2.

  71. Cpl. Henry C. Harmon, Third U.S. Colored Troops, to Editor, October 23, 1863, Morris Island, S.C., CR, November 7, 1863, p. 1.

  72. Sgt. Isaiah Welch, Fifty-fifth Mass., to Editor, December 2, 1863, Folly Island, S.C., CR, December 19, 1863, p. 2, and Sgt. Isaiah Welch to A-A, January 12, 1864, Folly Island, S.C., in Noah A. Trudeau, ed., Voices of the 55th: Letters from the 55th Massachusetts Volunteers (Dayton, Ohio: Morningside, 1996), 60.

  73. See, for instance, Patrick Rael’s argument that northern black leaders “sought not to revolutionize the existing discourse but instead to appeal to its core values in changing the public mind” on slavery and racial matters. Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), esp. chs. 1 and 7; quotation from p. 5.

  74. “Morgan,” Fifty-fourth Mass., to Esther Hawks, no place, no date, but with 1864 papers, Esther Hill Hawks Papers, PAW, Reel, 46 Coll. 18.

  75. Affidavit of a Pike County, Mo., slave, Aaron Mitchell, January 4, 1864, Louisiana, Mo., in Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, Black Military Experience, 237–38.

  76. Sgt. James Taylor, Second U.S. Colored Troops, to Editor, January 1, 1864, Ship Island, Miss., A-A, January 30, 1864, p. 1.

  77. Sgt. Richard White, Fifty-fifth Mass., to Editor, May 1, 1864, Folly Island, S.C., in Trudeau, Voices of the 55th, 102–03.

  78. The Black Warrior, May 17, 1864, Camp Parapet, La., p. 4, SHSW.

  79. See Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), for discussion of the uses (including political uses) of the Exodus theme among both antebellum northern black thinkers and southern slaves.

  80. “Barquet,” Fifty-fourth Mass., to Editor, March 24, 1864, near Jacksonville, Fla., A-A, April 16, 1864, p. 1.

  81. The Black Warrior, May 17, 1864, Camp Parapet, La., p. 2, SHSW. See also Sgt. James Trotter, Fifty-fifth Mass., to Edward Kinsley, March 13, 1864, Palatka, Fla., Edward Kinsley Papers, DU.

  82. Joseph E. Williams, formerly of the First N.C. Colored Volunteers, now a recruiter, September 7, 1863, Nashville, Tenn., CR, September 19, 1863, p. 1.

  83. On streetcar desegregation, see James McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (New York: Vintage, 1965), 261. For the text of an “Address of the Colored Convention to the Citizens of Kansas” issued by the Kansas convention on black suffrage, see McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War, 274–75.

  84. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 36; Peyton McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction: The Louisiana Experiment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 181.

  85. On Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, also known as the Ten Percent Plan, see LaWanda Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1981); William C. Harris, With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997); McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction; and Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction. Harris disagrees with the assessment (shared by the others) that Lincoln intended the plan largely as a war measure, and contends instead that the very lenient terms, including restoration of all rights and property for nearly all Confederates with no penalty or waiting period, were Lincoln’s actual blueprint for how all of Reconstruction should work after the war. During the war itself, the proclamation stirred up even more disagreement: many radical Republicans in particular were dismayed by the plan, seeing it not as a chance for expanding the rights of black Americans, but rather as assurance that no such expansion would ever happen because it would simply restore the old power structure that brought about secession in the first place. See William Frank Zornow, Lincoln and the Party Divided (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954).

  86. McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction, 197.

  87. Richard H. Black, Third U.S. Colored Troops, to Editor, October 24, 1863, Morris Island, S.C., CR, November 21, 1863, p. 1.

  88. For discussion of the relationship between soldiering and manhood for white soldiers, see Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, esp. ch. 3 and pp. 17–18, 42. See also Stephen Berry, All That Makes a Man. For
the relationship between manhood and the Civil War (including, though not exclusively, soldiering) for black men, see Kathleen Ann Clark, Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863–1913 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 13–24, 56–60.

  89. Sgt. Isaiah Welch, Fifty-fifth Mass., to Editor, October 15, 1863, Folly Island, S.C., CR, October 24, 1863, p. 2. Black Union regiments frequently included men from many states, not just the state that raised the regiment, because the various states authorized the enlistment of black soldiers at different times. Massachusetts began to raise black regiments earlier than many of its neighboring states; therefore, many black men (including Pennsylvanian Isaiah Welch) from all over the Northeast and Ohio joined the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Infantries, as well as the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry.

  90. A. T. Smith, La. Native Guards, in A-A, August 15, 1863, p. 4.

  91. “Wolverine,” Fifty-fifth Mass., to Editor, December 1863, CR, January 2, 1864, p. 2.

  92. Joseph Williams, recruiter, formerly of the First N.C. Colored Volunteers, to Editor, September 7, 1863, Nashville, Tenn., CR, September 19, 1863, p. 1.

  93. Pvt. Robert Fitzgerald, Fifth Mass. Colored Cavalry, diary, May 4, 1864, Readville, Mass., Fitzgerald Family Papers, SHC.

  94. Pvt. Edwin Van Cise, Forty-first Iowa, diary, July 30, 1864, between Moscow and Memphis, Tenn., Edwin Van Cise Diary, LC. Van Cise was a white soldier who befriended Pete when their regiments scouted together.

  95. Pvt. Spotswood Rice, Sixty-seventh U.S. Colored Infantry, to Miss Kitty Diggs, September 3, 1864, Benton Barracks, Mo., in Berlin, Fields, Glymph, Reidy, and Rowland, Destruction of Slavery, 689–90.

  96. Joseph Williams, recruiter, formerly of the First N.C. Colored Volunteers, to Editor, September 7, 1863, Nashville, Tenn., CR, September 19, 1863, p. 1.