5. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 18, 1861, p. 3. On baptism of fire, see also Joseph Allan Frank and George A. Reaves, “Seeing the Elephant”: Raw Recruits at the Battle of Shiloh (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989). The language of virginity was also often used to describe initiation into battle. See, for example, Creed Davis Diary, entry for May 11, 1864, VHS. On soldiers, killing, and religion, see also Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking, 1988), pp. 138–39.
6. Hugh McLees to John McLees, March 18, 1864, McLees Family Papers, SCL; Oliver Norton quoted in James I. Robertson Jr., Soldiers Blue and Gray (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 220–21.
7. “Sensations Before and During Battle,” clipping in George Bagby Scrapbook, 3:149, VHS; Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 279.
8. Byrd Charles Willis Journal, August 25, 1864, Diary Collection, ESBL. See T. I. McKenny to Earl Van Dorn, March 9, 1862, for description of federal dead being tomahawked and scalped in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1883–1901), ser. I, vol. 8, p. 194; see report of Thomas Livermore of the Fifth New Hampshire at Antietam ordering his men to put on paint and leading them with a war whoop, James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 123.
9. Osmun Latrobe Diary, October 16, 1862, May 10, 1863, transcript at VHS, original in Latrobe Papers, MS 526, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore. Redman quoted in Kent Masterson Brown, Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics, and the Pennsylvania Campaign (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), p. 234. On love of killing, see Theodore Nadelson, Trained to Kill: Soldiers at War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 72; Drew Gilpin Faust, “‘We Should Grow Too Fond of It’: Why We Love the Civil War,” Civil War History 50 (December 2004): 368; William Broyles, “Why Men Love War,” Esquire, November 1984, pp. 54–65; Bourke, Intimate History of Killing, p. 31; Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), pp. 92–93.
10. John W. De Forest, A Volunteer’s Adventures: A Union Captain’s Record of the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), pp. 111–12; Mills Lane, ed., “Dear Mother: Don’t Grieve About Me. If I Get Killed, I’ll Only Be Dead”: Letters from Georgia Soldiers in the Civil War (Savannah, Ga.: Beehive Press, 1990), p. 156; Robertson, Soldiers Blue and Gray, 220; William White, July, 13, 1862, William White Collection, PAHRC.
11. Henry Matrau, February 27, 1862, in Marcia Reid-Green, ed., Letters Home: Henry Matrau of the Iron Brigade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 20.
12. Bagby Scrapbook, vol. 2, p. 55, VHS. On comradeship as motivation to fight, see James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
13. Some historians cite the range of the new rifle as up to a thousand yards, but Gary W. Gallagher of the University of Virginia believes three hundred yards of effective use is a more accurate way to understand its capacities. My thanks to him for his help on this question. James M. McPherson estimates that 20 percent of the Confederate army and 8 percent of the Union army were draftees and substitutes. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), pp. 182–83.
14. Grossman, On Killing, pp. 24–25. Debate has raged about soldiers’ firing rates since the work of S. L. A. Marshall on nonfirers in World War II. See Grossman’s response to these debates on p. 333. See also S. L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (New York: Morrow, 1947), and John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking Press, 1976).
15. Val C. Giles, Rags and Hope: The Recollections of Val C. Giles, Four Years with Hood’s Brigade, Fourth Texas Infantry, 1861–1865, ed. Mary Lasswell (New York: Coward-McCann, 1961), p. 208.
16. S. H. M. Byers, “How Men Feel in Battle: Recollections of a Private at Champion Hills,” Annals of Iowa 2 ( July 1896): 449; Henry Abbott, July 6, 1863, in Robert Garth Scott, ed., Fallen Leaves: The Civil War Letters of Major Henry Livermore Abbott (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991), p. 188; Hess, Union Soldier in Battle, pp. 55, 52. On wounds, see George Worthington Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952), p. 113.
17. Kenneth Macksey and William Woodhouse, eds., The Penguin Encyclopedia of Modern Warfare: 1850 to the Present Day (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 111. On the changing nature and size of battle, see also John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking, 1976), pp. 285–336. On tactics, see James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 474–76, and Brent Nosworthy, The Bloody Crucible of Courage: Fighting Methods and Combat Experience of the Civil War (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003).
18. William Drayton Rutherford to Sallie F. Rutherford, June 23, 1864, William Drayton Rutherford Papers, SCL. On requirements, see Gerald Smith, “Sharp-shooters,” in David and Jeanne Heidler, eds., Encyclopedia of the Civil War (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC Clio, 2000), vol. 4, p. 1743. “To the Sharp Shooters of Windham County,” August 19, 1861 (Bellows Falls, Vt.: Phoenix Job Office, 1861), reproduced in Letters from a Sharpshooter: The Civil War Letters of Private William B. Greene, 1861–1865, transcribed by William H. Hastings (Belleville, Wis.: Historic Publications, 1993), p. 4.
19. Isaac Hadden to Brother, Wife and All, June 5, 1864, and June 12, 1864, Misc. Mss. Hadden, Isaac, NYHS; Henry Abbott to J. G. Abbott, July 6, 1863, in Scott, ed., Fallen Leaves p. 184. On snakes, see Richard Pindell, “The Most Dangerous Set of Men,” Civil War Times Illustrated, July–August 1993, p. 46.
20. Petersburg paper quoted in William Greene to Dear Mother, June 26, 1864, in Letters from a Sharpshooter, p. 226; De Forest, Volunteer’s Adventures, p. 144. On sharpshooters see also Hess, Union Soldier in Battle, pp. 106–7, and Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 140. On sharpshooting and its very personal nature, see “On the Antietam,” Harper’s Weekly, January 3, 1863, reprinted in Kathleen Diffley, ed., To Live and Die: Collected Stories of the Civil War (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 128–32. On changing technology of sharpshooting, see Ron Banks, “Death at a Distance,” Civil War Times Illustrated, March–April 1990, pp. 48–55.
21. Howell Cobb to James A. Seddon, January 8, 1865, in War of the Rebellion, ser. 4, vol. 3, pp. 1009–10; Mary Greenhow Lee Diary, April 3, 1864, WFCHS.
22. Thomas R. Roulhac quoted in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 566; Arkansas Gazette quoted in Gregory J. W. Urwin, “‘We Cannot Treat Negroes…as Prisoners of War’: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in Civil War Arkansas,” Civil War History 42 (September 1996): 202–3; W. D. Rutherford to Sallie F. Rutherford, May 2, 1864, William D. Rutherford Papers, SCL; Urwin, “We Cannot Treat Negroes,” pp. 197, 203. Whether or not Fort Pillow was a massacre has been debated since the day after the event itself. Recent historical work has established persuasively that it was. See John Cimprich, Fort Pillow: A Civil War Massacre and Public Memory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); John Cimprich and Robert C. Mainfort Jr., “The Fort Pillow Massacre: A Statistical Note,” Journal of American History 76 (December 1989): 831–33; and Andrew Ward, River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War (New York: Viking, 2005). For casualty statistics, see Cimprich, Fort Pillow, app. B, pp. 130–31, and table 7, p. 129. See also the official federal investigation: U.S. Congress, House Report (serial 1206), “Fort Pillow Massacre,” 38th Cong., 1st sess., no. 63, 1864. On killing black soldiers, see also Gary W. Gallagher, ed., Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 462, 465, 487.
23. George Gautier, Harder
Than Death: The Life of George Gautier, an Old Texan (Austin, Tex.: n.p., 1902), pp. 10–11.
24. John Edwards cited in Urwin, “‘We Cannot Treat Negroes,’” p. 205; Henry Bird to fiancée, August 4, 1864, Bird Family Papers, VHS, quoted in Chandra Miller Manning, “What This Cruel War Was Over: Why Union and Confederate Soldiers Thought They Were Fighting the Civil War,” Ph.D. diss. (Harvard University, 2002), p. 27.
25. Seddon quoted in John David Smith, “Let Us All Be Grateful That We Have Colored Troops That Will Fight,” in John David Smith, ed., Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. 45. See Kirby Smith to Samuel Cooper, in War of the Rebellion, ser. 2, vol. 6, pp. 21–22.
26. William Marvel, Andersonville: The Last Depot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 155.
27. Christian Recorder, July 30, 1864, p. 121; April 30, 1864, p. 69; August 22, 1863, p. 133.
28. W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 110; Christian Recorder, August 1, 1863, p. 126; Letter from Henry Harmon, Christian Recorder, November 7, 1863, p. 177; Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of North and South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 175. See Andrew K. Black, “In the Service of the United States: Comparative Mortality Among African-American and White Troops in the Union Army,” Journal of Negro History 79, no. 4 (Autumn 1994): 317–27.
29. Christian Recorder, August 15, 1863, p. 131. On Cailloux, see “The Funeral of Captain Andre Cailloux,” Harper’s Weekly, August 29, 1863; “Funeral of a Negro Soldier”, Weekly Anglo-African (New York), August 15, 1863; James G. Hollandsworth Jr., Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience During the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995); Stephen J. Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest: Andre Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).
30. “The Funeral of Captain Andre Cailloux,” Harper’s Weekly, August 29, 1863, p. 551; see also Weekly Anglo-African, August 15, 1863.
31. George E. Stephens in Donald Yacovone, ed., A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 203.
32. “The Two Southern Mothers,” in Weekly Anglo-African, November 7, 1863.
33. David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), pp. 113, 115. The Covey story is in Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855; rpt. New York: Dover, 1969), pp. 246–49.
34. Christian Recorder, February 20, 1864, p. 29; December 19, 1863, p. 203.
35. Cordelia A. Harvey to Governor James Lewis, April 24, 1864, Cordelia A. Harvey Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison.
36. Christian Recorder, April 30, 1864, p. 69; July 9, 1864, p. 110; February 4, 1865, p. 18.
37. Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” in Lincoln: Speeches, Letters and Miscellaneous Writings, Presidential Messages and Proclamations (New York: Library of America, 1989), pp. 686–87.
38. Aunt Aggy tells this story to Mary Livermore in Livermore, My Story of the War (Hartford, Conn.: A. D. Worthington, 1889), p. 261. On black vengeance, see also Louisa May Alcott, “The Brothers,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1863, in Diffley, ed., To Live and Die, pp. 191–208, and “Buried Alive,” Harper’s Weekly, May 7, 1864, in Diffley, Live and Die, pp. 284–88.
39. Daniel M. Holt, A Surgeon’s Civil War: The Letters and Diary of Daniel M. Holt, M.D., ed. James M. Greiner, Janet L. Coryell, and James R. Smither (Kent, Ohio: Kent University Press, 1994), p. 188; Howells quoted in Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 128; James Wood Davidson to C. V. Dargan, August 6, 1862, Clara Dargan MacLean Papers, RBMSC; Charles Kerrison to his cousin, July 19, 1862, Kerrison Family Papers, SCL; statistics from “Bull Run, First Battle of,” in Heidler and Heidler, eds. Encyclopedia of the Civil War, vol. 1, p. 316, “Shiloh, Battle of,” vol. 4, p. 1779, and “Casualties,” vol. 1, pp. 373–74. See also James McDonough, Shiloh: In Hell Before Night (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977), and Larry Daniel, Shiloh: The Battle That Changed the Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). On Confederate losses, see The War of the Rebellion, ser. 2, vol. 27, pp. 338–46; Kent Masterson Brown, Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics and the Pennsylvania Campaign (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), p. 2. Lee’s losses at Gettysburg, which he systematically understated, can only be estimated. John W. Busey and David G. Martin conjecture 23,231 in Regimental Strengths and Losses at Gettysburg, 4th ed. (Hightstown, N.J.: Longstreet House, 2005), p. 258; James M. McPherson suggests between 24,000 and 28,000; personal communication to the author, December 27, 2006.
40. Colonel Luther Bradley to My dear Buel, January 5, 1863, letter in possession of Robert Bradley, Somerville, Mass.; Frank, “Seeing the Elephant,” p. 120; Henry C. Taylor to Father and Mother, October 1863, Henry C. Taylor Papers, WHS.
41. William Stilwell to his Wife, September 18, 1862, in Mills Lane, ed., “Dear Mother: Don’t Grieve About Me. If I Get Killed, I’ll Only Be Dead”: Letters from Georgia Soldiers in the Civil War (Savannah, Ga.: Beehive Press, 1990), pp. 184–85. Indiana soldier quoted in Hess, Union Soldier in Battle, p. 119; James B. Sheeran, Confederate Chaplain: A War Journal, ed. Joseph T. Durkin (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1960), pp. 88–89; W. D. Rutherford to Sallie Rutherford, July 3, 1862, SCL; Robert Goldthwaite Carter, Four Brothers in Blue: or, Sunshine and Shadows of the War of the Rebellion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), p. 325; James Wood Davidson to C. V. Dargan, August 6, 1862, Clara Dargan MacLean Papers, RBMSC; George G. Benedict, Army Life in Virginia: Letters from the Twelfth Vermont Regiment (Burlington, Vt.: Free Press Association, 1891), pp. 190–91.
42. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, May 24, 1862, p. 98; Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (1885; rpt. New York: Library of America, 1990), p. 238;L. Minor Blackford, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Story of a Virginia Lady (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 213. On stepping on bodies, see Christian Recorder, July 18, 1863; L. S. Bobo to A. Bobo, July 7, 1862, Bobo Papers, CSA Collection, ESBL; Mary A. Newcomb, Four Years of Personal Reminiscences of the War (Chicago: H. S. Mills, 1893), p. 43; John Driscoll to Adelaide, April 18, 1862, Gould Family Papers, WHS; Alexander G. Downing, Downing’s Civil War Diary (Des Moines: Historical Department of Iowa, 1916), p. 325.
43. John O. Casler, Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade (Guthrie, Okla.: State Capital Printing Co., 1893), p. 29; Thompson in Gregory A. Coco, A Strange and Blighted Land: Gettysburg, the Aftermath of a Battle (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1995), p. 54; Chauncey Herbert Cooke, A Soldier Boy’s Letters to His Father and Mother, 1861–1865 (Independence, Wis.: News-Office, 1915), p. 97; Pierce in Gregory A. Coco, Killed in Action: Eyewitness Accounts of the Last Moments of 100 Union Soldiers Who Died at Gettysburg (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1992), p. 112; Walker Lee to Dear Mother, June 15, 1862, in Laura Elizabeth Lee Battle, Forget-Me-Nots of the Civil War (St Louis: A. R. Fleming Printing Co., 1909), p. 355.
44. Southern Churchman, June 26, 1862; John Weissert to Dearest Mother and Children, December 14, 1862, John Weissert Papers, Box 1, Correspondence Nov.–Dec. 1862, BHL; Henry L. Abbott to J. G. Abbott, October 17, 1863, in Scott, ed., Fallen Leaves, pp. 223–24; “Indifference of Soldiers to Death,” Christian Recorder, November 14, 1863, p. 184; Surgeon [name illegible] to Reverend Patrick Reilly, June 25, 1862, Patrick Reilly Papers, PAHRC; Henry Clay Trumble, War Memories of an Army Chaplain (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1898), pp. 158, 39; Isaac Hadden to his Kate, May 24, 1864, Misc. Mss. Hadden, Isaac, NYHS; Charles Wainwright in Allan Nevins, ed., A Diary of Battle: The Personal Journals of Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, 1861–1865 (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1962), p
. 56; Wilbur Fisk quote in Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 157.
45. Weymouth Jordan, ed., “Hugh Harris Robison Letters,” Journal of Mississippi History 1 ( January 1939), p. 54; Elijah P. Petty, Journey to Pleasant Hill: The Civil War Letters of Captain Elijah P. Petty, Walker’s Texas Division, CSA, ed. Norman D. Brown (San Antonio: University of Texas, Institute of Texan Cultures, 1982), p. 304; Angus Waddle to My dear Sister, March 6, 1862, Ellen Waddle McCoy Papers, MOHS; Katharine Prescott Wormeley, The Other Side of War: With the Army of the Potomac: Letters from the Headquarters of the United States Sanitary Commission During the Peninsular Campaign in Virginia in 1862 (Boston: Ticknor & Co., 1889), p. 114.
46. Daniel E. Sutherland, Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861–1865 (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 163; Casler, Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade, p. 89; Soldiers’ Almanac (Richmond, Va.: MacFarlane & Fergusson, 1863).
CHAPTER 3. BURYING
1. Board of Trustees of the Antietam National Cemetery, History of Antietam National Cemetery (Baltimore: J. W. Woods, 1869), p. 5.
2. [Henry Raymond], “Editor’s Table,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 8 (April 1854): 690, 691.
3. Ibid., pp. 691, 693. On body and death, see Caroline Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), and Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
4. Daniel E. Sutherland, Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861–1865 (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 274; Gage in Gregory A. Coco, Wasted Valor: The Confederate Dead at Gettysburg (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1990), p. 137; Wirt Armistead Cate, ed., Two Soldiers: The Campaign Diaries of Thomas J. Key, C.S.A., December 7, 1863–May 17, 1865 and Robert J. Campbell, U.S.A., January 1, 1864–July 21, 1864 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938), p. 182; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, August 16, 1862, p. 334.
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