Yet in December Barton trekked out to Fredericksburg, where she could see for herself the slaughter from her perch on the second floor of the once gracious mansion, Lacy House, that was now a hospital. Leaving it, she crossed the river while under Confederate fire to attend the Union men lying in a heap near the stone wall. Burial had begun before the battle ended—although the air was so frigid, the earth so frozen, that the dead men’s skin stuck to the ground. Lee had refused a truce, so that the dead hadn’t been immediately collected, and the soldiers had to dig shallow graves in the hard soil with nothing more than the jagged pieces of exploded shell.
Lacy House was crammed with 1,200 men. “I wrung the blood from the bottom of my clothing, before I could step,” Barton said, “for the weight about my feet.”
“All that was elegant is shabby, all that was noble is shabby,” said one of the surgeons. “All that once told of civilized elegance now speaks of ruthless barbarism.”
Though assisted by the Sanitary Commission, Barton trusted few people. A loner, she felt she’d been thwarted too many times by well-intentioned folks. “My position is one of my own choosing,” she boasted, “full of hardship and fraught with dangers.” Aid societies and do-good chaplains, with their inexperienced, callous, or befuddled natures, were nuisances at best, and though the Sanitary Commission was large and moneyed, it was not hers. “I am singularly free,” she said, “—there are few to mourn for me, and I take my life in my hand and go where men fall and die, to see if perchance I can render some little comfort.” Of course she had to cultivate officials—men in high places, men such as Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, who chaired the Military Committee—but Barton preferred direct action and not, as she later said, “the ordinary deliberations of organized bodies,” which were of no use when it came to alleviating real and bloody anguish.
“I do not believe in missions,” Barton explained, although she would go on to found the Red Cross. Unlike Dix, Barton had no grand scheme to revolutionize institutions or medical practice even though, as everyone knew, Florence Nightingale in the Crimea had been the doyenne of the battlefield, and until now, in America, nursing had been a male profession. No more. “This war of ours has developed scores of Florence Nightingales whose names no one knows but whose reward in the soldier’s gratitude and Heaven’s approval, is the highest woman can win,” Harper’s Weekly declared—though often women were not greeted with open arms. “Dr. Buck informed me that he didn’t wish a woman in his military hospital,” said Mary Ann Bickerdyke, the matron of nursing in Cairo, Missouri. “It was no place for a woman.” Bickerdyke then asked the patients, most of them amputees, to vote on whether she should stay. The vote was unanimous. Yes.
THEY CAME TO look for the lost. A mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a young wife: they walked through the hospitals or picked through the scores of men who looked frighteningly alike as they lay in the tents hastily converted into makeshift hospitals. Walt Whitman was among them. The brassy poet had come from New York to Washington in search of his brother First Lieutenant George Whitman of the 51st New York Infantry. After the battle at Fredericksburg, Whitman rode out to the camp of Brigadier General Edward Ferrero, who had been a dancing master before the war. The camp wasn’t too far from Washington, and as Whitman slowly walked through it, he noted with quiet despair the dismembered legs, arms, and feet piled high under a tree. George had not been badly hurt, thankfully, but the poet could not bring himself to return home to New York. He rented a room in the Washington house of a friend.
Like Barton, Whitman had found a job as a part-time copyist. Evenings, dressed in burgundy corduroy, he would leave the paymaster’s office and mop the brows of feverish soldiers in the hospital wards, or he read to them or wrote their letters home. Distributing small amounts of change to them, he cheered them too with little gifts, such as apples, oranges, or sweet crackers. He went out to the regimental, brigade, and division hospitals, merely tents on the cracked field, where the injured men on the frozen ground were “lucky,” he said, “if their blanket is spread on a layer of pine or hemlock twigs.” Some of the boys, he later recalled, were no more than sixteen.
After the war, each in different ways, Alcott, Barton, and Whitman kept doing a version of what they had done: Barton would search for soldiers missing in action; Whitman would continue to write poetry and essays, and Alcott would transform her family into the March household of Little Women. They also published wartime recollections, as so many people would do that by the 1880s the public grew bored with them. In 1885, in The Rise of Silas Lapham, the novelist William Dean Howells created a Civil War veteran, the crude self-made millionaire Silas Lapham, who listens apprehensively while his dinner guests wax nostalgic about bygone days. “I don’t want to see any more men killed in my time,” Lapham says. His companions rustle uncomfortably and turn the discussion to other, pleasanter things.
CONFEDERATE WOMEN SERVED the machine that kept the war going, not necessarily to keep it going but to minister to the broken bodies on their doorsteps. Short on supplies, crippled by the Union blockade, the Confederacy often depended on women’s ingenuity and hardiness. Anxious wives, mothers, and sisters stuffed boxes with coarse pillowcases or handkerchiefs finished with a little bit of embroidery, mute and sad tokens of love and hardship, from the land they were protecting. And not only did they sew flags and underwear and collect money for such aid organizations as the Ladies’ Gunboat Societies, they smuggled necessary drugs to the front in the heads of dolls, gave over their homes to the care of the wounded, or set up extemporaneous hospitals near the battles, converting schools and churches into relief stations staffed by local volunteers. No one had special training, and without centralization, which didn’t occur until 1862, the relief societies were mostly a federation of those who did the best they could do.
After the Battle of Shiloh in the spring of 1862, Kate Cumming managed to get herself from Mobile, Alabama, to Corinth, Mississippi (circa three hundred miles), where she pulled together a traveling hospital to follow the army. Like Barton, she was distributing the supplies she’d gathered, caring for the wounded, and mobilizing other women who, like Hannah Ropes, encountered “a great deal of opposition from surgeons,” said Cumming, “as all of the ladies have who desire to go into hospitals.” Yet in late 1862, the widow Phoebe Yates Levy Pember was named chief matron of Richmond’s large Chimborazo Hospital, where she too discovered jealousy and competition—state against state, officer against enlisted man, doctors against nurses; but the women shared a common emotion: hatred of Yankees. “The women of the South had been openly and violently rebellious ever since they thought their states’ rights touched,” Pember would write. “They were the first to rebel, the last to succumb.”
To Pember, the hospital served as an extension of the home, where hard work did not, after all, detract from a lady’s refinement. When one of the wounded men, in the aftermath of Fredericksburg, called out for his comrade at arms, she found the boy. “The results of war are here to-day and gone tomorrow,” she noted when the same boy died. Another young man, maybe eighteen, asked her to tell his widowed mother that her only son had perished “in what I consider the defense of civil rights and liberties.”
Home, husband, and country—those were the ideals that Confederate women embodied, or so they told themselves, or were told, and so they believed. Henry Timrod praised them in his poem “The Two Armies,” published in the Southern Illustrated News. The women’s army, “with a narrower scope,”
Yet led by not less grand a hope,
Hath won, perhaps, as proud a place,
And wears its fame with meeker grace,
Wives march beneath its glittering sign,
Fond mothers swell the lovely line,
And many a sweetheart hides her blush
In the young patriot’s generous flush.
No breeze of battle ever fanned
The colors of that tender band;
Its office is beside the
bed,
Where throbs some sick or wounded head.
It does not court the soldier’s tomb,
But plies the needle and the loom;
And, by a thousand peaceful deeds,
Supplies a struggling nation’s needs.
And when William Gilmore Simms collected the war poetry of the South into a single volume after the war, he dedicated the book to “the women of the south,” who lost a cause “but made a triumph! They have shown themselves worthy of any manhood.”
DESPITE THE CONFEDERATES’ victories at Fredericksburg and, in the spring of 1863, their success at Chancellorsville, where Stonewall Jackson smashed Fighting Joe Hooker’s confused forces, there were hard losses. The beloved Stonewall Jackson was killed at Chancellorsville from wounds inflicted by friendly fire, and his death seemed to symbolize—or perhaps foretell—the doom of the Confederacy, slain by its own hand. The news of Jackson’s death rocked the South. A volume of Confederate verse contained forty-seven elegies about Jackson, and Lee later lamented, “Had I Stonewall Jackson at Gettysburg, I would have won a great victory.”
There were other hard changes brought on by war: the North’s Emancipation Proclamation, and in the South, the Conscription Act as well as the new law authorizing the seizure of private property, which might include one’s slaves, should one have any. There was the indignity of the Impressment Act. Passports were now needed to enter or leave a city such as Richmond. And Richmond, the once gleaming capital, was “crowded to suffocation,” Mary Chesnut observed. Refugees, as well as thieves and prostitutes newly minted in order to pay the bills, were looking for food, for money, for jobs, and for housing, which, if they were lucky enough to find, they couldn’t afford.
The winter of 1863 had been a tough one. It had been cold and snowy. There weren’t enough men around to work the small farms. There wasn’t enough to eat. Railroads carried men and munitions, not grain, and in any case no one could keep up with inflation. The Confederate currency was depreciating by the minute, it seemed. Hungry children scavenged for bread. Demoralized and destitute, the women of the working classes felt forgotten and forsaken.
On a warm April morning in the muddy, rainy spring of 1863, a crowd of women and boys—many of the women were wives of men who worked in the Tredegar Ironworks factory—congregated in Richmond’s Capitol Square, near the statue of George Washington, to protest the devastating food shortages. Shouting “Bread! Bread!” or “Bread or blood!” they headed to the business district, Main and Cary Streets, looting stores, seizing with their skinny arms coffee and meat, hats and shoes. The leader was a tall woman with a feather in her hat, it was said, but, as another woman disdainfully noted, the mob was made up mostly of “women and children of the poorer class.”
When the mayor couldn’t do anything to quiet the crowd, Jefferson Davis mounted his horse and rode over to the square to beg the rioters to go home. Visibly upset—Davis was not a cruel man—he told the people: you do not have money, so here is all I have. He emptied his pockets and threw down some coins, as if that might help. According to eyewitnesses, the gaunt president then told the crowd to disperse or he would have to order the military to open fire. Other eyewitnesses said it was Governor Letcher who authorized the militia to load their muskets, which they did. People left quietly, their stomachs still empty.
In the coming weeks, forty-three women and twenty-five men were arrested for having fomented a riot. Confederate troops prowled the streets of Richmond to make sure there were no more outbreaks by half-starved women eager to protect their homes, not their homeland. James Seddon, the Confederate secretary of war, issued an order to suppress any mention of the disturbance in public papers to prevent the Yankees from “plying their lying arts,” although the New York Herald and New York Times did run accounts, some contradictory, later in April, taken mainly from local papers: beggar women had been turned away from shops, they reported; women carrying hatchets and axes had smashed plate-glass windows and had beaten down locked doors; the rabble had instigated the riot, they said, but selfish, silly women who steal shoes and jewelry can never harm the Confederacy; greedy speculators had been hoarding goods to jack up prices.
The various conflicting accounts, observed Harper’s Weekly, seemed fishy. “We had forgotten Yankees and were fighting each other,” lamented Mary Chesnut, who was lucky, she knew, to have meat on her table.
RAISED IN THE border town of Wheeling, Virginia (later West Virginia), Rebecca Harding had published a novella, “Life in the Iron Mills,” and then a serialized novel, Margret Howth, in The Atlantic Monthly during the earliest years of the war. Readers bred on romantic fancies found “Life in the Iron Mills” dark, elemental, gritty, and gruesome. Harding was a new voice, a woman’s voice, a voice of the voiceless, the laborer, and the mill girl; she was a voice too of the border between North and South. “I write from the border of the battlefield,” she said in Margret Howth, “and I find in it no themes for shallow argument or flimsy rhymes.”
As she later recalled, “My family lived on the border of Virginia. We were, so to speak, on the fence, and could see the great question from both sides. It was a most unpleasant position.” In nearby Pennsylvania, abolitionists called her slaveholding friends Simon Legree. At home, she argued with her slaveholding friends, who called abolitionists emissaries of Hell. “The man who sees both sides of the shield,” she said, “may be right, but he is most uncomfortable.”
In the summer of 1862, flush with the success of her Atlantic publications, the thirty-one-year-old Harding went to Boston to meet the reigning literati, or what was left of them, and in Concord, she was introduced to Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and the depressed Hawthorne. “While they thought they were guiding the real world, they stood quite outside of it,” she later said, “and would never see it as it was.” Alcott and Emerson talked of a war they knew nothing about; something was lacking: the backbone of fact. For she was witnessing “the actual war,” she said, “the filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing political masks and glutted by burning homes and outraged women; the chances in it, improved on both sides, of brutish men to grow more brutish.”
Neither sentimental nor chivalric, Harding’s view of war, although written in retrospect, served as a corrective to the postwar sugarcoated paeans, the stories of gallant soldiers falling with grace for a glorious cause. For if men and women behaved with courage, they also acted in unthinkable ways. “A man cannot drink Bourbon long and remain in his normal condition,” she noted. “We did not drink Bourbon, but blood.” Soldiers did not enlist for patriotic reasons, or not patriotism alone; many of them had been recruited from jails and penitentiaries, especially in the border regions; and since war and its maintenance were the sole business of the country, men had to enlist or go hungry. The border was an armed camp with “right and wrong mixing each other inextricably together,” as she wrote in one of her Civil War stories. So too for the country.
And death was everywhere, not just at Shiloh or Antietam or on the carpeted plain in front of Marye’s Heights. “Does anybody wonder so many women die?” Mary Chesnut asked. “Grief and constant anxiety kill nearly as many women as men die on the battlefield.”
Under those conditions, the ailing and aging Hawthorne could not squeeze out another romance. This was no time, he too discovered, for phosphorescent literature. Just a few months before Thoreau’s death, he had boarded the series of trains that would take him to Washington, calling himself, when he wrote of his trip, a “peaceable man,” to alert his Atlantic audience that he did not write as a partisan or Republican but as a Democrat who preferred peace to war and peace to the abolition of slavery. Disgusted by the waste, the inefficiency, the bloated lies, the ignorance, and the basic absurdities of the slaughter, Hawthorne remarked that the war had sprung from “the anomaly of two allegiances”: the North devotes itself “to an airy mode of law, and has no symbol but a flag,” he said, whil
e the South fights state by state, which “comes nearest home to a man’s feelings, and includes the altar and the hearth.”
He may not have been wrong about the reasons Southerners said they were fighting, but his analysis did not warm Republican hearts. “What an extraordinary paper by Hawthorne in the Atlantic!” cried George W. Curtis, the antislavery editor of Harper’s Weekly. “It is pure intellect, without emotion, without sympathy, without principle.” Yet Hawthorne, like Rebecca Harding, deplored the poetic propaganda, North and South, written to boost flagging spirits, allay nagging doubts, or stifle the unstoppable screaming of the wounded in the night.
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THE LAST FULL MEASURE OF DEVOTION
The dead cannot bury themselves.
During the Civil War, more than 750,000 soldiers died, North and South combined, a dumbfounding number (recently revised upward) and far greater than the number of men who had perished or would perish in all other U.S. wars put together. They died from cannonades, from rifle fire, from exploding shells and minié balls; they died from typhoid fever, from pneumonia and gangrene, from infection, exposure, and sunstroke. At Antietam, as mentioned, in just one day, the number of casualties exceeded 26,000, and during the three-day battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1863, it rose to an unthinkable 51,000, which made Gettysburg the most shattering and destructive battle of the war to date. If an American sibyl had foretold that, no one would have believed her.
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