LIVING HELL
LIVING HELL
The Dark Side of
the Civil War
Michael C. C. Adams
© 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Adams, Michael C. C., 1945–
Living hell : the dark side of the Civil War / Michael C. C. Adams.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4214-1221-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 1-4214-1221-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4214-1222-1 (electronic)
ISBN 1-4214-1222-5 (electronic)
1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Social aspects.
2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Psychological aspects.
3. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Casualties.
4. War and society—United States—History—19th century.
5. War casualties—United States—History—19th century. I. Title.
E468.9.A34 2014
973.7 1—dc23 2013021123
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For the boys who fell
And the girls who mourned them
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
JULIA WARD HOWE
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1861)
CONTENTS
Preface
OPENING. Jim Conklin and General Sherman
1. Gone for a Soldier
2. On the March
3. Close-Order Combat
4. Clearing the Battlefield
5. The Edge of Sanity
6. Deprivations and Dislocations
7. Invasions and Violations
8. State of the Union
CLOSING. General Lee and the Gray Ladies
Notes
Suggested Further Reading
Index
— Preface —
This book paints a graphic picture of the dark side of the Civil War, its pain, heartbreak, and tragedy. It describes the vicious nature of combat, the terrible infliction of physical and mental wounds, the misery of soldiers living amid corpses, filth, and flies. It also concerns the many civilians who endured loss, deprivation, and violations. To understand what the people of that time endured, I have relied heavily on bringing back their candid voices from the hushed past. That these eyewitnesses deserve to be heard again constitutes a core conviction of this book.
Because I want them to speak for themselves, I have neither corrected people’s grammar nor interrupted their thoughts with that unpleasant expletive, sic, supposedly needed to flag linguistic errors. Instead, I rely on the reader’s common sense to grasp the intended meaning of writings through which our forebears sought to reveal what they experienced.
Regarding terminology, I capitalize North and South as the major belligerent sections; by the same token, east and west, although major theaters of war, remain in lowercase. In the endnotes for each chapter, I cite sources used in the text. On first reference to a work, I give full information on author, title, and facts of publication. The author’s last name and an abbreviated title only appear in subsequent notes for that chapter. The standard abbreviation for The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies is O.R., and I use this after each full reference in a chapter.
To achieve immediacy, I have at times attempted to create a sense of live action, as though we are experiencing an episode “on camera.” This technique begins in the Opening, where we piggyback on Stephen Crane’s arresting image of a road that moves with wounded soldiers shambling to the rear, in order to conjure for ourselves a gallery of Americans journeying together down the path of war. Just as Crane’s road was not actually in motion, we will not really sprint down a neurasthenia ward with the animated Dr. Weir Mitchell. Nor would we in fact meet individual men from so many different units clustered together as we and they grope through the smoke on a firing line. We are staging a reconstruction, a reenactment, but one in which the players are the original participants. This modest stylistic device in no way distorts or detracts from the original documents, and I hope will prove valuable to the reader.
The intellectual debts contracted over a career are incalculable; mine would fill another book. Many of my creditors appear in the endnotes, but other sources of inspiration must remain unacknowledged. For example, I early learned from reading the late John Keegan to understand the real face of battle, but that particular piece of his work has no direct bearing here.
Marcus Cunliffe, a masterful thinker and writer, became the founding father of American studies in the United Kingdom, where I was raised. He was my mentor, and I remain grateful for his encouragement of my tendency to think a little sideways (or perhaps it is bass ackwards, as Lincoln put it). Although long gone, I imagine he still bends over my shoulder as I sit at my desk, taking his pipe from his mouth to make pointed comments.
I have benefited from discussions with numerous colleagues on the nature of war. For conversations specifically on the Civil War, I would like to thank John T. Hubbell, Civil War historian and past director of the Kent State University Press. Among several provocative comments, John once asked me if I had ever thought that much armed conflict might just be tribal in origin. Gabor Boritt twice asked me to speak in the Gettysburg College Civil War Institute. On our second visit, he hosted lunch for Bob Bruce, my wife, Sue, and me at his handsome farmhouse that had been a field hospital during the July 1863 fighting. On a beautifully clear, warm Pennsylvania day, Gabor showed us minnie balls with deep teeth marks: surgeons indeed told patients to “bite the bullet” so as not to injure their tongues.
Two of my fellow Regents Professors at Northern Kentucky University deserve a special mention: J. Robert Lilly and James A. Ramage. Bob has done incisive work on U.S. military justice; Jim is a national authority on partisans and raiders.
Nobody could hope for a better, more supportive editor than Robert J. Brugger. A combat veteran with the courage to talk about war while still in uniform, Bob enthusiastically advocates candid writing about war. He urged me to write the book, and his vigorous advice immeasurably enhanced it. Thanks also to Melissa Solarz, acquisitions assistant, for her enduring patience and ability to cut through Gordian knots. Helen Myers did a brilliant job of copyediting and proved to be a splendidly supportive reader. Juliana McCarthy, managing editor, smoothed the transition from typescript to book. Thanks also to all the other staff at Johns Hopkins University Press whose expertise and hard work have brought this project to fruition.
My wife, Susan Steves Adams (nee Kissel), and I have been constant companions and colleagues for thirty years. We read all of each other’s writing. Sue not only encouraged and supported me fully in undertaking this work, she read, commented on, and improved the manuscri
pt at each stage of its evolution. In a vital proofreading role, she restrained my urge to pepper the text with indiscriminate volleys of commas.
Thanks to all.
LIVING HELL
— OPENING —
JIM CONKLIN AND
GENERAL SHERMAN
×
MY TEENAGER YEARS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM COINCIDED with the centennial of the American Civil War. For me, the remembrance meant that I could acquire paperbacks normally unavailable to the general reader: Henry Kyd Douglas’s I Rode with Stonewall, the memoirs of General Ulysses S. Grant, and the recollections of Confederate Admiral Raphael Semmes. I held a rather innocent view of the war at this time. I harbored romantic notions of dramatic exploits on the battlefield, of boys being forged into men through the ultimate test of combat. In part, Stephen Crane’s 1895 novel The Red Badge of Courage inspired my vision. I read it in the Classics Illustrated graphic version around the impressionable age of twelve, then went on to devour the complete written text and to see John Huston’s evocative 1951 black-and-white movie, in which Audie Murphy played the green youth transformed by the transcendent experience of battle. Henry Fleming’s ascent into heroism seized my imagination.
In due course, I went to college and graduate school, where I wrote a dissertation on the war that became my 1978 book Our Masters the Rebels. In this work, I argued that Union generals, particularly in the east, had a tendency to talk and act as though awed by their Rebel opponents, whom they perceived as being from a more martial culture than their own. Their inferiority complex, as we might loosely label it, meant Federal army commanders lacked offensive spirit, displaying undue caution. Afflictions of “the slows” even affected their ability to follow up defensive successes, such as at Gettysburg.
I still think the thesis has merit. But I now see other reasons why generals were unable to capitalize when an enemy retreated: their own victorious forces often became too broken and wearied to mount effective pursuit. Today, my teenage images of battle-hardened veterans, endlessly enduring and consistently gallant, succored and sustained by stoic, long-suffering civilians, seem naive and misleading. I understand why Audie Murphy, a veteran who had seen more than enough combat in World War II, found Henry’s flag-waving antics after returning to the regiment bitterly silly, and why, during shooting breaks, he wandered off the set, “as though lost in a distant dream.” He had the two-thousand-yard stare of the emotionally spent combat soldier. He said as much, recalling: “Before the war, I’d get excited and enthused about a lot of things, but not any more.”1
In a sense, this development in my understanding mirrors the journey from ignorance to enlightenment described by another combat veteran, General William Tecumseh Sherman. Speaking to a crowd of admirers at the Ohio State Fair on August 11, 1880, Sherman pointedly addressed young people in the crowd, asserting, “There is many a boy here to-day who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.” The general carefully added that he did not espouse pacifism and would serve again if needed, but he urged people to look squarely at war’s horrors.2
I want to stay with this point. I propose that we not go forward to watch Henry Fleming marching exuberantly off the field (he should not look quite so cheerful, anyway, as his next rendezvous with battle will be Gettysburg). Instead of moving on, let us dwell a while on the pains, the fears, and the blighted lives, indeed the tragedies of those who became the war’s victims, like Jim Conklin, Crane’s decent, tall soldier, shot through the body, milling along amid a crowd of other wounded, afraid of being run down by the artillery, wanting to be left alone to die. Jim experienced no transcendence, caught up in the mangle of war along with many thousands of other men, women, and children.
I am by no means the first author to argue for looking starkly at the grim features of the war. Walt Whitman, who worked in Washington, D.C., during the conflict and served as a volunteer hospital nurse, said the real war, the cruel war, would not get into the books. But he tried in his prose and poetry to add some darker shadows. Much later, the distinguished historian Allan Nevins exhorted us to confront the war’s hard reality:
We should probe more deeply into roots, a process that will expose some of the weaknesses of our social fabric and governmental system. We should pay fuller attention to its darker aspects, and examine more honestly such misinterpretations as the statement it was distinguished by its generosity of spirit, the magnanimity with which the combatants treated each other; a statement absurd on its face, for no war which lasts four years and costs 600,000 lives leaves much magnanimity in its later phases. We should above all examine more closely the effects of the great and terrible war not on the nation’s politics—we also know that; but on its character, the vital element of national life.3
My concerns are not coterminous with those of my distinguished predecessor, although I have become preoccupied, as he was, by the societal aspects of the war more than its politics. Also like him, I do not wish to deny the great issues involved and civic virtue shown, the fighting that produced prodigious courage, sacrifice, endurance, and magnanimity among soldiers and civilians. But I believe strongly that Professor Nevins correctly urged us to dwell more on the dark side. We should remind ourselves now and then about the grimmer realities of this struggle and, perhaps by extension, all armed conflicts. Many books consider in depth this or that important aspect of the bleak war. I hope to perform a service by pulling together all the strands into one large tapestry. The sesquicentennial presents the opportunity to do this, as once again we “celebrate” the conflict, a word I suspect could not be less appropriate.
To begin with, the Civil War’s cardinal characteristic became its stunning bloodiness. It may be a commonplace, yet it still shocks us to remember that the fight cost as many lives as all of America’s other major wars combined. Equally startling, the butcher’s bill came for a contest neither sharply delineated nor fought by combatants bonded together in defense of clearly enunciated positions and universally held ideologies. The politics of division proved so complex, confusing, contradictory, and tangled that even today we hotly debate the reasons for the war.
Of course, it would be satisfying if we could find one single, straightforward explanation for the war. We try. Thus, one camp sees a clear-cut moral struggle between the forces of slavery and freedom. Agreed, slavery must have been a large factor, probably the biggest one, in the coming of the conflict. After all, the election as president of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed the further extension of slavery, led South Carolina fire-eaters to kick the lid off the cauldron and jump inside.
Yet, say skeptics, Northern opposition to slavery stayed so lukewarm that Lincoln did not even propose partial emancipation until fall 1862, and then not as a moral crusade but a military measure to put new life into the flagging war effort. Many white Northerners embraced racism as much as the next bigot: free blacks could not vote in much of the North, and several midwestern states excluded African Americans from living within their borders.
Some who downplay the debate over slavery counterclaim that the primary cause of the war may be found in Northern encroachment on Southern rights; Confederates fought a disinterested battle to uphold the principle of a states’ right to resist centralized intrusion. Local rights included secession from the Union.
Again, the argument has some merit. Whether state or national authority should be paramount got a good airing during the war. But making this legal disagreement the focus of the contest still presents the problem that people do not normally precipitate a bloodbath to test an abstract constitutional principle. Appeals to state sovereignty usually masked other, more pragmatic, interests. Southerners embraced states’ rights when convenient but insisted that national authorities return fugitive slaves, overriding the states’ rights protest of Northern local officials.
Trying to broaden the debate, another school argued that we see an epic confrontation between an aristocratic agrarian South and a bourgeois business-industrial North doomed to col
lide. Charles and Mary Beard championed this argument between the world wars. It gained popularity both with Marxist historians and conservative apologists for the Old South. There must be some validity to the idea of rising industrial interests squaring off against older, entrenched agricultural concerns. But farmers and factory owners do not necessarily have to shoot each other over negotiable issues such as the height of protective tariffs. Midwestern farmers stayed loyal to the Union.
The only aspect of Southern agrarianism distinct enough to provoke a war remained plantation slavery. It lay at the base of the Southern way of life. Even though a majority of white people in Dixie might not own slaves, they subscribed to the caste system and could not conceive of a state of society in which blacks were free, let alone equal. So the argument turns full circle and the ravel of causes remains.
If we could say one thing with certainty, it would be that the war represented a profound failure of the political system; discord had broken government. The war does not qualify as a classic tragedy, fated to happen. The British Empire had abolished slavery peacefully between 1833 and 1838. Russian Tsar Alexander II ended serfdom without civil war in 1861. Only when the South closed its mind to rational debate of the Peculiar Institution late in the antebellum period did compromise become impossible in the United States, as Clement Eaton pointed out in The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (1940). John Brown’s 1859 raid on the U.S. armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, although failing to spark a slave revolt, finished driving many Southerners into paranoia.
When statesmanship failed, the calamity fell on a people with lives already steeped in hardship and loss. Victorian life, while not idyllic, still led many to see themselves at the apex of human development. They could evidence an intellectual flowering in New England, the polished manners of some Southern gentry, and the growing dynamism of the west that bred vigorous newcomers, like the Lincolns, Shermans, and Grants. The rise of the common man meant that more white males voted than ever before. Mass production enhanced daily life with cheap, plentiful goods, from ready-made furniture and clothing to newspapers and books. The middle class expanded, and the prosperous lived well.
Living Hell Page 1