But the grandsire’s chair is empty,
The cottage is dark and still;
There’s a nameless grave in the battle-field,
And a new one under the hill.44
Individual grief often overshadowed news of victories. “Alas,” wrote Emma Holmes after Lee’s spring 1862 victories, “we have scarcely the heart to rejoice, for our land is filled with mourning for the heroes who had shed their life-blood for its liberty.…” The military custom of allowing clusters of hometown boys into one unit made the burden of loss worse, as a whole family or half a village might get wiped out in a day. After a skirmish in which Georgia militia tangled with the Federal 46th Ohio and 97th Indiana in November 1864, a bluecoat knelt by a badly-wounded fourteen-year-old Rebel who told him the adjacent corpses belonged to his father, two brothers, and an uncle. On the Prairie Grove field in December 1862, a Union officer watched a woman with children clinging to her skirts searching among the gray-coated dead. She found a brother, then another. When she reached her husband, she emitted a “wild unearthly shriek.” He thought that “the suffering of that woman none but God can know.”45
Grief often could not be contained or bottled up. Richmond socialite Thomas DeLeon described Mrs. Breck Parkman, a guest at an autumn 1862 wedding, trying to get through the ceremony in a church where only a year before she had married a soldier, now dead. She “tottered to a chancel pew, and threw herself prone upon the cushions, her slight frame racked with sobs.” Louisiana diarist Sarah Morgan conjures for us, finally, the razor-sharp cut of devastating loss. On February 5, 1864, she recorded brother Gibbes’ death and her initial denial: “Not dead! not dead! O my God! Gibbes is not dead. Where O dear God!” Just six days later, on February 11, she wrote of her other brother: “O God O God have mercy on us! George is dead! Both in a week! George our sole hope—our sole dependence.” They had been killed in the same action.46
In the depth of sorrow, three questions frequently stayed uppermost in people’s minds. How and where had the loved one died; had the body been identified; and could it be retrieved? Often, three or four soldiers in a unit would agree that, should one survive an engagement, he would write to the others’ families with basic details. Nurses performed the same function for patients. Commonly, correspondents included a lock of hair with the letter or, in a particularly meaningful gesture, the family received a planting from where the soldier fell—a growing, living memorial. James Weeks, a searcher after William Robinson of the 83rd New York, killed in the Cornfield at Antietam, wrote home to say, “I bought a rough coffin (the best I could get) and washed his face and combed his hair smooth and covered him round with a large clean sheet” before interring him. Still, this family was fortunate. Despite every effort, the disposition of about 50 percent of the dead remained unknown, identity or burial sites unaccounted for. The thought of a loved one simply disappearing intensified survivor pain, an emotion captured in verse by J. H. McNaughton:
My brave lad sleeps in his faded coat of blue;
In a lonely grave unknown lies the heart that beat so true;
He sank faint and hungry among the famished brave,
And they laid him sad and lonely within his nameless grave.
The emotional need for finite sites that provided some dignity to death led the Federal government in 1862 to develop national cemeteries. The South did the same on a local basis.47
Yearning to know about a soldier’s last hours could be mixed with trepidation. Poor Sarah Morgan, after losing one of her brothers, said “I so sadly long to hear from living lips of his last days on earth,” yet “It will be dreadful, dreadful, the first instant we look on one who saw his dead face.” Photographs offered a link to the dead. By 1860, over 3,100 photographers worked in the United States, providing thousands of visiting-card-sized images that even those of modest means could afford. Thanks to the stereoscope devised by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., one might hope to look, in realistic three dimensions, at the place where the departed fell. Holmes thought everyone should see war’s reality. Walt Whitman hesitated. Listening to the screams of the mangled boys hospitalized after Chancellorsville, he mused: “O well it is their mothers, their sisters cannot see them—cannot conceive, and never conceiv’d, these things.” Indeed, looking at pictures of the dead could wrench more than comfort. Emma Holmes found it hurt “to gaze upon the features of these sad fated friends and how almost impossible to realize that their presence will never more bring a smile to the lip and a bright sparkle to the eye.”48
Return of remains proved a mixed blessing. Decay often advanced so quickly that even loved ones felt repulsion. Families frequently received warnings not to open caskets. Union infantryman Newton Botts wrote his aunts in Boone County, Kentucky, about his brother Jasper’s death at Murfreesboro in February 1865. A bullet hit him in the head while he reloaded behind a rail fence. The lieutenant propped him in a quiet corner to die. “I was sorry to learn,” he added, “that the casket could not be opened.” Embalming of recognizable remains could halt the rotting process, and firms offered this service near the lines. But only the rich could afford their rates. Receipt of the body could help bring closure or it could reopen the wound. When Sergeant Thomas Owen escorted Captain August Perkins’ body to Pennsylvania, the outpouring of anguish unsettled him: “Up to this time I had not fully realized what war was. This was the first time I witnessed the great sorrow of friends at home over the loss of their sons and brothers killed in war, and it left an impression on my mind that I shall never forget.”49
Religion offered consolation to many. There would be reunion in a better place according to God’s ordained plan. And what better place to find community support in a bleak time than the church? At the same time, one influential recent argument suggests that the enormous butchery precipitated a critical questioning of faith, pointing toward a secularized spirituality. Undoubtedly, significant doubt welled up about the idea of a just and benevolent God overseeing the slaughter. But this religious skepticism probably became most accepted among the cultural elite. For example, some of the New England Brahmin caste, particularly young men in uniform, turned to a philosophy of blind stoicism, finding meaning only in how well one stood up to the hollowness of random fate. At the same time, we must be careful of over-intellectualizing the mood of many ordinary people, whose values surely changed less radically than those of leaders in ideas. Mainstream views seldom underwent a 180-degree revolution. Religion might be put aside as temporarily unhelpful without being absolutely eschewed. The deaths of Robert Gould Shaw and other family friends deeply affected Harriet Beecher Stowe. But, as the wife of a divinity professor, she did not renounce religion, turning instead for relief to “household merriment,” the simple satisfactions of home and hearth. She began planning “House and Home Papers,” “a sort of spicy sprightly writing that I feel I need to write in these days to keep from thinking of things that make me dizzy & blind & fill my eyes with tears.”50
Many people typically treated religious rituals as somewhat a matter of proper form, of correct behavior, not particularly deeply felt. Good manners demanded that grief be expressed in conventional ways. For example, bereft relatives could buy a color print, suitable for framing, depicting a wife and daughter languishing on a dead soldier’s grave. His name could be written in on the headstone. And, at the end of the day, the frank fact remained that loss simply had to be endured as best one could. For many, railing against God or fate served no purpose. One just felt a pain in the heart that had to be voiced and then endured. Susan Caldwell’s two-year-old daughter died of scarlet fever in September 1864. She neither cursed the Divinity nor talked of meeting the child as an angel in heaven. She simply called out her grief, writing to her husband, Lycurgus, an official in the Confederate government: “My darling babe—Mamma’s heart aches all day and night for you. I feel at times my heart will break when I know I cannot get my baby back to me any more.”51
Mary Boykin Chesnut had much to cope with in
the war, and she did not find faith a great support. Perhaps the finest diarist of her period, she remains a fascinating personality, a woman of paradox who managed to get through somehow. Although of the slaveholding class, she refused to be a virulent apologist for the Peculiar Institution. Despite appearing a conventional Southern matron, she could be outspoken to the point of violating convention. Strong in character, she yet needed frequent opium doses to quiet her nerves. I find her wonderfully human, an old friend worth spending time with, whatever one’s viewpoint. We might imagine strolling with her along Charleston’s spacious Battery, fronting the Bay where Colonel Shaw and his brave black soldiers perished in a gallant rush for freedom. Here, on the promenade, we might briefly rest our eyes on the broad, sun-dappled waters, a momentary respite from our investigation of war. And now, let us walk on with her, trying through a thumbnail sketch of her experience to provide the individual perspective that can sometimes be an invaluable window into people and events.
Mary endured the conflict in two locations, the seat of government in Richmond and her South Carolina plantation. She witnessed the terrible emotional deprivation Confederate losses brought and experienced dislocation with the Confederacy’s defeat and the end of slavery. In her writings death became a constant caller. She quickly learned not to romanticize battle injuries. Dr. Robert Gibbes, who gazed on the Southern dead from Manassas, July 1861, told her, “the faces of the dead are black and shining like charcoal.” Later, she viewed the corpse of a once-handsome soldier, Frank Hampton, killed at Brandy Station, in September 1863, now laid out in an open coffin. “How I wish I had not looked!” she moaned. “He died of a saber cut across the face and head and was utterly disfigured.” In the same period, she witnessed horrid sights as a hospital volunteer, fainting on her first visit. On the ward, she watched “a poor wretch horribly maimed” struggling to walk, while other wounded soldiers laughed at him to cover their own anxieties. He collapsed on his cot, weeping hysterically. The suffering of the patients appalled her; their “eyes sunk in cavernous depths haunted me as they followed me from bed to bed.” She felt badly for the men who slunk into hospital from their units before a battle. While medical officials berated them as cowards, she slipped away, “hanging my head for the poor devils so insulted.”52
Mangled men became ubiquitous in Richmond, so close to the front. At an 1863 Christmas Eve dinner with the Prestons, a leading family, she noted the contrast between beautiful young belles and men “without arms, without legs,” their throats smashed and eyes missing. She could laugh with one girl who joked darkly that the only men left were “a glorious assortment of noble martyrs and wrecks—heroes, I mean,” and another belle who said that “I fear it will be my fate to marry one who has lost his head.” But Mary also grieved for poor, physically wrecked John Bell Hood, doomed to lose Buck, the Prestons’ beautiful daughter, because the family blocked her marriage to a cripple. After seeing the maimed, she would have nightmares and wake up screaming.53
Being within a war zone, men’s deaths had a jolting immediacy. In church during the May 1863 Battle of Chancellorsville, she witnessed “a scene calculated to make the stoutest heart quail.” A church official walked up discreetly to those “whose family had been brought down wounded, dying, or dead, and the pale-faced people following the sexton out.” Just a few doors away, Captain Cheves McCord died in convulsions from brain damage incurred earlier at Fredericksburg, his pregnant wife and his mother arriving a day too late to kiss him goodbye. Mary suffered insomnia, so “unfortunate & miserable & wretched is it all.” She retreated frequently to her room, there to embrace the cushion provided by opium and laudanum, a drug habit begun when she contracted gastric fever on the war’s eve. Nervous fainting fits and violent hysterics also assailed her. She felt, like many women, that she had “no safety valves of any kind” for her pent-up need to act. But she held together through it all, even as others broke under the strain.54
After many funerals, she admitted, “I tremble when I hear the death march now.” Yet she never screamed, although “I can understand now the women who do.” Indeed, many houses echoed with screaming. Mary’s niece let out a piercing wail when she confronted General Hood’s new artificial leg standing in the corner of a closet; Mary was keeping it safe for him. The grief continued without end. Mary accompanied the widow of Colonel Francis Bartow when a military funeral passed by: “the first sound she heard of the dead march, she fainted!” Again: “Today a poor woman threw herself on her husband’s coffin and kissed it. She was weeping bitterly. So did I, in sympathy.” Mary knew some who simply could no longer carry on, such as the widow of Colonel Means, killed at Fredericksburg. She had already lost her daughter, Emma, to consumption. When news came that her son too had fallen, presumed killed, Mary reported the colonel’s widow suffocated herself.55
A practical bent helped Mary Chesnut persevere. In addition to hospital work, she improvised military supplies: “To day, I have already picked to pieces some Moreen curtains—enough to make six shirts for the soldiers—4 counterpanes & some white stuff for bandages.” In fall 1861, she set up her maid Molly in an egg and butter business on a profit-sharing basis. By the end of the war, the proceeds constituted the major family income. She showed no maudlin regret for having to sell a special pink gown to eke out the budget. She retreated to the rural asylum of the Chesnut plantation at the end of the war. Despite poverty and the threat that her husband, James, a leading secessionist, might be tried for treason and imprisoned, she kept the farm in operation, supervising the newly freed house servants and outdoor workers who wished to stay, finding remuneration for them and tending to the sick, showing a brave face even though she feared some of the field hands might “riot.” She described her life as lonely and healthy, with books as comforting companions, though she frequently had trouble concentrating on them: “such a blow as we have survived does make one necessarily a little stupid the rest of their lives.”56
Tart wit helped her cope, even though it got her into trouble. Thinking of the unstable, lawless condition of the state’s rural interior in the wake of war, she remarked wryly: “happy land happy homes where foremost among the list of necessary house utensils rank Sharpe’s rifle & Colts revolver.” (An interesting perspective for Stowe’s papers on domestic economy.) Mary never addressed head-on the conundrum of a just God allowing a cruel war. Instead, and perhaps more tellingly, she drew a sharp contrast between man’s feeble efforts at mayhem, using rifle and cannon, and the all-powerful Divinity’s much more spectacular slaughter inflicted through natural germ warfare (which she had observed in the hospitals). “Men murdering each other wholesale in these great battles—& sickness & disease God-sent, laughing their puny efforts to scorn. Ten men dying in hospitals where one dies on the battle field.” Serving in hospitals, boiling her clothes when she got home, Mary knew the relative power of disease: “God shows he can make troubles.”57
As the killing mounted and the South’s cause floundered, Mary came to think the dead might be fortunate to have missed the final debacle. As early as February 1862, she wrote wistfully: “Men can find honorable graves—we do not see what is to become of the women and children.” Mary’s acerbic tongue, her acid political critiques, and her childlessness—in itself an offense to convention—made her resented in the South’s exclusive social circles and thus a ready target for attack. At a social gathering in May 1865 she continued her earlier thought, remarking that the dead might be fortunate to be well out of harm’s way. An acquaintance, Harriet Grant, attacked her viciously for this comment, accusing her of sentimentalizing the battlefield butchery. The unexpected attack reduced Mary, always more vulnerable than she admitted, to “strong hysterics.” In fact, Harriet had misunderstood the point, perhaps on purpose. Mary did not intend to romanticize. Rather, she verbalized a common feeling among Civil War people that they who still lived had survived only to see their world, with all its former verities and safeguards, shattered by the invasive presence of war
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— CHAPTER SEVEN —
INVASIONS AND VIOLATIONS
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THE COMING OF FRATRICIDAL CONFLICT SHOCKED AND troubled many thoughtful Americans. Virginian Judith McGuire wrote, “Can it be that our country is to be carried on to the horrors of civil war?” When she thought of the coming time, “I shut my eyes and hold my breath.” Those civilians closest to government circles often had the best opportunity to gauge the extent of the gathering storm. Varina Howell, wife of Jefferson Davis, recalled, “I felt like some poor creature circulating about a whirlpool helpless and drawing every moment nearer to the vortex.”1
Yet, for many people, the possibility of being ruined or annihilated by war seemed remote. They might have boys in uniform to worry about, but the fighting would be short and limited to a few encounters between well-regulated armies that would respect the rights of property, along with the persons of noncombatants and prisoners. This vision of a “bandbox war” evaporated as it became evident that neither side would yield easily, and the contestants became locked in a bloody, grinding, slogging match. By spring of 1862, the conflict showed clear symptoms of moving from a limited to a total war, one in which not simply men in arms but the whole opposing society would be seen as a military resource to be ground down and broken. In this chapter, we will follow the road of war where it leads into ever more harshness and destruction, as the hearts of men harden and the defenseless pay accordingly.
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