TNT’s 1994 miniseries Gettysburg, based on Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels: A Novel (New York: McKay, 1974), received viewer kudos for the realism of the battle scenes, such as infantry being blown back by close-range canister fire. But these men would have been blown to pieces, not pushed backward. And, for safety reasons, the guns were not loaded with a heavy enough charge to show recoil, a difficult and dangerous feature facing gunners. Given moviemakers’ ability to produce special effects (such as spacecraft, storm troopers, and alien creatures being blown apart), we must wonder if we see again a reluctance to fully rend the curtain covering what happens when flesh and metal collide on the battlefield.
Often, film is best at exposing not the physical but the emotional cost of war. In Gettysburg, Richard Jordan gives a heart-breaking rendition of the ghastly scenario confronting General Lew Armistead on the third day, when he must lead his brigade in a suicidal frontal assault against a position held by his oldest friend. Shenandoah (1965) achieved critical and popular acclaim for its unwavering depiction of the sufferings experienced by peace-craving civilians (in Virginia) caught between the contending armies. Two short films treat the psychological impact of the war. The 1962 French movie An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge brought to the screen one of the twisted Gothic nightmares from the haunted imagination of Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce. And The Jolly Corner (1975) faithfully retold Henry James’ ghost story about the apparition of a cruel and brutal veteran, maimed physically and mentally by the war.
By stretching a little beyond our immediate subject, we can add to our visual understanding of war. Tony Richardson’s 1968 film, The Charge of the Light Brigade, based on Cecil Woodham-Smith’s classic The Reason Why (New York: McGraw Hill, 1954), shows in graphic detail the result of ignoring the power of modern defensive weaponry. Although often seen as a unique blunder, the charge was actually representative of officers’ refusal to surrender belief in inevitable offensive superiority. In The Gallant Six Hundred: A Tragedy of Obsessions (New York: Mason & Lipscomb, 1974), John Harris argues that Captain Louis Nolan, who carried the order for the charge, deliberately misled General Lord Cardigan into attacking the wrong position in order to prove a theory that light cavalry, with neither artillery nor infantry support, could carry a heavily fortified position. Nolan did not live long enough into the attack to learn that he was wrong. General Custer, another exponent of the reckless offense without reconnaissance or support, named two of his hunting dogs Cardigan and Nolan.
Stretch a little further to David Lean’s 1970 film of Ireland in the aftermath of the failed 1916 Rebellion, Ryan’s Daughter. Here you will see a quite startling movie recreation of what soldiers meant by the Civil War term “shook over hell.” In an Irish pub, the village idiot sits beating his boot on the wainscoting. The rhythmic thumps reproduce the pulsing of shells bursting over trenches on the western front. A British soldier, Major Doryan, a decorated officer who also happens to have chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, starts to shake, the tremors becoming so uncontrollable that glasses and bottles on the counter rattle and bounce.
Ken Burns’ ambitious nine-episode documentary miniseries, The Civil War (1990), occupies a category of its own. When the program aired on PBS, it was seen by approximately 40,000,000 viewers, and the series has remained popular. It has netted some forty major TV and film honors. Nevertheless, Burns has been variously criticized: for over-emphasizing slavery as a cause of conflict, for sentimentalizing the participants, for presenting a textbook view of the war, and for giving too much air time to the views of author Shelby Foote. Whatever the case, Burns deserves credit for doing an enormous amount to educate the public about the war.
Reenactors claim to realistically reproduce the mayhem and slaughter of the Civil War battlefield. Journalist Tony Horwitz spent several days with “hard core” reeanactors who assert that by living rough they reproduce the Civil War field experience. Horwitz wrote up his reportage in Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York: Vintage, 1999). According to Horwitz, one particularly colorful character, Robert Lee Hodge, was able to flawlessly imitate the bloat that afflicted corpses left out on the battlefield. This is not an informed judgment, as Hodge’s spectators will see no shattered bone, no pools of black clotted blood, no stink, no putrescent melting facial features. Brian Pohanka, a reenactor in the 5th New York, told USA Weekend (June 29, 1990) that his activities supply “the guts of the Civil War.” But they can’t, metaphorically or physically: reenactors don’t load with ball ammunition.
An unintended potential consequence of reenacting is that it may give the impression a visit to the battlefield provides a fun outing for the whole family, much like a visit to the circus, and that combat was probably an exciting undertaking. This undermines our attempt to grasp the dark side of the war. As poet Kent Gramm pointed out in Gettysburg: A Meditation on War and Values (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), Civil War sites are killing fields that we should approach with all the solemnity and sobriety we would reserve for a chapel or a cemetery, not as recreation areas. At the end of the day, one of the best ways to begin fully appreciating what soldiers endured in the great conflicts is to read a first-rate study. I suggest for starters, Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (New Haven, CT: Ticknor & Fields, 1983) and James Lee McDonough, Shiloh: In Hell before Night (Knoxville; University of Tennessee Press, 1977).
Civil War fiction has not fared well at the hands of critics. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) are considered classics, but most novels about the conflict have been ephemeral, failing to evoke the essence of the struggle. An example might be Ross Lockridge Jr.’s Raintree County (Boston: Houghton Mifflin: 1948). The plot about an Indiana family experiencing all facets of the war is perhaps interesting in itself but somehow too convoluted and distanced from the guts of the struggle to work as a good war novel.
Possibly the most successful branch of the genre has focused on stories of ordinary Rebel soldiers trying to find their way home as the Confederacy crumbles. Good older examples include Ray Grant Toepfer, The Scarlet Guidon (New York: Coward-McCann, 1958) and Maggie Davis, The Far Side of Home (New York: Macmillan, 1963). The most wrenching story of a soldier determined to get home, even at the price of desertion, is Charles Frazier’s splendid Cold Mountain (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), brought to the screen in 2003. Readers might want to consider this tale in conjunction with Kenneth Radley’s Rebel Watchdog: The Confederate States Army Provost Guard (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). Also, stories of ordinary Southerners challenging the accepted social hierarchy might encourage one to read Stephanie McCurry’s challenging argument that the war had revolutionary effects on the Southern power structure. See Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
If, while reading Living Hell, you have wondered why you were not more informed about the dark side of the conflict, you might wish to explore how we have dominantly remembered our wars. See, for instance, G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); Jim Cullen, The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); Edward Tabor Linenthal, Changing Images of the Warrior Hero in America: A History of Popular Symbolism (New York: Mellen, 1982); Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); John Limon, Writing after War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Mark C. Carnes, ed., Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (New York: Henry Holt, 1995).
Finally, in a perceptive recent study, Evan Thomas documents how quickly the Civil War was mythologized as a great adventure paving the way for America’s leap into international power: The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898 (New York: Little, Brown, 2010).
— Index —
Abbott, Edith, 144, 145
Abbott, Henry Livermore, 118
abortion, 10
Adams, Charles Francis, Jr., 48, 215–16
Adams, F. Colburn, 39
Adams, Henry, 196
African American soldiers, 13, 27–28, 31, 33–36, 148–49
burial duty assigned to, 101
conscription of, 147
execution of, 35–36
medical treatment for, 94–95
as prisoners of war, 177–78
racial discrimination experienced by, 34–36
unfair treatment of, after the war, 187–89
African Americans: children of, 147–48
desperate circumstances of, 147–48
disenfranchisement of, 186
incarceration rates for, 190
lynching of, 197
racism experienced by, 6, 13, 186–90
sexual assaults on, 175–76
stereotypes of, 163, 188, 189. See also freedmen
race relations
slaves
agrarianism, Southern, 6–7, 196
Alabama (ship), 81
Albemarle (ship), 81
alcohol abuse: by civilians, 150–51
by officers, 112–13, 124
by soldiers, 20–21, 22, 53, 80, 129
alcohol consumption, 9–10
Alcott, Louisa May, 20, 25, 94, 114
Alexander II, Tsar, 7
Alexander, Porter E., 64
Alexander, R. A., 184
Allen, William, 146
Ambrose, Stephen E., 208
ambulances, 85, 86
ammunition, 66, 68–69, 73–74
amputations, 68, 89–90, 91–92, 95
aftermath of, 200
Anderson, “Bloody Bill,” 198
Anderson, Richard H., 74
Andersonville, Georgia, prison at, 177, 178, 180, 201
anesthesia, 91, 92–93, 97–98
scarcity of, 160
animals: inadequate care of, 39
injuries to, 105. See also hogs
Anthony, Susan B., 191
anthrax, 49
Antietam, Battle of (Sharpsburg, Battle of), 43, 67, 71–72, 74, 77, 78, 87–88, 100, 104, 106, 115, 116, 118, 120, 127, 152
Armistead, Lewis A., 74, 76–77, 213
Armory Square Hospital, 95
Armour, Philip, 194
Army of the Tennessee, 28
Arnold, Frank, 66
artillery, developments in, 62
Atkins, Smith D., 165
Atlanta (ship), 81
Atlanta campaign, 44, 47, 65, 79, 170–71
Averell, William, 67
Bacon, Leonard W., 215
Bacot, Ada, 51, 202
Baker, Enoch T., 15
Barksdale, William, 74, 77
Barlow, Arabella, 25
Barlow, Francis C., 25, 74, 78
Barned, Numa, 166
Barnes, James, 74
Barnum, Henry A., 78
Barton, Clara, 36, 46–47, 203
Bartow, Francis, 119, 157
Beard, Charles, 6
Beard, Mary, 6
Bechler, Valentine, 141
Beers, Fannie, 105, 160
Belknap, W. H., 200
Bellard, Alfred, 23, 103
Bellows, Henry W., 190
Benson, Berry, 102–3
Bierce, Ambrose, 102, 105, 117
Billings, John D., 42
Bimford, James M., 126–27
Binford, Patrick, 91
Bingham, Ezra, 25
Birth of a Nation, The, 189
Blackford, Charles Minor, 45, 51, 56, 142, 151
Blackford, Susan Leigh, 142, 151
Blackford, William Willis, 104
blockade runners, 135
Booth, Charles A., 138
Bottom, Henry, 203
Botts, Jasper, 153
Botts, Newton, 153
bounty brokers, 29–30
bounty jumpers, 29, 110
Boyd, Cyrus F., 20, 22, 23, 27, 40, 66, 72, 73, 89, 112
Bragg, Braxton, 28, 52, 112, 134
bread riots, 141
Breckinridge, John C., 53, 77, 101
Brent, Joseph L., 53–54
Brewster, Charles Harvey, 124
Bridges, Alfred, 59
Brinton, John H., 19, 178
Broderick, Matthew, 189
Brooke, John R., 74
Brooks, Preston, 165
Brown, John, 7, 164
Browne, Albert Gallatin, 184
Brownlow, James, 137–38
Buck, Lucy, 137, 173
“buffalo soldiers,” 187
Bull, Rice C., 23, 46, 103
Bull Run, First. See Manassas, First Battle of
Bull Run, Second. See Manassas, Second Battle of
Bumgardner, John, 119
Burns, Robert, 47
Burnside, Ambrose E., 64
Burr, Chauncey, 202
Burr, Henrietta, 162
Burrus, Edward, 166
Burton, James H., 62
Butler, Benjamin F., 160, 168
Butterfield, Daniel, 74
Byers, Sam, 113
Cairo (ship), 82, 161
Caldwell, F. M., 176
Caldwell, Lycurgus, 155
Caldwell, Susan, 155
Callaway, Joshua, 161
calomel, 8, 49
Cameron, Simon, 202
Camm, William, 41, 44, 146
canister, 73–74
cannonading, impact of, 113–14
cannons, 70–72
Carnegie, Andrew, 194
Carney, William, 189
Carroll, William Henry, 112
Carse, George, 202
Casler, John, 41
casualties, Civil War, 5, 11–12, 17, 67–68, 84, 87, 92, 124, 199
burial of, 203
as compared with other wars, 11–12, 22, 67, 75, 92
and the grief of families, 149–58
among officers, 74–75
photography of, 17, 153
Cemetery Ridge, 53, 76, 78, 123
Chamberlain, Fannie, 211
Chamberlain, Joshua Lawrence, 65–66, 123, 133, 211
Chancellorsville, Battle of, 44, 57, 66, 71, 72, 90, 97, 153, 156
Chesnut, James, 10, 46, 157
Chesnut, Mary Boykin, 10, 96, 123–24
as diarist of the conflict, 155–58
drug use by, 155, 156–57
Chicago Exposition (1893), 213
Chickamauga, Battle of, 67–68, 79, 167
chicken pox, 23
children: of African Americans, 147–48
deaths of, 8, 136, 155
delinquency of, 144, 202
in workhouses, 144–45
Chisolm, J. J., 91
chloroform, 8, 52, 54, 91, 95
cholera, 9
Christian Commission, 21
Chunn, William, 16
citizen soldier, as new model, 37–38
civilians: in the contested borderlands, 173–74
desperate circumstances of, 140–42, 172–76
enemy troops’ abuse of, 161–63
grief and loss experienced by, 149–58
impact of Civil War on, 103–7, 133, 134–49
psychological trauma suffered by, 103–7
as refugees from the war, 139–40, 172–73
troops as looters of, 137–38
civil rights, after the Civil War, 184–86. See also racial discrimination
Civil War: assessment of, 182
atrocities committed during, 166–68, 169–72
casualties suffered in, 5, 11–12, 17, 67–68, 74–75, 84, 87, 92, 124, 199, 203
costs and consequences of, 202–5
destruction left by, 184
disillusionment with, 16–18
escalation of, 160–63
impact of, on civilians, 103–7, 133, 134–49
impact of, on farmers, 28–29
impact of, on veterans, 197–201
naval combat in, 79–82
officers leading from the front lines during, 76–79
precipitating factors in, 5–7
reconciliation afterward, 214–16
as total war, 159, 160–63
prisoners of war in, 168–69
trench warfare in, 113–14. See also medical treatment
military service
officers
soldiers, Civil War
weaponry
Clark, Milton, 95
Clarke, Herman, 134
class discrimination, 30, 31–32
Cleburne, Patrick, 57, 67, 78, 134
Coan, G. N., 147
Cobb, Edward, 81
Cobb, Sam, 129
Cocke, Philip St. George, 124
Cockrell, Francis, 77
Coe, Alexander, 126
coffee coolers, 112
Coffin, Charles Carleton, 105, 162
Colbert, Eveline, 163
Colborne, Sir John, 109
Cold Harbor, Battle of, 67, 69, 87, 98, 123
Coleman, Thomas H., 167
Coles, Isaac, 179
Collins, John O., 166
Colston, Raleigh, 66
combat fatigue. See post-traumatic stress disorder
psychological trauma
communications technology, 75
Compton, Samuel, 102
Congleton, James A., 207
Congress (ship), 81
conscription, resistance to, 28–33, 130
Conscription Act (Confederacy), 28
conscription acts, 13, 28–29, 34
Conwell, Russell, 188
Cooper, Edward, 141
Corbell, LaSalle, 122–23
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