Uncensored and composed by men who, if war had not called them away from their homes, would have had no reason to express their innermost thoughts to their loved ones in writing, Civil War soldiers’ letters and diaries offer unparalleled insight into the thoughts of ordinary Americans during a defining time in the nation’s history. 17 It is no wonder historians and members of the general public remain fascinated with them. Countless letters and diaries reside in repositories throughout the United States, which means that source shortage presented no problems, but choosing collections wisely sometimes could. The letters and diaries used in this book come from forty-five state and local historical societies and libraries located from the Atlantic coast to Kansas, and from large archives like the Library of Congress and the United States Army Military History Institute. They were written mainly by enlisted men (though some junior officers appear) from every state that took part in the war. To preserve soldiers’ own voices, their innovative spelling and grammatical habits appear exactly as written, without intrusion by sic or correction, except when absolutely necessary to avoid confusion. The resulting sample of soldiers, large in size and carefully reflective of the makeup of the actual armies, consists of men chosen not for their extraordinary ideas but rather for their very ordinariness; it provides a base from which to draw conclusions about the army as a whole.
In the course of this project, I unearthed more than one hundred regimental newspapers whose survival and whereabouts have escaped historians’ attention, which makes this book the first study to use this unique type of source extensively and systematically. 18 These newspapers, unofficial, uncensored publications written almost entirely by enlisted men with whatever resources they could find, differ from one another in many details, but taken together, they offer valuable insights. Intended primarily for other soldiers as heartily sick of mud marches, oppressive heat, and wormy rations as the writer, camp newspaper articles had less need to keep up appearances for the benefit of worried wives or parents. Soldiers’ newspapers were also written by many authors and therefore provide diverse perspectives to supplement the deep ones found in individuals’ letters and diaries, although the preponderance of articles signed with initials or pseudonyms (if at all) can make the identification of individual authors difficult. Both Union and Confederate soldiers created camp newspapers, though many more Union than Confederate examples survive, especially from the later years of the war.
This book’s inclusion of black Union troops presents its own challenges in terms of sources. While most black Union soldiers were slaves until the time of their enlistment, most surviving letters and diaries and the two black soldiers’ camp papers I found were written mainly by northern free black soldiers, not least because the overwhelming majority of slaves were illiterate. Former slaves, then, stand out as the most seriously underrepresented group in this book, though I have made every effort to find their voices in other places, such as verbal testimony given to Congress or army officers, letters dictated to literate comrades, and proceedings of meetings held in camp where the illiterate made their voices heard. African American newspapers such as the Anglo-African and the Christian Recorder regularly included letters from soldiers, as well as accounts of soldiers’ camp gatherings. Letters to the Anglo-African and Christian Recorder appear often, because while public letters differ from private ones and must be read with care, they provide better insight into the war than the exclusion of black soldiers altogether, which has been the solution adopted by many studies to date.
Letters, diaries, and camp newspapers allowed Civil War soldiers to release pent-up frustrations and explore their own emotions, but just as important, they also provided places for soldiers to deliberate on slavery’s role in the war. Throughout the conflict, troops continued to identify themselves as citizens first, and as soldiers only temporarily and by necessity, which meant that they retained the privilege of holding their own opinions. It is possible—even easy—to find a Civil War soldier’s letter, diary, or newspaper article that says almost anything. Because dissent jangled constantly throughout the Union and Confederate ranks, it occupies considerable space in the pages that follow. Yet despite the persistence of disagreement and opposing viewpoints, soldiers’ letters, diaries, and newspapers point to definite trends and patterns in soldiers’ predominant understandings of the war. In other words, the wind of rank and file opinion always blew in multiple directions, but it generally blew harder in some directions than in others. Where the fundamental, underlying cause of the war was concerned, it amounted to a full-blown gale.
To determine the direction of prevailing winds, I built a series of gauges in the form of long compilations on each of the topics that soldiers themselves identified as important, including patriotism, politics, slavery, and race. Each compilation was organized chronologically. For instance, every time a soldier made a remark about politics, I made a new entry in the politics compilation. If the letter dated from May 5, 1863, I transcribed the relevant portion into the politics compilation between any remarks made by any other soldiers on May 4 and May 6, 1863. I used one font for Union soldiers and another font for Confederate troops, which permitted me to compare men from the two armies and still distinguish between them at a glance. The chronological organization of these gauges allowed me to chart change over time, while the topical nature of each compilation enabled me to measure the relative strength of each position taken on an issue. As I used quotations to write chapters, I reread each soldier’s excerpt in the context of the entire letter, diary entry, or camp paper article in which it appeared, which helped adjust for any unusual stimuli or circumstances. In order to conclude that any one position dominated among Union or Confederate soldiers at a particular time, I stipulated that expressions of the prevalent view had to outnumber expressions of the dissenting view by a ratio of at least three to one. I indicate in the Notes any instances in which the proportion is lower.
More important than differences in sources or approach, this book departs from other books about Civil War soldiers because it places its primary focus on what soldiers thought about slavery. It does so because soldiers themselves did so. Rather than discussing slavery as one among many topics that soldiers addressed during the war, this book rescues slavery from the periphery of soldiers’ mental worlds, where subsequent generations have tried to relegate it, and returns slavery to its rightful place at the center of soldiers’ views of the struggle. In so doing, it alters our view of the Civil War in several ways. It eliminates the need to explain away a war about slavery as either a war about something else or a war imposed on unwitting nonslaveholding soldiers (despite those soldiers’ own clear statements to the contrary) and instead helps unravel precisely why nonslaveholding Southerners would fight a war to protect slavery. Trying to understand why slavery mattered to the Confederate rank and file, rather than fabricating a view that we find more comforting or appealing, illuminates how and why enlisted Confederates held on as long as they did, and it also modifies our understanding of the timing of the war’s end.
Seeking to understand, rather than deny or assume, the centrality of slavery also sheds light on how nineteenth-century Americans, especially Southerners, defined what it meant to be a man. While white Union soldiers did not articulate a clear relationship between slavery and manhood, white Southerners closely linked the two. A true man protected and controlled dependents, which for white Southerners meant that a man competently exercised mastery over blacks (whether or not he owned any) as well as over women and children. It also meant that a man took care of his family and sheltered his loved ones from harm, including the almost unimaginable harm that white Southerners feared emancipation would bring, because they assumed that slaves released from bondage would terrorize, murder, and violate vulnerable white women and children. Ironically, black Southerners (and even northern free blacks) also took for granted a relationship between slavery and manhood. For bondmen, the institution of slavery made true manhood impossible because i
t robbed a black man of the ability to protect his family from sale or to shelter his loved ones from violence or sexual violation at the hands of white masters. While slavery was necessary to white Southerners’ conception of manhood, in other words, it was antithetical to manhood among black men.
In placing slavery at the center of soldiers’ ideas about the war, we recast much of what we know about white Union soldiers by providing a new understanding of when Union soldiers began to support emancipation, which in turn reveals a new emphasis on ordinary enlisted Union soldiers as agents of change who shaped the progress and outcome of the war. Few white Northerners initially joined the Union rank and file specifically to stamp out slavery, and most shared the antiblack prejudices common to their day, especially when the war began. Yet the shock of war itself and soldiers’ interactions with slaves, who in many cases were the first black people northern men had ever met, changed Union troops’ minds fast. At first, white Union soldiers had little trouble separating their ideas about slavery from their racist attitudes and saw no contradiction between demanding an end to slavery and disputing any notion of black equality or opposing any suggestion of increased rights for black people. Yet as the war dragged on, even attitudes as stubborn as white Union troops’ antiblack prejudices shifted with the tide of the war, sometimes advancing and other times regressing. By the end of the war, white northern opinions about racial equality and civil rights, intractable though they had seemed in 1861, were far more malleable and vulnerable to intense self-scrutiny among Union troops than anyone could have imagined when the war began.
Attention to Union soldiers’ early shifts on slavery allows this book to enter yet another ongoing conversation about the Civil War, the conversation about how slavery ended. Some historians chiefly credit slaves themselves, who weakened the institution of slavery by their actions during the war, and who forced a war for Union to become a war against slavery by using their physical presence to make it impossible for Union Army generals and political leaders like President Abraham Lincoln to ignore or shunt aside the question of slavery. 19 Other historians acknowledge individual slaves’ actions as instrumental in securing their own individual freedom (a slave who ran away to the Union Army did indeed free himself), but argue that ending the institution of slavery required the exercise of governmental power; therefore, President Lincoln, who issued and stuck with the Emancipation Proclamation and championed the Thirteenth Amendment (unlike his 1864 presidential opponent, George McClellan, who would have done neither) bears primary responsibility for destroying slavery in the United States. 20 This book argues that the enlisted men in the Union Army forged the crucial link between slaves and policy makers. Slaves themselves did force emancipation onto the Union agenda even when most white Northerners would have preferred to ignore it, but one of the most important and earliest ways they did so was by converting enlisted Union soldiers, who, in 1861 and 1862, developed into emancipation advocates who expected their views to influence the prosecution of the war. Slaves convinced enlisted soldiers, who modified both their beliefs and their behavior. In turn, the men of the rank and file used letters, camp newspapers, and their own actions to influence the opinions of civilians and leaders who, lacking soldiers’ direct contact with slaves, the South, and the experience of living on the front lines in a war that most people wanted over, lagged behind soldiers in their stances on emancipation.
By recognizing the centrality of slavery to Union soldiers’ understanding of the war, this book also provides a key to understanding President Lincoln’s immense popularity among the Union rank and file. When soldiers voted in 1864, nearly 80 percent of them cast their ballots for Lincoln, but the bond between president and soldiers was formed years earlier than that. In explaining the bond, historians have habitually emphasized Lincoln’s humble demeanor, his accessibility, and his visits to the Army of the Potomac in the field. 21 Each of these characteristics helped enhance Lincoln’s appeal among soldiers who saw the president, either by visiting the White House or by witnessing one of Lincoln’s visits to camp, but they do not explain the love for him that even soldiers who never laid eyes on him expressed. Union troops believed that Lincoln shared their vision of the war’s cause and purpose, even when nobody else at home seemed to understand. Although black Americans had advocated the destruction of slavery even before the war began, few white troops initially believed that the Union had any authority to interfere with slavery (and some would not have wanted it to regardless of authority), but their wartime experiences convinced them that slavery must be destroyed in order to win the war and redeem the American Republic from sin, and they believed that the president’s views had evolved along a similar (though somewhat later) trajectory. When in the Gettysburg Address Lincoln avowed that the Union mattered for all humanity, and especially in later speeches like the Second Inaugural when he portrayed the war as punishment for the shared sin of slavery, the president validated a version of the war that soldiers had already espoused, but that their loved ones at home could not seem to grasp. A soldier’s father might not see eye to eye with him about slavery and the war, and so as the war progressed, the soldier came to rely on Father Abraham instead.
White Union soldiers’ commitment to emancipation was created by and during the war itself, but the issues of slavery and abolition had not appeared out of the blue in 1861. Tensions between North and South over slavery had been mounting for the entire lives of the men (most of whom had been born between the mid-1820s and mid-1840s) who enlisted in the Union and Confederate armies, even as the institution of slavery itself had been strengthening and growing. 22 The number of slaves jumped from 800,000 to 4,000,000 in just two generations, while the prosperity of southwestern cotton states like Mississippi and Alabama and the addition of Texas to the Union pushed the institution from the seaboard into the interior of the continent. 23
The first real conflict over slavery arose in 1819, when Missouri applied to enter the Union as a slave state. Misled by Missouri’s small number of slaves and the peripheral role that slavery at that time played in Missouri’s economy, Representative James Tallmadge of New York miscalculated that Missouri would be an easy place to enact a gradual form of emancipation. He introduced the Tallmadge Amendment, which would not have freed existing slaves, but would have permitted no new slaves to be carried into Missouri after statehood, and would have stipulated that any children born in Missouri to slave parents would become free once they reached the age of twenty-five. To Tallmadge’s surprise, southern leaders reacted with outrage, which did not die down until the so-called Missouri Compromise resolved the controversy and determined the fate of slavery in western territories for the next three decades by admitting Missouri as a slave state and drawing a boundary across the Louisiana Purchase territories at 36° 30’ latitude. Territories below the line would be slave; above it would be free. 24
In the wake of the Missouri Compromise, a proslavery ideology that abandoned the earlier habit of identifying slavery as a necessary evil in favor of forcefully arguing for it as a positive good took shape among white Southerners, even as an abolitionist movement increasingly critical of southern slavery emerged in the North. 25 Eager to avoid controversy over such an uncomfortable topic, most white Northerners and Southerners did their best to suppress troubles over slavery in the 1830s. They usually succeeded, despite exceptions like the gag rule controversy of 1836–44 (in which a southern-controlled Congress prevented the reception of antislavery petitions over howls of protest from some white Northerners who objected to the violation of the First Amendment rights of white petitioners). Occasional outbreaks of violence, such as the killing of antislavery advocate Elijah Lovejoy in 1837, sometimes broke the tenuous calm, but not very often. 26 Beneath the surface, tensions smoldered, and they sparked again in the 1840s when the rapid acquisition of Texas, New Mexico and Utah Territories, and California all reintroduced the question of slavery’s expansion into western territories. When Pennsylvania Democrat David Wil
mot proposed the Wilmot Proviso, which would have prevented the United States from introducing slavery into territories gained from Mexico (where slavery had been abolished), he ushered the slavery issue back into politics, and there it stayed, even after the Compromise of 1850 uneasily quelled the controversy stirred up by the proviso. Among other measures, the Compromise of 1850 threw out the Wilmot Proviso, admitted California as a free state, and enacted an unprecedentedly stringent Fugitive Slave Law. 27
The Fugitive Slave Law prevented the slavery issue from disappearing in the 1850s. Article IV of the United States Constitution permitted masters to recapture slaves who fled to free states, but said nothing about the role of northern states or civilians in that process. The Fugitive Slave Law broke new ground because it mandated that states and individuals participate in the capture of fugitives and imposed harsh penalties for noncompliance. In response to the Fugitive Slave Law, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a sentimental novel that sold better in the North than any previous work of fiction and that touched off angry protest in the South, where the book was banned. 28 Meanwhile, federal and state jurisdiction came into conflict throughout the North, as evidenced by fugitive slave rescue cases such as the Anthony Burns case in Massachusetts, the Joshua Glover case in Wisconsin, the Oberlin-Wellington case in Ohio, and others. Some northern states passed personal liberty laws, which overtly flouted the Fugitive Slave Law by exempting individuals, including those who worked for the state, from participating in the capture of fugitive slaves if their personal consciences so dictated; in response, white Southerners threatened violent retaliation. 29 The notoriety stirred up by fugitive rescues and the vitriolic southern response to northern states’ personal liberty laws inflamed public opinion over slavery throughout the nation, dramatically limiting the effectiveness of Congressional compromise.
What This Cruel War Was Over Page 2