What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  The most prominent Copperhead, Ohioan Clement Vallandigham, latched onto racism to tie multiple sources of resentment together and fire up the opposition. In 1862, Vallandigham lost his bid for reelection to Congress, but he did not allow defeat to slow down his larger campaign to repudiate the war and emancipation. On Janaury 14, 1863, Vallandigham made his farewell speech to the House, and later circulated the speech in a pamphlet entitled The Great Civil War in America, which for the next two years served as the basic articulation of the Peace Democrat platform. In turning a war for Union into one for emancipation, Vallandigham argued, Republicans sacrificed lives needlessly and turned the North into a despotism heedless of civil liberties. Condemning “the folly and madness of this crusade against African slavery,” he demanded an immediate end to the war that would be beneficial to “the welfare, peace, and safety of the white race, without reference to the effect that settlement may have upon the condition of the African.” 82

  Among Union soldiers, Vallandigham badly overplayed his hand. On May 1, just as the Army of the Potomac fought desperately at Chancellorsville, Vallandigham recapitulated his platform at Mount Vernon, Ohio, and soldiers hated him for it. Wilbur Hinman and his friends in the Sixty-fifth Ohio entertained themselves by imagining Vallandigham “pounding his head against the wall of Fort Warren instead of preaching his treason.” Upon hearing that the Ohio agitator had in fact been imprisoned by the Union general Ambrose Burnside, Hinman and his peers suggested that as additional penance, the prisoner “be fed only on army crackers,” and offered to “donate a few boxes of that loyal food for his use.” 83 Chauncey Welton did not find anything about Vallandigham amusing, especially when he learned that Vallandigham was out of prison and running for governor of Ohio. According to Welton, that “news fell like a thunderboalt upon this regiment.” Despite lifelong Democratic loyalties, Welton now believed that Vallandigham and Copperheads like him betrayed “the true principles of democracy,” and wanted his father to “understand that any man who upholds Vallandingham at all never can be called any thing but my enimy…. There is no one on the face of this earth that is despised and hated by every soldier as mutch as the copperhead is.” 84 Aaron Beck summed it up best when he wrote, “I don’t know which would cause the most rejoicing in camp, Richmond taken or Val[landigham] hung but I believe the latter would.” 85

  Soldiers’ anger at Vallandigham and Copperheads did not amount to repudiation of Democrats in general, the two-party system, or political dissent, all of which soldiers continued to regard as aspects of the republican self-government they fought to uphold. “Politics govern this nation,” a Michigan private pointed out to his mother. “Defending the proper politics in majority” was tantamount to “defending our Nation in fact,” but the only way to determine the majority was to pit two alternatives against each other at the ballot box and see who won. 86 Many proud Democrats continued to identify themselves as Democrats, but they also increasingly viewed two topics, Union and emancipation, as above politics. Partisan disagreement over economic policy or civil liberties remained perfectly acceptable, even desirable, but the survival of the intact Union and the end of slavery became nonnegotiable, because they were national, not partisan issues in many soldiers’ eyes. 87

  The problem with Copperheads was that they overstepped the bounds of legitimate dissent, and in so doing ran the risk of discrediting the Democratic Party as the respectable alternative necessary to the proper functioning of electoral democracy. As one Illinois Democrat grieved, “the name of Democrats…is being sullied and disgraced by demagougs who are appealing to the lo[w]est prejudice and passion of our people.” Copperhead agitation sent a “keen and fatle pang to the heart” of every loyal Democrat. “There is just as good Democrats as any other partie,” but “there are a portion…that deserve the name of Copperheads,” and “the Democrats in our Regiment are even madder at them than the Republicans.” 88 Union troops, in short, saw a real distinction between dissent and disloyal obstruction. They hated Vallandigham and the Copperheads not because they were Democrats, but because they refused to admit the connection between emancipation, winning the war, and saving the Union.

  When civilians did not respond as hostilely to Copperheads as soldiers did, a rift deepened between soldiers and the folks at home. After learning of the anti-emancipation leanings of their state legislatures, “the soldiers of Illinois and Indiana are boiling over with rage and indignation,” Jacob Behm reported. 89 David James did not know whether to be disappointed or just plain angry when he heard that the citizens of his hometown, Richland Center, Wisconsin, had convened an anti-emancipation meeting. He told his parents about Illinois regiments encamped nearby that had “passed some encouraging resolutions” in support of the administration, the proclamation, and the war effort. The Wisconsin soldiers, assuming that their families and neighbors would never do anything so disgraceful as to denounce emancipation, had not passed similar resolutions, but now James and his fellow troops regretted their misplaced confidence in the home front. 90 Even Chauncey Welton accused his Peace Democrat father of being “mistaken considerable” about the war and politics. 91

  Soldiers regretted disagreements with family members, but their commitment to the war and emancipation could for the most part withstand family disharmony because success or failure of the Union would be proven by its ability to show the world that republican government based on universal principles worked, not by the government’s track record in promoting the interests of particular individuals and families. As a Massachusetts private explained, all of “civilization and common humanity” had a stake in the Union’s survival, which meant that soldiers must rise above “family ties” to “sacrifice something for the common good.” 92 When Samuel Storrow’s parents objected to his decision to hazard his own life and responsibilities to help save the Union and end slavery, Storrow asked them, “what is the worth of this man’s life, or of that man’s education, if this great and glorious fabric of our Union…is to be shattered to pieces…? If our Country and our nationality is to perish, better that we should all perish with it and not survive to see it a laughingstock for all posterity to be pointed at as the unsuccessful trial of republicanism.” 93 Differences and quarrels with the families and communities that soldiers believed they represented might sadden soldiers, but they did not necessarily undermine the rank and file’s faith in the Union or the war, because both the Union and the war were about something important enough to transcend personal aspirations, and even, by 1863, to warrant revolution.

  “Any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks…is either a fool or a liar”

  Cpl. Samuel Storrow’s questions would have struck many white Southerners as odd. After all, the function of government was to protect citizens’ property and interests, not diminish them to nothingness. The logic of secession said that when the government came into conflict with the interests of enfranchised citizens, it contradicted its own purpose and relieved citizens of loyalty to that government. One irony of the Civil War was that Union soldiers’ way of envisioning the relationship between individuals, families, and the government lent itself to sacrifice better than the Confederate vision of government did, but the war demanded more sacrifices from Confederates than it did from Northerners. In 1862 and 1863, white Southerners and the interests of their families suffered while the Confederate government continued to function in ways that met with severe disapproval from Confederate soldiers. Incidents like the Richmond bread riots demonstrated that disaffection had become a genuine problem for the Confederacy. Yet as powerful as discontent was, it did not amount to rejection of the Confederacy or the war effort because all internal upheaval faded in the face of united opposition to the very ideas of the Emancipation Proclamation and the enlistment of black soldiers into the Union Army.

  In October 1862, the Confederate Congress modified the conscription law by exempting one white owner or overseer for every farm or plantatio
n containing twenty or more slaves. To supporters of the provision, the new measure contributed to community safety by protecting white women and children from violence at the hands of slaves left at home with no white men to control them. In reality, the law intensified the conflict between individual or family interests and community well-being that plagued the Confederacy from start to finish. Specifically, the twenty-slave law (more commonly dubbed the “Twenty-Nigger Law”) aggravated class tensions, which in turn strained, but did not negate, ordinary Confederates’ willingness to fight in two ways.

  First, many nonslaveholders concurred with the rationale that race control and home-front safety required the presence of white men to police slaves, but they did not see why nonslaveholders could not provide that community service just as effectively as the wealthy could. After all, many nonslaveholders had experience on antebellum slave patrols. 94 A nonslaveholder from Green County, North Carolina, for example, agreed that unless a white man stayed behind, local “negroes” would be “left hear to plunder an steel…an destroye our famely,” but he also argued that a poor man with a family to support should be allowed to stay home and do the job for his local community rather than exempting a wealthy man whose family could better afford his absence. 95

  Second, and more broadly, ordinary white Southerners did not begrudge fighting for the security of wealthy slave owners’ human property—they accepted the necessity of that—but they did object to the way in which the so-called Twenty-Nigger Law seemed to make them bear the disproportionate brunt of the fight. An angry Georgia soldier challenged, “I cannot for my life see how it is, that because the institution of slavery elevates the social position of the poor man, that therefore the poor man should fight the battles of our country, while the rich are allowed to remain at home and to enjoy ease and pleasure.” He did not question that he should fight to defend slavery, but he did question why the wealthy should not also have to pitch in, and he resented elite stay-at-homes who took his suffering for granted. “For God’s sake don’t tell the poor soldier who now shivers in a Northern wind while you snooze in a feather bed, that it is just and right” for one class to avoid the war while the rest of the white male population “must fight, bleed, and even die, for their ten [sic] negroes,” he seethed. 96 Months later, in March, a Texas soldier remained furious at the “trembling lawgivers” who pandered to the wealthy with measures like the twenty-slave exemption. He went so far as to wish the Yankee cavalry would ride into Richmond, if such an invasion would “prevent our Congressmen from continuing their weighty deliberations on the conscript act which was to force every man of the South except themselves and their kind into the army.” 97

  In April 1863, the Richmond bread riots heightened the disaffection that many soldiers already felt because of hardships imposed on their families by the war and by oppressive policies like impressment. Thomas Warrick’s enthusiasm flagged even before the bread riots. In March, he instructed his struggling wife “to sende me worde if the Goverment has dun Eney thing for you.” Warrick knew that the cow was sick and producing little milk, and he worried about his ailing children, along with his farm’s prospects for the upcoming growing season. His faith that an independent Confederacy could or would do anything to alleviate his family’s woes had all but disappeared. 98 The bread riots further strained that faith. On April 2, 1863, several hundred Richmond women met at a Baptist church and marched to the Virginia governor’s mansion to inform the state’s chief executive of their families’ distress and to demand relief. When the governor rebuffed the women, the crowd began to turn into a mob and headed for Richmond’s commercial district. There, the rioters broke into bakeries and shops and helped themselves to food and to thousands of dollars’ worth of other merchandise until the governor and the mayor of Richmond organized a militia company and marched it into the fray.

  Meanwhile, President Jefferson Davis joined the mayor and governor, climbed on a cart, and tried to get the attention of the rioting women by addressing the crowd calmly, and then throwing a few coins into the mob. The clamor did not die down, and in the midst of the confusion, one of the three officials announced that he would order the militia to fire if the crowd did not disperse in five minutes. After four tense minutes, the mob melted away, and cannons rolled into town to prevent further looting. Smaller riots also began to erupt in other towns throughout the Confederacy, but the riot in the Confederate capital especially intensified ill feeling. Pvt. Daniel Brown was dismayed by a “mob” of famished women swooping in on commissary stores with “bowie nives and swoards,” but he was even more horrified when “old jef davis ordred our troops to fiar on them.” He reported that even though his regiment never fired, two men and one woman were killed by the very army supposedly fighting for the rights of all (even poor) white Southerners. 99 The riots certainly illustrated existing dissatisfaction with a Confederacy that was clearly not furthering white Southerners’ best interests, but they did more besides. By creating a situation in which white men endangered rather than controlled and protected white women, they shook soldiers’ faith in the Confederacy’s ability to uphold its own social order.

  In response to developments like the twenty-slave law and the bread riots, soldiers’ vocal dissatisfaction with both the government and the population of the Confederacy intensified. The Arkansas soldiers who created a camp paper called The Reveille criticized the Confederate cabinet as nothing more than a scribbling menagerie of petty and self-serving “chief clerks.” They also lambasted President Davis as a power monger who forgot that the “President of the Confederate States is the creature of the Constitution,” not of his own devising. 100 Focusing his own resentment on the Confederate Congress, Sgt. Felix Buchanan sourly concluded that the weak and corrupt legislature did not “reflect much honor upon our government.” 101 Confederate civilians did not portray the South in a very flattering light either, complained soldiers like Alabamian Edward Brown. As the pressures of war intensified and the home front grew more jaded, Brown nearly despaired to learn that civilians in his home county insisted on growing cotton rather than food. Nobody could eat cotton, which meant that if farmers insisted on growing it, “we are whipped.” The Army would be “starved out,” and defeat would follow. Only greed for the profits earned by running cotton through the blockade (or worse, sold north) could explain farmers’ blindness to the needs of the South’s own army. 102 Sgt. William Chunn grew despondent over what he viewed as civilians’ petty profiteering. Instead of proving “willing to make any sacrifice in the cause of their country & for the accommodation of the suffering soldier,” everyone he met in Mississippi “from the children up” was on the take. “There is nothing they are willing to do for the cause unless they get the money,” Chunn complained. 103

  In short, the Confederate assumption that government existed primarily to allow white individuals and families to pursue their own interests had led to real trouble by 1863. Rule by “ignoramuses at home & bigots in the army…has crushed the spirit of liberty,” Sgt. Edward Brown claimed. 104 On one hand, a government that imposed impressment, tax-in-kind, and a draft that was widely perceived to be unfair ran counter to the interests of most soldiers and their families. At the same time, when some civilians took advantage of opportunities for personal gain, soldiers interpreted other people’s self-interested behavior less as manifestation of sound political ideology than as selfishness at a time when unity was more necessary than ever. The boastful prewar fire-eaters who had been so sure of a quick Confederate victory that they promised to drink all the blood spilled in the conflict could now sit at home if they wished, spared by the twenty-slave law from making the sacrifices demanded of ordinary men. As Pvt. J. C. Daniel expressed it, “the men that was going to drink the blood, Are not the men that wades the mud.” In his company, at least, the “[se]cession boys are very scanty.” 105 Louisianan John Ellis was so disgusted with the Confederacy that he advocated “a counter revolution…another secession, a recall of all the stat
e troops…and freedom from Jeff Davis.” 106

  Yet as vehemently as they denounced the Confederacy, not even the angriest of Confederate soldiers like John Ellis called for a return to the Union. White Southerners might not share much in the way of affection for the Confederate States of America, but they did share hostility to the North. Even when the war’s mounting fury, resentment of seemingly unfair burdens placed on nonslaveholders, and the fierce hardships that culminated in the bread riots provoked John Ellis to call for “counter revolution,” the revolution he had in mind bore no resemblance to the one taking place in the Union, nor did it involve abandoning the Confederacy for the Union. Whatever else the Richmond government might do, Confederate soldiers knew it would neither abolish slavery nor introduce measures that hinted at racial equality.

  In contrast, when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and endorsed the enlistment of black soldiers, he finally revealed what Confederate soldiers assumed had been Northerners’ grand design all along. As a Confederate soldiers’ newspaper put it, “Now, any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks, and that the whole course of the Yankee Government has not only been directed to the abolition of slavery, but even to a stirring up of servile insurrections, is either a fool or a liar.” 107 No internal tensions or political quarrels could outweigh the danger of imminent abolition or the terrifying prospect of armed slaves. That revolution, Confederate soldiers felt sure, would be worse than the Confederacy in spite of its disappointments, and it must be resisted at all costs.