What This Cruel War Was Over

by Chandra Manning

  Violence for its own sake might dispel misapprehensions about excessive timidity among black men, but it would do nothing to lay claim to other attributes of manhood, such as liberty of conscience and moral agency, or the ability of adult males to make their own moral choices and act with conscious rectitude in the service of worthy causes. As a volunteer in the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts put it, volunteering “made us men when we enlisted,” not simply because the Army put guns in black men’s hands, but also because the war gave black soldiers an opportunity to choose to defend noble principles. 91 Black soldiers who fought the Confederacy deliberately chose to help the Union “become triumphant over slavery.” In helping to lay “the foundation of our liberty,” a black volunteer reasoned, African American men displayed “liberty of soul,” which constituted one sure way to “sho forth our manhood.” 92 Newly recruited Robert Fitzgerald was eager “to go to the front” to “prove our Love of Liberty,” which in turn would prove “that we be men.” 93

  Many black Union troops saw serving in the Army as a way to reclaim their standing as husbands and fathers, a characteristic of manhood that had been stripped away by slavery. When a black soldier named Pete scouted with his regiment in Tennessee, he also used the opportunity to liberate his wife from a plantation near Memphis. 94 Former Missouri slave Pvt. Spotswood Rice established his manhood through wartime service when he wrote to Miss Kitty, the owner of his two daughters, announcing his intention to free his daughters forcibly as soon as his regiment came through her neighborhood. Insisting that his children were “a God given rite of my own,” and that the Union stood on the side of his rights, Rice warned Miss Kitty that she would “burn in hell” if she prevented a man and father from caring for his own flesh and blood. 95

  The institution of slavery denied the full humanity of all African Americans, not just adult males; sometimes when black soldiers talked about the “manhood of the race,” they meant the full humanity of all black Americans. Black soldiers, in other words, saw the war as a way for African Americans as a whole to “attain greatness as a type in the human family,” as one black soldier noted. 96 By fighting against slavery, black soldiers not only rescued fellow members of their race from the curse of bondage, but they also sought to free all blacks from the risks, legal discrimination, and stigma of inferiority that the existence of slavery applied to all black Americans. Daniel Walker described fighting courageously as the best way to bring about “the elevation of a downtrodden and oppressed race.” 97 Similarly, Isaiah Welch felt certain that because black soldiers “labored faithfully amid prejudice and oppression,” and because they helped “to fight the battles of their noble country,” the “onward move of my race” must be inevitable. Black Americans were sure to be acknowledged as “a nation worthy of the applause of others” after black soldiers served so well in war, Welch concluded. 98 As long as racial slavery persisted, white Americans could regard blacks as childlike, dependent, or otherwise less than full citizens or true men. Soldiering to end slavery could help destroy such assumptions. Furthermore, as long as slavery existed, even free northern blacks faced the danger of kidnapping and sale into bondage, and institutionalized discrimination in northern law remained nearly impossible to combat. 99 By battling against the institution that kept southern blacks in bondage, black soldiers hoped to smash the chains of prejudice and inhumanity that bound all members of the race.

  “God is with us & will carry us through safe if we will only prove ourselves worthy”

  Confederates experienced the Fourth of July, 1863, much differently from Union troops. Late June had taken on something of a holiday atmosphere for members of the Army of Northern Virginia as they marched into Pennsylvania, where farms and gardens were ripe for the picking. In addition to being able to supplement their rations in ways that depletion in Virginia had long since made impossible, many Confederates took advantage of the opportunity to capture black men and women. 100 One corporal, for instance, reported that a friend had found several runaways and sent them, along with luckless free blacks, into bondage in Virginia. 101 Virginian Isaac Reynolds had also been enjoying the summer jaunt into Pennsylvania, capturing “horses and cattle by the hundreds” and plucking “anything we wanted in the eating line” from the “Dutch” farms that lined the army’s route, until Gettysburg’s “great slaughter” abruptly changed the mood. 102 As news of the defeat spread, morale soured. Soldiers traveling by train from Lynchburg, Virginia, to Richmond were already in a foul humor thanks to reorganization among companies and the reshuffling of officers. News of Gettysburg compounded their dissatisfaction, and they gratuitously shot at hogs and cattle through open train windows. Every crossroads where they stopped to stretch their legs had its “Fruit Trees & Gardens demolished, [and its] chickens killed,” according to one private. 103 Meanwhile, in Vicksburg, “Many Soldiers” sent a letter to Confederate General John Pemberton stipulating, “if you can’t feed us, you had better surrender.” The alternatives, the starving troops warned, were “desertion” or “mutiny.” 104 As his regiment quit Vicksburg, a Georgian confessed that the army was “whipt,” and that he “never did wan to leave eny plase half as bad in My life.” 105 Another weary soldier decided, “the backbone of our confederacy is broke.” 106 As the ensuing two years of additional warfare make clear, July 1863 did not really mark the downfall of the Confederacy, but the mood after Gettysburg and Vicksburg contrasted starkly with the mood the previous spring. Demoralization was not permanent, in other words, but it was serious. 107

  In addition to battlefield setbacks, mitigated only temporarily by a dramatic but short-lived victory at Chickamauga on the border of Georgia and Tennessee, hardship, divisiveness, and conflict among Confederates continued to escalate in 1863. In 1861, President Jefferson Davis had confidently assured listeners that the Confederacy would “have nothing to fear at home, because at home we shall have homogeneity,” but such assurances sounded hollow to many soldiers and civilians by 1863, when, as one army surgeon put it, Confederates did not seem “united enough to strike the decisive blows. 108 James Zimmerman, a nonslaveholding farmer born in Georgia who lived in North Carolina before enlisting in the Army of Northern Virginia in July 1862, articulated several concerns shared by many of his fellow enlisted men in 1863. Soldiers worried about letters they received from home telling, as Private Zimmerman put it, of “children…crying for bread and…not a mouthfull to give them.” 109 Far from feeling that the nation was pulling together to weather difficulties, soldiers resented what John Kinyoun called “those vultures that have stayed at home and preyed on the hearts blood of the best men of the land while communities are shrouded in sackcloth and in ashes.” 110 Other troops noted with distaste that the very men who had done the most to bring about the war seemed to do the least to bear its burdens. In Tennessee, Florida sergeant Archie Livingston wished “that men who were so anxious to see rebellion would do as near their duty as the patriot.” Rattling off a list of local elite who had breathed fire at the time of the Florida secession convention, Livingston wanted to know why those same men seemed so reluctant to risk their lives and fortunes now that the Confederacy that they had so urgently called for needed them. The ranks, he claimed, consisted instead of “men who acted no conspicuous part in bringing on the troubles.” 111 The rancor is easy to understand in the second half of 1863, when suffering mounted everywhere, the war in the West looked grim for Confederates, and not even the trusty Virginia theater could offer white Southerners much reason to celebrate; it did not amount to a desire to return to the Union, but it taxed the Confederate cause and the men who fought for it nonetheless.

  Many Confederates (in and out of uniform) continued to blame government authorities for the war’s woes, and sometimes even found ways to resist measures designed to prosecute the war, but which individual southern whites regarded as illegitimate breaches of authority. As the war’s mounting challenges led the Davis administration to exercise more power in its attempt to meet those ch
allenges, some white Southerners feared that Richmond posed as great a threat to their liberties as Washington, D.C. Even staunch Confederates like Macon Bonner worried that “President Davis…is ambitious and ambition knows no bounds.” Few “men who ever have had full power gave it back to the people,” Bonner warned. 112 More Southerners resented threats to their immediate welfare. Impressment caused Thomas Taylor to rail against the “Military Despotism” that allowed Confederate authorities to demand a share of the livestock and produce upon which his family relied. To Taylor, impressment violated the whole point of government, which was to protect rather than plunder people and property. He urged his wife to sell her cows immediately while she could still reap some personal profit, since “it would be useless to try to keep them,” only to have them taken away by the “Military authorities.” 113 James Zimmerman felt even more bitterness toward “the tax collector and the produce gathere[r]s [who] are pushing for the little mights of garden and trash patches…that the poor women have labored hard and made.” He gave his wife precise instructions to resist the authorities by telling them, “you thought your husband was fighting for our rights and you had a notion that you had a right to what little you had luck to make.” 114 State leaders also came in for criticism. Georgia soldier Thomas Trammell complained to Governor Joseph Brown that if Georgia “will not protect our helpless families,” he was “unwilling to fight longer,” and the same was true of “most of the soldiers here from Fannin [County].” 115

  At the same time, the hard edge of class conflict in the Confederacy sharpened, and while it did not become cutting enough to slice the Confederacy into pieces, it did contribute to an increasingly jagged social landscape as soldiers grew angrier with the kind of civilians that James Zimmerman called “rich bigbugs.” “[T]oo many poor [are] fighting for the rich,” who stayed home “grasping and grabing after what little the poor women have to spair,” Zimmerman grumbled. 116 As Marcus Hefner saw things in mid-July, “this is a rich Mans war it is not for the pore,” and Hefner was not alone. 117 If there was anyone that John Kinyoun “hate[d] and wish[ed] damned,” it was the local men of wealth and influence who avoided military service and stayed home “to see who[se] pocket they may filch in the persons of widows or some little orphaned children.” 118 A Texan complained bitterly about the “rising men” at home who “ignobly speculated upon the necessities of the soldier and his family” and allowed soldiers’ families “to live like widows and orphans” while they pursued a “position of profit.” 119 The extension of conscription to older men alongside the persistence of the exemption for owners or overseers of twenty or more slaves (rather than poor neighborhood men who might equally well have stayed home to provide local race control) continued to aggravate class tensions. Disgusted that poor men up to the age of fifty-five were to be “called out” while affluent men stayed home simply because they owned a sufficient number of slaves, Sgt. John Calton cursed the government and the war, and advised his brother to take any steps possible to avoid joining the Army. Meanwhile, he did not exert much effort in his regiment’s assigned task of rounding up deserters and draft dodgers. 120

  As John Calton’s halfhearted performance of his duty shows, alienation among Confederate troops could do more than heighten the frequency of griping in camp; it could hurt the Confederacy. Alabama private Richard Ledbetter took part in the Confederacy’s victory at Chickamauga in September 1863, only to see the gains made there reversed at Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge in the weeks that followed. By the end of 1863, Ledbetter went so far as to predict defeat for the Confederacy, not simply because of the setbacks his army suffered, but also because “two thirds of our army” had no heart in the Confederate cause, and it was impossible to “make good contented and fighting soldiers out of a man who is forced to fight contrary to his own belief and against a cause that he wishes to prosper.” 121

  Ledbetter’s spirits were unusually low compared to most soldiers, and they especially contrasted with morale in Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, where morale stayed higher than anywhere else in the Confederacy. Yet even among Lee’s men, troops like James Zimmerman began to condemn the “firebrands” who had started a war for selfish reasons. 122 “It is a pity that the Malitia officers and the big fighting men cant be got out to fight as easy as to make speaches,” observed Private Zimmerman, as he gave his wife advice about how to hide the family’s meager harvest. “How can they think we can fight when they the great leeding fighting men wont?” 123 In some cases, bitterness even led to desertion, just as the Confederate Army desperately needed more, not fewer, men. 124 From the middle of July, one Louisiana soldier began to note new desertions in his diary almost every day. 125 After Gettysburg, William Wagner wished soldiers everywhere would desert down to “the last man” in order to bring the fighting to an end. 126 Some regiments appeared to do their best to comply with Wagner’s wishes. According to one member of a regiment stationed nearby, the Fifty-second Georgia simply up and left one night. 127 Neither the Fifty-second Georgia nor the Confederate Army really evaporated overnight, but the confluence of rising home front hardship and bad battlefield luck was enough to “dishearten and drive [even] old Satin mad,” as one soldier put it, and numbers in some regiments dwindled as a result. 128

  Popular disaffection also influenced state and local elections, which painted a muddled picture of what kind of nation white Southerners hoped to see emerge from the conflict. Two-thirds of elected freshman members of the Confederate Congress had opposed secession in 1861, and in some states the proportion was even higher. Nearly 40 percent of Confederate congressmen, and almost half of Confederate senators, now opposed the Davis administration. 129 The results rebuked the administration and the war effort by any measure, but they did not translate into a widespread desire to return to the Union, nor did they add up to any kind of consensus. Instead, the results showed that soldiers and other white Southerners did not like the Confederacy they had, but neither did they share a coherent vision of the Confederacy that they wanted in its place. In Georgia, for instance, Governor Joseph Brown, who relentlessly opposed the Davis administration, ran for reelection. Two candidates ran against him. One, Joshua Hill, supported reentry into the Union, while the other, Timothy M. Furlow, remained true to the Richmond administration and had proven himself an ally of capitalists and large slaveholders while alienating workingmen with an antilabor stance in the Georgia state senate. Brown won reelection, but soldiers’ votes and reactions showed division and ambivalence more than anything else. For example, because Lofton’s Regiment of Georgia Volunteers was stationed in Georgia at the time of the election, its members could vote. In Companies C and K, which voted together, only five soldiers even bothered to cast votes for governor, and they split them almost equally: Brown received two votes, Furlow received two, and Hill received one. In Companies D and H, Hill did significantly better, garnering many votes and narrowly beating Brown, while leaving Furlow back at the starting gate with a single vote. 130 Georgia lieutenant Josiah Patterson worried that state elections revealed a populace too disjointed to win the war and achieve Confederate independence. “The times call for bold determined men,” he observed, not “wishy washy legislation,” and he did not believe that the elections answered that call. 131 Overall, the elections of 1863 created state governments and a Confederate legislature full of dissent and often hostile to the Davis administration, but with no agreed-upon alternative to the Confederacy’s disappointing path, nor any desire to return to the Union.

  In North Carolina, discontent resulted in more than just ambiguous election results; it contributed to a full-blown peace movement led by newspaper editor William Holden in the summer of 1863, which further revealed a divided and uncertain people, but not a people ready to return to the Union. Especially after the defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Holden determined (and exclaimed in his newspaper, the Weekly Standard) that “what the great mass of our people desire is a cessation of hostiliti
es, and negotiations” leading to a “settlement…which would leave them in the future in the enjoyment of ‘life, liberty, and happiness.’” 132 Since the people were sovereign and they wanted peace, Holden argued, the Confederate government was obligated to negotiate for peace with federal authorities. If the central Confederate government refused, North Carolina should assert its state sovereignty and conduct its own negotiations, which would in turn inspire other states to do likewise, until a settlement could be reached. Sparked by Holden, communities throughout the state held mass meetings where they passed resolutions calling for negotiations to end the war, ideally between Confederate and federal authorities, but through separate state action if necessary. 133 Resolutions passed from the state’s eastern tidewater to its western mountains clearly signaled that North Carolinians were not satisfied with the Confederacy as it was, and that they were tired of the depredations of war, but the resolutions did not necessarily imply a wish to go back into the Union. 134 In fact, the published proceedings of a Caldwell County meeting reasoned that overtures toward peace would actually shore up the Confederate war effort, because even if they did not end the war, they would “restore harmony & unite the people” by quieting “dissatisfaction.” 135

  Soldiers’ reactions to the North Carolina peace movement varied, and revealed a rank and file that matched the home front in its distaste for the Confederacy coupled with an unwillingness to give up on a Confederacy altogether. Much as Indiana and Illinois troops had felt a special burden imposed by the embarrassment of meetings against the Emancipation Proclamation in their home states, some North Carolinians felt ashamed of the peace movement back home. A few, like Adelphos Burns, believed that if the loyal simply ignored the meetings, the peace movement would not “affect much,” but not many shared Private Burns’s restraint. 136 George Dewey called anyone “remaining at home and talking about reconstruction” a “Cowardly scoundrel.” 137 In September, when a detachment of the Army of Northern Virginia led by Gen. James Longstreet traveled through North Carolina to join the Army of Tennessee in the western theater, a group of soldiers destroyed Holden’s press and sent Holden himself fleeing. Such actions horrified some soldiers who worried about military incursions against civil liberties like freedom of the press, but satisfied others who felt that Holden deserved what he got. One soldier was “verry much pleased to hear of the soldiers making a raid upon old Holden’s office,” but he wished they had “pitched old Holden into the Streets and broke his neck instead of his press.” 138 Still other soldiers actually welcomed Holden and his campaign to end the war. At a regimental meeting, Pvt. William Wagner and his fellow North Carolinians discussed the peace meetings and hoped that they would help “stop the war on some fare terms or another.” The men then conducted a straw poll in which “the most of the solegers voted for peese” and even took the rare step of expressing “willing[ness] to go back in the union a gain.” 139