The Confederacy was also supposed to protect the race and gender hierarchy that white southern men relied on to define their identities as men, but the weight of the war now strained that very social structure. Many Confederate forces complained about not being treated as white men, especially when the Confederate Congress passed a bill dictating mandatory reenlistment for soldiers whose terms of service were due to expire. Required reenlistment inspired several regiments to renew their enlistments early in a show of support for the Confederacy, but other soldiers resented the way that compulsory reenlistment robbed them of control over their own actions, a key attribute of white manhood. As Pvt. Lewis Branscomb explained, since “congress has declared everybody in for the war,” the only way to retain influence over the brigade’s organization, and to ensure that “we can’t be called conscripts” was to sign on before the act of Congress took effect later in February. 99 Daniel Abernethy, in contrast, was an illiterate private so angered by mandatory reenlistment that he persuaded a messmate to write a letter at his dictation. Congress or no Congress, Abernethy and others in his regiment announced that their “time is out this spring,” and “the[y] intend to go.” Abernethy claimed he would return to the Union before he would be forced into the Army without the respect for his own wishes due to him as a white man. 100
White civilians further eroded rather than bolstered the proper social structure when they failed to treat Confederate soldiers as white men. “If a soldier goes out in the country hear to get something to eat and goes to some of these big negroes oners he is not so much as asked in the house, but if they se fit to give you any thing, they will tell you to set down and they will send it out to you by a Negro,” Pvt. John Killian complained, which especially infuriated him “when I am fiting for their property.” Regardless of wealth, all white men should be treated as equals, and equals would be invited to eat in the house. 101 Women family members of white men off fighting the war should also be treated with respect and decency, but an increasing number of Confederate soldiers learned that the opposite was true. A Georgia private “shead tears” at the news that local citizens treated his wife so poorly that she felt as if she lived “like a neger,” and he even threatened to desert the Army and come home to take care of her if things did not improve. 102 Louis Branscomb grew enraged when he heard that his neighbor, Mr. Cable, had not punished one of his slaves when the slave struck Branscomb’s sister. The idea that a white female member of his own family had been touched by a black man and nobody had done anything about it was almost more than Branscomb could take. “Just to think that I am off here fighting for my country and rich peoples property to have a dear sister treated [like] that at home” made him less inclined to kill Yankees than it did to kill “half the people in town,” including “that negro or Mr. Cable.” 103 If the whole point of fighting against the Union was to prevent whites from being put “on an equality with the Negroes,” as the rank and file insisted, then Confederate failures to uphold the racial hierarchy made for serious trouble. 104
Black Southerners compounded matters. By defying racial boundaries and treating white Southerners with scorn rather than deference, they provided soldiers with a glimpse of what life might be like without slavery to enforce the customary social hierarchy. Sometimes African Americans presumed to the material possessions and status that whites felt should have been reserved for them. In Charlottesville, Virginia, a Georgia soldier watched in shock as a group of former slaves insulted their former master and his family, “took the rings off ladies’ fingers[,] slapped their jaws[,] struck them with their sabres” (presumably borrowed from the Yankees or pilfered from southern whites), “and took all their meat[,] corn and horses and acted mean generally.” Released from slavery, blacks seemed to enjoy good food, fine things, and the ability to treat whites as whites had treated them. 105 In Norfolk, Virginia, a Confederate soldier under loose Union guard after his capture at the battle of Greentown complained about former slaves who claimed the privilege of mobility, which should have been reserved for whites. “Great crowds of contrabands who had once been carriage drivers for their masters” drove around Norfolk in their masters’ vehicles, escorting young black “wenches [who] would scoff and sneer at us as they passed.” 106 Most disturbing, black men threatened white men’s abilities to protect and control white women. Pvt. John W. Calton shuddered as he listened to a messmate tell a story about a black man who announced plans “too mean for me to repete but in a mild manner to Seduce your Sister.” The story confirmed Calton’s fears that the war was so destabilizing the world as he knew it, that soon the Yankees would “set [the black man] free, put him on equality with you, [allow him to] et with your Daughter at Church or else whare if she resists it or insults the Black Scoundrel she is arrested by the Same Party & taken to prisen.” 107
Confederates began to meet black Union soldiers in combat more frequently in 1864, which further aggravated white southern men’s sense of racial inversion. By bearing arms and mostly holding the same rank (private) held by most of the Confederate Army, black troops literally presumed to equal status with white southern enlisted men. “Damn you, you are fighting against your masters,” howled one Confederate as he faced black troops in Tennessee, but mere words could not put things back in their proper order. 108 One young chaplain, Richard Webb, had never seen “any negro troops before,” and his first encounter threw him off balance. He was shocked to see “one big buck” of a black Union soldier “walk nearly down to our pickets…big as life dressed in his blue cloth” in order to strike up a conversation, without a hint of the deference that Webb expected from African Americans. Worse, that soldier typified black troops, whom he claimed “will jump out and dance and hollow to our men, calling them rebels, saying they are as free as we are.” 109 Initially, Texan Charles Trueheart tried to force black troops into the molds carved by his notions of black men’s ineligibility for true manhood. Unable to believe that black men had voluntarily chosen to take up arms against the institution of slavery, for which Trueheart assumed God intended them, he claimed that captured black troops “begged that they might be turned back to their masters.” By portraying black prisoners as “abjectly submissive” and reporting that they addressed their Confederate captors as “Master,” Trueheart tried to drain the image of fighting black soldiers of its credibility and its danger. His efforts did not work for long. Whether he liked it or not, Trueheart had to admit that “some fought with an obstinacy that was really surprising, and held their ground till our fellows came to close quarter and knocked them in the head with muskets, or bayonetted them.” Just when Trueheart thought things could get no worse, a black soldier “stood up boldly at a distance of 30 paces, and had a regular duel with the Sergeant Major of our reg’t.” Duels took place between equals, not between a “highspirited young Southern blood” and a black man, yet the black soldier held his ground, despite being fired at “five or six times,” and “plugged the Sgt. in the forehead” before Confederates finally shot him. 110
Some Confederate troops responded to the topsy-turvy state of things by sticking with the habit of focusing more intently on the needs of their own families than on the good of the whole Confederacy. Even Al Pierson, who remained much more committed to the “wealth, honor & liberties of this Confederacy” than many of his fellow Southerners, recognized that soldiers fought less for a Confederate government, or a set of political principles, or even the idea of a separate Confederacy, than to “protect their homes” from all comers, including other Confederates. 111 Home- and family-centered motivation might prove useful in the short term, but could backfire if the conflict between the demands of families and the Confederacy became too acute, because troops might side with their families and leave the Confederacy to its own devices. A Mississippi soldier illustrated this very danger. Under no circumstances, he directed his sister, should she comply with the authorities’ demand that she turn her tanyard over to the government, no matter how badly the Army needed l
eather goods. Instead, she should save her resources for her own needs. 112 Meanwhile, when President Davis called up the Georgia militia to help defend Atlanta, one of the most important cities and rail hubs in the Confederacy, Pvt. A. T. Holliday refused to go because he lived in a neighborhood with “about 400 negroes minus any one to control them,” and he was not willing to risk “the quantity of Negroes above stated turned loose upon our wifes and children for one month.” In the face of such an obvious and immediate threat to the loved ones and racial order that a war for the Confederacy was supposed to safeguard, the menace posed by the Union Army at the city limits of Atlanta seemed secondary, and, as Holliday informed Governor Joseph Brown, he had no intention of subordinating his family’s safety or racial control for the benefit of the Confederacy, the state of Georgia, or the city of Atlanta. 113
Amid all the turmoil, President Davis pursued a strategy of trying to influence the northern election by soft-pedaling independence so that emancipation would look like the real impediment to a negotiated settlement. Some advisers feared that the tactic would push nonslaveholding soldiers to desert the Army out of disenchantment with fighting for someone else’s slaves while their own families suffered, but the projected explosion in desertions did not occur. 114 Instead, Confederate troops’ thoughts and actions in the summer of 1864 highlight how and why prevention of emancipation remained so critical to most of the nonslaveholding Confederate rank and file, even at a time when many felt like the world as they knew it was crumbling away.
Concerns about nonslaveholders who were beginning to question slavery were exaggerated, but not entirely misplaced. A tiny number of Confederate soldiers did begin very cautiously to regard the institution of slavery more critically. Worried that publicly criticizing slavery might lead to trouble for his family at home, Pvt. Noble Brooks confined his doubts to his diary. In the privacy of its pages, Brooks compared the devastation of the war-torn South to Egypt’s plagues in the Book of Exodus. As Egyptian “slaveholders and task masters…suffered great privation and final overthrow on account of the bondage of the Israelites,” so, too, were “the American people suffering all the calamities of war and the scarcity of provisions on account of African slavery.” 115 John Killian, a North Carolinian who had gone to California before the war but had come back to fight against the imposition of abolition on his native South, now found himself disenchanted with the very institution that he had returned to defend. “I some times think that this is rong to one a slave for the Bible ses that a man shal eat bred by his swet of his brough,” Killian admitted to his sister. 116
Yet despite their newfound doubts, neither Brooks nor Killian turned against the war or the institution of chattel bondage because neither of them could imagine a South without slavery any more than their fellow soldiers could. Even if slavery was wrong, Killian resisted the prospect of emancipation, because he dreaded the thought of a society in which “we will aul be on an equaliety.” 117 Brooks, meanwhile, could not “divine what will be the final issue of all these things” because he could not envision a safe and peaceful way of managing race relations without slavery. If black bondage disappeared, he felt sure that “there will be an awful shaking of the nation.” 118 Another private learned to his chagrin just how unwise voicing any doubts about slavery could be. When Edward Brown confided to his wife that he “would not give a hundred dollars for any Negro” while the Confederacy was in such upheaval, Mrs. Brown made the mistake of sharing the letter with a member of Brown’s regiment who was home on leave at the time. The soldier returned to camp and broadcast Brown’s views, leading the regiment to “condemn” the hapless Brown as “an unsound southern man.” 119 In contrast to their northern counterparts, white Southerners always recognized clearly that slavery could not be separated from race, which made any hint of the absence of slavery without definite plans for managing the fate and maintaining the inferior social status of freedpeople a dangerous matter.
Because they could not imagine that the South, their families, or even their own identities as white men could be safe in the absence of slavery, most Confederate troops responded to 1864’s preview of a world without a slavery-enforced racial hierarchy not by questioning chattel bondage, but by clinging desperately to it, and to a war to defend it. Alabamian Joseph Stapp worried about the high prices, food shortages, social unrest, and “desolation and ruin” that plagued the Confederacy, but told his mother that white Southerners would have to “bear any hardships” in order to “live independent of old Abe and his negro sympathizers.” 120 To a Louisianan, the options were equally stark. His wife wished the Confederacy would surrender, but he could not face the inevitable results of abolition, which would include “all of our property confiscated[,] our liberties taken from us…our slaves stationed in every town with guns in their hands to make us do our masters bidding.” 121 War-weary as men might be, much of the Confederate rank and file concurred with Al Pierson’s desire for “everlasting war in preference to a union with a people who condescend to equalize themselves with the poor, ignorant & only half civilized negro.” 122
In short, by 1864 Confederate troops faced a Confederacy that differed more than ever from their expectations that an independent nation would advance their families’ interests and aspirations and uphold a clear social structure based on racial hierarchy, but the Army as a whole continued to fight a punishing war largely because Confederates feared that reunion with the North and abolition would be even worse. The 1864 North Carolina gubernatorial race between incumbent Zebulon Vance and challenger William Holden demonstrates this calculus at work within one state. Neither candidate ran as a friend of the Confederate government. Since his election in 1862, Vance had built his reputation as wartime governor around resisting Richmond. Holden, editor of the North Carolina Weekly Standard and leader of the peace movement, ran as an out-and-out peace candidate who proposed ending the war by negotiating with federal authorities, even if North Carolina had to do so separately from the rest of the Confederacy. 123 The campaign boiled down to a contest over what Vance called “the best plan to obtain this consummation so devoutly wished,” namely “Peace, blessed peace!” 124
For a time, Holden posed such a serious challenge to Vance that Holden looked likely to sweep the soldier vote. Encamped in Virginia, Pvt. George Williams depicted Holden as his regiment’s choice for governor “by a large majority,” while Sgt. Martin Gash predicted that “Holden will get a good shar[e]” of support from North Carolinians in Georgia. 125 Soldiers’ reasons for preferring Holden were simple. They were tired of fighting, their families were suffering, and Holden seemed to offer the best chance for ending the conflict that brought so much misery. James Morris, a private who had recently joined the Fifty-seventh North Carolina, personally favored Vance, but feared that the rest of his regiment would go for Holden in a landslide. Morris wrote to tell Vance, “if you wish to be elected govenor you should try to put and end to those depredations that our cavalry has been committing in western North Carolina.” Several of Morris’s fellow enlisted men were receiving letters from frightened and hungry wives about how Confederate cavalry banged on doors in the middle of the night and rode off with crops, livestock, and whiskey. “It makes them very low spirited to [think] that they are defending the cause of our country and [our] own soldiers are destroying their homes,” Morris explained. Unless Vance could convince soldiers that he would do something about families’ problems, his electoral prospects looked bleak. 126 Other war-weary troops like Daniel Abernethy had no inclination to support Vance in the first place; after all the “talk of N.C. doing something for pease,” Abernethy was tired of “people at home [who] keepe bloing and don’t’ strike.” As governor, Holden looked like someone who might actually do something about ending the fighting, at least for North Carolinians. 127 Adelphos Burns felt sure that “Holden will beat Vance in the Army,” because soldiers would rather be “without a Confederacy” than to keep “fighting this war out.” 128
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p; Governor Vance launched his response with an appearance at Wilkesboro, North Carolina, on February 22, 1864, where, accompanied by music from the “Johnny Reb” band, he delivered a speech that he would repeat around the state and to soldiers camped in Virginia all spring and summer. The speech did wonders. In it, Vance assured audiences that he, too, sought an end to the conflict, but most of all he electrified them with his own gritty determination to achieve it without bowing to Lincoln and the abolitionists. He began with a joke, and then immediately moved on to acknowledge the hardships facing North Carolinians. “Gallant boys have been slaughtered,” he recognized, and women and children “pine for the presence and support of their natural protector.” He could understand how some might be tempted to consider reunion with the North: “all are liable to reach out, with the spirit of a drowning man, to grasp any passing straw, which for the moment, may keep their heads above the roaring flood.” Yet North Carolinians must resist such temptations for two main reasons. For one thing, it might temporarily look as if the Confederacy was harming rather than advancing families’ best interests, but in fact the welfare of the Confederacy was inseparable from that of individual families. “In its destiny are involved the welfare of State, community, home, wife, children, self,” Vance argued. Even more important, North Carolinians had better remember that putting their state “into the arms of Lincoln” would destroy the racial order. Good white men from North Carolina would join “the service of Uncle Sam, to fight alongside of his Negro troops in exterminating the white men, women, and children of the South.” They would have to “take an oath to support his [Lincoln’s] proclamation abolishing slavery, his proclamation inciting the slaves of our State to burn your homes and murder your families!” Meanwhile, black slaves “are all to be turned loose upon us.” North Carolina would look like Beaufort, South Carolina, where blacks owned land confiscated from whites. Every “Southern youth” would have to watch meekly while “he saw a Negro officer walking the streets and making his sister give way for him or insulting her.” Any white Southerners willing to endure such conditions deserved “the fate of dogs,” Vance thundered. 129
What This Cruel War Was Over Page 23