What This Cruel War Was Over
Page 30
Second, astonishing changes took place in many white Union men’s ideas about slavery and eventually, if more fragilely, about racial equality. When ordinary northern men, many of whom began the war without a single black acquaintance but with plenty of prejudice toward African Americans, actually met black people face to face and often came to rely on the aid, comfort, and military intelligence that former slaves offered to the Union Army, they found reasons to discard old views. Those changes remind historians of the power of events to rearrange even the most seemingly immovable cultural ideas and attitudes among people in the past, and they alert all of us to the dramatic changes in attitude and achievement that can take place when people who think they have nothing in common find themselves thrust into interaction and interdependence.
Finally, the vision of a very different United States could be seen clearly by men like David Williamson in the spring of 1865 but had faded tragically by the turn of the twentieth century. Taken together, the vividness of the vision and its eventual fading challenge historians to investigate more rigorously exactly how the United States could in the crucible of war create such vast potential for change and then, in the end, fail to fulfill it.
NOTES
Abbreviations for Archives and Collections
A-A
The Anglo-African
AAS
American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.
ADAH
Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery
AHC
Atlanta History Center
BA
Boston Atheneum
CAH
Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin
CHS
Chicago Historical Society
CMM Ser. A.
Confederate Military Manuscripts, Series A, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond
CMM Ser. B.
Confederate Military Manuscripts, Series B, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
CNMP
Chickamauga National Military Park, Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia
CR
The Christian Recorder
CTHS
Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford
CWMC
Civil War Miscellaneous Collection, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pa.
CWTIC
Civil War Times Illustrated Collection, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pa.
DU
Special Collections, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.
EU
Special Collections, Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta
FC
Filson Club, Louisville, Ky.
GDAH
Georgia Department of Archives and History, Atlanta
HCWRTC
Harrisburg Civil War Round Table Collection, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pa.
Hoole
Hoole Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
ISHL
Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield
JCHS
Jackson County Historical Society, Independence, Mo.
KCPL
Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, Mo.
KSHS
Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka
KU
Kansas Collection, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence
LC
Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress
LOV
Library of Virginia, Richmond
MDAH
Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson
MHS
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston
MNHS
Minnesota Historical Society, Minneapolis
MOC
Eleanor S. Brockenbrough Library, Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond
MOHS
Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis
NCDAH
North Carolina Division of Archives and History, Raleigh
NYHS
New-York Historical Society, New York
NYPL
Manuscripts and Special Collections, New York Public Library
NYSL
Special Collections, New York State Library, Albany
OHS
Ohio Historical Society, Columbus
PAW
People at War, microfilm collection of Library of Congress sources
PRONI
Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast
Quiner Papers
E. B. Quiner Correspondence of Wisconsin Volunteers, microfilm reels available from State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison
SCAH
South Carolina Archives and History Center, Columbia
Schoff
Schoff Collection, Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Schomburg
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
SCL
South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia
SHC
Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
SHSW
State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison
SU
Bird Library, Syracuse University, Syracuse
TSLA
Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville
UAR
Special Collections, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
UMOC
Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, University of Missouri, Columbia
UMOKC
Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, University of Missouri, Kansas City
UMOR
Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, University of Missouri, Rolla
UVA
Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville
VHS
Virginia Historical Society, Richmond
VOS
Valley of the Shadow Civil War Project, http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu
VTHS
Vermont Historical Society, Montpelier
WRHS
Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland
Introduction
1. The Wisconsin Volunteer, February 6, 1862, Leavenworth, Kans., p. 3, KSHS. The Wisconsin Volunteer was the newspaper of the Thirteenth Wis. Infantry regiment. Hereafter, “Infantry Regiment” will be omitted in the names of military units; any regiments not specified as artillery or cavalry may be understood to be infantry regiments.
2. The Vidette, November 2, 1862, Springfield, Tenn., p. 3, TSLA. The Vidette was the newspaper of Morgan’s Confederate Brigade.
3. The Black Warrior, May 17, 1864, Camp Parapet, La., p. 2, SHSW. The Black Warrior was the camp paper of the Fourteenth R.I. Heavy Artillery, a black regiment.
4. Ibid.
5. Since Maris Vinovskis famously wondered if social historians had lost the Civil War (Maris A. Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War? Some Preliminary Demographic Speculations,” Journal of American History 76:1 [1989], 34–58), studies of the home front, and later the overlap between the battlefield and home front, have flown off the presses. Joseph Glatthaar’s “The ‘New’ Civil War History: An Overview,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 115:3 (July 1991), 339–69, describes how the mounting realization that wars are “cataclysmic” (339) events that offer insight into the societies that wage them has reinvigorated the study of American wars, especially the Civil War. Recent works that attest to this trend include Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863 (New York: Norton, 2003); William Blair, Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Charles E. Brooks, “The Social and Cultural Dynamics of Soldiering in Hood’s Texas Brigade,” Jo
urnal of Southern History 67 (August 2001), 535–73; Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Joseph Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaign (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985); Randall Jimerson, The Private Civil War: Popular Thought During the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). The March to the Sea and Beyond in particular probes how midwestern cultural mores and the experiences of three years of fighting molded the men who took part in the Union’s famous 1864 march through Georgia and the Carolinas, and who in turn influenced the course of one key campaign of the war.
6. See, for example, Blair, Virginia’s Private War; Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Gary W. Gallagher, Lee & His Army in Confederate History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Anne Sarah Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Aaron Sheehan-Dean, “Justice Has Something To Do With It: Class Relations and the Confederate Army,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 113:4 (November 2005), 340–77. Rubin in particular labors to portray instances of white southern self-interest as momentary aberrations from “real” patriotism, which prevailed.
7. See, for example, Fred Arthur Bailey, Class and Tennessee’s Confederate Generation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Paul D. Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Armstead L. Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005); David Williams, Rich Man’s War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998); David and Teresa C. Williams and David Carlson, Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War: Class and Dissent in Confederate Georgia (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2002).
8. Susan-Mary Grant in North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000) and Peter Parish in The North and the Nation in the Era of the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003) portray northern patriotism, by which they mean a militant commitment to the aims of the state and government, as the product of the Civil War. Both authors concede that Northerners felt an emotional attachment to the American nation before the war, but they did not connect it to the U.S. government until after the war. In contrast, Phillip S. Paludan argues in “The American Civil War Considered as a Crisis in Law and Order,” American Historical Review 77:4 (October 1972), 1013–34, and “A People’s Contest”: The Union and the Civil War 1861–1865 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), esp. part 1, that the daily exigencies of small-town life and its many opportunities for office holding, voting, and other forms of participation in government led antebellum Northerners to feel a strong emotional attachment to the U.S. government before the war, which was why secession prompted such an outpouring of emotion and outrage among ordinary Northerners.
9. On antebellum millennialism in the North, see Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Seabury, 1975); Samuel S. Hill, Jr., The South and the North in American Religion (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981); Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630–1875 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), Introduction; James H. Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War 1860–1869 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); and Philip Paludan, “Religion and the American Civil War,” in Miller, Stout, and Wilson, Religion and the American Civil War.
10. Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943) and The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952). I was hooked from the time I borrowed The Life of Johnny Reb from my local library (and only partly because of the thrill of being allowed to check a book out of the adult section of the library at the tender age of about seven), and any time a group of Civil War enthusiasts gets together, chances are good that at least one of them will share a similar experience.
11. For examples of “bottom up” histories of Civil War soldiers, see Larry Daniel, Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee: A Portrait of Life in a Confederate Army (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); J. Tracy Power, Lee’s Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
12. Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series 2, The Black Military Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1987); Hondon B. Hargrove, Black Union Soldiers in the Civil War (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1988); James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience During the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995); Edward Miller, The Black Civil War Soldiers of Illinois: The Story of the Twenty-Ninth U.S. Colored Infantry (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998); John David Smith, ed., Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Noah Andre Trudeau, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998); Keith Wilson, Campfires of Freedom: Black Soldiers During the Civil War (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2002). In 1994, the DaCapo Press of New York reprinted Joseph T. Wilson’s classic The Black Phalanx: African American Soldiers in the War of Independence, the War of 1812, and the Civil War (Hartford: American Publishing, 1890).
13. For an example of a World War II study that stresses the nonideological nature of enlisted soldiers, see Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Despite differences in emphasis and interpretation, and despite the valuable insights they offer, works as diverse as Michael Barton, Goodmen: The Character of Civil War Soldiers (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981); Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Macmillan, 1987); and James Robertson, Soldiers Blue and Gray (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988) all downplay the significance of ideology to the men who fought the Civil War. James McPherson links this tendency to World War II and the Vietnam War in For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4–5, 90–91.
14. Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988). In a related development, some historians have taken up the associated issue of how soldiers’ religious beliefs molded their wartime experiences. See, for example, Steven E. Woodworth, While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001). An older, but still useful, treatment of soldiers’ religious views is Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., A Shield and Hiding Place: The Religious Life of the Civil War Armies (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1987).
15. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades. McPherson’s earlier book, What They Fought For: 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), which actually began as the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History, previews many of the themes that appear in For Cause
and Comrades.
16. Gary Gallagher, J. Tracy Power, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, for example, concentrate exclusively on soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia, while Larry Daniel gives the Confederacy’s major western army, the Army of Tennessee, its share of attention. Meanwhile, Union soldiers provide the exclusive focus of works like Earl J. Hess, Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and Their War for the Union (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997); Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997); and Steven E. Woodworth, Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861–1865 (New York: Knopf, 2005). For works covering both armies, but treating them as virtually interchangeable, see Joseph Allan Frank and George Reaves, Seeing the Elephant: Raw Recruits in the Battle of Shiloh (New York: Greenwood, 1989); and Larry Logue, To Appomattox and Beyond: The Civil War Soldier in War and Peace (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996). Even McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades often makes it difficult to distinguish between Union and Confederate troops. In fact, the idea for this study took root in class one day when students and I were discussing For Cause and Comrades. Discussion remained lively until I asked students what made Union and Confederate soldiers different from each other. Sometimes dead silence in response to a question simply means students have not read the book, but on that day, they had been chatting right along up until that point. The sudden silence led me to resolve that before settling for the notion that 620,000 Americans killed one another because they all agreed on everything, I wanted to take another, more consciously comparative, look.