150. Pvt. James Zimmerman, Fifty-seventh N.C., to wife, October 21, 1863, Brandy Station, Va., James Zimmerman Papers, DU.
151. Martha Warrick to husband, Pvt. Thomas Warrick, Thirty-fourth Ala., October 9, 1863, Coosa, Ala., Thomas Warrick Letters, ADAH.
152. Pvt. Richard Ledbetter, Fortieth Ala., to wife, December 25, 1863, near Dalton, Ga., Fortieth Ala. Infantry File, CNMP.
153. Martha Warrick to husband, Pvt. Thomas Warrick, Thirty-fourth Ala., October 9, 1863, Coosa, Ala., Thomas Warrick Letters, ADAH. Southerners who maintained strong loyalty to slavery also expressed doubts about how to control freed slaves. According to Missouri soldier Walthall Robertson, who had once made his living as a slave trader, “turning [slaves] loose to shift for themselves” guaranteed further disruption to the South, since he assumed that most former slaves would either “starve or steal.” See Robertson to sister, October 25, 1863, Miami, Mo., Mary Overton Gentry Shaw Family Papers, JCHS.
154. Lt. Edmund Patterson, Ninth Ala., diary, August 18, 1863, Johnson’s Island Prison, in John G. Barrett, ed., Yankee Rebel: The Civil War Journal of Edmund DeWitt Patterson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 130.
155. Pvt. Grant Taylor, Fortieth Ala., to wife, December 6, 1863, hospital, Marietta, Ga., in Ann K. Blomquist and Robert A. Taylor, eds., This Cruel War: The Civil War Letters of Grant and Malinda Taylor, 1862–1865 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000), 205.
156. Lt. Edmund Patterson, Ninth Ala., diary, August 4, 1863, Johnson’s Island Prison, in Barrett, Yankee Rebel, 128.
157. Jefferson DeVotie, Ga., to father, July 20, 1863, Charleston, S.C., in Lane, Dear Mother: Don’t Grieve About Me, 253. See also Pvt. John Brightman, substitute in the Eighteenth Tex., to brother, August 23, 1863, St. Landry’s Parish, La., John Claver Brightman Papers, CAH; Lt. James Lineberger, Forty-ninth N.C., to wife, August 20, 1863, near Weldon, N.C., in H. O. Pitts, ed., Letters of a Gaston Ranger: 2nd Lt. James Wellington Lineberger (H. O. Pitts, 1991), MOC.
158. Pvt. Thomas Taylor, Sixth Ala., to sons, July 20, 1863, Martinsburg, Va., Thomas S. Taylor Letters, ADAH. Similarly, John Street proclaimed the certainty of Confederate victory: “Will not God favor the rights? I believe he will.” See Pvt. John Street, Ninth Tex., to wife, September 26, 1863, Camp Lauderdale Springs, Miss., John K. and Melinda East Street Papers, SHC. To Newton Davis, a simple syllogism explained all. Since God was both “omnipotent & just” and the southern cause was “just,” then “doubtless He in his own good time will give us the victory.” See Newton Davis, Twenty-fourth Ala., to wife, December 11, 1863, Dalton, Ga., Newton N. Davis Papers, ADAH.
159. Pvt. Richard Jacques, S.C., to Tutes, October 20, 1863, Richard Jacques Letters, CAH.
160. Jason Phillips discusses Confederate soldiers’ religious conviction that they could not lose because God favored their side in “Religious Belief and Troop Motivation: ‘For the Smiles of My Blessed Saviour,’” in Wallenstein and Wyatt-Brown, Virginia’s Civil War, 101–13, esp. 106–09.
161. Cpl. William Andrews, Tenth Va. Battalion, to father, January 11, 1865, Darbytown Road, Va., William B.G. Andrews Papers, DU.
162. Sgt. Reuben Allen Pierson, Ninth La., to father, January 30, 1864, Orange Co., Va., in Cutrer and Parrish, Brothers in Gray, 226.
163. Pvt. John Brightman, Eighteenth Tex., to brother, June 1, 1863, Washington, La., John Claver Brightman Papers, CAH.
164. For discussion of this theme, see Steven E. Woodworth, While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001).
165. For more on southern religion and its general distaste for reform movements, see John Boles, The Great Revival: Beginning of the Bible Belt (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996); Wyatt-Brown, “The Antimission Movement in the Jacksonian South; Crowley, Primitive Baptists of the Wiregrass South; Hill, The South and the North in American Religion; Hughes and Allen, Illusions of Innocence; Kuykendall, Southern Enterprize; Mathews, Religion in the Old South; Shattuck, A Shield and Hiding Place; Smith, Revivalism & Social Reform; and Snay, Gospel of Disunion. Kuykendall and Shattuck especially emphasize the antireform ethos of the South, and explain that it was based on the belief that reform assigned to humans a role that belonged to God, and also because it flirted with heresy. See Kuykendall, Southern Enterprize, esp. ch. 4; and Shattuck, A Shield and a Hiding Place, 2–8. While John Quist (Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan) and Beth Barton Schweiger (The Gospel Working Up) have modified the picture of antebellum southern religion by showing some temperance activity among Alabama Whigs in one county and among Virginia clergymen, temperance still involved individual behavior, and their findings do not change the central point that white Southerners by and large looked with great suspicion on attempts to remake society.
166. Lt. Frank Peak, Byrne’s Infantry Battery (Ark.), diary, December 1863, prison, Alleghany City, Pa., Frank P. Peak Narrative, CMM Ser B., Reel 5.
167. Lt. Josiah Patterson, Fourteenth Ga., to daughter, August 14, 1863, Orange Court House, Va., Josiah Blair Patterson Letters, GDAH; William Stillwell, Ga., to wife, August 13, 1863, Fredericksburg, Va., in Lane, Dear Mother: Don’t Grieve About Me, 260.
168. Lt. James Lineberger, Forty-ninth N.C., to wife, September 11, 1863, near Weldon, N.C., in Pitts, Letters of a Gaston Ranger, MOC.
169. Pvt. William Pemberton Davis, Sixty-third Ga., diary, December 27, 1863, GDAH. For the particular significance of concern over profanity, and for claims that profanity was a collective issue among southern leaders and churchmen, see Drew Faust, “Christian Soldiers: The Meaning of Revivalism in the Confederate Army,” Journal of Southern History 53:1 (February 1987), 79–80. Soldiers remarked on widespread swearing, but they did not attribute the same social significance to it.
170. Charles James addresses this theme repeatedly in letters to his sister; for the fullest treatment, see Lt. Charles James, Eighth Va., to sister, February 13, 1865, near Richmond, Charles Fenton James Letters, VHS.
171. For the importance of church leaders’ and prominent white Southerners’ beliefs that God had appointed the slaveholding South as an earthly model of Christian order, orthodoxy, and benevolence, see Edward R. Crowther, Southern Evangelicals and the Coming of the Civil War (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), esp. ch. 5 and the Conclusion; Eugene D. Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998); Jack P. Maddex, Jr., “Proslavery Millennialism: Social Eschatology in Antebellum Southern Calvinism,” American Quarterly 31:1 (spring 1979); Snay, Gospel of Disunion. For the emphasis on slave marriage, see Genovese, A Consuming Fire, 23–32, 51–54, 59–61. For just a few of many sermons making these points, see “Practical Considerations Founded on the Scriptures, Relative to the Slave Population of South Carolina,” by “A South Carolinian who is a D.D.” (Charleston, 1823); James A. Thornwell, “The Rights and Duties of Masters” (May 26, 1850), in Chesebrough, “God Ordained This War,” 177–92; and J. B. Thrasher, “Slavery a Divine Institution” (November 5, 1860) (Port Gibson, Miss., 1861), Widener Library, Harvard University.
172. Steven Woodworth also makes this point in While God Is Marching On.
173. Lt. James Lineberger, Forty-ninth N.C., to wife, September 11, 1863, near Weldon, N.C., in Pitts, Letters of a Gaston Ranger, MOC.
174. Pvt. Grant Taylor, Fortieth Ala., to wife, October 12, 1863, near Demopolis, Ala., in Blomquist and Taylor, This Cruel War, 184. See also Pvt. Thomas Osborne, Sixth Ky. (CSA), to sister, January 27, 1864, near Dalton, Ga., Thomas D. Osborne Letters, Eastern Kentucky University, transcripts at MOC.
175. Revivals among Confederate troops (especially the Army of Tennessee and the Army of Northern Virginia) have been well documented by historians Larry Daniel, Bell Wiley, and Drew Faust, among others, and as Reid Mitchell points out, references to revivals appear in soldiers’ letters and diaries through
out the Confederacy. Faust attributes the timing of the revivals in part to the discouraging progress of the war, explaining that revivals “directly reflected the stresses of the soldier’s life and death situation: the strains of life in the ranks of a mass army; the pressures of daily confrontation with death—and with a rate of mortality unmatched in any American war before or since.” In addition, Confederate soldiers received poorer rations and fewer furloughs than their Union counterparts, which rendered them even more in need of spiritual consolation. See Faust, “Christian Soldiers: The Meaning of Revivalism in the Confederate Army,” 64, 68. For revivals in the West, see Larry Daniel, who counters the supposition that revivals began in the Army of Northern Virginia by arguing that revivalism emerged first in the Army of Tennessee, which suffered from considerably worse luck and fewer victories than its eastern counterpart. Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee, ch. 8. Wiley, in The Life of Johnny Reb, first examined the revival phenomenon and attributed Confederate revivals to a more religious character among Southerners than Northerners. Reid Mitchell shows that religion was important to Confederate armies, but that Union soldiers, who also experienced a wave of revivalism, were equally devout, though they were more likely to be church members before entering the Army than were Confederates, and so a smaller proportion was available to “convert” or join a church as members. See Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers; and Mitchell, “Christian Soldiers? Perfecting the Confederacy,” in Miller, Stout, and Wilson, Religion and the American Civil War, 297–309.
176. Pvt. John Street, Ninth Tex., to wife, September 26, 1863, Camp Lauderdale Springs, Miss., John K. and Melinda East Street Papers, SHC.
177. Sgt. Edward Brown, Forty-fifth Ala., to wife, May 1, 1864, Dalton, Ga., Edward Norphlet Brown Letters, ADAH.
178. John Crowley notes that part of the appeal of the Primitive Baptist faith among its adherents in the Wiregrass South was and is that it provides moments when “doubts cease.” It is not hard to see why that aspect of religious faith would be appealing to Confederates in 1863. See Crowley, Primitive Baptists of the Wiregrass South, 190.
179. “Fiery ordeal” was a pet phrase among Southerners in this time frame. For just two of many examples, see Lt. Edmund Patterson, Ninth Ala., diary, July 4, 1863, Gettysburg, Pa., in Barrett, Yankee Rebel, 119; and Sgt. Thoms Ragland, Ninth Tenn. (CSA) to father, August 1, 1863, near Chattanooga, Tenn., Ragland Family papers, TSLA.
5: “Many Are the Hearts That Are Weary Tonight”: The War in 1864
1. Sgt. Richard Black, Third U.S. Colored Troops, to Editor, Jan. 4, 1864, Morris Island, S.C., A-A, January 30, 1864, p. 1.
2. G.E.S., Fifty-fourth Mass., to Editor, January 5, 1864, Morris Island, S.C., A-A, January 23, 1864, p. 3.
3. Pvt. Wilbur Fisk, Second Vt., to Green Mountain Freeman, May 9, 1864, Spotsylvania, Va., in Rosenblatt and Rosenblatt, Hard Marching Every Day, 217. Fisk then revealed that once the battle subsided and he was able to attend to his own, rather than Uncle Sam’s, constitution (i.e., he got something to eat), his resolve returned, but his demoralization, even if temporary, indicates the discouraging effect that the spring 1864 battles could exert on soldiers’ morale.
4. Pvt. Lewis Bissell, Second Conn. Heavy Artillery, to father, June 2–4, 1864, Cold Harbor, Va., in Olcott and Lear, The Civil War Letters of Lewis Bissell, 245–49.
5. Sgt. James Jessee, Eighth Ill., diary, March 13–16, 1864, Vicksburg, Miss., James W. Jessee Diary, KU.
6. Only soldiers who had signed on for three-year enlistments in 1861 approached the end of their terms in 1864, so anyone who enlisted in 1862 or later did not figure into the reenlistment drive. In the end, of soldiers whose enlistments expired, about 136,000 soldiers reenlisted, while almost 100,000 did not (McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 720). The Army of the Potomac generally suffered from lower morale than the western armies did, and it also had the lowest reenlistment rate, 50 percent. In Embattled Courage, Gerald Linderman has pointed out the need to resist the easy conclusion that the voluntary reenlistment of the majority of the Army signified patriotic zeal, and has argued instead that reenlistment had more to do with soldiers’ fatalistic belief in the certainty of their own deaths and consequent desire to take advantage of the reenlistment furloughs to say goodbye to loved ones. Soldiers’ own words similarly caution against an overly romantic view of patriotic zeal in 1864, but otherwise they present a different picture than Linderman asserts. Soldiers who did not reenlist generally explained that they believed that they had fulfilled their commitment and now thought that stay-at-homes should do their part before three-year veterans signed on for more; they did not write that the war didn’t matter anymore, or that its outcome was unimportant. Soldiers who did reenlist described the decision neither in terms of romance and glory nor of resignation and cynicism, but rather in terms of their desire to get the job of victory done, and see to completion the task they had started. In short, the decision to reenlist or go home should not be oversimplified into an up-or-down vote on the war effort.
7. For the peace conference, and for Davis’s strategy of soft-pedaling independence in hopes of encouraging the northern electorate to see emancipation as the major issue of the war and impediment to peace, see Larry E. Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric: Confederate Policy for the United States Presidential Contest of 1864 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980); and Edward Chase Kirkland, The Peacemakers of 1864 (New York: Macmillan, 1927).
8. Pvt. Benjamin Jones, Twenty-first Ky., to brother, March 9, 1864, Chattanooga, Tenn., Union Soldiers Letters, FC. See also Pvt. Joseph Fardell, Invalid Corps (formerly 111th Ill.), to parents, February 6, 1864, Benton Barracks, Mo., Joseph A. Fardell Papers, MOHS.
9. Columbus Crisis, August 3, 1864, quoted in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 768–69.
10. The Republicans also held their convention in the summer of 1864. Assembling in Baltimore in June, they renominated Abraham Lincoln, though the more radical and more conservative wings of the party both vetted alternative candidates. Although a faction of the party broke away to run John C. Frémont on a platform that first promised, and then repudiated, greater rights for African Americans than the Republican Party explicitly advocated, Frémont’s candidacy eventually withered. Soldiers were aware of the convention, but to most of them, Lincoln was so obviously the right choice that they voiced few surprising or controversial views on the matter. Soldiers’ support for Lincoln in the summer of 1864 was consistent with prevailing opinion in the ranks since 1862, and received even stronger and more vociferous (though not qualitatively different) expression in the autumn of 1864, as the election approached. See Chapter 6 below.
11. “Democratic Platform of 1864,” Kirk H. Porter, compiler, National Party Platforms (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 59–60.
12. Sgt. Charles Bates, Fourth U.S. Cavalry, to parents, June 20, 1864, Big Shanty, Ga., Charles Edward Bates Papers, VHS.
13. Cpl. Peter M. Abbott, Third Vt., to parents, August 15, 1864, on Shenandoah River, Va., in Marshall, A War of the People, 253–54.
14. Pvt. Adin Ballou, Tenth Maine, to parents, May 29, 1864, Morgan’s Bend, Miss., Adin Ballou Papers, ISHL.
15. See Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998); David Long, Jewel of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln’s Reelection and the End of Slavery (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1994); and Joel Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860–1868 (New York: Norton, 1977).
16. Sgt. E. C. Hubbard, Thirteenth Ill., to brother, January 17, 1864, Woodville, Ala., E. C. Hubbard Letters, UAR.
17. Cpl. Chauncey Welton, 103d Ohio, to father, July 28, 1864, near Atlanta, Chauncey B. Welton Letters, SHC.
18. Inspector James Connolly, Third Division, Fourteenth Corps, to wife, April 5, 1864, Ringold, Ga., in Angle, Three Years in the Army of the Cumberland, 187–88. The incident in Charleston, Illinois, took place March 28,
1864, killing nine and wounding twelve. The Volunteer also published an article entitled “Copperhead Massacre of Union Soldiers in Illinois,” The Volunteer, 1:6 (April 2, 1864), Athens, Ala., p. 3, MOHS. The Volunteer was a camp newspaper written by members of the Sixteenth Army Corps.
19. Q.M. Thomas Clark King, Second Division, Ninth Army Corps, to brother, February 9, 1864, Knoxville, Tenn., King Family Papers, ISHL.
20. Abraham Irvine, Army of the Potomac, to brother, June 14, 1864, Wilderness, Va., Abraham Irvine Letter, T. 2135/1, PRONI. This theme recurs frequently in 1864, as it had done throughout the war. Cpl. George Cadman, Thirty-ninth Ohio, instructed his wife to remember that if he was hurt or killed, “it will be not only for my Country and my Children but for Liberty all over the World…for if Liberty should be crushed here, what hope would there be for the cause of Human progress anywhere else?” (Cadman to wife, March 6, 1864, Athens, Ala., George Hovey Cadman Letters, TSLA). Similarly, Charles Henthorn, Seventy-seventh Ill., wondered “where are the oppressed and down-trodden millions of the earth to look for hope” if the Union’s “experiment of self-government by the people shall fail?” (Henthorn to sister, March 7, 1864, recuperating in hospital in Quincy, Ill., Charles Henthorn Letters, Schoff). Richard White, a black sergeant in the Fifty-fifth Mass., also envisioned the Union as a guarantor of “justice and liberty” for “the oppressed and down-trodden” everywhere, despite its record of oppressing and trodding on black slaves since its inception as a nation (White to Editor, May 1, 1864, Folly Island, S.C., A-A, June 4, 1864, p. 1). See also Capt Henry Crydenwise, Seventy-third U.S. Colored Infantry, to family, May 8, 1864, Port Hudson, La., Henry Crydenwise Letters, EU; Cpl. Louis Rowe, Twelfth N.H., to Abbie, May 27, 1864, Pointrock, Va., Louis Rowe Letters, CWMC, Ser. 2; Sgt. John Brunt, Thirty-third Iowa, to wife, June 1, 1864, Little Rock, Ark., John M. Brunt Papers, KSHS.
What This Cruel War Was Over Page 41