Upon the Altar of the Nation

by Harry S. Stout

  Children’s literature echoed the same themes as adult moral commentary and propaganda. Published often by the American Tract Society or religious newspapers, it was far more patriotic than ethical. In one poem published in the aftermath of Bull Run, the patriotic story of “Charlie the Drummer-Boy” is recounted. In the poem, Charlie serves bravely on the battlefield and loses an arm. The scene then shifts to the reunion as an old Union veteran delivers his drummer boy home. Bowed but not broken, Charlie comforts his mother with this:It might have been worse too—the right arm instead.

  I’m glad for my country I’ve suffered and fought;

  I’ll try to be brave now, and bear as I ought

  This little misfortunate that Providence sent

  You will not mind, mother, if I am content.4

  Music was also employed to instill patriotic fervor and martial glory in the children of the North and South. War songs like the “Star-Spangled Banner” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (“Glory Glory, Hallelujah”) were sung in school and performed in public. Playgrounds became parade grounds and children learned to imitate soldier fathers and brothers.5

  Recent studies have shown that children were assimilated early in the war effort and encouraged to wear uniforms and play war games, turning chairs into ambulances and imagining themselves without a limb like Charlie the Northern drummer boy. Parents would have photographs taken of their children with guns and swords. Alongside the games, patriotic songs and “panoramas” brought home the nobility of war to children on a dramatic scale. One broadside for the Tremont Temple in Boston advertised a “[p]anorama or, gigantic illustrations of the war” that would include musical accompaniment and paintings of all the major battles through the Peninsula campaign against Lee in Virginia.

  A photographic portrait of a boy soldier. The war reached all ages of Americans in both the North and the South. Children not old enough to volunteer dressed up like soldiers and imitated their actions in heroic battles waged against imagined dastardly foes.

  The broadside promoted a reduced admission for children and promised a thrilling experience: “In the Battle Scenes is heard the Rattle of Musketry—the Booming of Cannon, mingled with the tumultuous noise of the deadly conflict. The Storm effects at Sea are wonderful and sublime, filling the be-holder with awe. You see the vivid flash of the lightning, you hear the terrible roar of the tempest, and above it all, now more distant—now more near—peal on peal, the thunder rolls.”6

  The degree of “realism” in these activities varied, but all shared a lack of any real moral grounding. They simply boosted the relatively new commercial distribution of toys. In fact, most war games abandoned any attempt to encourage moral improvement. The object, in part, was to make war entertaining and fun, hence marketable.7 Beyond that, the clear purpose of panoramas, toys, and music was martial and patriotic, not moral or cautionary.

  In a column for children, the New York Evangelist described the war in exalted terms: “We are waiting for the thunder from Richmond. When two clouds charged with electricity approach each other in midheaven, we look to see the angry bolts leap from the black driving mass. So when two great armies stand in the presence of each other, we know that a collision cannot long be delayed.” To “the children at home,” the Evangelist provided a “Chapter about Heroes” that begins: “Is it not grand to hear about all these brave men? I am so glad that I live in these war times!” said George. “So am I,” said his brother William. “We did not think that the men who live now-a-days could be such heroes. It seems like reading the histories of old times.” “Don’t you wish, Will,” said George, after a pause, “that we were men and could do such things?”8

  The opposite of manliness, of course, was cowardice, and the religious press often addressed the duty of courage together with assertions that Christians make braver soldiers because they have heaven in view. Children learned that the worst shame was cowardice. A “Sunday School missionary” for the Christian Herald told young readers the story of “The Soldier Boy who was a Coward.” Young female readers were taught to despise such a soldier: “And as for little girls, would they waste their bright glance and sunny smiles upon a boy who was a coward? ... the more of a Christian a boy was, the better soldier he would prove.”9

  Letters from the battlefront to children or younger siblings often included horrific details of battles. In some cases the letters also employed the horror of war and death as a not-so-subtle enjoinder to behave at home so that God would look kindly on their fathers in time of battle. The historian James Marten quotes Private Henry Abbott’s letter to his children: “Now you must be good all the time & remember, when you get mad & begin to cry, it makes the rebel bullets come a good deal nearer to me.” Two other children, Hilga and Edmund Heg, worked hard to be good and keep their father and brother alive; unfortunately, Marten concludes, “they may have paid a huge psychic price when [their father] Colonel Heg was killed at Chickamauga.”10

  In the South, children learned the same lessons. War stories proved especially popular, and no one was more revered than Stonewall Jackson. In Boys and Girls Stories of the War, Edward Boykin recounted the battlefield heroics of Jackson and then went on to describe the people’s veneration, both free and slave. Echoing the familiar myth that slaves preferred their servile but protected status to unprotected free labor in the North, Boykin worked up a dialogue between “Uncle Ned,” a slave who hated the Yankees for robbing his house, and a mysterious soldier. Uncle Ned asked the stranger: “Is you a Confed. Or a Yank?” “I am a Confederate officer,” replied the soldier in the gray coat, with stars on his collar:“Well den marster I will tend to you right ’way. But stop, who is at de head of all dese men. Is it old Stonewall?” “Yes,” said the officer, “I am Stonewall.” “Hooray” cried uncle Ned, “hurray! I goes wid you ober de Blue Ridge! Hurray!” and he swung his old hat in the air.... So the faithful negro shut the window, locked the door of his cabin and was soon seen guiding the army through the mountain pass.11

  For years, white Southerners had chafed at their dependence on Northern presses—steeped, as they supposed, in “abolitionism”—for so much of their literature, including primers and textbooks.12 With the onset of war, they determined to produce their own children’s textbooks. Although that meant that they had far fewer children’s books or magazines to choose from, it enabled them to retrofit schoolbooks for the war effort and a partisan indoctrination. In many instances, Southern publishers simply took existing textbooks and added “Confederate” instead of “American.” In terms of nationalism, textbooks contained more of what the historian George Rable terms “negative nationalism”—or the excoriation of the Northern enemy—than constructive discussions of Confederate nationalism.13

  Talking about a Confederate textbook, however, and producing one were two different things, as the South quickly learned. Some texts, such as The First Confederate Speller, came out at the start of war in 1861. But the great majority of Confederate texts did not appear until the last two years of the war.14 By then a significant enough time had elapsed for young readers to learn the “history” of the young nation and its just war.

  A Geography for Beginners articulated the just cause of the war and its divine destiny:In 1861 the Government of the Confederate States was duly established at Richmond, Va.... Every effort that human ingenuity could contrive, or immense resources of money and vast armaments on sea and land could accomplish, was made by the Northern government to capture the capital and other important plans, and break up the political organization of the Confederacy. But by the constant, evident and acknowledged aid of the God of Battles and King of Nations, these efforts have all failed; and, at vast expense of suffering and blood, the people of the Southern States have fought their own way to political independence and the respect and amity of the great nations of the world.15

  Beyond patriotic pride and celebration of leaders, the texts offered little moral commentary on the war. Military themes and history predomi
nated. For example, children learned math by computing company and brigade size and armaments. The Dixie Speller explained to its young readers that “[a] Battery is used in war to protect the gunners. Cavalry are soldiers who fight on horseback, and infantry are those who travel on foot.” The effect, as the historian Rachel Stillman has pointed out, was to “emphasize the manhood, bravery, loyalty and sometimes the invincibility of Confederate soldiers.”16

  Although patriotism dominated commentary on the war in Confederate textbooks, moral commentary did appear in two forms. The first was unstinting loyalty to Christian orthodoxy as the foundation of the nation. Children were enjoined to read the Bible as the inspired Word of God and to have daily devotions. “Bible morality” became the watchword for daily behavior and the Ten Commandments were recited in classrooms daily. Mathematics textbooks included exercises utilizing Bible texts and chapters.17

  The second moral theme developed in Confederate texts was the rightness of slavery. Children would be taken through the same Bible texts adult theologians argued to justify biblical precedents for the institution. But alongside these standard defenses and denigration of abolitionists were en-joinders to treat the slaves as human beings with moral dignity. God would not rain defeat on the Confederate cause for slavery, but He would punish the South if they refused to see His image in the slaves’ souls.

  Marinda B. Moore’s Primary Geography insisted that slavery was not sinful, as the North wrongly claimed, but that the slaves’ common humanity needed to be respected: “Let all the little boys and girls remember that slaves are human, and that God will hold them to account for treating them with injustice.” 18 Texts told stories of slaves who were “liberated” by Union soldiers only to return to the safety and security of their masters. This happened, children learned, because good masters treated their slaves well and took care of them. Children too must be “kind” to their “servants” or God would hold them accountable.

  Ironically, amid all the defenses of slavery in white textbooks, the Civil War marked one of the first times that Southern educators talked seriously about educating blacks. Ministers—especially Baptist ministers—pushed their conventions to pass resolutions that would promote the repeal of laws banning slave literacy. To this end, the resolutions would encourage church members to urge their legislators in that direction. Clearly worried that God’s favor depended on just treatment of the slaves, Confederate moralists sought to expand slaves’ opportunities in ways that would encourage God to smile on His Confederacy In so doing, proslavery leaders recognized they needed to appear more humanitarian in the eyes of a larger world—especially Britain.

  Among Presbyterians, the moderator of the Southern Presbyterian Assembly, James A. Lyon, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Columbus, Mississippi, placed at the top of his priorities “a manifesto on slavery and the religious instruction of negroes.” Though emphatically proslavery, Lyon was intent on reforming the institution, particularly in regard to education. He even went so far as to recommend mixing whites and blacks in existing public schools. Although his clerical peers supported him in the general assembly, the laity balked and the reforms were put on hold.19 The laity understood only too well what they were fighting for, and it was not to affirm the humanity of the Negro.

  Clearly Northern and Southern children could have been spared the raw details of battles. Neither did they have to wallow in pools of patriotic romanticization. But this war would rapidly become a total war, and that dictated that children, no less than adults, would experience it directly. It also required that restraining moral considerations not be allowed to silence the drumbeat for ever-greater battles, and glory for all.

  Throughout the war much of the child-rearing and household maintenance fell perforce on the women. As accounts of battles reached every town and city, the pressures on the home front could prove intolerable. Historians are only now comprehending and chronicling the toll on wives and children. In her December 1861 letter to her husband, George Frederick, Nancie Jourdan included entries from her diary to convey to him the effects of war at home:Nervous illness. “27th Thanksgiving.... came home and went to bead after having something like a fit. Had the Doctor at about 7 oclock. I trembled all over so badly I could not get my things off when I got home but cannot account for it. The Doctor called it a neuralysis of the nerves. I thought I should never see daylight again. I think my blood did not serculate around my heart, for I had such bad feeling there, and my limbs were allmost inirely useless. I continued to be weak for a week or more, could not go up and down stairs without a great deal of exertion. Am well now hope to remain so until your return.... I will now close please accept this from your affectionate and lonely. Nancie.20

  The toll was equally steep, and far more direct, in the South, where rich and poor women alike suffered. The derogatory term “refugee” was first applied to wealthy planters who, when faced with invading Federals, fled with their slaves, sacrificing patriotism for possessions. But soon the term took on a more gendered meaning as the majority of dispossessed were female. Although often resented for their class and aristocratic attitudes toward work and station, many women were left penniless and forced to throw themselves on the mercy of the state.21

  An especially poignant window into white Southern women’s experience in the Civil War are the letters from them seeking employment with the Confederate States Treasury office “for signing and numbering Confederate notes.”22 Applicants were instructed to write to Christopher Gustavus Memminger, secretary of the Confederate Treasury, with assurances that priority would be given to those with the greatest need (and acceptable handwriting).

  In a letter to Treasury Secretary Memminger seeking employment with the agency, L. E. Hughes captured the plight of rearing children with a husband in the field:My object in getting employment is to support myself and three children, all under eleven years of age, while my husband is in the army: and I wish to make a permanent arrangement for a year. I have no means of support and no near relation living, having lost my only brother in one of the battles before Richmond. I am perfectly willing to give my whole time to business and to work faithfully with a determination to give satisfaction. I shall anxiously await your answer, which I earnestly hope may be favourable, and until that time I remain very respectfully yours.23

  Many of these letters describe the immediate suffering imposed by the loss of a husband or sons. On October 3, 1862, Eugenia Hyde wrote: “I am a widow, with three sons in the army, and finding that a prolonged exile has contracted seriously my former income, I venture to apply for a situation as clipper of Treasury notes, such as I understand you have already bestowed on many in similar circumstances.” An accompanying letter of reference from George Woodbridge read: “Mrs. Hyde is a lady of great worth and excellence of character. She belongs to the old Fairfax family, one of the first families in the state. Her home has been entirely destroyed by the enemy, and her three sons now in the war, are unable to render her any assistance. If there be a situation to confer upon any lady now, it could not be conferred upon one more deserving or more destitute.”24

  From many of the petitions it is clear that the war devastated all ranks of Southern society However much troops might complain about a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” there was more than enough suffering among all classes. When Mary Gifford applied for work with the department, her reference, W. M. Tucker, told the following story:She is the widow of Mr. A.F.D. Gifford, lost in his return to this country with a cargo, to fill a contract with the government. She is the daughter of the late Chapman Johnson, one of the greatest lawyers of Va. She is the guardian and protector of two little orphan children of her late brother Dr. Curtis Johnson, lost in the arctic. Upon the death of her husband, his affairs being settled left her dependent. She joined her brother in teaching a school in Fredericksburg on the ist of October last. But she is driven here by our Public Enemy.... To see her in such a state as she is, is as painful almost as I would be to s
ee my sister so. I am much attached to her ... and her appointment would be a real personal favor to me.25

  Husbands in the field often complained about the delays or infrequency of letters from home. When placed in the context of Southern petitioners it becomes clear that the war had become as much a war of civilian suffering as military. The same was true in the North. Assuming that 30 percent of Union and Confederate soldiers were married, the number of women widowed by the war would be at least 108,000. Still, the momentum for war ran strong in the civilian populations as both the North and the South contributed and received patriotic reinforcements on all sides.26

  If women at home were praised for their virtue, women on the other side were villanized even more than the men. This was particularly true of Southern women who far more frequently came into direct contact with enemy soldiers. When not excoriating soldiers’ sins in the South, many Northern moralists fixed a damning eye on Southern women. In a sermon delivered on the anniversary of the surrender of Fort Sumter, Henry Ward Beecher seared the Confederate woman:Consider, again, the strange part that has been played in this conflict by Southern women. A woman always goes with her whole heart, whether for the good or for the bad. Women are the best and the worst things that God ever made! And they have been true to their nature in this conflict. Southern men have been tame and cool in comparison with the fury of Southern women.27