What This Cruel War Was Over Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  “When This Cruel War Is Over”

  Introduction

  1. “Lincoln and Liberty”: Why an Antislavery President Meant War

  2. “Richmond Is a Hard Road to Travel”: Gaps Between Expectation and Experience

  3. “Kingdom Coming in the Year of Jubilo”: Revolution and Resistance

  4. “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory”: The War and the Hand of God

  5. “Many Are the Hearts That Are Weary Tonight”: The War in 1864

  6. “Slavery’s Chain Done Broke at Last”: The Coming of the End

  Conclusion: What This Cruel War Was Over

  Notes

  Primary Sources

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Dedicated to the memory of my grandmother and my grandfather, who did not laugh when I, at the age of three, promised to dedicate my first book to them;

  and to Derek, with all my love.

  “When This Cruel War Is Over”

  Charles C. Sawyer, 1862

  The title What This Cruel War Was Over comes from the title of the most popular (at over one million copies of sheet music sold) song of the Civil War, at home and in camp, North and South, “When This Cruel War Is Over,” (sometimes also known as “Weeping, Sad and Lonely”). The tune is so mournful that some officers forbade men from singing it in camp, out of worries that it would harm morale. The prohibitions met with only limited success; white Americans everywhere continued to sing the song. Union and Confederate lyrics to the song were nearly interchangeable, except for the last two lines of the first verse. Below is the Union version; Confederates simply changed the last two lines of the first verse to read: “Oh! How proud you stood before me, in your suit of gray/When you vow’d from me and country ne’er to go astray.”

  Dearest Love, do you remember, when we last did meet,

  How you told me that you loved me, kneeling at my feet?

  Oh! How proud you stood before me, in your suit of blue,

  When you vow’d to me and country, ever to be true.

  CHORUS:

  Weeping, sad and lonely, hopes and fears how vain!

  When this cruel war is over, praying that we meet again.

  When the summer breeze is sighing, mournfully along,

  Or when autumn leaves are falling, sadly breathes the song.

  Oft in dreams I see thee lying on the battle plain,

  Lonely, wounded, even dying, calling but in vain.

  CHORUS

  If amid the din of battle, nobly you should fall,

  Far away from those who love you, none to hear you call—

  Who would whisper words of comfort, who would soothe your pain?

  Ah! The many cruel fancies, ever in my brain.

  CHORUS

  But our Country called you, Darling, angels cheer your way;

  While our nation’s sons are fighting, we can only pray.

  Nobly strike for God and Liberty, let all nations see

  How we loved the starry banner, emblem of the free.

  CHORUS

  Union soldiers of the Seventh New York state militia at Camp Cameron, 1861. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

  A Confederate soldier: Georgia Private Thomas Kitchen. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

  Company E., Fourth United States Colored Infantry at Fort Lincoln. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

  Introduction

  “THE FACT that slavery is the sole undeniable cause of this infamous rebellion, that it is a war of, by, and for Slavery, is as plain as the noon-day sun.” 1 So claimed the farmers, shopkeepers, and laborers who made up the Thirteenth Wisconsin Infantry Regiment in February 1862. The white Southerners of Morgan’s Confederate Brigade might not have seen eye to eye with the Wisconsin men on much in 1862, but they agreed that “any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks…is either a fool or a liar.” 2 Two years later, black men in the Fourteenth Rhode Island Heavy Artillery reminded each other, “upon your prowess, discipline, and character; depend the destinies of four millions of people and the triumph of the principles of freedom and self government of this great republic.” 3 These soldiers plainly identified slavery as the root of the Civil War. Just as plainly, by “slavery,” they did not mean some abstract concept or a detached philosophical metaphor for ideas about freedom, but rather the actual enslavement of human beings in the United States based on race.

  Yet to say that soldiers placed slavery at the center of the war is to open rather than solve a mystery. Neither the authors nor the intended audiences of these remarks held high office or made policy. Few owned slaves, and few of the white soldiers thought of themselves as abolitionists. They were instead very ordinary men of the type unlikely to figure in historical inquiries into the causes of the Civil War; they were men often assumed, even by historians from both the North and the South who for decades have acknowledged that without slavery there would have been no Civil War in the United States, to be little more than pawns swept up in events they probably did not understand, let alone consent to or shape. Members of the general public recognize even less of a connection between soldiers, slavery, and the Civil War. My most recent reminder of this sobering truism came at a wedding in September 2005, when a man from Buffalo, New York, who had no idea what I do for a living, spent more than an hour insisting to me that slavery had nothing to do with the conflict. And who can blame him? The Confederate ranks consisted primarily of men who owned no slaves, and historians have not convincingly explained why those men would fight a war they knew was waged to prevent the destruction of slavery. At the same time, scant numbers of the white men who filed into the Union Army had ever laid eyes on a slave, though most harbored their own prejudice against black people, so why would they fight to end slavery? And why would more than 180,000 black men fight for a government that, for its entire existence, had smiled on the enslavement of members of their race? What, in other words, did a “war about slavery” mean to the men who fought the Civil War, and why would it be important enough to fight?

  This book is about what ordinary soldiers thought about the relationship between slavery and the Civil War. It is not about soldiers’ motivations for enlisting, for individuals chose to do that for widely varied reasons. Seldom did a man enlist for the pay, which was low and unreliable. Few joined the military because they were forced; both Union and Confederate armies overwhelmingly consisted of volunteers. Many enlisted out of a sense of duty or personal honor. Some became soldiers in order to take part in what they assumed would be the biggest adventure of their lives. While some Northerners entered the ranks to help eradicate slavery, others enlisted to preserve the Union, with small concern for enslaved African Americans. In the South, many took up arms to safeguard their own slave property or their hopes to own slaves one day, while others shouldered rifles out of the belief that doing so protected their homes and families. Yet in spite of these and the countless other reasons that sent individual Northerners and Southerners into the ranks, broad consensus existed within each army as to why a war needed to be fought in the first place. Whatever else occupied their minds, ordinary Union and Confederate soldiers recognized slavery as the reason for the war, and the purpose of this book is to figure out why that was, and what it meant for the war and the nation.

  Most Confederate soldiers owned no slaves, and more than anything else in the world, they cared about the interests and well-being of their own families. Why, then, would an ordinary, nonslaveholding white southern man readily identify slavery as the reason for the war, and why would h
e consider it important enough to himself and his family to imperil both in a fight to prevent its abolition? Why would men continue to fight for four desperate years, through military catastrophes like Gettysburg and Atlanta and through political disasters like the reelection of President Abraham Lincoln, and then stop in the spring of 1865?

  Why would most white Northerners, who knew no black people, and who may or may not have viewed slavery as vaguely distasteful but certainly would not have sympathized with the antebellum abolitionist movement, care enough about an abstract concept like the “Union” to fight a war that they too knew would never have happened if not for the institution of slavery? And if enlisted Union troops so vigorously opposed emancipation (as many historians and even more members of the general public, including the wedding guest from Buffalo, have long supposed), then why did the mass desertions predicted to occur in the wake of emancipation not happen? Did soldiers possess different attitudes toward slavery and its abolition than we have assumed? How did those attitudes compare to their ideas about racial equality and civil rights for black people? And how did the experiences of war and of interacting with black Americans (for the first time, in the case of many white Union soldiers) influence ordinary men’s views?

  Black men who joined the Union ranks harbored few delusions about the United States’ long and complicated relationship to slavery or about white Northerners’ attitudes toward blacks. As the soldiers of the Fourteenth Rhode Island Heavy Artillery pointed out, by 1860 slavery might have existed only in the southern states, but it still cast its “baleful shadow over the whole land from Maine to Texas.” Even after the war began, “the North…despised the offer of her most loyal men” and barred blacks from the Army. 4 Why would African American men struggle so determinedly to join an army that at first refused them, and then once it did accept them, paid them less and prohibited them from becoming officers until the final year of the war? What did black troops expect the war and its aftermath to bring?

  These questions enter into several ongoing conversations about the Civil War, including one about the relationship between military factors and social and political influences. What happened on the battlefield and what happened on the home front could not be separated in the Civil War, sometimes because the two arenas melted into one (for example, during Sherman’s March), but more often because the cultures and societies from which Civil War soldiers came influenced how they and their leaders carried out the war. 5 Specifically, cultural values and attitudes molded the unique senses of Confederate and Union patriotism that in turn shaped how each side fought the war and weathered its turmoil.

  Some historians have argued that a passionate, emotional connection to the abstract notion of an independent Confederacy transcended divisions among white Southerners, especially class divisions, while others have argued that internal fault lines dividing the wealthy from the nonwealthy prevented any true sense of patriotism from congealing in the white South. Those who argue for an emotional sense of patriotism run up against the hard reality of white southern behavior that directly and sometimes intentionally harmed the Confederacy and its war effort, and they must struggle to explain the apparent contradictions away. 6 Historians who argue that class conflict led to such resentment that nonslaveholders either never felt an attachment to the Confederacy and its war for independence or else abandoned that sense of attachment early in the war miss the strong and real commitment that even nonslaveholders felt to the institution of slavery, and therefore struggle to explain why an army made up primarily of nonslaveholders held on for four punishing years. 7 The soldiers in this book attest to a particular and distinctive sense of Confederate patriotism that transcended without erasing class division; self-interested behavior could and did damage the Confederate cause, but rather than negating the existence of Confederate patriotism, such behavior was actually the logical manifestation of white Confederates’ unique brand of patriotism, based firmly on white men’s perceptions of the best material and ideological interests of their loved ones, which they assumed to depend upon the survival of slavery. Far from splintering Confederates along class lines, slavery served as the cement that held Confederates together even under almost impossibly trying circumstances.

  Historians have devoted less attention to Union patriotism, but among those who have considered it, questions center less on its relationship to self-interest than on whether emotional attachment to the American government predated or was created in the midst of the Civil War. 8 The soldiers in this study show that they did feel a strong sense of connection and duty to the United States government, which grew in part out of an ante-bellum millennialist understanding of the United States’ unique mission in the world. 9 In the main, Union soldiers cared about the United States government not primarily because it served their families’ interests, but because its survival mattered for the survival of ideals like liberty, equality, and self-government for all humanity. It was not that Union soldiers cared less about their families and interests than Confederate soldiers did, or that white Southerners were inherently more selfish than Northerners; instead, the relationship between individual and family interests and the nation worked differently for Confederates than it did for Union men. One irony of the Civil War was that the struggle placed far greater demands on Confederates than it did on white Northerners, even as it provided Confederates with a version of patriotism less well suited to sacrifice.

  This book also enters into an even longer-running historical conversation about Civil War soldiers. Bell Wiley began the first serious study of common soldiers with his classics The Life of Johnny Reb and The Life of Billy Yank, works that surely must bear the credit or blame for inspiring as many budding Civil War historians as any publishing event since the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession. 10 Other than Wiley, most historians concentrated on officers or political leaders until the 1980s and 1990s, by which time social history’s emphasis on history from the “bottom up” prompted increased attention to the lot of common soldiers. 11 Interest in social history also began to inspire pioneering works on black Union soldiers, although most studies then and since segregate white and black soldiers’ ideas and experiences as thoroughly as Civil War military policy did. 12 Influenced partly by Wiley and even more by studies of World War II soldiers and by the national experience of the Vietnam War, historians for quite a while anachronistically projected modern notions of the nonideological soldier onto the Civil War generation. 13 The problem with such projections is that they impose modern views backward rather than trying to come to grips with nineteenth-century Americans on their own terms. Civil War–era Americans were not just like us, but dressed in funny clothes; instead, they were shaped by the culture and values of their day, which we need to try to understand in order to get a glimpse of how the war looked from their point of view. Eventually, important studies like Reid Mitchell’s Civil War Soldiers began to call assumptions about ranks full of unthinking automatons into question. Civil War Soldiers awards more weight to elusive but important values like honor, duty, and manhood than it does to sharply articulated ideas, but it led the way in focusing historians’ attention on the significance of soldiers’ thoughts to their perceptions of the war. 14 James McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War has done the most to shatter the misconception of the unthinking soldier by demonstrating the importance that Northerners and Southerners assigned to ideas about freedom, equality, the American Revolution, and the place of slavery within the American Republic. 15

  After all that, the reader could creditably be wondering what could possibly be left to say about Civil War soldiers. This book veers from the beaten path in a number of ways. First, unlike in most books about soldiers, which are organized thematically (a chapter on soldiers and patriotism, a chapter on soldiers’ views of the enemy), Chapter One begins with the opening shots of the war and the rest of the book proceeds chronologically through the four years of conflict, which was the way that soldiers
experienced the struggle. Moreover, the chronological organization allows the book to convey change over time, a perspective that is essential in understanding a long and bruising conflict that challenged every ideal and preconceived notion that enlistees held dear. Further, few other books compare Union and Confederate soldiers’ views, either because they consider only one army or the other, or because they operate from the assumption (or at least seem to imply) that northern and southern troops harbored nearly interchangeable ideas. 16 In contrast, this book explicitly compares what Union and Confederate soldiers thought about slavery, including when, how, and why soldiers’ ideas changed. In addition, most books about soldiers address either white or black soldiers, but this book includes both white and black soldiers because the Union Army contained white and black troops, so both must be included to represent the UnionArmy. At the same time, this book resists the common practice of lumping all black Union soldiers together, and aims instead to arrive at a fuller understanding of black soldiers’ views on slavery, the war, civil rights, and racial equality.

  As the inclusion of black soldiers suggests, this book also draws on the voices of more and slightly different soldiers than any of its predecessors. While most books about soldiers rely disproportionately on the opinions of officers, 1861 recruits, Easterners, and men who fought in the Virginia theater, this book casts a net broad enough to capture members of traditionally underrepresented groups such as immigrants, African Americans, western soldiers, late enlisters, and soldiers who served in the West, in order to approximate cross sections of the actual Union and Confederate ranks. It draws on letters and diaries written by men during the war itself, rather than postwar memoirs, in which nostalgia, revisionism, and selective memory often cloud the ideas that soldiers entertained at the time they actually served. For every soldier whose writings I read, and for whom I could obtain sufficient biographical detail, I created a data sheet that recorded such information as birth date, home, occupation, marital status, regiment, rank, battle participation, and experiences such as capture, wounding, or death. These 477 Confederate soldier data sheets and 657 Union soldier data sheets helped place soldiers’ words in appropriate social and demographic context, and also helped ensure that my cross section of soldiers resembled the actual makeup of the enlisted ranks as closely as possible. In addition, I drew on the letters and diaries of hundreds of additional recruits for whom biographical information was too scanty to compile, and on letters written by soldiers to newspapers.