Upon the Altar of the Nation (20 page)

To appease the antislavery wing, Lincoln reiterated his preference for aid to all states who would adopt the gradual abolition of slavery in their territories. On the other side, he continued to favor a policy of colonization of free blacks in Central America and Africa, and a graduated payout of compensated emancipation for loyal slave owners. This was precisely the sort of language that could not penetrate public discourse of the North and South, dominated as they were by the rhetoric of Providence. Lincoln’s frame of reference allowed him to think nonconventionally. But his thoughts would lead to nothing in the face of an implacable North and South, each certain that God and global destiny dictated events.

Left ideologically adrift, Lincoln had to gain military victories, no matter how bloody. Otherwise, the Democrats would wrest power on the premise that victory over so vast a region was impossible—a premise Confederates also embraced.

Spring thaw brought renewed opportunities for new battles. On both sides, the anticipation was suffused with dread and excitement. In what was to become characteristic of the Civil War, battles were fought on so many fronts that civilians had to depend on the press to sort them out. On March 7, General Sam Curtis’s eleven thousand Yankees defeated General Earl Van Dorn’s seventeen thousand Confederates in the snow at Pea Ridge, Arkansas.

No sooner was Pea Ridge concluded than a stunning naval battle erupted at Hampton Roads, Virginia, between two ironclad juggernauts, the USS Monitor, with its single revolving turret gun, and the CSS
Merrimack
(officially Virginia). Shells bounced off the armored titans, and each ship alternately rammed the other and withdrew. When neither side could gain the advantage, both retreated. Most Americans did not realize at the time that they were gaining a preview of modern naval warfare. Henceforth, wooden vessels of the fleet would stand by helplessly as the new era rendered them obsolete.

Whatever uncertainties plagued both sides in the early spring of 1862, one fact seemed inescapable. This war, expected initially to be done in a year, was far from over. In a letter to his soldier son, the Reverend C. C. Jones conceded that predictions of early success were naive. “We are engaged in a long and desperate war, and our only hope is in the Lord and in the wise, energetic, and determined use of every means in our power to obtain our independence.”
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Despite disappointments at Donelson and Pea Ridge, Confederates continued to trust in God and their cavalier “manliness.” The river war, though disappointing, was not yet over and spring was coming. To buttress the war effort the Southern Congress enacted conscription and martial law. In the North confidence burned bright and the end was in sight—or so they thought.

I
n June 1862 the
Christian Herald and Presbyterian Recorder
ran a “Children’s Corner” with “Talk about War” led by a Federal chaplain known as “Uncle Jessie.” Uncle Jessie sought to describe battles in realistic scenes for the children, but first he needed to set the stage by explaining why the war was necessary and just. Uncle Jessie’s young readers soon learned that one side in the struggle was entirely right and the other entirely wrong. Because the enemy was evil, no level of destruction could be too much. With “Christ’s sword” in hand, Uncle Jessie was now ready to get down to the business of describing the macabre details of an actual battle:

Other religious newspapers soon picked up on the same series. On October 2, 1862, the Presbyter interrupted its series on Uncle Jessie to observe that “Uncle Jessie had to be in the war again last week, and had no time to talk about it.” But the next week Jessie was back from the war to talk to the children about “Picket Guard.”
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This war that was fast becoming a citizens’ war inevitably meant a children’s war as well. In a letter to her husband soldier, George Frederick Jourdan, Nancie Jourdan wrote: “Albert went to bed tonight crying for me to read Papas letter. I had just got him undressed and commenced reading, he was just as interested as could be when William drove up. I did not finish it, of course, and when he saw Emily put it into her pocket he could stand it no longer. I finally soothed him by telling him I would go up and get it for him.”
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For children to be co-opted into the war effort there had to be an all-encompassing indoctrination on both sides of the struggle. By spring of 1862 the work was virtually complete. Awed children learned to revere the war and the warriors of Christ who prosecuted it. No lessons emerged on minimizing casualties or the virtuous protection of innocents. Only a romanticized glory endured.

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:

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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:

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.”
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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.”
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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:

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.
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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.
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By then a significant enough time had elapsed for young readers to learn the “history” of the young nation and its just war.