This Republic of Suffering (6 page)

Although the affluent were more likely to prepare wills, many soldiers of lesser means also sought to specify the distribution of their assets, perhaps to try to exert some control over a future in which they would play no part. Attendants in military hospitals often solicited oral declarations from dying soldiers in order to know what to do with their effects. John Edwards's dying wishes, recorded as his “Noncuptative Will,” by Mr. Hill at the hospital of the 53rd Virginia in April 1862, requested that the forty dollars in his possession be sent to his sister because he knew he was “bound to die.”
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Soldiers' personal possessions often took on the character of
memento mori,
relics that retained and represented something of the spirit of the departed. Burns Newman of the Seventh Wisconsin Volunteers undertook the “painful duty” of informing Michael Shortell's father of his son's death near Petersburg the preceding evening. “Enclosed,” he continued, “send you some trinkets taken from his person by my hand. Think you will prize them as keepsakes.” A Bible, a watch, a diary, a lock of hair, even the bullet with which a son or a brother had been killed could help to fill the void left by the loved one's departure, and could help make tangible a loss known only through the abstractions of language.
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In a more figurative sense, condolence letters reporting the details of soldiers' deaths served as
memento mori
for kin working to understand wartime loss. Survivors rewrote these narratives of Good Deaths using the condolence letter as a rough draft for a range of printed genres designed to impose meaning and purpose on war's chaos and destruction. Obituaries often replicated the structure and content of condolence letters, frequently even quoting them directly, describing last moments and last words and assessing the likelihood of a deceased soldier's salvation. William James Dixon of the Sixth Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers, his obituary reported, had not entered the army as a believer, though he had always “maintained a strictly moral character.” Several battles, however, impressed him with “the mercy of God in his preservation,” so that before his death at Chancellorsville he had “resolved to lead a new life.” His loved ones could, the
Daily South Carolinian
assured them, safely “mourn not as those who have no hope” and could be certain “that their loss is his eternal gain.”
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Civil War Americans worked to construct Good Deaths for themselves and their comrades amid the conditions that made dying—and living—so terrible. As war continued inexorably onward and as death tolls mounted ever higher, soldiers on both sides reported how difficult it became to believe that the slaughter was purposeful and that their sacrifices had meaning. Yet the narratives of the
ars moriendi
continued to exert their power, as soldiers wrote home about comrades' deaths in letters that resisted and reframed war's carnage.

Men did so not simply to mislead the bereaved in order to ease their pain—a ruse that historian Jay Winter attributes to the self-consciously deceptive letters from the Western Front in World War I. As Roland Bowen of the 15th Massachusetts responded to a friend's request for “all the particulars” about a comrade's death at Antietam, “I fear they will do you no good and that you will be more mortified [devastated] after the facts are told than you are now. Still you ask it and wither it be for the better or worse not a word shall be [kept] from you.”
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Although the authors of Civil War condolence letters did try their utmost to cast the deaths they described in the best possible light, their efforts are striking in their apparent commitment to honesty, their scrupulousness in reporting when a deceased soldier's faith had been suffused with doubt, when his behavior had been less than saintly. Civil War soldiers seem themselves desperately to have wanted to believe in the narratives they told and in the religious assumptions that lay behind them. The letters may have served in part as a way of reaching across the chasm of experience and horror that separated battle and home front, as an almost ritualized affirmation of those very domestic understandings of death that had been so profoundly challenged by circumstances of war, as a way of moving symbolically out of the meaningless slaughter back into the reassuring mid-nineteenth-century assumptions about life's meaning and purpose. Narratives of dying well may have served as a kind of lifeline between the new world of battle and the old world at home.
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In the eyes of a modern reader, men often seem to have been trying too hard as they sought to present evidence of a dead comrade's ease at dying or readiness for salvation. But their apparent struggle provides perhaps the most eloquent testimony of how important it was for them to try to maintain the comforting assumptions about death and its meaning with which they had begun the war. In face of the profound upheaval and chaos that civil war brought to their society and to their own individual lives, Americans North and South held tenaciously to deeply rooted beliefs that would enable them to make sense out of a slaughter that was almost unbearable. Their Victorian and Christian culture offered them the resources with which to salve these deep spiritual wounds. Ideas and beliefs worked to assuage, even to overcome the physical devastation of battle. And yet death ultimately remained, as it must, unintelligible, a “riddle,” as Herman Melville wrote, “of which the slain / Sole solvers are.”
⁵⁸
Narratives of the Good Death could not annul the killing that war required. Nor could they erase the unforgettable scenes of battlefield carnage that made soldiers question both the humanity of those slaughtered like animals and the humanity of those who had wreaked such devastation.

CHAPTER
2

KILLING

“The Harder Courage”

“I am aposed to one man killing another [but]…I shall fight.”

THEOPHILUS PERRY

T
olstoy once wrote that what fascinated him about war was “its reality”—not the strategies of generals or the maneuvers of troops but “the actual killing.” He was “more interested,” he explained, “to know in what way and under the influence of what feelings one soldier kills another than to know how the armies were arranged at Austerlitz and Borodino.”
¹
Killing is battle's fundamental instrument and purpose. And in the Civil War it was killing, not dying, as Orestes Brownson observed in 1862, that demanded “the harder courage,” for it required the more significant departure from soldiers' understandings of themselves as human beings and, in mid-nineteenth-century America, as Christians.

Most Civil War combatants were very like one another—metaphorically, if not literally, brothers, in the oft-repeated trope of the war. When racial difference eroded this common identity, killing became easier, as in the many reported instances of atrocities against black soldiers, such as the infamous 1864 massacre at Fort Pillow. But in most circumstances and for most individuals during the war, killing posed a problem to be overcome. In this respect Civil War soldiers were hardly different from their fellow combatants in other wars. Studies of warriors in ancient times, in Napoleonic armies, in World Wars I and II, and in the Falklands confirm the judgment of Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, U.S. Army Retired, specialist in military psychology and former West Point faculty member, that “man is not by nature a killer.” Indeed, he often resists even firing his weapon.
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But just as human beings die differently in different times and places, they come to kill differently too. Human reluctance to murder expresses itself within a particular historical and cultural moment. Civil War killing, like death more generally, required work—intellectual and psychological effort to address religious and emotional constraints, as well as adaptation to the ways this particular war's technologies, tactics, and logistics shaped the experience of combat.

The first challenge for Civil War soldiers to surmount was the Sixth Commandment. Dying exemplified Christian devotion, as Jesus had demonstrated on the cross, but killing violated fundamental biblical law. As one Texas recruit explained his fears, fighting in battle seemed “the most…blasphemous thing perhaps on earth.” Sermons and religious publications North and South invoked and explored the traditional “just war” doctrine, emphasizing that killing was not merely tolerated but required in God's service. There is “nothing in the demands of a just and defensive warfare at variance with the spirit and duties of Christianity,” an oft-reprinted tract for soldiers emphasized. Citing a variety of Old Testament texts, the
Confederate Baptist
insisted that men were exempt from the commandment not to kill “when lawful war calls for the slaying of our country's foes.” While southerners most often appealed to self-defense against invasion as the source of the war's justness, they invoked as well the notion of divine sanction for a holy war in which they served as Confederate crusaders. Northerners just as avidly claimed God for their side as they fought to save a nation that represented “the last best hope of earth.” “I am aposed to one man killing another,” a Union soldier wrote to “Friends at Home,” but, he continued, “when we are atacked and our lives are in danger by a gang of men aposed to the best government on earth I shall fight.” As emancipation emerged as an explicit war aim after 1862, northerners increasingly cited the sin of slavery as a religious justification for the use of violence. In 1864 the
Christian Recorder,
published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, editorialized on “The War and Its Design,” inquiring when war and killing are acceptable and concluding that the goal of overturning the wrong of slavery made the conflict a righteous one and its carnage justifiable.
³

Such arguments offered permission to kill, or at least softened deeply held prohibitions against it. But soldiers and even commanders still struggled with taking other men's lives. Union general in chief Winfield Scott observed before First Bull Run how thin a line separated war from murder. “No Christian nation,” he insisted, “can be justified in waging war in such a way as shall destroy five hundred and one lives, when the object of the war can be attained at a cost of five hundred. Every man killed beyond the number absolutely required is murdered.” From his perspective in 1861, Scott would have regarded the ultimate slaughter of hundreds of thousands and the profligate squandering of lives that was to come at places like Malvern Hill, Marye's Heights, Cold Harbor, and Gettysburg as unforgivable. Scott's successor as Union commander, George B. McClellan, shared this aversion to killing. “When he had to lose lives he was almost undone,” observed historian T. Harry Williams. General George Gordon Meade believed that in order to ensure minimal losses on both sides, the North should prosecute the war “like the afflicted parent who is compelled to chastise his erring child, and who performs the duty with a sad heart.” It was in this context that Meade's bloody victory at Gettysburg would seem appalling, and that Grant's casualties in the spring campaigns of 1864 would be attacked as “butchery.”
⁴

As they took up arms and, in the phrase they commonly used to describe initiation into battle, went “to see the elephant,” individual soldiers worried about their direct personal responsibility for killing. A Massachusetts man wrote of his first experience under fire in Baltimore in April 1861, when a mob of irate southern sympathizers attacked Union troops heading through the city to Washington. Edwin Spofford pulled the trigger almost without thinking after a soldier standing next to him was killed. “The man who shot him fell dead by my rifle,” he wrote. “I felt bad at first when I saw what I had done, but it soon passed off, and as I had done my duty and was not the aggressor, I was soon able to fire again and again.” Duty and self-defense released him from an initial sense of guilt and helped him to do the work of a soldier. Implicit yet present here too was the motive of revenge. Spofford came to kill almost as a reflex, as a response to what he saw as the murder of the comrade beside him.
⁵

“The Sixth Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteers Firing into the People, Baltimore, April, 1861.”
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper,
April 30, 1861
.

As the intensity of this war and the size of its death tolls mounted in the months and years that followed, vengeance came to play an ever more important role, joining principles of duty and self-defense in legitimating violence. The desire for retribution could be almost elemental in its passion, overcoming reason and releasing the restraints of fear and moral inhibition for soldiers who had witnessed the slaughter of their comrades. Hugh McLees of South Carolina wrote of the struggle not to abandon his principles in his treatment of a group of Union prisoners. “I saw some nasty blue Yankees in the cars at Atlanta,” he wrote in 1864,

and as I looked at our poor Boys there with their grisly wounds and some of them cold in death I could much more easily have taken a dagger and said to them see there what a carnival of blood you have made and as you love it take still more that of your own hearts take that with what you have already drunk I could more easily have done that than I could act toward them in the part that I know a truly brave magnanimous man must ever act toward a foe in his power and unarmed. May God give me grace to live a Christian.

As it reiterated “take…that…take that,” McLees's letter home enacted in language the violence he had abjured; the pen freed him to express a brutality he had resisted with dagger or sword. Yankee Oliver Norton proved less controlled after his messmates fell victim to Confederate fire, for he abandoned all thoughts of magnanimity or Christianity. The feeling “uppermost in my mind,” he explained, “was a desire to kill as many rebels as I could.”
⁶

Once the constraints of conscience and custom loosened, some soldiers, especially in the heat of combat, could seem almost possessed by the urge to kill. A soldier in action became “quite another being,” one of “almost maniac wildness,” with eyes darting, nostrils flared, and mouth gasping, a correspondent for a southern newspaper observed. A
New York Tribune
reporter at Shiloh described this frightening transformation. “Men lost their semblance of humanity,” he wrote, “and the spirit of the demon shone in their faces. There was but one desire, and that was to destroy.” It was difficult for him to think of these men as Christian soldiers, or even as beings who were fully human.
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Soldiers, too, found themselves surprised by the power of some comrades' exhilaration. Byrd Willis of the Army of Northern Virginia wrote in his journal about seeing a member of his unit “jumping about as if in great agony” during an 1864 skirmish. “I immediately ran up to him to ascertain when he was hurt & if I could do any thing of him—but upon reaching him I found that he was not hurt but was executing a species of Indian War Dance around a Poor Yankee (who lay on his back in the last agonies of death) exclaiming I killed him! I killed him! Evidently carried away with excitement & delight, I left James to continue his dance.” Numbers of Civil War letters and diaries describe similar instances of soldiers playing at being Indians—imitating war whoops, painting their faces with mud or soot from cartridges in what they saw as Indian style—when going into battle. By replacing their own identities with those of men they regarded as savages, they redefined their relationship both to violence and to their prewar selves.
⁸

The emerging delight in killing was not restricted to the heat of battle. Confederate artillery officer Osmun Latrobe described his pleasure contemplating a job well done after Antietam: “I rode over the battlefield, and enjoed the sight of hundred[s] of dead Yankees. Saw much of the work I had done in the way of several limbs, decapitated bodies, and mutilated remains of all kinds. Doing my soul good. Would that the whole Union army were as such, and I had had my hand in it.” For Latrobe, this “work” represented a successful execution of his duties as a soldier. Vengeance was simply a form of justice, the mutilated bodies equivalent to the biblical eye and tooth of retribution. Half a year later Latrobe would be celebrating “glorious heaps of Yankee dead” after Chancellorsville. Sergeant William Henry Redman was in pursuit of Confederates retreating after Gettysburg when he wrote his mother of his near obsession with destroying the rebels who had dared invade the North. “I am only satisfied nowadays when I am fighting the enemy. The proper time to fight him is while he is on our northern soil. I shall kill every one of them that I can.”
⁹

Although Union and Confederate soldiers often struggled, at least initially, with killing, men throughout history have reported loving combat, and the Civil War was no exception. Union officer John W. De Forest explained that “to fire at a person who is firing at you is somehow wonderfully consolatory and sustaining; more than that, it is exciting and produces in you the so-called joy of battle.” Although De Forest described the comfort of shooting in self-defense, he also revealed how he escaped an oppressive sense of victimhood through action against his enemy; he was at once justified and empowered by battle's intensity. Frank Coker of Georgia tried to explain to his wife how despite battle's horrors, “there is an excitement, a charm, an inspiration in it that makes one wish to be where it is going on.” For some men from rural areas, battle took on the character of the hunt, with its sense of sport and pleasure. A Texas officer exulted as the enemy fell before him, “Oh this is fun to lie here and shoot them down.” To a Union soldier near Harrison's Landing, Virginia, in 1862, battle “seemed like play for we would be laughing and talking to each other yelling and firing away. One fellow would say ‘Watch me pop that fellow.' Another fellow said, ‘I dropped a six foot secesh.'”
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