America Aflame (40 page)

While understandable, these complaints did not account for the suffering of families who coped without a breadwinner, or worse, with his death. It did not account for the refugee families in the South who fled in advance of Union troops. Nor did it account for the daily worry about losing a loved one. War is that way. It creates an estrangement compounded by unknowing.

The soldiers tried as best they could to describe the war in their letters and diaries, but the unimaginable often proved impossible to convey. And the unimaginable stayed in the imagination forever. “A battle is indescribable,” a Union chaplain wrote in December 1862, “but once seen it haunts a man till the day of his death.” The scenes brutalized them and, to a point, inured them. Shiloh made them question God, man's inhumanity, and their own salvation. William T. Sherman, a man rarely given to sentimental musings, found Shiloh a deeply unsettling experience:

Who but a living witness can adequately portray those scenes on Shiloh's field, when our wounded men, mingled with rebels, charred and blackened by the burning tents and underbrush, were crawling about, begging for someone to end their misery? Who can describe the plunging shot shattering the strong oak as with a thunderbolt, and beating down horse and rider to the ground? Who but one who has heard them can describe the peculiar sizzling of the minie ball, or the crash and roar of a volley fire? Who can describe the last look of the stricken soldier as he appeals for help that no man can give or describe the dread scene of the surgeon's work, or the burial trench?
25

The slaughter at Shiloh shocked Grant into believing that the rebellion would end quickly. The Confederacy, he thought, could not sustain such losses and remain in the field much longer. Shiloh, coupled with the victories earlier in the year, gave Grant hope of an early peace. He realized soon after Shiloh, however, that the South could yet field vast armies. At that point, “I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.” The general's body servant, who remained with him throughout the war, recalled “only one time when he [Grant] appeared troubled in his mind. That was … after the battle of Shiloh. He used to walk his room all night.”
26

The press could not get out news of Shiloh fast enough. Civilians crowded telegraph offices to hear the latest from the front, and newspapers sold out as soon as they landed in newsboys' hands. One enterprising fifteen-year-old Michigan lad who sold newspapers on trains passing through his town, knowing that news from Shiloh would sell out his stock quickly, arranged for a line of credit to buy large numbers of newspapers, which he hawked at higher prices. Using the profits from such sales, he founded his own newspaper and set himself to learn the art and science of telegraphy. Thomas Edison went on to work for Western Union during the later years of the Civil War, where he experimented with improvements to telegraphic communications, launching his career as an inventor.
27

The carnage at Shiloh created a dilemma for religious Americans on both sides. Evangelical Protestantism had defined the major political issues of the 1850s and influenced the sectional crisis and the war that followed. Each side had cloaked itself in righteousness. Yet, if the evangelical God was just and benevolent, how could He countenance the continuation of a bloody war? How could He approve of Christians killing each other? “How,” in the words of one troubled Christian, “does God have the heart to allow it?”
28

Abraham Lincoln wrestled with this question, especially after the death of his son Willie in February 1862 and mounting casualties on the battlefields. God was not, for Lincoln, the intimate deity of the evangelicals, but an inscrutable presence whose ultimate purpose was unknowable. Lincoln's view of a predestinarian God and the limits of man's ability to mold events harked back to the Calvinism of his father rather than the optimistic free will proponents of early nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism. The war had taken turns beyond any man's expectations. “God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party,” he wrote in September 1862. “God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.”
29

As the war buffeted Lincoln's faith, it transformed those on the battlefield. Religion offered an understanding and a rationalization of the death and destruction surrounding these young men. Their chaplains reassured them that death was but a midpoint between life and the glorious hereafter. They heard about the exalted nature of their sacrifices, that “the rivers of blood” had “hallowed” their nation. Elevating the war as a tale of suffering and redemption enabled soldiers to make sense of death. Or, it did not. Herman Melville's poem “Shiloh: A Requiem” proclaims, “What like a bullet can undeceive!”
30

Faith did not die on the battlefield, but the war shook it. Melville predicted the war would resemble “an upheaval affecting the basis of things,” and he was right. Tales circulated of how a pocket Bible stopped a bullet and saved a private's life. As the war progressed, the veteran soldier learned that a deck of cards did just as well. A Confederate soldier summarized the view of many of his comrades: “The soldiers naturally distrusted the efficacy of prayer when they found that the most devout Christians were as liable to be shot as the most hardened sinner.”
31

Religious organizations on both sides rushed to shore up a faltering faith. Bibles, tracts, and sermons flooded camps. Ministers led revivals. Presidents Lincoln and Davis called for public fast days and prayer. Pocket songsters included tunes that urged piety and sobriety. These periodic paroxysms of religious fervor gained some converts, but they did nothing to ameliorate the war and may have prolonged it, for who could walk away from a crusade? Sacrifice required a great cause, but what kind of God would demand bloodletting on such a scale?

A sense of betrayal gripped some of the young men. The nobility of serving a just cause the politicians had promised had proved elusive. They expected a Walter Scott novel, a quick victory, a bloodless conquest, and young women throwing rose petals at their homecoming. Many never came home, and few experienced the war as a romantic adventure. Ashley Wilkes, in Margaret Mitchell's
Gone with the Wind
(1936), thought the war would be an extension of his chivalrous life in the Old South. It wasn't, as he wrote to Melanie from his Virginia camp: “I see too clearly that we have been betrayed, betrayed by our arrogant Southern selves, believing that one of us could whip a dozen Yankees, believing that King Cotton could rule the world.” What was left for Ashley Wilkes and his Confederate comrades was to fight and die for home and family, which would never have been in peril in the first place were it not for the betrayal.
32

Home and family rendered the threat of death and dying especially poignant. Most of these young men had never ventured beyond a few miles from home. They came from small towns and farms, generally, and they lived among extended family relations. They rarely met people from other parts of the country. Now, Georgia farm boys found themselves in Virginia camps, and Illinois clerks slogged through the mud of Mississippi. The shreds of familiarity in their lives were the letters to and from home. The correspondence documented that a reality existed outside the insanity of war. They complained when loved ones did not send replies quickly; they doted on information about young children; and they wept at the deaths they could not attend.

When they closed their eyes, they saw home, they heard the tapping of treetops against the roof, they felt the breeze, and “the sweet-smelling meadow.” Long after the war was over, soldiers remembered how the visions of home sustained them. “Above the smoke of battle,” a former Iowa soldier wrote in 1892, “in the clear empyrean, arose the vision of the American soldier's home, secure to him and his loved ones.” Such visions supported the men in their camps and on the battlefields, but not always. Longing for home also produced homesickness, which, more than fear, contributed to desertion on both sides. The worry over crops or businesses, or over illness, or just plain missing someone, a lover, a child, a mother, could compromise a soldier's willingness to fight.
33

Women recognized how important they were to the attitude of the troops. “Don't worry; all of us are fine” did more to boost a soldier's morale than the most inspired sermon. Complaints, tales of woe, and entreaties to come home had the opposite affect, and women, north and south, received copious advice on their roles as morale boosters, moral sentries, and sounding boards for their men in uniform. This was especially so in the South, where white women occupied a specific and prescribed role as secondary figures with primary roles as supporters of their men. They received unstinting praise for their work, as in poet Henry Timrod's salute “Two Armies,” praising women and their “thousand peaceful deeds,” satisfying “a struggling nation's needs.” Newspapers set out their importance, that women held the “principal creation and direction” of Confederate public opinion “in their hands.”
34

These statements were as much warnings as endorsements. As the war progressed and battles produced more casualties, troop morale was ever more important. The press stepped up its admonitions to women: “The maid who binds her warrior's sash / And smiling, all her pain dissembles.” “The mother who conceals her grief” had “shed as sacred blood as e'er / was poured upon the plain of battle.” More bluntly, a Huntsville, Alabama, newspaper warned women in bold headlines, “DON'T WRITE GLOOMY LETTERS.” Still, it was difficult, and time and again soldiers wrote home, “Be cheerful and do the best you can.”
35

Alabama writer Augusta Jane Evans published a popular novel,
Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice
(1864), based on the Greek mythological figure in the title who sacrificed herself on the altar of the gods in order to save Athens from defeat. The story's modern-day heroine gives up both her father and her lover to the Confederate cause and lives a life of “Womanly Usefulness,” laboring in “God's great vineyard.” Evans wrote approvingly of mothers who “closed their lips firmly to repress a wail of sorrow as they buckled on the swords of their first-born.” Yet Evans did not follow her own advice, sending sharply critical letters to General Beauregard and Confederate congressmen on military strategy and the class bias of the draft, and complaining that women's talents were going wasted.
36

Mary Chesnut, wife of a prominent Confederate official, shared Evans's frustration, confiding to her diary: “I think
these
times make all women feel their humiliation in the affairs of the world. With
men
it is on to the field—‘glory, honour, praise, &c., power.' Women can only stay at home—& every paper reminds us that women are to be
violated
—ravished & all manner of humiliation. How are the daughters of Eve punished.”
37

Most of all, it was difficult to reconcile grief and patriotism, and grief became ever more common in the years after Shiloh. Widows lay in darkened rooms day after day clutching pictures of their lovers. Well-intentioned neighbors and family came to express their sympathies, but “O God … if they only knew the misery I feel.” Women in the North also sent their men into battle with smiles, forced or otherwise. By the time of the Civil War, however, northern women faced fewer strictures on maintaining a subordinate role. Their leadership in evangelical and anti-slavery causes, their numerous publications, and their organizing activities and political campaigning had primed society to accept a more diverse role for women during the war. It was not surprising, for example, that northern women quickly took up the nursing profession, while southern women debated its propriety.
38

Few northern families suffered the dislocations southerners did; with hardly any exceptions, they did not cope with the destruction of land and livestock and the loss of family fortune. In the more dense and more urban North, isolation was less common, news more frequent, the mail more reliable, and the economy stronger. The war engaged a much higher percentage of southern men. Pleading letters to come home and save the family farm came less frequently from northern women. The war strengthened some northern women as they warmed to the task of self-reliance. An Iowa woman whose husband went off to war wrote that “the whole responsibility” of keeping the family farm running “rested with myself and the children”—a girl of thirteen, two boys, ten and eight, and a baby girl. “They were my only assistance and companions … and it was wonderful what enthusiasm and helpfulness those four dear children manifested all the time. They seemed enthused with the spirit of the times.”
39

Both sides shared a common grief. That less chaotic circumstances surrounded northern women and their families provided little solace for the loss of a life's partner. George Norris, a future senator from Nebraska, recalled his childhood in Ohio during the war when his older brother, John, died fighting in Georgia. Four months later, his father died. Thereafter, “I never heard a song upon the lips of my mother. I never even heard her hum a tune.… The war ended, and the young men came back, but John slept in a soldier's grave in the blackened southern countryside. There were times when it seemed that the heartache over her son never would pass.”
40

War was death, and death was war. How to deal with its possibility as a soldier, and how to process its reality if you were a friend or a family member? How do you die when you are lying helpless in the woods and the fire is about to consume you, or a wild pig is tearing at your entrails, or you have lost your legs to an artillery shell and you know you will bleed to death? Do you think about the Union? States' rights? God? Your family? Or, do you plead for someone to shoot you? Is it better to die as your comrade did this morning as you sat eating breakfast together and a minié ball crashed into his brain and splattered it over your plate? How do you die if you are stretched out on a hospital bed, sweating from fever and infection, while a young woman wipes your face with a cold cloth and you ask her if you are going to die and you do not hear her answer? Or, if you are moving in and out of consciousness, catching your breath at every draw, and gasping “water,” and maybe your nurse hears “Jesus,” because that is what she writes to your family. How do you respond when you receive a black-rimmed envelope bearing an official seal from Richmond? How do you respond when you are handed a letter from a stranger, a nurse, a comrade, assuring you that your husband or father or son died nobly for his country? Do you thank God?