The War Was You and Me

Civilians in the American Civil War

Joan E. Cashin

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691091747, 9780691091730
• eBook ISBN: 9780691218113
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Though civilians constituted the majority of the nation's population and were intimately involved with almost every aspect of the war, we know little about the civilian experience of the Civil War. That experience was inherently dramatic. Southerners lived through the breakup of basic social and economic institutions, including, of course, slavery. Northerners witnessed the reorganization of society to fight the war. And citizens of the border regions grappled with elemental questions of loyalty that reached into the family itself.


These original essays--all commissioned from established scholars, based on archival research, and written for a wide readership--recover the stories of civilians from Natchez to New England. They address the experiences of men, women, and children; of whites, slaves, and free blacks; and of civilians from numerous classes. Not least of these stories are the on-the-ground experiences of slaves seeking emancipation and the actions of white Northerners who resisted the draft. Many of the authors present brand new material, such as the war's effect on the sounds of daily life and on reading culture. Others examine the war's premiere events, including the battle of Gettysburg and the Lincoln assassination, from fresh perspectives. Several consider the passionate debate that broke out over how to remember the war, a debate that has persisted into our own time.


In addition to the editor, the contributors are Peter W. Bardaglio, William Blair, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Margaret S. Creighton, J. Matthew Gallman, Joseph T. Glatthaar, Anthony E. Kaye, Robert Kenzer, Elizabeth D. Leonard, Amy E. Murrell, George C. Rable, Nina Silber, Mark M. Smith, Mary Saracino Zboray, and Ronald J. Zboray. Together they describe the profound transformations in community relations, gender roles, race relations, and culture wrought by the central event in American history.

PART ONE

The South

Chapter 1

Of Bells, Booms, Sounds, and Silences: Listening to the Civil War South

MARK M. SMITH

Heard Pasts?

Whatever else it was, the American Civil War was noisy, cacophonous, and decidedly loud. Union and Confederate soldiers spoke endlessly about “the roar and din of the artillery” and confessed that shells “pass over us with a sound that makes our flesh crawl.” Talk of “cannon balls whizzing & bursting over our heads” was common enough to have worked its way quietly into the titles of books on the military history of the war. For all of this implicit recognition of the noises of war, though, we know little about how soldiers perceived and reacted to battlefield soundscapes. Unsurprisingly, then, our knowledge of the perception of sounds and the ways that they affected and were comprehended by civilians on the Civil War home front is even less developed. It is, in fact, shockingly sparse.¹

The relative absence of historical inquiry into Civil War soundscapes is quite in keeping with the vast majority of historical work on nineteenth-century America. Inclined to examine the past through the eyes rather than the ears of historical actors, historians have tended not to listen to (and, ergo, not hear) the heard worlds of the past. There is no compelling reason for this deafness. I suspect that the revolution in print in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the assumed ascendancy of vision in the antebellum period, and our modern tendency to privilege sight over sound have inclined us to expect historical actors to appreciate and wring meaning from their worlds visually rather than aurally.²

This assumption is, of course, quite incorrect: elites and nonelites alike in the nineteenth century understood their worlds by hearing and listening as much as they did by seeing and looking.³ Indeed, the heard world provided all nineteenth-century Americans with important metaphorical and literal information about the nature of their societies and themselves. Elites, for example, heard social order during the course of everyday interaction and, simultaneously, at an abstracted level. Ruling classes, North and South, agreed on much when it came to perceiving and shaping their heard environments. Both vested profound meaning in, for example, the ringing of bells to mark national and local celebrations, signal alarms, regulate labor, toll deaths, summon parishioners, and locate themselves and their societies in time and space. They also agreed that industrious activity hummed happily and that economic recession was disturbingly silent.⁴

There were, though, important differences separating how antebellum ruling classes in both sections constructed one another. Northern elites embraced the hum of industry and a qualified pulse of democracy while Southern masters countered with an acoustic construction that embraced the pulse of industriousness, not industrialism or the noise of wage labor; one that stressed the quietude of the Southern social order, an order that made tranquillity the proxy for a way of life. Slaveholders wanted quietude, not silence. Silence was, in fact, dangerous and closely associated with plotting bondpeople. Quietude was slaveholders’ preferred register, for it provided a soundscape that was pastoral and connoted a particular set of social and economic relations in which slavery was literally and metaphorically in harmony with a rural, socially conservative soundscape. This was both an idealized and actual world where masters were determined to control the production and consumption of sounds and noises. Thus, slaveholders embraced the sounds of industriousness as an index of their society’s economic productivity but rejected the noise of industrialism because it was a talisman for liberal, not conservative, capitalism.⁵

The argument that consciousness of place and identity were constructed and shaped through the heard world is perfectly consistent with the little theoretical work done on historical soundscape studies. R. Murray Schafer uses the term “keynote sounds” for those sounds that imprint “themselves so deeply on the people hearing them that life without them would be sensed as a distinct impoverishment.” While these keynotes or soundmarks are created by, among other factors, “geography and climate,” they are also produced by specific cultural, social, and economic relations. Slavery, as a mode of production, had a particular and meaningful keynote to antebellum slaveholders; for northern elites, the sound of democratic capitalism and industry had its own soundmark. “[O]nce a soundmark has been identified, it deserves,” argues Schafer, “to be protected, for soundmarks make the acoustic life of the community unique.” Sounds, then, serve as anchors to regions, as acoustic identifiers of community, and, as a result, if those soundscapes or soundmarks are threatened by other, alien sounds, communities interpret those sounds as noise and as threats to their identities and ways of life. This is precisely what happened in the years leading up to civil war.⁶ The antebellum sectional and, in fact, intrasectional contest in preserving and shaping sectional keynotes continued during the war itself. One way to understand the unfolding and meaning of that contest is to listen to how Southerners on the home front heard the war and its meaning. All of this listening and hearing, of course, occurred in a context defined by the gravest Constitutional issues and many thousands of deaths at home and on field. These critically important matters were themselves inscribed with aural meanings and helped shaped how and which events were heard.

Listening to how various Southern constituencies heard the Civil War is important for (at least) three reasons. First, listening to the heard war muddies the tidy distinction some historians have made about the separateness of home and battlefield and contributes to a more recent emphasis stressing the conceptual necessity of blending of the two, particularly when trying to understand the Confederacy.⁷ Second, particular Southern constituencies constructed the soundscapes of the Civil War differently. There were, in effect, multiple acoustic home fronts during the war, and they were contingent on time, place, and status. And, third, listening to actual and perceived soundscapes in the Civil War South suggests how, in addition to all the other well-known contradictions that wilted the Southern will to prosecute the war, the introduction of new noises and the muting of old sounds probably helped erode Confederates’ long-term commitment and ability to resist their noisy Northern enemy.⁸ Unlike Northerners, who found the fewer new noises generated by the war perfectly compatible with their imagined and preferred future, Southern elites experienced new and deeply troubling noises and silences. While mobilization in the North was, for the most part, in harmony with their idealized and actual industrial, free-labor soundscape, gearing up for war in the South quickly became too Northern for many white Southern tastes. Because the actual sounds of war were far fainter in the North, there was much less adjustment to make than in the South where noises of battle and strife increasingly encroached on the Southern, tranquil, idealized home front. In the end, such radical changes in the Southern soundscape, while inspiring feverish resistance and even a degree of accommodation in the first instance, probably had the effect of enervating the Southern will to win not just because of the new noises inaugurated by the war but also because this conflagration muted traditional Southern sounds. Although sometimes unintended, sound itself became part of psychological warfare on the Confederate home front. For other Southern constituencies, slaves in particular, the sounds of war were the welcomed notes of freedom.

An exploration of these three issues allows us not merely to appreciate a hitherto neglected dimension of the war but sharpens our understanding of how various Southern constituencies attached multiple meanings to the significance of the sectional conflict. To be sure, those fighting the war heard the tumult of battle, the noise of military loss, and the sound of victory. But, and as this essay is dedicated to demonstrating, we need to venture beyond the noise of war on the battlefield and examine the aural world of the Confederate home front in order to appreciate the full complexity of Southern understandings of the war. Sounds of war and noises of military encounter were not spatially delimited: noises, shrieks, cannonading, and a host of other sounds echoed, literally and figuratively, on the home front, thus joining southern home front and battlefield acoustically and metaphorically. The combined effects of the war generally created what white Southerners in part heard as the silence of economic, social, and political ruin in the South, a silence that gained literal and metaphorical power through the South’s loss of bells during the conflict.

The essay concludes with an examination of the aural worlds of the enslaved during the war. Slaves, too, heard the noises and silences of the war. But, unlike their masters and mistresses, they used and understood these sounds differently and impregnated them with alternative meanings. For many ex-slaves interviewed in the 1930s, memories of the war were aural and what they heard at the time proved useful. Slaves during the Civil War listened hard to the blending of military and plantation soundscapes in order to ascertain the location of Union troops and flee to freedom. They also measured freedom itself in aural terms. While Confederates lamented the silence of defeat, the loss of many of their soundmarks, and what they perceived as the impending cacophony of black independence, ex-slaves, not unlike antebellum abolitionists, celebrated the sound of freedom’s bell. Freedpeople made their freedom heard and they reconfigured the hated noise of the plantation bell into an icon that proclaimed the sound of Emancipation and the silencing of slavery.

Earwitnessing Home Front(s)

The greatest changes to the Northern soundscape inaugurated by the Civil War were more of degree and less of kind. Sounds of war and sounds of home mingled in cities where Union forces prepared for war, the cadence of accelerated industrialization feeding into a long-held respect for the sound of industrial capitalism. Home to the army’s transportation bureau during the war, Washington, D.C., hummed with industrial life preparing for others’ military deaths. By 1863 “the streets resound with the deafening rumble of heavy wagons.” The “Horseshoeing [sic] Establishment” was loud but its timbre was reassuring to those anxious for both military and ideological victory: “Two hundred men . . . beating out an anvil chorus that rings in a deafening peal upon the ear, and dies away over the housetops and across the placid river in a soft, melodious chime, like the music of the bells . . . the roar of the bellows sounds like the rush of a tempest sweeping upon a forest.” Whatever changes the war introduced to the Northern soundscape, it also left much of it intact. Preparations for battle and occasional Confederate advances notwithstanding, the Northern soundscape generally experienced an amplified continuity that most found acceptable.⁹

Unlike the majority of Northern civilians, most Southerners on the home front came to hear the war literally as well as metaphorically. For them, the Civil War was an acoustic hemorrhaging, the end of a way of life that had invested in social quietude and tranquility. The master class found it increasingly difficult to control and contain the soundscape of the Civil War South, especially as the war went on and Union forces invaded, bringing with them sounds of freedom and industrial might, noises planters had long loathed.

Confederate soundscapes obviously depended not just on how sounds from the past were remembered and conceptualized metaphorically but, in a more immediate sense, on the extent of Union advance in particular regions of the Confederacy. The coming of Union noises and the sounds of war was important for reaffirming the Confederate commitment to their heard pasts as well as for counterpointing how very new, different, and disruptive the present sounded or, in some instances, did not sound. For most Southerners, the initial phases of the war were quiet and more reminiscent of the Old South than of the new noisy one that was their future. Witness the early wartime correspondence of Savannah River rice planter Louis Manigault. In late March 1861, sounds usual prevailed. “Mr Capers tells me all things are going on well on the plantation,” wrote Manigault to his father. “I find thus far all very quiet, and we will occupy ourselves in Threshing the Crop.” In fact, the Confederate soundscape sounded utterly normal and peaceful, not warlike: “Macon,” commented Manigault, “is quite a pretty Town, of about Ten Thousand inhabitants, and it is quiet there as if we were still a part of the United States.” By November, strains of war were still distant and were nowhere near loud or alien enough to drown out the happy hum of Manigault’s industrious plantation or disrupt the tranquility of slave labor. “[O]ur people are working well and Cheerfully,” wrote Manigault, elaborating, “I yesterday rode over the entire plantation with Mr Capers, and I have no reason to complain of any thing. In every direction the steam of the various Threshers indicated that the usual plantation work was going on. ... it is difficult to realize, in the midst of our quietude, that nearly within sight, on Daufuskie Island, the Yankees have entered Mr Stoddard’s House.”¹⁰

Little had changed by December. In fact, Manigault was more preoccupied with the customary disruptions to plantation life than he was with the possibility that new forces would interrupt his plantation serenity. At times, Manigault could hardly believe his ears: “Every thing on the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About the Author
• Table of Contents
• Editor’s Acknowledgments
• Editor’s Introduction
• Part One The South
• Part Two The North
• Part Three The Border Regions
• About the Contributors
• Index
• Illustrations Follow