The View from the Ground

Experiences of Civil War Soldiers

Aaron Sheehan-Dean

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780813124131
• eBook ISBN: 9780813137612
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Civil War scholars have long used soldiers' diaries and correspondence to flesh out their studies of the conflict's great officers, regiments, and battles. However, historians have only recently begun to treat the common Civil War soldier's daily life as a worthwhile topic of discussion in its own right. The View from the Ground reveals the beliefs of ordinary men and women on topics ranging from slavery and racism to faith and identity and represents a significant development in historical scholarship—the use of Civil War soldiers' personal accounts to address larger questions about America's past. Aaron Sheehan-Dean opens The View from the Ground by surveying the landscape of research on Union and Confederate soldiers, examining not only the wealth of scholarly inquiry in the 1980s and 1990s but also the numerous questions that remain unexplored. Chandra Manning analyzes the views of white Union soldiers on slavery and their enthusiastic support for emancipation. Jason Phillips uncovers the deep antipathy of Confederate soldiers toward their Union adversaries, and Lisa Laskin explores tensions between soldiers and civilians in the Confederacy that represented a serious threat to the fledgling nation's survival. Essays by David Rolfs and Kent Dollar examine the nature of religious faith among Civil War combatants. The grim and gruesome realities of warfare—and the horror of killing one's enemy at close range—profoundly tested the spiritual convictions of the fighting men. Timothy J. Orr, Charles E. Brooks, and Kevin Levin demonstrate that Union and Confederate soldiers maintained their political beliefs both on the battlefield and in the war's aftermath. Orr details the conflict between Union soldiers and Northern antiwar activists in Pennsylvania, and Brooks examines a struggle between officers and the Fourth Texas Regiment. Levin contextualizes political struggles among Southerners in the 1880s and 1890s as a continuing battle kept alive by memories of, and identities associated with, their wartime experiences. The View from the Ground goes beyond standard histories that discuss soldiers primarily in terms of campaigns and casualties. These essays show that soldiers on both sides were authentic historical actors who willfully steered the course of the Civil War and shaped subsequent public memory of the event.

A “VEXED QUESTION”

White Union Soldiers on Slavery and Race

Chandra Manning

If anyone had told E. C. Hubbard in January 1861 that he would fight to end slavery, he likely would have laughed or, if in a quarrelsome mood, thrown a punch. By his own admission, he “came into the service . . . thinking that a negro [was] a parallel case of a dog.” Yet by December 1861, Sergeant Hubbard of the Thirteenth Illinois complained that the Union’s failure to destroy slavery was prolonging the war, and he, like many of his fellow enlisted soldiers, demanded an end to the institution that they identified as the root of the conflict.¹ The first Americans to insist on a connection between emancipation and Union victory were black Americans; the first group of white Americans whose views they changed consisted of Union soldiers serving in the South, who in turn developed into advocates and agents of emancipation. Yet white soldiers’ embrace of emancipation came with limits. Although blacks knew that slavery could not be separated from race, white Union troops initially ignored questions of racial equality or black rights. The fury of the war, God’s apparent intervention in the July 4 victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and the performance of black soldiers convinced many whites in the Union army that their racial attitudes made them complicit in the sin of slavery and even led some to demand black rights; however, support for the rights of African Americans varied with the course of the war. Together, the advances in and limitations of white Union soldiers’ views on slavery and race help explain the achievements and disappointments of the war and its aftermath.

Although studies of Civil War soldiers abound, no methodical examination of white Union soldiers’ changing views on slavery and race exists. Bell Irvin Wiley’s seminal works, The Life of Billy Yank and “Billy Yank and the Black Folk,” conflated slavery and race and led to the long-standing assumption that Northern racism made soldiers oppose emancipation.² Later works, including Reid Mitchell’s Civil War Soldiers and James McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades, depict variations in Union views on slavery and race, but their thematic (rather than chronological) organization makes change over time difficult to track.³ Joseph Glatthaar shows support for emancipation by the end of the war in The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaign, but Glatthaar’s subject precludes an examination of earlier developments and excludes men not in Sherman’s army.⁴ Still needed is a systematic examination of white soldiers’ views on slavery and race, with particular attention to change over time and to the role of enlisted men as agents of change who expected to influence the progress of the war.

Drawing conclusions about white Union soldiers’ views on slavery and race presents challenges, because the army consisted of millions of individuals who disagreed with one another on nearly everything. It is not difficult to find an example of a soldier to support virtually any point of view. The task here is not to make a case for harmony but to examine dominant patterns in white Union soldiers’ positions on slavery and race as expressed in the letters and diaries of mainly enlisted men (along with some junior officers) from West and East, immigrant and native born, urban and rural—soldiers who came from every Union state and who fought in every theater of the war. In addition, this study draws on approximately 100 camp newspapers created by enlisted soldiers in the field.⁵

From the outset, black Americans knew that the war had to strike at slavery. A black New Yorker saw the war as “nothing more nor less than perpetual slavery against universal freedom,” which meant that the Union would not win until it “put an everlasting end to negro slavery.”⁶ Slaves in the South demonstrated the links between Union victory and the end of slavery with their physical presence. Just weeks after Fort Sumter, so many slaves fled to Union lines at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, that General Benjamin Butler had to ask his superiors what to do about “entire families” of slaves. Their arrival in camp signaled that the Union army would have to pay attention to the status and future of African Americans.⁷

In contrast, white Union soldiers’ views on slavery varied widely at first. Andrew Walker, the son of Irish immigrants, worked as a schoolteacher in the spring of 1861. As soon as he heard about Fort Sumter, he predicted that the North would have the opportunity to “forever set aside Slavery,” and before the year was out, he had enlisted in the Fifty-fifth Illinois to help.⁸ Others denounced the very idea of a war to end slavery. The Advance Guard, a regimental newspaper written by soldiers of the Seventeenth Illinois, lambasted “the northern fanatic” who awaits “the probable abolition of slavery in the southern States, rubs his hands with delight and rejoices that the day of deliverance has arrived. All the horrors of civil war are of no consequence to him if his darling project is accomplished.”⁹

For most Union troops, both Walker and the Advance Guard missed the point because the war’s main purpose had less to do with either supporting or opposing abolition than with proving that republican government, established by the founders on the principles of liberty and equality and administered through free and fair elections, could work. A soldier stationed in Virginia maintained that the Union army aimed “to defend the Union of our Revolutionary sires, and protect and perpetuate a Government which the oppressed in every land have looked upon for half a century as the beacon of liberty.”¹⁰ The destruction of the Union would turn the idea of government based on liberty and equality into a worldwide laughingstock. As Private Leigh Webber of Kansas put it, “if we fail now, the hope of human rights is extinguished for ages.”¹¹

Despite early emphasis on the Union and republican government, it did not take long for much of the rank and file to echo the Wisconsin soldier who proclaimed, “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.”¹² As men in the ranks saw it, Confederates had seceded to protect slavery from a president who opposed its extension: that made the war about slavery, whether an individual white Northerner liked it or not. If Southerners had not rebelled, a Pennsylvanian insisted, most Northerners would have continued “following their plow, minding their forge, or exerting their talents in the mercantile line,” with thoughts of slavery and war far from their minds.¹³

At first, consensus on slavery’s part in starting the war did not translate into agreement over what to do about it. Some men reasoned that if states seceded out of fear for the security of slavery within the Union, the quickest way to bring them back was to demonstrate that slavery was perfectly safe. As one regimental newspaper saw it, once white Southerners realized that the Union posed no threat to slavery, “they will certainly abandon their hopeless and hell-conceived undertaking.”¹⁴ Especially in the border states, which retained both slavery and tenuous ties to the Union, some soldiers considered a hands-off policy the best way to ensure loyalty. “The Secesh had represented that we were heare to free all their negroes,” Private Edward Dwight remarked from Missouri, but when locals noticed that soldiers did not interfere with slavery, approval of the Union increased.¹⁵ Others worried that the practical demands of fighting a war and ending slavery at the same time would be more than the Union could handle. When Lieutenant E. P. Kellogg read that the Wisconsin State Journal’s editor approved of freeing and arming slaves, Kellogg urged caution. The “question of the disposal of the negroes after their emancipation” would be complicated, he noted. Better to “have but one Gordian Knot at a time. If you give us more we shall have to cut them all, and perhaps cut our fingers if not our throats.”¹⁶ Other volunteers opposed emancipation simply because they disliked black people. A member of the First Kansas had his “gorge of contrabands” and wanted nothing to do with freeing them, lest former slaves move to Kansas. “Our prairies, rich in promised wealth, have already been converted from a living green, into a sickly ebony hue,” he complained.¹⁷

Between August and December 1861 a striking pattern took shape, as soldier after soldier began to insist that because slavery had caused the war, only the destruction of slavery could end the war. “You have no idea of the changes that have taken place in the minds of the soldiers in the last two months,” one enlisted man from the Midwest declared. Firsthand observations of the South forced men who had once ignored slavery “to face this sum of all evils, and cause of the war,” with the result that “men of all parties seem unanimous in the belief that to permanently establish the Union, [we must] . . . first wipe [out] the institution of slavery.” In short, “The rebellion is abolitionizing the whole army.”¹⁸ John Boucher agreed: because “it was slavery that caused the war,” only “the eternal overthrow of slavery” could win the war.¹⁹ Throughout the ranks, enlisted soldiers reasoned that eliminating the war’s cause would end the rebellion and prevent its recurrence. As a result, they championed the destruction of slavery a full year ahead of the Emancipation Proclamation, well before most civilians or political leaders did.

As enlisted men’s views on emancipation changed, they anticipated corresponding changes in policy. At first, many Union officers ordered strict respect for private property, including slaves, but by late 1861, the rank and file protested. As long as Confederates’ “niggers [are] returned there is no chance to whip them,” one sergeant grumbled. “The better course I think would be to confiscate . . . nigger and all.”²⁰ E. C. Hubbard despised General Henry Halleck’s practice of expelling fugitive slaves from camp on the grounds of strategy and humanity. For one thing, it made more sense to Hubbard to use the information that slaves provided than to restore laborers to disloyal owners, but beyond tactical concerns, most runaway slaves would rather risk the open road than return to their masters. “To expel them from camp is to expel them to starve,” Hubbard shuddered. “Unless this policy is changed the Dept of the Missouri needs a new Commander.”²¹ In contrast, when General John C. Frémont’s controversial proclamation of August 30, 1861, freed the slaves of secessionist owners, William Dunham reckoned that Frémont “has done more for to infuse energy into the Western Division of the service than all others together.”²² When Lincoln revoked Frémont’s proclamation and removed Frémont from command, many soldiers, such as a Swiss immigrant in the First Minnesota, wondered angrily why the administration had “interfered” with an action that “would soon end this war by removing the cause of it.”²³ The Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862, which permitted the confiscation of disloyal owners’ slaves, struck men like Walter Reeder as signs “that Congress has, at length arrived at the conclusion they had arrived at long since.”²⁴

To be sure, measures such as Frémont’s proclamation and the Confiscation Acts generated what E. P. Kellogg called a “diversity of opinion.” Kellogg himself opposed Frémont’s measure on the grounds of “practicability.”²⁵ The timing of the Second Confiscation Act, soon after the Army of the Potomac’s Peninsula Campaign failed to capture Richmond, angered numerous Union soldiers serving in Virginia. Roland Bowen wished the “damned set of Politicians who are everlastingly fighting about a Damned Nigger or some General” were “all in hell Rolling and Pitching upon the firey coals.”²⁶

Many others continued to oppose emancipation in general, especially as new rounds of recruits who had not yet witnessed the South or slavery enlisted. Massachusetts tinsmith Charles Knapp told his brother, “wee did not come here to fite for niggers and that is all that theay are fiting for now.”²⁷ Henry Bandy made his position equally clear when he exclaimed, “hooraw for the union and not for the nigar.”²⁸

Although hostile attitudes never disappeared entirely, the desire to win the war transcended prejudice without erasing it, leading the bulk of the Un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• The Blue and the Gray in Black and White Assessing the Scholarship on Civil War Soldiers
• A “Vexed Question” White Union Soldiers on Slavery and Race
• A Brothers’ War? Exploring Confederate Perceptions of the Enemy
• “The Army Is Not Near So Much Demoralized as the Country Is” Soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia and the Confederate Home Front
• “No Nearer Heaven Now but Rather Farther Off” The Religious Compromises and Conflicts of Northern Soldiers
• “Strangers in a Strange Land” Christian Soldiers in the Early Months of the Civil War
• “A Viler Enemy in Our Rear” Pennsylvania Soldiers Confront the North’s Antiwar Movement
• Popular Sovereignty in the Confederate Army The Case of Colonel John Marshall and the Fourth Texas Infantry Regiment
• “Is Not the Glory Enough to Give Us All a Share?” An Analysis of Competing Memories of the Battle of the Crater
• Afterword
• Selected Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index