This Republic of Suffering (9 page)

Yea! although it tarry long,

Payment shall be made for wrong!
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This notion of fitting retribution also lay at the heart of Frederick Douglass's view of the war and of black soldiers' role within it. The most prominent voice of the northern black community, Douglass understood the centrality of violence to slavery from his own experience in bondage. He had been beaten, he had fought back, and he had fled; he retained few illusions about the likelihood of white southerners giving up their peculiar institution without a desperate struggle. Douglass believed he had reclaimed his own “manly independence” by fighting and overcoming the brutal white overseer Covey. In Douglass's view, slaves had the absolute right to rise up and kill their masters, and his sympathy for John Brown had arisen from this premise. Douglass embraced a redemptive as well as an instrumental view of bloodshed; violence was not simply effective but instructive and liberating. The war's brutality, he wrote, served as a “blazing illustration” of the fundamental truth that “there is no more exemption for nations than for individuals from the just retribution due to flagrant and persistent transgression.” But the Civil War's “tears and blood,” he believed, “may at last bring us to our senses.”
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Black soldiers entered battle not just deeply invested in the war's outcome but strongly motivated to kill in service of their cause. Already victims of generations of cruelty in slavery, they saw themselves to be simply balancing accounts as they struggled for the freedom that would equalize their condition. They were fighting, they repeated again and again, for “God, race and country”—for righteousness, equality, and citizenship. But as the war continued and black troops experienced rising numbers of atrocities at the hands of Confederate troops who singled them out for special cruelty and humiliation, many African American soldiers felt even more entitled to vengeance and even more eager to kill. They knew, too, that they would be given no quarter if captured by southerners, who were likely either to shoot them or to send them into slavery—regardless of whether they had been slaves or had even lived below the Mason-Dixon line before the war.
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Cordelia Harvey, sent south by the governor of Wisconsin to provide aid to the state's wounded, wrote from Mississippi late in April 1864 to describe the anger and determination of black soldiers. “Since the Fort Pillow tragedy,” she explained, “our colored troops & their officers are awaiting in breathless anxiety the action of Government…Our officers of negro regiments declare they will take no more prisoners—& there is death to the rebel in every black mans eyes. They are still but terrible.
They will fight
…The negroes know what they are doing.” A black regiment, she reported, had already hanged a Chicago cotton merchant who had dared to say that he believed the rebels “did right” in killing the blacks on a nearby plantation during a recent raid.
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News of Fort Pillow prompted cries for vengeance from northern blacks. Soldiers should not cease fighting “until they shall have made a rebel to bite the dust for every hair of those…of our brethren massacred at Fort Pillow…give no quarter; take no prisoners…then, they will respect your manhood,” wrote one correspondent to the
Christian Recorder.
But Henry M. Turner, the black chaplain of the First U.S. Colored Infantry, worried about the position “highly endorsed by an immense number of both white and colored people, which I am sternly opposed to, and that is, the killing of all the rebel prisoners taken by our soldiers.” Even if the rebels had “set the example,” such actions represented an “outrage upon civilization and…Christianity.” Turner urged black soldiers to disappoint those who expected them to behave brutally; they should instead claim a moral superiority to their enemies. Vengeance, as another black chaplain emphasized, belonged to the Lord.
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In March 1865 the ringing cadences of Lincoln's Second Inaugural would echo the widespread black understanding of the war's carnage as divine punishment for the sin of slavery. Advocating “malice toward none,” urging that Americans “judge not that we be not judged,” Lincoln nevertheless suggested the possibility that in the Civil War God himself had judged—not in designating a victor but in exacting the lives of so many Americans. The deaths brought about by the Civil War were less a Christian sacrifice than an atonement. “If God wills that it continue,” Lincoln proclaimed just a little more than a month before the end of the war, “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”
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Lincoln's eloquence was perhaps matched by the passion of an elderly woman slave who saw in the work of death and killing the conflict's fundamental purpose. Mary Livermore, Union nurse, described a wartime encounter with an African American woman she had known years before during Livermore's service as a governess on a southern plantation. Aunt Aggy had waited through decades of cruelty to see “white folks' blood…a-runnin' on the ground like a riber.” But she had always had faith “it was a-comin. I allers 'spected to see white folks heaped up dead. An' de Lor', He's keept His promise, an' 'venged His people, jes' as I knowed He would. I seed 'em dead on de field, Massa Linkum's sojers an' de Virginny sojers, all heaped togedder…Oh, de Lor' He do jes' right, if you only gib Him time enough to turn Hisself.”
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Slavery gave the war's killing and dying a special meaning for black Americans; the conflict was a moment for both divine and human retribution, as well as an opportunity to become the agent rather than the victim of violence. Killing was for black soldiers—as well as for black civilians like Aunt Aggy—the instrument of liberation; it was an act of personal empowerment and the vehicle of racial emancipation. To kill and to be, as soldiers, permitted to kill was ironically to claim a human right.

         

In the aftermath of battle, when the intensity and the frenzy dissipated, when the killing at least temporarily ceased, when reason returned, soldiers confronted the devastation they had created and survived—“the unmistakable evidence,” as one soldier put it after Spotsylvania, “that death is doing its most frightful work.” William Dean Howells later wrote of the lasting impact of the Civil War on James Garfield, a Union general and later U.S. president: “at the sight of these dead men whom other men had killed, something went out of him, the habit of a lifetime, that never came back again: the sense of the sacredness of life and the impossibility of destroying it.” Dead men whom other men had killed: there was the crux of the matter. Battle was, as a North Carolina soldier ruefully put it, “majestic murder.” The carnage was not a natural disaster but a man-made one, the product of human choice and human agency. Neither North nor South had expected the death tolls that Civil War battles produced, and the steadily escalating level of destruction continued to amaze and horrify. The Mexican War had claimed approximately 13,000 U.S. lives, of which fewer than 2,000 had been battle deaths; the First Battle of Bull Run in August 1861 had shocked the nation with its totals of 900 killed and 2,700 wounded. By the following spring at Shiloh, Americans recognized that they had embarked on a new kind of war, as the battle yielded close to 24,000 casualties, including approximately 1,700 dead on each side. Shiloh's number of killed and wounded exceeded the combined totals of all the major engagements of the war that had preceded it. The summer's fighting on the Virginia Peninsula would escalate the carnage yet again. “We used to think that the battle of Manassas was a great affair,” Confederate Charles Kerrison wrote home to South Carolina in July 1862, “but it was mere child's play compared with those in which we have lately been engaged.” By the time of Gettysburg a year later, the Union army alone reported 23,000 casualties, including 3,000 killed; Confederate losses are estimated between 24,000 and 28,000; in some regiments, numbers of killed and wounded approached 90 percent. And by the spring of 1864 Grant's losses in slightly more than a month approached 50,000.
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Faced with the Civil War's unprecedented slaughter, soldiers tried to make sense of what they had wrought. As they surveyed the scene at battle's end, they became different men. For a moment they were relieved of the demand to kill; other imperatives—of Christianity, of humanity, of survival rather than courage or duty—could come again to the fore. And now they had time to look at what was around them. Union colonel Luther Bradley described this transformation:

Of all the horrors the horrors of the battlefield are the worst and yet when you are in the midst of them they don't appal one as it would seem they ought. You are engrossed with the struggle and see one and another go down and say, “there goes poor so-and-so. Will it be my turn next.” Your losses and dangers don't oppress you 'till afterwards when you sit down quietly to look over the result or go out with details to bury the dead.

Dealing with the “afterwards” required work lest, as a Confederate soldier worried after Shiloh, the spectacle “dethrone reason or pervert the judgment.” Henry C. Taylor wrote to his parents in Wisconsin after a grim night collecting the dead and wounded from an 1863 battle in Kentucky, “I did not realize anything about the fight when we were in action, but the battlefield at midnight will bring one to a realizing sense of war. I never want to see such a sight again. I cannot give such a description of the fight as I wish I could. My head is so full that it is all jumbled up together and I can't get it into any kind of shape.” But he could draw one clear and revealing conclusion: “Tell Mrs Diggins not to let her boy enlist.”
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Soldiers struggled to communicate to those eager to know their fate at the same time that they themselves struggled to understand what they saw. Why indeed were they still alive? As one Indiana soldier wrote in his diary in 1864, his “best men” had fallen around him, yet “I am not better than they.” William Stilwell of Georgia confessed to his wife the day after Antietam, “I am in good health this morning as far as my body is concerned, but in my mind I am perplexed.” Unable to explain, soldiers tried to describe, invoking the raw physicality of carnage and suffering. Even as survivors they could not escape the literal touch of death, which assaulted the senses. First there was the smell. “The dead and dying actually stink upon the hills,” W. D. Rutherford wrote his wife after the Seven Days Battles around Richmond. For a radius of miles, the “mephitic effluvia” caused by rotting bodies ensured that even if the dead were out of sight, they could not be out of mind. And then there were the thousands of bodies. Men had become putrefied meat, not so much killed as slaughtered, with “nothing to distinguish them from so many animals.” Stepping accidentally on a dead man's leg felt to James Wood Davidson's “boot-touch like a piece of pickled pork—hard and yet fleshy,” and he leaped back with alarm. Soldiers looked with horror upon bodies that seemed to change color as they rotted, commenting frequently upon a transformation that must have borne considerable significance in a society and a war in which race and skin color were of definitive importance. “The faces of the dead,” one northern Gettysburg veteran described, “as a general rule, had turned black—not a purplish discoloration, such as I had imagined in reading of the ‘blackened corpses' so often mentioned in descriptions of battlegrounds, but a deep bluish
black,
giving to a corpse with black hair the appearance of a negro.”
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Witnesses to battle's butchery often wrote of the impossibility of crossing the field without walking from one end to the other atop the dead. “They paved the earth,” a soldier wrote after the Battle of Williamsburg in 1862. Grant found the same after Shiloh: “I saw an open field…so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping only on dead bodies without a foot touching the ground.” With grim precision Eugene Blackford described a two-acre area at Fredericksburg containing 1,350 dead Yankees; others estimated stretches of a mile or more at Antietam or Shiloh where every step had to be planted on a dead body. Men were revolted both by the dishonor to the slain beneath their feet and by the pollution represented by such distasteful contact with the dead. Like a modern snapshot, this oft-repeated representation of battle's horror graphically portrayed in the freeze-frame of a picture what soldiers could not narrate in a sequence of words. With vividness and detail, for the senses rather than for the reason or intellect, this recurrent image communicated the unspeakable.
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Men wept. Even as he acknowledged that “it does not look well for a soldier to cry,” John Casler of the Stonewall Brigade knew “I could not help it.” Benjamin Thompson of the 111th New York affirmed that after Gettysburg “no words can depict the ghastly picture.” He “could not long endure the gory, ghastly spectacle. I found my head reeling, the tears flowing and my stomach sick at the sight.” Colonel Francis Pierce confessed that “such scenes completely unman me.” Battle changed the living to the dead, humans into animals, and strong men into “boys…crying like children”—or perhaps even into women with their supposed inability to control their flowing tears. As Walter Lee wrote his mother from the front in June 1862, “I don't believe I am the same being I was two weeks ago, at least I don't think as I used to and things don't seem as they did.”
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One way soldiers became different men was by resisting and repressing the unbearable horror. “The feelings of a soldier walking over his first battle-field and over his second, are widely different,” a southern newspaper observed. Men wrote of “hardening,” numbing, or becoming “calloused” or even indifferent to others' deaths as well as to the prospect of their own. A Union surgeon, surrounded in Virginia by “a horrible spectacle of human misery,” saw this transformation in attitude as a blessing, regarding it as a “wise provision of divine providence that man can accommodate himself to any & every circumstance, at first no matter how revolting.” A seasoned soldier could sleep or eat amid the bodies of the dead; “all signs of emotion…or ordinary feelings of tenderness and sympathy” disappeared. With a gesture that reflected either a jocular insensitivity or an ironic anger that may well have shocked and surprised his wife, Isaac Hadden of New York invited her to join him at dinner “in the enemy's rifle pits where the dead lay around crawling away with dear little worms called maggots…I was kind of hungry and got used to the pretty sights.” Union colonel Charles Wainwright reported that when another soldier fell against him proclaiming himself a dead man, “I had no more feeling for him, than if he had tripped over a stump and fallen; nor do I think it would have been different had he been my brother.” Private Wilbur Fisk of Vermont resorted to irony in his attempt to depict soldiers' changing attitudes: “The more we get used to being killed, the better we like it.”
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