Day 30. March 30, 1862. – We Saw a Grate Smoke Raise Up: Letters, Diaries, Wires from the Valley of the Late Rebellion

caressingly cut one another’s throats with dull butcher knives….

March Wensday 30

Quite cool this morning but is somewhat like winter that is cold and it got somewhat pleasant. I found myself at Frederick Co. Winchester VA in the army of the United States in the 110^th Regiment P.V. We had no lunch at this camp today and we have had but one Sermon since we left the state. Oh I am afraid some of our chaplins* are rather careless and I think that some of them don’t think much about the future wellfare of their fellow men. I have been unwell for some time and I hope we may soon be where the Sabbath day is respected and I hope the day may soon come

*Note previous mention in this manuscript that the 110^th Chaplain Jeremiah Schindel was court-martialed. Union Chaplains made $120 a month. Chaplain Schindel of the 110^th can be seen here by finding his name on the page. He stands second from right. Alternately, find him here: https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.33114/

Same picture, lesser quality here:

https://thechaplainkit.com/chaplains/19th-century-wars/civil-war/

At the above link, the 110th Regiment, PA Volunteers, Lutheran Chaplain Jeremiah P. Schindel, is the stout man, 2nd from right. Born in Lebanon, PA, (1807-1870), he was a PA. State Senator from 1858-1860 then Chaplain of the 110th from December 1861 to June 1863. For information on his court martial in 1863, see Court Martial Case Files, 12/1800-10/1894, RG 153, Records of the Office of the Judge Advocate General (Army) 1792-2010, NARA.

8/3/61 saw the “War Department Act”: Chaplains were to be provided for the army. 3K Chaplains became part of Union forces. Worship services took place outdoors, in tents, around campfires with Protestant Catholic, Jewish, & eventually Black Chaplains of various faiths.

A Stillness at Appomattox Bruce Catton P. 215

“Even the chaplains seemed to be showing the strain, and many of them quietly gravitated toward safe jobs far behind the lines. (“Undue susceptibility to cannon fever,” a New England soldier complained, “ought to be regarded as a disqualification.”) A surgeon in the 39^th Illinois, on duty at a base hospital at Fortress Monroe, felt that the chaplains there were “pharisees who made it a business to pray aloud in public spaces… rotten to the core, not caring half as much for their souls’ welfare or anybody else’s as for the dollars they received.” One chaplain ruined morale in his ward by coming in half a dozen times a day, sitting on the edge of some soldier’s cot, and telling the man he looked bad and must prepare to die; a patient threw a plate at him one day and told him to go to the devil. The doctor added stoutly that he himself had “stood beside hundreds of soldiers when dying from disease or wounds, and he has never yet seen one manifest the least fear of death.’”

The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 81

“For as the pressure of the yankee increased, the whole South, including the Methodists, would move toward a position of thoroughgoing Calvinism in feeling if not in formal theology. It would never completely arrive there, to be sure. The old Arminian doctrine of Free Will—the doctrine most natural to the frontier, and most congenial in many respects to the Southern pattern generally—would retain a great deal of vitality always. God would continue to be, in considerable measure, a sort of constitutional monarch, bargaining for the allegiance of His subjects and yielding a quid for a quo. Nevertheless, everybody did come increasingly, and without regard for his traditional creed, to think and speak of Him as being primarily the imperious master of a puppet-show. Every man was in his place because He had ordained it so. Hence slavery, and, indeed, everything that was, was His responsibility, not the South’s. So far from being evil, it was the very essence of Right. Wrong would consist only in rebellion against it. And change could come about only as He Himself produced it through His own direct acts, or—there was always room here for this—as He commanded it through the instruments of His will, the ministers.”

Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War John R. Kelso Edited by Christopher Grasso P. 54

“I know that it is easy to say a soldier should have no animosity against those whom he may be killing, or who may be killing him. I know that it is very easy to say that, when killing one another, brother Christians– the common followers of the “meek and lowly Jesus” – should do their mutual work on one another in a “spirit of love;” – to say that they should lovingly shoot one another with smooth bullets which will not tear the flesh;– to say that they should affectionately cleave one another’s skulls with dull sabres, or caressingly cut one another’s throats with dull butcher knives which will not feel so uncomfortably keen when they touch the skin. Probably I might now do these things myself in– talk. At the time of which I am speaking, however, I did not have quite grace enough to do them in– deed. Very few men ever have so much grace.

P. 54 footnote

“Clergy on both the North and South urged early in the war that soldiers fight without malice or revenge in their hearts. But as “the Civil War escalated in scope and intensity, the fury of hatred and revenge against the perpetrators of death and destruction crowded out Christian charity.’”

Americans Remember Their Civil War Barbara A. Gannon P. 149

Note: Footnote 2, discussing Mark S. Schantz’s Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and American Culture of Death, Barbara Gannon writes:

“Instead of focusing on how the war transformed the United States, he emphasized how antebellum culture prepared Americans for the war. “Americans came to fight the Civil War in the midst of a wider cultural world that sent them messages about death that made it easier to kill and be killed,’” including the idea of heaven.”

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era James McPherson P. 594

“Constitution-breaking, law-defying, negro-loving Phariseeism of New England” had caused the war. “In the name of God, no more bloodshed to gratify a religious fanaticism.’”

Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s Piers Brendon P. 496

Note: Morgan quotes from B.L. Grayson’s The American Image of Russia 1917-1977 (1978) P. 143:

“When historians look back, I believe the fading of religious faith in this era will seem the chief explanatory factor of its madness. Men haven’t got used yet to the emptiness of the sky, and so they worship gods of clay again—what crude and bloody ones!—and believe in myths and promises of heaven on earth. Soviet Russia was far enough away, and sufficiently insulated by the language barrier, to function wonderfully in the place of Kingdom Come. All you had to do was dismiss all the plain facts as atrocity stories—they are horrible enough to sound like it—and believe the whole state-owned propaganda, and you could be as tranquil amid the falling ruins of civilisation as an infant in the arms of Jesus.”

Note: Actually no, it’s not parody.

Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 Walter A. McDougall P. 355

“Southerners posed as proud Cavaliers, masters of their domain and all who dwelled therein. That may have been their most painful prevarication. If the planters were secure and benevolent, why did they need strict slave codes, censorship, and armed posses to maintain their system? (South Carolina even forbade slaves to have pet dogs lest they get a feel for being the master.) Why did they stoop at election time to stirring up fears and prejudice among whites who did not own slaves? Why did their “plantation novels” drop copious hints that southern patriarchs weren’t even masters of their own household? George Tucker’s The Valley of Shenandoah (1829) founded the genre. William Alexander Caruthers wrote several such novels, including The Cavalier of Virginia, in the 1830s.”

America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 5

“The religious fervor entered political campaigns with unprecedented vigor beginning with the 1844 presidential race. From then on, political parties paraded their religious bona fides and attacked opponents as infidels. The campaigns themselves came to resemble religious revivals as much as political exercises. Religion was not only an issue itself, it permeated other issues of the day, especially slavery.

P. 404

Church became both the cultural and religious center of southern life. The southern white church boomed in the 1860s. Evangelical denominations had 31,000 more church seats and 450 more congregations in 1870 than in 1860. While property values fell throughout the South during this decade, the church property of these denominations rose in value by nearly $1 million.

P. 359

(the Bible Amendment)

“Evangelicals attempted one last major intrusion into America’s civil religion during the war. Even Protestant denominations from seven northern states banded together to promote a constitutional amendment proclaiming the United States as a Protestant Christian nation. The “Bible Amendment” would modify the opening paragraph of the U.S. Constitution to read, “We, the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among nations. His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to form a more perfect union.” Two lobbying efforts earlier in the war had proved successful. First, “In God We Trust” was engraved on coins, and second, Lincoln had proclaimed Thanksgiving, which had been a Protestant religious feast, as a national holiday in 1863. These were ecumenical measures, he believed.’”

Note: Pumpkin pie became popular in the war era for Thanksgiving, & was a abolition symbol to the North, as pumpkins were grown on small farms, not on plantations. In Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation he addressed the nation– not one side or the other– with, “all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers, in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged.”

(Note: “Slavery a Divine Trust: Duty of the South to Preserve and Perpetuate It” was a pamphlet– 30k of which could be found everywhere south of the Mason-Dixon (233 miles long, & 15 miles due south of Philly, where I grew up, about 15 miles west)– with lines such as “Its banner-cry rings out already upon the air– ‘liberty, equality, fraternity,’ which simply interpreted means bondage, confiscation, and massacre.” This is a story they tried to tell. Because of course whites gravitated to a book that has zero degree of human accountability for slavery built into it; after all, “we can’t know the heart of god, we can only follow his scripture.” How Orwellian, the various prophesiers, the commentariat, the grotesquerie with a tight lead sentence that pushes the masses through a narrow doorway to accept anything said at them, & quickly. Imposter Christianity, the White male Christofascist Republicans with their 18th Century English Justification Narratives.)

P. 192-193

“In a stirring conclusion, Palmer argued that only independence could fulfill the South’s “providential trust”: the duty “to ourselves, to our slaves, to the world, and to Almighty God… to preserve and transmit our existing system of domestic servitude, with the right, unchallenged by man, to go and root itself wherever Providence and nature may carry it.” the sermon stunned the congregation with its candor and eloquent justification for a reviled civilization under siege. No longer shunned prophets in their own land, they were God’s Chosen Nation. Thirty thousand copies of the sermon blanketed the South, creating “a very great sensation.” One Southerner, years later, noted that Palmer had done more than “any other non-combatant in the South to promote rebellion.” Union General Benjamin F. Butler agreed, placing a bounty on Palmer’s head when his troops occupied New Orleans in 1862.”

The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 74

“No group of people anywhere, indeed, ever more constantly represented to themselves and to the world that they were absolutely under the domination of these ideas and the Christian virtues, to which they wedded them; no group ever more completely contracted the habit of referring every act to these motives, of performing even the most commonplace of deeds only to the accompaniment of solemn protestations of selfless devotion; and no group was ever more convinced that it was all so.”

Note: In 1860 just 15% of U.S. children were in school. Contrasting with “selfless devotion” Cash mentions above:

Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) Edmund Wilson P. 227-229

Edmund Wilson on Frederick L. Olmsted’s observations in The Cotton Kingdom:

“There is no way of getting schools, just as there is no incentive for building roads or bridges. The traveller finds that one family he visits is putting through a road in a certain direction in order to establish communication with neighbors whom they happen to like, but doing nothing in the other direction, because they do not like the people who live there. He is astonished at the lack of “improvements” of the kind that are always being made in the North, and he eventually becomes appalled at the deficiency of the South in that “culture” which means so much to New England. There are few newspapers, and few people read them. Almost no books are published. The press is under virtual censorship, since no discussion of slavery is possible. The people rarely talk about anything except narrowly local matters. They have almost no interest in literature or art, science or foreign affairs. If their manners are more elegant than those of the North, it is only because social gatherings are their sole form of recreation, and, with ceremony and gracefulness and gallantry, they make out of them all that they can. But in general they have nothing else- neither sports nor debating societies, military companies nor libraries, theaters nor concert halls, singing societies nor amateur theatricals. There are no civic bodies to sit on- no school boards or church corporations, no benevolent or agricultural societies, no bridge or water companies.

Observing this state of things, the traveller is brought to the conclusion that the classical argument that the bondage of an inferior class of laborers is justified by the use of his leisure that the liberated master may make has not been proved in the South. Nor have the planters had the energy or foresight to develop their peculiar economy along its own lines. Since large-scale production is profitable, why have they never organized any joint-stock cotton plantations to correspond to the joint-stock mills of Massachusetts? And why, in the middle of the nineteenth century, when, no further away than Ohio, the spinning wheel and the hand-loom have already become curiosities, does the South produce nothing but homespun? The Southerners will not even take care of their soil but simply use it up and move on, leaving whole areas sterile and desolate. The Northerner Olmsted can demonstrate, by a statistical contrast with Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts, how Virginia, with its magnificent natural resources, has declined from its once brilliant civilization and its first place among the states to a place far below the three others in agriculture, even in Charlottesville, Jefferson’s Monticello had been left to neglect and ruin, with the drawing room used as a granary, that when the patriotic Jewish veteran of the War of 1812 Uriah P. Levy rescued the place by buying it and tried to induce Virginia to make it into a national shrine, he failed to arouse any interest; he might also have mentioned that the only two living Southerners who commanded respect outside the South by reason of their intellectual attainments- as Lowell says in his Biglow Papers– were William Gilmore Simms, the novelist, who complained that he was never read in his native South Carolina, and Matthew Fontaine Maury, the oceanographer, both born at the beginning of the century.”

P. 536-537 Note: Wilson on Armistead Churchill Gordon (1855-1931), VA. lawyer, future Mayor of Staunton, & author of “EBO”:

“The negroes have had no truer friend than Gordon and Page. They have written of them in their fidelity to their former owners, and have written with a loving interest in their hearts for them. They have seen the danger coming to them and to the whites among whom they live, from a false idea of education– an education that makes them ashamed of their mothers and fathers and assume an air of superiority to all on this account. The friends of the negro in the South are not opposed to his being educated, but think that the people among whom he lives should have the direction of it, for they would not suggest the idea of social equality– which can never be realized and can only cause discontent among them. One of Gordon’s poems, Ebo, gives the old father’s idea of what education had already done for his son.”

EBO. From Befo’ de War: Echoes in Negro Dialect. A.C. Gordon and T.N. Page, 1888

“All o’ dese here doin’s

Don’t suit me;

Ise an ole-time nigger–

Don’t you see?

Dis here eddication’s

Humbug, sho’;

It’s done played de debil

Wid Ebo.

Somewhar ’bout lars summer

Dicey she

Tuck’n struck a notion–

Don’t you see?

Says she: “Ise been thinking!”

An’ I says:

“What you done thunk, honey?”

Says she: “Yes,

Ise been thinkin’ mous’ous

“Bout Ebo;

He’s fo’teen year ole now–

Don’t you know?

Says she: “He’s a-growin’

Up a fool;

An’ Ise gwine sen’ him

Ter de school.”

S’I: “’Oman, you is

Right, I ‘spec’;

Dar’s fo’teen–he kim fus’–

Dat’s kerrec’ !”

Bein’s how it looked like

She was bent

One de projeck, Ebo

Tuk’n went–

An’ sence dat lars summer–

Don’t you see?

Dat ‘ar boy have p’int’ly

Outdone me!

Whe-ew! de norrations

Dem o’ his’n!

Umph! I busses laughin’

Jes’ ter lissen!

What you think dat Ebo

Come tell me.

Dat all dis here y’arth here–

Flat you see–

Dat it’s roun’, an’ rolls jes’

Like a ball!

“Ebo, dat’s a lie,” I

Says, “dat’s all!

“Don’t you see yer Mammy,

Ev’y night,

Set de water-piggin

Out o’ sight

“Ob you chillun, up dar

On de shelf?

Now, Mars’ Spellin’-booker,

“Splain yerself–

But he keeps resistin’

It are so–

Eddication’s done gone

Sp’ilt Ebo.

Sunrise, dat ‘ar water’s

In dar still;

Ef de y’arth turned over

It ‘ud spill!

He’s foever tellin’

Some sich lie;

He’s gwi’ fine out better

By-um by.

Ef Ebo keeps l’arnin’

At dat school,

Nex’ thing, he’ll be provin’

Ise a fool!

I are p’int’ly gwine ter

Take Ebo

Way f’om dat ar school-‘ouse

Sarten sho!”

The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors (2000) P. 12 “The Anatomy of the Myth”

“In the popular mind, the Lost Cause represents the national memory of the Civil War; it has been substituted for the history of the war.

The Lost Cause is therefore an American legend, an American version of great sagas like Beowulf and the Song of Roland. Generally described, the legend tells us that the war was a mawkish and essentially heroic and romantic melodrama, an honorable sectional duel, a time of martial glory on both sides, and triumphant nationalism.”

Note: Picture them punching each other, toupees flittering to the ground, landing under the upturned desks of Congress & the peanut gallery’s raucous cheering while the Southern man challenges, oh so tediously, the Yankee to yet another duel. Welcome to States Rights playing out until it came time to enforce federal fugitive slave law. Then southern lawmakers will all cry wolf.

Note: Nathaniel Hawthorne meets Lincoln today:

“By-and-by, there was a stir on the staircase and in the passage-way, and in lounged a tall, loose-jointed figure, of an exaggerated Yankee port and demeanor, whom (as being about the homeliest man I ever saw, yet by no means repulsive or disagreeable,) it was impossible not to recognize as Uncle Abe. There is no describing his lengthy awkwardness, nor the uncouthness of his movement; and yet it seemed as if I had been in the habit of seeing him daily and had shaken hands with him a thousand times in some village street. If put to guess his calling and livelihood, I should have taken him for a country schoolmaster.

We were invited to annex ourselves, as supernumeries, to a deputation that was to wait on the President, from a Massachusetts whip-factory, with a present of a splendid whip. Immediately upon his entrance the President accosted our member of Congress, who had us in charge, and, with a comical twist of his face, made some jocular remark about the length of his breakfast. He then greeted us all round, not waiting for an introduction but shaking and squeezing everybody’s hand with the utmost cordiality, whether the individual’s name was announced to him or not. His manner towards us was wholly without pretence, but yet had a kind of natural dignity quite sufficient to keep the forwardest of us from clapping him on the shoulder and asking for a story. A mutual acquaintance being established, our leader took the whip out of its case, and began to read the address of presentation. The whip was an exceedingly long one, its handle wrought in ivory (by some artist in the Massachusetts State Prisons, I believe), and ornamented with a medallion of the President, and other equally beautiful devices… the address was shorter than the whip, but equally well made. The gist of the reply was that he accepted the whip as an emblem of peace; not punishment, and, this great affair over, we retired out of the presence in high good-humor, only regretting that we had not seen the President sit down and fold up his legs, or have heard him tell one of his delectable stories, for which he is so celebrated. A good many of them are afloat upon the common talk of Washington, and are certainly the aptest, pithiest, and funniest little things imaginable. Though, to be sure, they smack of a frontier freedom and would not always bear repetition in a drawing room, or on the immaculate page of The Atlantic. Good Heavens! What liberties I have been talking with one of the potentates of the earth… But with whom is an American citizen entitled to take a liberty, if not with his own chief magistrate?”

Note: In Maryland & West Virginia today, the B&O reopens after being in Confederate control for 6 months.

some of them don’t think much about the future wellfare of their fellow men….

It would be 7.5 million deaths today. 7.5. Imagine.

Those alive in the year 2020 represent a mere 7% of all humans who have ever walked Earth. That small 7% gives off a vibe of the last of us now, set back deep in a cave, a single lit flame from someone’s iphone, putting our own palms on the walls then spraypainting with what we have left.

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