Day 115. June 23, 1862.
115
astonishment flows through Civil War diaries….
Monday 23
Quite cool this morning and looks very much for rain this morning. I don’t know of any news. We went to Abraham Harnish this morning. It commenced to rain. Rev L.G. Reid from Huntingdon was there. A. Harnish and I fixed up some of my accounts. It rained nearly all day. There is a grate many things for me to see after. I don’t feel very well but I trust that I will
Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis Donald E. Reynolds P. 42
Knoxville Whig:
“It is with a grateful heart we record the death of ROTTEN DEMOCRACY On Saturday the 23rd of June, 1860, after a protracted illness of one month, during which time its existence was only prolonged by the administration of powerful nostrums; it too [sic] sick at Charleston— was removed to Baltimore for medical treatment— and expired at midnight on the 23d instant. The disease which was the immediate cause of dissolution, has not been clearly ascertained— some of the Democratic Doctors who were present, attributed it to gangrene of its huge Pouch and Bowels; more generally known in the politic circles of Doggery keepers, as ROT GUT— some supposed it died of a disease known as SECESSION and DISUNION of soul and body— while others of large experience assert that it died of a disease, which has prevailed as an epidemic for years, called NEGROPHOBIA.”
The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War Andrew Delbanco P. 380-381
“In hindsight, it all seems predestined, as if a great chain of necessity led from General Butler’s decision of May 1861 to hold fugitives as contraband at Fort Monroe, to General Hunter’s emancipation orders of April and May 1862, to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and finally to the Thirteenth Amendment, passed by Congress in January 1865 and ratified by the states almost a year later, eight months after Lincoln’s assassination. At long last, “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” slavery was impermissible everywhere in the United States according to the Constitution that had once permitted it. Yet to imagine this outcome as somehow preordained is to be misguided by hindsight, whereby “everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable.” Lincoln got it right when, shortly before his death, he called the result of the war “astounding.”
So it felt to everyone who experienced it. The current of astonishment flows through Civil War diaries, memoirs, speeches, and memoranda, in close company with what one historian calls the sense of “contingency– the recognition that at numerous critical points during the war things might have gone altogether differently.” Every day of the war was a lesson in human impotence. What inscrutable force determined who lived and who died, which side failed and which prevailed? There were many names for this force– some called it chance or luck, others called it fate, God, or providence. By whatever name, it seemed impervious to human will. The theme is everywhere, from Lincoln’s famous remark “I have never claimed to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events controlled me,” to the writings of ordinary soldiers marveling at the arbitrary apportionment of life and death. Thirty years after fighting at the Battle of Perryville in October 1862, one Tennessee soldier remembered the inexplicable divergence between the fates of two comrades:
“We helped bring off a man by the name of Hodge, with his under jaw shot off, and his tongue lolling out. We brought off Captain Lute B. Irvine. Lute was shot through the lungs and was vomiting blood all the while, and begging us to lay him down and let him die. But Lute is living yet.”
As for what the war would mean for the fate of the enslaved population, historians rightly caution against “the fallacy of imagining emancipation as an inevitable result of the conflict.” As one scholar writes, “with different battlefield accidents,” the war “might have further entrenched and expanded human bondage.”
What kinds of “accidents?” Consider the tide-turning battle at Gettysburg. Over two days, in preparation for an infantry assault on enemy positions atop Cemetery Ridge, Confederate artillery fired on Union ordnance. Almost all the shells overshot their targets. No one knows why. Reports of troop locations might have been faulty. Fuses might have burned more slowly than the gunners calculated, or perhaps the recoil from the first discharges scarred the ground, sinking the wheels of the caissons and thereby raising the shooting trajectory too high.
What if the shells had hit home? Would Union troops have abandoned their positions? Would Lee’s army have broken through and threatened Washington? Would Lincoln’s government have fled north, prompting Britain to recognize the Confederacy and to dispatch its navy to break the Union blockade? Would McClellan, as Lincoln expected long after the battle was won, have carried the 1864 election on a platform promising to end the war and to restore the Union with the right to own slaves preserved in the former Confederacy?”
Note: Excerpt of Lincoln’s comments on the 1864 election:
“Human-nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged.”
The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors (2000) P. 155 “Continuous Hammering and Mere Attrition” Brooks D. Simpson
“Concentrating on the disparity of numbers of soldiers available and casualties suffered might appear to be a shrewd way to erode Grant’s reputation by sheer repetition if nothing else, but it also raised troubling questions. Had the South and the North possessed equal resources in the first place, it is doubtful that there would have been a secession crisis, for white Southerners would have possessed the political and economic clout to hold their own in the Union. It was the very inequality of numbers and resources—and the evidence that the disparity would continue to grow—which caused many white Southerners to contemplate secession in the first place. Thus the disparity in population and resources was assumed at the outset of the struggle (and helped to explain why there was a conflict). In turn, Union war aims and the means of carrying them out required superior numbers. The burden of offensive operations, including the need to occupy territory and protect supply lines, eroded a great deal of the advantage superior numbers gave Union forces. Reciting numbers also led to a continuous reassessment of the evidence on which such estimates were based, an exercise that continues to this day. Although advocates of the numbers approach to military analysis assumed that the figures would speak for themselves, they clearly did not. Nor did the tendency to evaluate victory and defeat by reference to a body count advance understanding of military operations. Of course, understanding was never the goal of that exercise.
P. 159
Grant, in an interview with newspaper reporter John Russell Young after the war: “Welles, Taylor & co. would soon have it pass into history that we had a 100,000 men killed in getting to the James river, when we could have gone by boat, without loss, and ignoring the fact that Lee sustained any loss whatever.”
P. 161
Grant: “The cry was in the air that the North had only won by brute force; that the generalship and valor were with the South. This has gone into history, with so many other illusions that are historical.”
P. 162
Grant: “I have had nearly all of the Southern generals in high command in front of me,” he said, “and Joe Johnston gave me more anxiety than any of the others.” He then added, quite pointedly, “I was never half so anxious about Lee.”
“Lee was of a slow, conservative, cautious nature, without imagination or humor, always the same, with grave dignity. I never could see in his achievements what justifies his reputation. The illusion that nothing but heavy odds beat him will not stand the ultimate light of history. I know it is not true.’”
Note: It comes down to strategy, then tactics, no? The “Elements of Operational Art” in every military pdf on Earth: End state and conditions, Center of gravity, Decisive points, Lines of operations and lines of effort, Operational reach, Basing, Tempo, Phasing and transitions, Culmination, Risk. Then, & only then, can you run your little victory flag up on goddamn pole under the sun & moon… “Keep open the sores of war,” as Lee said, otherwise. Lee’s funeral, where no stars & bars were to be had:
Ken Burns’s the Civil War: Historians Respond Robert Brent Toplin P. 136-138 “The Historian, the Filmmaker, and the Civil War.” Leon F. Litwack
“It is left to Ulysses S. Grant, the military victor, to utter perhaps the most poignant observation about the American Civil War in these eleven hours. He has come to Appomattox Court House to accept the surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. He finds himself “sad and depressed” by this meeting with his vanquished foe. Lee and his men had fought so long and so valiantly; they had suffered such immense losses for their cause. But for what purpose? The cause which led them to the battlefield and for which so many of them died, Grant reflected, “was, I believe, one of the worst for which people ever fought.” No amount of historical revisionism, no amount of sentimentalism about Johnny Reb fighting for his home and family can erase that fundamental truth about the American Civil War.
This was not, as Bruce Catton once argued, “the needless war” which might have been settled by “reasonable men of good will.” Nor is Shelby Foote persuasive when he suggests (perfectly consistent with the film’s spirit) that the war came “because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise.” He says nothing about what might have been compromised, but those who lived at the time, especially blacks, knew very well what would have been the basis for any new sectional compromise. Shelby Foote is an engaging battlefield guide, a master of the anecdote, and a gifted story teller, but he is not a good historian. He seems to have little idea as to what gave meaning to this “enormous catastrophe” other than the valor of the combatants. Barbara Fields argued that the struggle for black freedom made it a very different kind of war, that the slavery issue ennobled the war, turning the otherwise meaningless carnage into something higher and nobler. But Foote is unable to grasp this critical point and he will have none of it. When asked in an interview to respond to Fields’ observation, Foote vigorously dissented. “I don’t think it ennobled the war; I think it dirtied up the war.” And, he insisted, “Black contribution to the war was overemphasized”– a perfectly explicable statement from a person who has demonstrated no knowledge or understanding of that contribution.
The inescapable tragedy of the Civil War is that it had to be fought. The cause of human freedom required no less. If the Union had been preserved without abolishing slavery, it would not have been a Union worth saving. If the South had made good on its quest for independence, it would have perpetuated the enslavement of black men and women. The white South lost the war, not the black South. The white South, however, won the peace, and we continue to live with the consequences. For the four million freed slaves, as the final episode briefly suggests, the content of their newly won freedom remained unresolved. It is Barbara Fields who makes this critical point, adding that the Civil War is in many ways still being fought and may still be lost. By this time, however, her voice carries little weight, and Shelby Foote is again permitted the last word. “The truth is,” he insists, “that if we’d been anything like as superior as we think we are, we would never have fought that war.” That is more consistent with the theme and spirit this film conveys, though Burns opted for a more upbeat conclusion. In the end, Barbara Fields’ vision of a Civil War that is still being fought and may yet be lost and Ken Burns’s romantic vision of the war’s legacy are simply irreconcilable.”
The Civil War, A Narrative: Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian Shelby Foote P. 960
“Or there was the Boston lecturer Wendell Phillips, who assured a New York audience of its moral superiority over a foe whose only role in life was to block the march of progress. He pictured the young man of the South, “melted in sensuality, whose face was never lighted up by a purpose since his mother looked into his cradle,” and declared that for such men “War is gain. They go out of it, and they sink down.” Whipped, they would return “to barrooms, to corner groceries, to chopping straw and calling it politics. [Laughter.] You might think they would go back to their professions. They never had any. You might think they would go back to the mechanic arts. They don’t know how to open a jacknife. [Great merriment.] There is nowhere for them to go, unless we send them half a million of emancipated blacks to teach them how to plant cotton.” His solution to the problem of how to keep the beaten South from relapsing “into a state of society more cruel than war– whose characteristics are private assassination, burning, stabbing, shooting, poisoning”– lifted the North’s grim efforts to the height of a crusade: “We have not only an army to conquer. We have a state of mind to annihilate.’”
The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt P. 474
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
Maybe: Philip line dancing in The Americans. Night scene. The McDonald’s at the border, the dissonance. Pan down over the restaurant, then the slow move across the car roof, then a close-up into the backseat, Paige scarfing fries.
YouTube: “The Civil War in Depth” Shelby Foote
When asked a call-in question about recommended research materials, Foote told the caller about the 128 volume O.R., and spoke of the differing cultural mores about masculinity:
“But the most valuable stuff is the stuff out of that time so that you can get in tune with the way that those men felt. It’s not hard to do because they didn’t hesitate to express their feelings. We have a guardedness nowadays about expressing our feelings. They didn’t have that. They were not afraid that somebody would scorn them for having this or that or the other and yet somehow they were not really sentimental. They had a hardcore honesty about ’em that’s interesting to encounter. We’ve gotten so cluttered up nowadays we don’t know what is and what is not sentimental except they pronounced everything as sentimental, which I think is sometimes true.”
In the same interview, he said Robert Toombs once gave the best definition of that war he ever heard: “It was a war of one form of society against another form of society.” As well, Foote said that “the people who say slavery had nothing to do with the war are just as wrong as people who say slavery had everything to do with the war” and “Believe me no soldier on either side gave a damn about the slaves. They were fighting for other reasons entirely in their minds. Southerners thought they were fighting the second American Revolution.** Northerners thought they were fighting to hold the Union together.”
Note: He is 85 during this interview. Note too, for the 3rd time: the last line of Amnesty Oath Lee signed Oct. 2, 1865: “abide by and faithfully support all laws and proclamations which have been made during the existing rebellion with reference to the emancipation of slaves, so help me God.”
Causes Won, Lost, & Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War Gary W. Gallagher P. 92
“Historians often place freedom alongside Union as an equivalent northern war aim, and of the two, Americans more easily grasp freedom as a noble goal worth great sacrifice. The concept of Union is much more nebulous; indeed, it is almost impossible to convey to a modern audience why the union meant so much to so many millions of northerners. Americans can readily conclude, as historian Barbara J. Fields has argued, that preservation of the Union was “a goal to shallow to be worth the sacrifice of a single life.” Field’s memorable commentary in Ken Burns’s**** documentary gave her views far wider circulation than those of most academic historians. In several parts of the series, she maintains that only the addition of freedom to the North’s strategic goals elevated the cause in a way that justified the awful human and material cost. This statement recalls Frederick Douglass’s speech at Arlington that celebrated Union success but pronounced the war’s greatest outcome the death of “the hell-black system of human bondage.” Fields’s statements about the North’s war effort make sense in terms of issues important to modern Americans. For anyone in search of what led white northerners of the 1860s to commit human and material treasure in profusion, however, dismissal of the Union Cause poses serious problems. The assertion that Union was unworthy of a single life’s sacrifice trivializes the deaths of roughly a third of a million United States soldiers, while also promoting a flawed conception of the North’s Civil War.
P. 114
What about the Union cause? Of the four main interpretive traditions, it is Hollywood’s real lost cause. Lincoln’s vision of a democratic nation devoted to economic opportunity would seem to be an attractive theme, but it remains largely unexplored in the Civil War genre. Close analysis of recent films yields no explanation of what Union meant to a mass of northern men who enlisted in the pre-conscription years of 1861 and 1862. Numbering at least 750,000, these men composed the sturdy backbone of the United States war effort. Ideology did not drive the actions of all northerners, but it loomed large for many of them—an overwhelming majority of whom would have talked about Union rather than emancipation. The films suggest various motives for their joining the United States Army; however, devotion to the Union is not one of them. Yet something very much like Lincoln’s conception of Union as put forth in his message to Congress on July 4, 1861, surely motivated a large proportion of the first flood of volunteers who rushed to the national colors.
P. 115
A fascinating glimpse into what northern veterans most valued about the war lies in regimental histories published in 1865-1866. They seldom referred to the conflict as the Civil War, opting instead for some form of “the war of the Rebellion.”This choice of terms revealed a belief that the contest had been preeminently about restoring the Union and the need to safeguard progress toward a free-labor, democratic future. Three examples reflect common arguments. “Remove one block from the arch of liberty, and is it not insecure?” asked the historian of a Delaware unit. “Will it not yield to the rude storm, and be thrown to the ground? . . . Take from the monument to Washington, on the bank of the Potomac, one of those granite blocks which the States have furnished, of which it is constructed, and how long will it be before the whole superstructure will topple and fall?” Unchallenged secession, this man concluded, would ruin forever “the hopes of the world for a free republican form of government.” An Ohioan believed “citizen soldiers of the army of the Republic” had affirmed the “great experiment of self government”; after Confederate surrender, “liberty and popular institutions every where [are] recognized as a permanent outgrowth of American destiny.” A third author, from an Illinois regiment, prophesied that the war “will descend to posterity as a fearful warning against future attempts to dissolve and destroy the perpetual Union of the States established by the fathers.”
P. 123-124
Recent films not only fail to explain the Union Cause; they also depict United States military forces in strikingly negative ways. In reality, United States soldiers destroyed civilian property, engaged in some atrocities, and otherwise behaved badly—much like their Confederate counterparts. The scholarly literature, however, makes clear that most of them avoided such activities. Despite vicious guerrilla operations along the margins, callous treatment of prisoners of war, and refusal to grant quarter in some instances, the conflict unfolded in remarkably restrained fashion considering its scope. Hollywood’s collective portrait departs radically from the scholarly consensus. Except in Gettysburg and Gods and Generals, white soldiers in blue fare poorly. Hollywood serves up a post-Vietnam vision of the Union army as a cruel, racist juggernaut that wreaks havoc and stands for nothing admirable. It looks remarkably like United States military forces in Vietnam as imagined in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), Brian DePalma’s Casualties of War (1989), and other such films. These movies offer harsh images of American soldiers in Southeast Asia. Rape of Vietnamese women, indiscriminate murder of some civilians and callous brutality toward others, application of massively superior firepower, and gleeful destruction of noncombatants’ property create a collective portrait of unrestrained warriors—a portrait utterly at odds with the uncritically celebratory tone Hollywood adopted for most films about World War II in the 1940s and 1950s.
P. 134
Would friends of the Union, who seem irretrievably to have lost the war on film, find much to like about how recent artists have treated their side of the war? Or would admirers of the Lost Cause find modern artworks more to their taste?”
Kite-Flying and Other Irrational Acts: Conversations with Twelve Southern Writers Edited by John Carr P. 13
(From a 1970 interview):
FOOTE: Well, sources come in different categories. There are the memoirs by the men who were there. There are the reports and the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, which were written at the time. That’s my main source. Then there are good studies. The work of Bruce Catton has been of great help to me. Douglas Southall Freeman’s books, Stanley Horn’s books, Robert S. Henry, Kenneth C. Williams, a lot of good treatments, and they serve as a guide through the labyrinth of this material, to keep you from missing any of it and really show you the salient features of the source material.
INTERVIEWER: Is there any state whose soldiers did not keep enough memoirs? Do you run across that, not enough regimental history and so forth?
FOOTE: Well, regimental histories are not much count. They’re always interesting to read. You pick up good little features out of them. But they were written after the war, and the war took on a sheen when it was over.
.
I fixed up some of my accounts….
Ephraim seems stilted, stalled. He left the war but the war did not leave him. And he still feels unwell. He is conflicted about any move or plan to return; there is no conclusion about it. It’s somewhere between a possibility and a probability. You want to be able to give a proper burial, you know? Maybe that’s what he’s thinking about, at home with the family. That he wouldn’t get that, they wouldn’t get that if he went back. You walk out your house. You get gone once & for all:
“And everywhere among these countless graves—everywhere in the many soldier Cemeteries of the Nation, (there are now, I believe, over seventy of them)—as at the time in the vast trenches, the depositories of slain, Northern and Southern, after the great battles—not only where the scathing trail passed those years, but radiating since in all the peaceful quarters of the land—we see, and ages yet may see, on monuments and gravestones, singly or in masses, to thousands or tens of thousands, the significant word Unknown.
(In some of the cemeteries nearly all the dead are unknown. At Salisbury, N. C., for instance, the known are only 85, while the unknown are 12,027, and 11,700 of these are buried in trenches. A national monument has been put up here, by order of Congress, to mark the spot—but what visible, material monument can ever fittingly commemorate that spot?)” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 777-778; excerpt from THE MILLION DEAD, TOO, SUMM’D UP.
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