Day 20. March 20, 1862.
20
people generally had a cowed and stupid look….
March Thursday 20th 1862
Quite cool and cloudy and raining this morning. I got up & Lieut A. [illeg. Kay or Ray] and we made some coffee and eat some crackers and about 9oclock the 3 Brigade came up the Rail Road from where they were camped. Last night it rained and was very disagreeable. We took up the line of march back to our old Camp Shields 3 ½ miles North of Winchester on the Martinsburg Turnpike. We had a very hard march through the mud. We was 6 hours coming from Strausburg to Winchester. That is making very good time and it was very cool all day and misting the grater part of the day and towards evening it commenced to rain and rained pretty smart and was very mudy and we got back about 7oclock in the evening of a march of 22 miles in 7 ½ hours which is very good. There are not many soldiers that travel that much. We have seen some travelling since we have left home and there is no doubt that we will see much more before we leave this Service of the United States. I hope that it may soon be put through and peace be restored to our land once more
Note: See March 29 (“My Hands and Heart Full” by Peter Stanley) where an Isaac Kay of the 110th is quoted. He may have been the same soldier Ephraim refers to above.
Note: Stuck in the mud: https://www.loc.gov/item/2004661529/
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 51
“7a.m. 38; 2p.m. 41; 9p.m. 39. Vernal Equinox, .37. Sunrise at 6a.m.; sunset at 6p.m.”
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War James M. McPherson P. 100
“Glorious cause. Lives sacrificed on the country’s altar. Hearts bleeding for the country’s welfare. Some modern readers of these letters may feel they are drowning in bathos. In this post-Freudian age these phrases strike many as mawkish posturing, romantic sentimentalism, hollow platitudes. We do not speak or write like that any more. Most people have not done so since World War I which, as Ernest Hemingway and Paul Fussell have noted, made such words as glory, honor, courage, sacrifice, valor, and sacred vaguely embarrassing if not mock-heroic. We would justly mock them if we heard them today. But these words were written in the 1860s, not today. They were written not for public consumption but in private letters to families and friends. These soldiers, at some level at least, meant what they said about sacrificing their lives for their country.
P. 150
In some Confederates this passion became almost pathological. A Maryland-born officer in Longstreet’s corps, a grandson of the architect Benjamin Latrobe (who helped design the United States Capitol and the White House), directed the artillery fire of Confederate guns from Marye’s Heights during the battle of Fredericksburg. Afterward he rode over the battlefield and, as he described the experience in his diary, “enjoyed the sight of hundreds of dead Yankees. Saw much of the work I had done in the way of severed limbs, decapitated bodies, and mutilated remains of all kinds. Doing my soul good. Would that the whole Northern Army were as such & I had my hand in it.” Similarly, a Texas officer rode over the Chickamauga battlefield viewing “the black and swollen [Yankee] corpses that will never be buried and whose bones will be bleached by the pelting rains of the coming winter…. It actually done me good to see them laying dead, and every one else that I heard expressed [the same] opinion.” A corporal in the 4th Virginia was not satisfied with the death only of enemy soldiers: “I really think that it would be for the good of mankind, if the whole Yankee race could be swept from the face of the earth.’”
Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology 1809-1865 Volume III: 1861-1865 C. Percy Powell P. 130
“July 28, 1862: Lincoln discloses attitude toward prosecuting war in letter to C. Bullitt: “What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is? Or, would you prosecute it in future, with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water?… I am in no boastful mood. I shall not do more than I can, and I shall do all I can to save the government, which is my sworn duty as well as my personal inclination. I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.’”
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War James M. McPherson P. 101
“In the Confederate army the highest-status groups– members of planter families and of slaveholding professional families– voiced patriotic sentiments at almost twice the rate of nonslaveholding soldiers. A similar though less marked pattern occurred between the deep South, with its higher percentage of slaves and slaveholders, and the Upper South. The contrast between South Carolina and North Carolina soldiers was particularly notable: 84 percent from South Carolina avowed patriotic convictions, compared with 46 percent from North Carolina. In the Union army there was no such regional variation, and the disparity between higher-status and lower-status groups was much less marked than between Confederates of slaveholding and nonslaveholding status. Thus there was a greater democratization of patriotic motivations across class and regional lines in the Union sample. It is impossible to know whether the same contrast held true for all three million Civil War soldiers. If so, it might help to explain the dogged determination that sustained Union volunteers through four long years of fighting in enemy territory against a foe sustained by the more concrete motive of defending that territory.”
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America Nancy Isenberg P. 156
“Quoting an Alabama editor in 1856:
Free society! We sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists? All the northern, and especially the New England states, are devoid of society fitted for well-bred gentlemen. The prevailing class one meets with is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a southern gentleman’s body servant.
Robert Young Hayne of South Carolina said in the Senate, “Sir, there have existed, in every age and every country, two distinct orders of men – the lovers of freedom and the devoted advocates of power.’”
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 46-47
“Moreover, there was the influence of the Southern physical world– itself a sort of cosmic conspiracy against reality in favor of romance. The country is one of extravagant colors, of proliferating foliage and bloom, of flooding yellow sunlight, and, above all perhaps, of haze. Pale blue fog hangs above the valleys in the mornings, the atmosphere smokes faintly at midday, and through the long slow afternoon cloud-stacks tower from the horizon and the earth-heat quivers upward through the iridescent air, blurring every outline, and rendering every object vague and problematical. I know that winter comes to the land, certainly. I know there are days when the color and the haze are stripped away and the real stands up in drab and depressing harshness. But these things pass and are forgotten.
The dominant mood, the mood that lingers in the memory, is one of well-nigh drunken reverie– of a hush that seems all the deeper for the far-away mourning of the hounds and the far-away crying of the doves– of such sweet and inexorable opiates as the rich odors of hot earth and pinewood and the perfume of the magnolia in bloom– of soft languor creeping through the blood and mounting surely to the brain…. It is a mood, in sum, in which directed thinking is all but impossible, a mood in which the mind yields almost perforce to drift and in which the imagination holds unchecked sway, a mood in which nothing any more seems improbable save the puny inadequateness of fact, nothing incredible save the bareness of truth.
But I must tell you also that the sequel to this mood is invariably a thunderstorm. For days– for weeks, it may be– the land lies thus in reverie, and then…
The pattern is profoundly significant– was to enter deeply into the blood and bone of the South– had already entered deeply therein, we may believe, by the time of the coming of the plantation.”
A Virginia Yankee in the Civil War David Strother P. 17
“MARCH 20, THURSDAY.—Cold, rain, and wind. Paid a gouging bill at the Virginia Hotel. Left for Winchester and passed several regiments of Shields division en route for the same place. At Newtown an old man came out and asked me to stop and come near to him as he was deaf. I did so and he began inquiring about the results of the battle. I told him there had been no battle that I knew of. He was astonished and said his neighbors had told him that wagon loads of dead had passed through the town. He had two grandsons in the Confederate Army. He was a Pennsylvanian and a Union man and told doleful stories of the abuses put upon them by the Southern troops. Their horses, teams, grain, fodder, Negroes, and white men were carried off without remorse. Every man that dared open his mouth to remonstrate or talk Union was threatened with death or captivity. The people generally had a cowed and stupid look….”
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 140
“Civilian desperation and official intransigence brought about a radical dislocation of civic relations, as noncombatants finally urged their men to desert. A provocative recent study argues the breakdown of the established order in the Confederacy represented a revolution in the political and social structure of the South, helping to bring about the downfall of the planter hegemony.
March 20, 1862, General Magruder sends a letter to Lee: “I think McClellan has shown his plan is to turn flanks by great detours by land and water. The falling back of our army from the Potomac gives me the power to detach largely, and I think he will never risk a defeat himself when he can devolve the risk of it upon some one of his subordinates.”
Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War U.S. Congress 1863 Vol. 1 P. 287 Testimony of General John Pope
“The men will all, without any exception, steal poultry, or anything they can eat, whenever they can get a chance to do so.”
Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War U.S. Congress 1863 Part One: Army of the Potomac. P. 290
Washington. July 8, 1862 Testimony of General John Pope:
“Question: Would not the taking of that property by our troops weaken the rebels, at least so far as we prevented them from getting it?
Answer: Of course discipline is always much more rigid in the advance than in the rear of the army. The teamsters and followers of the army in the rear, when they get outside of the main body of the army, generally do pretty much as they please. But I have never seen any instance, or heard of any, where there being no guard about a house, the soldiers have taken any improper liberties where the people were at home, even where they were avowed secessionists. I mean taking furniture out of the house, or things that were needed by the people there, except things to eat. They will take chickens, pigs, sheep, cattle, calves, and things of that kind, whenever they can get hold of them, almost run the risk of being shot to get fresh meat of any kind.”
Note: This little piggy goes to Sherman, this little piggy never goes to market, this little piggy goes to Sherman.
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we will see much more before we leave this Service of the United States….
It’s a cold northeasterly wind right now. Despite the snowy weather & having begun late, they push ahead into the white trails of the next town where the Director will pass the same script to the same ongoingly bad battle, ensuring stunt casting that will unfold like a flipbook in the Official Records later. Fall-in, forward march. Step right up. Hay foot, hay foot, hay foot, straw foot, hay foot. And so it begins again. And the day after that. And the day after that. And the year after that. Snatching rats & whatnot to stay alive, hunger a physical property beside them taking each step ahead. By 1860, 1 out of every 7 Americans is owned by another, causing 15 billion to get spent on a war where 21%– more than 1/5th of our nation’s young men– were killed or wounded between 1861-1865. 3.1 million will serve altogether; 55 million were it today, which amounted to 3.6% of the total U.S. population now dead, that’d be 17 million dead Confederates now.
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