Living Hell Page 2
Yet the mass of people did not. The scientific concept of a balanced nutritional diet, for example, scarcely existed. Many Southern yeomen, along with most poor whites and blacks, subsisted on a vitamin-deficient diet of cornmeal, molasses, and salt pork, leavened by occasional seasonal boilings of greens or beans. Urban workers had neither the time nor money to eat properly, their food often stale, badly cooked, monotonous. Fanny Fern, a pioneering female journalist, wrote in 1855 of cheap boardinghouses where clerks, apprentices, and seamstresses “bolt their meals with railroad velocity” amid “soiled table-cloths, sticky crockery, oily cookery.” Ice for refrigeration remained scarce. Harriet Beecher Stowe, enduring humid June heat, complained, “I am sick of the smell of sour milk, and sour meat, and sour everything.”4
Heavy, restrictive dress proved hard to keep clean and impeded overall health: vests and frock-coats encased men like stovepipes; women’s stays constricted the lungs, while layers of pantaloons and petticoats dragged in the muck and caught fire in parlor fireplaces. Poor physical specimens abounded, as army surgeons examining recruits in 1861 could attest.
Medical practice stayed close to medieval. Young Sarah Morgan, partially paralyzed when her buggy overturned, endured frequent medical hot-cupping and bleeding. The doctor, she screamed, “has again been murdering me.” Drugs to combat disease remained inadequate. A physician lost his daughter to convulsions, having only mustard plasters to fight the illness. Class proved no guarantee against sudden death: Mary and Abraham Lincoln, Varina and Jefferson Davis, Ellen and William T. Sherman, Mary and Robert E. Lee all lost children, as did other prominent couples. Known drugs, “heroic remedies,” had drastic side effects. Calomel and “blue pills,” commonly available mercury compounds used to treat bowel disorders, typhoid fever, and much else, produced gum disorders and kidney disease. Chloroform, prescribed for insomnia, and arsenic, found in widely advertised and readily available patent nostrums, killed.5
Because bacteriology remained in its infancy, public hygiene languished. Cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Louisville had negligible sewer arrangements; scavenger pigs ate waste thrown in the streets and became emboldened to attack workers’ children. For the poor and vulnerable, such as children under five, death rates stayed high. Typhus, cholera, and yellow fever struck hard. Almost eight thousand people died in the 1853 New Orleans yellow fever outbreak. The 1849 cholera epidemic killed five thousand New Yorkers alone. Only 2 percent of city homes had a water line that might have helped stop this water-borne disease. Rural areas also had no immunity: people built privies too close to kitchens, and animal waste fouled ground water. At Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1855, cholera killed the commandant’s wife and fourteen others in one day.6
The accelerating pace of life added to physical and emotional stress. The telegraph enhanced communication but had unforeseen consequences, demanding radical human adjustments to technology. For example, the speed of the wire created havoc with military planning. A journalist could inform his newspaper of army movements virtually as they happened; an enemy agent might then relay the information to his side. Infuriated generals put reporters beyond the lines or threatened execution.
Steam power, applied to travel, propelled railroad locomotives, paddle boats, and screw-driven ships. But heightened speed jangled the nerves of people used to a horse’s pace. Trains created air and noise pollution. Henry David Thoreau, seeking solitude at Walden Pond, heard wildlife agitated for hours after an engine roared through: the machine had invaded the garden. Disasters occurred frequently. Cows on the line derailed cars, foreshadowing interstate pileups. Fast steamers blew up. Charles Dickens, voyaging to America, depicted the ship’s boiler as “a fire in hiding, ready to burst through any outlet, wild with its restless power of ruin and death.” (In an 1865 shocker, the steamer Sultana, taking home Union prisoners of war, exploded, killing 1,700.)7
To alleviate stress and seize a modicum of comfort, Americans used tobacco with abandon, snuffing, chewing, and lighting up. New Yorkers smoked 75,000,000 cigars a year. People guzzled alcohol freely, along with readily available mood-enhancing drugs. Laudanum conveniently infused the two stimulants and proved handy for keeping children quiescent, daycare being virtually unknown outside of prosperous nurseries. Excessive imbibing caused debilitation, violence, and family abuse. One contemporary estimate had 60,000 homes ruined by drink per year. Drunken brawling infected Congress; in one 1857 scrimmage, a colleague knocked inebriated Representative Laurence Keitt of South Carolina across two tables, a shoe taking off in mid-flight.8
Americans regarded opium as a beneficial tonic and relaxant. They imported 24,000 pounds through northeastern ports in 1840, rising to 105,000 pounds by 1860. For women, with lives severely restricted by gender roles, opium served a similar function to Valium, prescribed in the 1950s for bored and depressed housewives. Alice James, sister of Henry and William, suffered attacks of neuralgia bordering on hysteria. Too bright for her stifling role, she fantasized knocking her father’s head off while he sat stiffly reading. Instead, she resorted to self-medication, as did Mary Boykin Chesnut, one of the sharpest minds of the period. Denied the active public life of her senator husband, James, she struggled against overuse of opium and its derivative, morphine.9
We consider the nineteenth century a simpler, saner, more grounded time than our own, yet it looks similar in many ways. A grave equality gap existed between rich and poor. Hostility to immigrants manifested itself in a nativist movement. People found distraction in coarse entertainments such as freak shows, cockfights, gambling, and bare-knuckle boxing. They followed the latest fashions and fads. Prominent British personalities exercised their fascination, the public avidly following the indiscretions of the randy Prince of Wales or the handsome stage star, Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble. Their faces adorned engravings, mugs, and handkerchiefs, to be superseded in 1861 by pinups of generals.10
Youth did not necessarily behave better. Bachelor young men rioted in their off hours, fighting pit bulls, getting stewed, and joining violent gangs. Elders protested against the fecklessness of their juniors. James Henry Hammond, a seaboard planter, called his boys “dead weights” that only hunted and fished. They “growl, grumble, sulk and do nothing,” he complained.11
We easily exaggerate Victorian sexual probity. Limited contraception produced unwanted pregnancies. One physician estimated in 1860 that 20 percent of such cases terminated in abortion. Venereal disease thrived alongside prostitution. Many women without male support felt obliged to sell themselves for food. They faced an alternative of underpaid domestic service, with the threat of being forced by male household members, or doing work in factories with typical fourteen-hour days and minimal safety standards.12
“Accidents” in plants occurred frequently due to owner negligence. New York attorney George Templeton Strong recorded in his diary on January 11, 1860, that in Lawrence, Massachusetts, “a huge factory, long notoriously insecure and ill-built … suddenly collapsed into a heap of ruins.… Some five- or six-hundred operatives went down with it—young girls and women mostly.” Strong wondered if Southern slaveholders could possibly treat their workers any worse than did the “misanthropes” of the North.13
The attorney had a point. Poor life expectancy and bad working conditions in the industrial North and in England often exceeded those on the plantation. But one factor separated slaves’ status from any other and made it uniquely awful: they were property. (This allowed Lincoln to quip that although many held slavery to be a good, none wanted it for themselves.) State and national authorities deprived slaves of all civil and human rights. The U.S. Supreme Court held that they could not seek redress in court. They could not testify against a white. Slaves found themselves denied education, beaten, raped, and mutilated with impunity. The auction block separated slave families forever.
Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel endures the grim fate of being sold away from his loved ones downriver to Louisiana. There, Simon Legree, a
New England Yankee (that complexity again), exploits land and people with equal callousness, thrashing Tom to death. Possibly while working a flatboat to New Orleans, Lincoln developed his repugnance to the Peculiar Institution. And, of course, South Carolina’s hostility to Old Abe precipitated America’s most destructive war.
Just how bloody became this conflict that engulfed the troubled land? Perhaps as many as 620,000 military died (360,000 from the North, 260,000 from the South). To give some context, soldiers had a 1 in 4 chance of dying versus 1 in 126 for Korea. Civil War military fatalities outnumbered U.S. losses in World War II by 50 percent. The statistics jar us even more if we consider losses as a percentage of population. A reliable estimate holds that at least 2 percent of Americans alive in 1860 died in uniform. This translates to more than 6,000,000 today. Union losses represented 1.6 percent of loyal state residents, the equivalent of 4.8 million now. Rebel dead, at 2.9 percent of white and black folk, equates to a stunning 8.7 million currently. And these figures fail to address the thousands that were physically or mentally maimed, or the civilians who suffered loss, malnutrition, displacement, death.14
I intend to place center stage the dark side of the war glimpsed in these figures. Author William Dean Howells said that Americans will only embrace tragedy if it ends happily. This implies that we must march on with Henry, wrapped in his red badge of courage. But I believe readers will wish to stay back with me a while, walking along that road where poor Jim Conklin staggers by amid a torrent of hurt humanity, brokenhearted Mary Lincoln weeps beside Varina Davis, and peppery General Sherman peers into hell.
In the eight chapters that follow, we will escort the reader down the dirty, dusty road of war, in a logical progression from military enlistment to camp, then on the march, to the battlefield, and from there to the hospital, the grave, and the haunted minds of psychologically damaged soldiers. As we draw the reader along, the landscape grows ever darker when we deal with massive civilian deprivation and social dislocation, invasion, and violations. The road then stretches away to the far horizon, charting some legacies of the war, even down to 2012.
Finally, in the Closing, we will take one more walk together. Conjure up the year 1898, and imagine we find ourselves on a dusty lane in Texas leading to the nearby railroad tracks. There a last great sadness awaits us.
— CHAPTER ONE —
GONE FOR A SOLDIER
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AS WE BEGIN OUR JOURNEY DOWN THE ROAD OF WAR, WE will sense around us an air of exuberant patriotism, because the bracing clarity of a call to arms has replaced the stress and uncertainty of the Secession Crisis. We will see boys invigorated by being asked to play a man’s role. But dark shadows soon gather, for the exciting road leading into army life also delivers up disease, death, and disillusionment. Youths who have dreamed only of glory will be appalled by the reality, not only of battle, but of daily military routine, with its lowly toil, verbal and physical abuse, brutal and degrading punishments. Liquor and sexual excess lure some and disgust others. Recruits succumb to illness, not just venereal disease and alcoholism, but such camp sicknesses as measles, mumps, and nostalgia.
When volunteer enthusiasm fails, both sides resort to compulsion. But conscription laws tend to favor the rich and so ultimately produce a violent reaction, including armed resistance. To meet its manpower needs, the Union reluctantly authorized black recruitment. Many persons of color welcomed this opportunity, with its promise of racial advancement, yet they continued to face abuse and exploitation in a fundamentally racist society.
To begin, cheerfulness verging on euphoria greeted the cannon fire of April 1861. Many citizens felt relief that the wearing political bickering had ended. Southerners readied themselves to defend home and fireside from Yankee invasion, Northerners prepared to avenge the insult to Old Glory and preserve mankind’s best hope—the Union.
Ella Thomas, a young woman from a prosperous Georgia slaveholding family, felt no man should stay “in the lap of inglorious ease” when threats to the homeland existed; her husband, brother, and brother-in-law all answered the call. She felt “proud to see them exhibit the noble, manly spirit which prompts them to go.” After all, she felt, the fighting would be short, easily won by Southern cavaliers, each of whom could whip about a half dozen degenerate, money-grubbing Yankees. Some fire-eaters even promised to lap up any blood spilled in civil war.1
In the North, swelling enlistments promised regeneration for a section that seemingly had too often compromised to preserve a dishonorable peace, one designed to guarantee the continued flow of Southern cotton and capital to Northern factories and banks. “A nation hath been born again, Regenerate by a second birth!” boomed the poet W. W. Howe. No more sordid deals, declared Wisconsin’s Madison State Journal. “A people long grown servile-necked,” with “bowing under Mammon’s yoke,” had come to its senses and “to-day stand haughtily erect.”2
Mothers might worry about the fate of their soldier sons, but girls inflamed by patriotic fervor insisted the beaux sign up. “If a fellow wants to go with a girl now he had better enlist,” opined a volunteer. Older men could look with jaundiced eye at the coming fratricidal bloodshed and the infatuation of youth with the shallow trappings of patriotism. Virginian William Thomson told his fire-eating son, “The young and sanguine are rapidly carried away into dreamy fields and flawed visions.” But a younger man, the New York 7th’s Major Theodore Winthrop, better captured popular sentiment. Billeted in Washington at the Capitol, he determined the presence of troops in “our palace” necessary to amend the cowardice, bosh, and imbecility of the politicians “who had here cooperated to corrupt and blind the minds of the people.”3
War allowed youth to assume a man’s role while fleeing workaday grind and tedium. At the start of Moby Dick (1851), Herman Melville pictured office workers, stapled to their desks, who spent Sundays lining New York’s wharves and piers, longingly scanning the ocean skyline for hints of adventure. He also created Bartleby the Scrivener (1853), a clerk who exemplifies the alienation of labor. Paralyzed by the soul-destroying work of sorting dead letters and copying documents, Bartleby becomes mentally and physically stultified, wasting away in a poor house.
Robert Gould Shaw, of the Boston elite, far more privileged than Bartleby, nevertheless cried out, “I am a slave now,” after he graduated from Harvard and entered his uncle’s mercantile business. He escaped into uniform early in the conflict. Boys, stigmatized as feckless by their elders, now turned the argument, posturing in the role of manly patriots. “We’ve been told of our degeneracy for years,” wrote Henry Lee Higginson, son of a wealthy Boston merchant. But, he added proudly, the boys were proving to be “the same men who fought in ’76, a thousand times better than any soldiers living.”4
Service, deemed a rite of passage into manhood, brought boys eagerly flocking to the colors. Recruiters obliged them: “I didn’t tell them that I was only fifteen. So I became a soldier,” wrote Thomas Galwey, a youngster from Cleveland, Ohio, who joined the Union army in April 1861. Randolph Shotwell, from North Carolina, enlisted because it meant “the complete cutting loose from boyhood to assume the responsibilities and perils of manhood.”5
Research suggests that both the innocence and enthusiasm of adolescence encourage volunteering. Boys in their late teens comprised the largest category of soldiers, at 40 to 50 percent of the whole. About 250,000 were just entering the teen years. These exuberant adolescents, packed with adrenaline, threw their kepis in the air and capered for civilians peering at their camps from passing trains. Joseph E. Crowell, a New Jersey volunteer, doubted that patriotism had motivated most boys to enlist. “To many it was a change from the ordinary humdrum of life. Others looked upon it as a picnic. And then in every boy’s heart there is an inherent spirit of adventure.”6
To poor or unemployed men, service offered a chance to gain self-respect and the promise of a steady wage (which subsequently created bitterness when pay became late). Enoch T. Baker, a Pennsylvania volu
nteer, wrote in late 1861 to his wife, who fretted about his leaving: “You know if i could have got work i wood not have left you or the children.” Recent immigrants, often out of work or marginally employed in the worst jobs, could hope for financial stability in the military and a potential leg up into cultural acceptance by mainstream Americans. Half a million foreigners wore blue, including 150,000 Irish out of a total immigrant base of 1.5 million in 1860. Lesser numbers of Germans, Italians, Russians, Hungarians, and other Europeans fought for the Union. Fewer foreign nations were represented in gray, as many immigrants avoided the slave states because of distaste for human bondage or a reluctance to compete for jobs with a servile workforce.7
Inevitably, military fervor began to dissipate. We cannot say precisely when, but a fair estimate might be the spring of 1862. What caused the initial zeal to wane? First, exposure to battle proved sobering, even horrifying. We shall explore the subject of combat fully in chapters three and five, but we should mention the experience here just as a factor in declining enthusiasm. Romantic illusions failed to survive battle’s grim truths. Recruits had been imbued with Currier & Ives’ artful depictions of war, in which serried ranks of gaily uniformed soldiers, led by plumed officers on horseback, charged beyond the fallen, who assumed restful poses. Such fantasies bore no relation to the reality of metal projectiles disintegrating fragile bodies as men screamed and cried.