Demonization of the enemy

[SWMODave]

One of the themes picked up in the 5th episode of the PBS Vietnam special was the soldiers ability to demonize the enemy, making it easier to kill them in combat. This is still common today. The next day I read this diary and began to wonder what were some of the "terms" soldiers and media used during the Civil War to demonize the 'enemy'.

(warning - raw and offensive language)

Capt John Wyatt
Captain/Assistant Surgeon
2nd Infantry, 7th Division
Missouri State Guard

Sept 1st 1861 17 miles from Ft. Scott. Lying bye about 1500 troops marched on this morning in the direction of the Fort. This evening word came that they were engaging the enemy and wants reinforcements--So all hands have been notified to prepare for advancement tonight to reinforce the advance started and got several miles on the road and met the troops sent out this morning with a lot of horses and mules captured from the enemy and a hundred or so prisoners. They had had a single brush and the enemy did not stand. Instead of pushing on as an able commander would, have now been sent back to camp. God pity the cause that is under such hands, if this war is lost it will be due to lazy and incompetent Generals. One satisfaction is the Dutch have no better officers than we have. Segel [Sigel] ran like a coward at Wilson Creek and McCulloch was too coward to catch him.


Our troops who went through the Springfield fight with so much courage are losing confidence in their commander and themselves. I am afraid the same cowardly sluggishness that characterized that battle both before and after the fight will be repeated again should we run come up with the enemy--one thing thank God we have not the immortal Ben with us now. Wilson Creek was an accident and old Ben had the fight forced on him, if he had had the chance he would have run like old Dutch Segel (Segel) did, but he could not get lose long enough to run.


If we are attacked we will fight our way out like we did then, leader or no leader, it is not in the blood of the South to submit to ****** & Dutch Domination. The Southern Boys will die but never yield. We trust in God and the justice of a rightess [sic] cause and fight, I pray for victory. God will be with us as he was with our Sires in the dark days of 76-81.


I suppose we will advance right on thru and give them hell where we meet them. The boys stood fire fine at Ft. Scott, and are anxious for another try all that is wanting is competent and courageous leadership---I guess the St. Louis Republican Press will call it a great Yankee Victory. Dam them I hope all their victories may be like this one.--Dam that infested paper- It is the cause of all our troubles in this State. I hope to God I may be the one to put a torch under that building. I hope we may be in St. Louis soon--to see their double lying comments on the Battle of Springfield......

Sept 9th 1861. Made 13 mi this day and camped at Rose Hill in Johnson Co. It is said that 12 or 1500 Dutch are at Warrensburg 22 miles from here, and the orders are for us to get supper, feed horses, and march upon them tonight which I suppose will be done unless they change their minds which is quite easily done when there seems to be danger ahead.


Met Capt. Buanmm [?] who tells me of a fight at Potosi. I hope the Dutch got hell from our boys. If everything works right and Old Pops courage don't ooze out again we will have another chance at them. **** the ****** Equality Sons *****es. I am praying for success.

Sept 10th 1861. Started for Warrensburg at dusk last evening. Traveled till ten and went into camp. (Pop got sleepy). We started again at day light reached Warrensburg in the forenoon, and found that the enemy had flown burning bridges behind him. It began to rain about sunrise and we all got wet, but who cares for a little wetting if we can get a few Dutch to make up for it. If we ever whip these Dutch it will be running them down like rabbits as they have not courage to stand and fight. ......

Sept 13 1861. (Lexington, MO) In camp at fair ground & raining like Hell - no fighting today unless we are attacked and that is not likely if what we hear is true of the result of our cannon fire yesterday evening. Rain, Rain, Rain. Hope it may be clear in the morning - at least I hope so - I do not know what the program for tomorrow will be but I know what it ought to be.


We should whip the Hell out of the **** Dutch and liberate this beautiful town. I suppose they are picking out the house Old Abe is going to give them for killing Rebel Babies. It sure would be a curse to turn over this beautiful town to these **** filthy Dutch. Today we were reinforced by 1000 troops from Independence with an excellent Brass Band - It is likely the Dutch will also be reinforced by morning when it will be close again. .....

(more)

Capt Wyatt turned 35 later in his short diary but would probably qualify for the running of 'curmudgeon of the year'. No one, from the enemy to his own generals, escaped his colorful wrath. And he was an assistant surgeon! (The Dutch was a derogatory, some might say, racist term used to define German-American troops in Missouri, most serving under General Franz Sigel.)

This may be an extreme example of phrases used to demonize the Union forces in Missouri, but what other terms or phrases do you find used against the "other side" during the Civil War. Examples?

 

[GS]

Artists, sketching for newspapers and magazines, did much demonizing of the enemy without saying a word.

 

[Patrick H]

I'm confident that this happened in general practice throughout Federal and Confederate armies. The demonization is particularly bad in accounts of clashes between Federals and Missouri partisans. Newspaper accounts and authors of the day tended to demonize the partisans with particular vitriol. Letters between civilians often demonized the Federals and their leadership. It obviously depends on who is doing the writing (or the shooting). My fellow Missourians on the forum are well aware of all of this. Some others might not be.

 

[AUG]

From the accounts I have read I think as the war progressed the soldiers themselves (at least those in the conventional armies) tended to see the enemy as just other human beings after having been in combat and having the chance to see each other's dead, wounded and captured. Lots of incidents where soldiers from opposing sides helped each other's wounded, treated prisoners fairly right after their capture, fraternized and traded goods between the lines, etc.

Generally speaking (with the exception of the guerrilla conflicts, Kansas and Missouri, etc.) I think the demonizing was at its most at the outset of the war with most of the newspapers dishing out propaganda and inexperienced recruits on either side so eager to get at the enemy. For the troops in other wars, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries it sounds as though it was sometimes the opposite, but of course in the ACW Americans were fighting fellow Americans.

 

[NH Civil War Gal]

During the battle of the wilderness there were accounts of soldiers from both sides, once the fire got roaring, of helping each other pull each other. One account, which brought tears to my eyes when I was telling my husband, was of one soldier who had been wounded in his leg and was using his musket (somehow) as a crutch. Another soldier on the other side was somehow wounded too but could limp along. Neither was strong enough by themselves to pull an injured soldier on the ground away from the fire. Together, these two soldiers - with hardly words exchanged - each grabbed the fallen soldier, dragged him out away from the fire, smiled, shook hands, and went their way.

 

[Zack]

I think this is an absolutely fascinating topic, and one which I have studied extensively. This discussion will be biased towards Northern soldiers opinions of their Southern foes.

I would like to open with a quote from the historian Lance Herdegen regarding stories of North-South camaraderie during the war:
"In many ways, the soldiers of both sides had more in common than what separated them. I think that examples of kindness between foes occurred with some regularity, but that did not mean both sides didn't try their best to kill each other. The stories of a Confederate soldier helping a Yank or a Yank helping a Johnny were seized upon by the veterans after the war as examples to be used in bringing the country back together. The stories of compassion were accepted and highlighted and the cruelty of combat put aside. It was all part of the great healing process. I think that is why we see so many of these romanced incidents in 19th century accounts."
http://www.soldierstudies.org/index.php?action=herdegen01

I think there is much truth in this statement. I would also add that it is easy to demonize the enemy as a collective and yet still feel sympathy to the individual. The two are not mutually-exclusive emotions.

Overall, however, for a war which lasted four years and resulted in 650,000-750,000 deaths, I think it is remarkable how little attention we pay to the animosity and hate between the two sections. One Iron Brigade soldier, in the same letter in which he later expressed revulsion at the carnage of the battle, noted of Antietam:
"We were brought up in the rear of a rebel brigade and laid in the woods; fired 20 twenty rounds before we was discovered; piling them in heaps as they lay behind the fence. After they discovered our position, well, then they threw down their arms and broke for the woods, what was left of them. Then we had fun picking them off. We might have taken them all prisoners, but we wasn't in for that. Even a wounded man could not be seen creeping off without being plugged by a minie ball." – Private Hugh Perkins, 7th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Iron Brigade, Union Army of the Potomac

Quite a shocking statement - and not the kind of thing you expect to hear from a Civil War soldier. For those wondering which action of the battle he is referring to, he is one of the men responsible for the famous photograph of Confederate dead lying along the Hagerstown Turnpike. We must remember that these men did not die in battle, they were killed.

Sergeant Michael Shorter, reflecting on the fighting on Culp's Hill, recalled:
"A. Lumbard and the writer walked out over the battle field on July 4th, where the dead were lying around by the hundreds. Seeing a rebel lying on his back with a blanket over his face Lumbard, of course, thinking him dead gave him a kick and said, 'This fellow fell nice.' To our great surprise the man threw the blanket off his face and said, 'Please don't hurt me, I am badly wounded' and we walked away without even asking him whether we could do anything for him, or even so much as to offer him a drink of cold water. This has always been one of the saddest regrets of my life. We might excuse our actions by the fact that the feeling ran so high between the North and the South; that they were our enemies and ready to kill us at any opportunity; that we were mere boys only 20 years of age and knew but little of the ways of the world; but even granting the above excuses were true, yet how unkind and inhuman our treatment of this man."
https://npsgnmp.wordpress.com/2015/...le-sgt-michael-schroyer-remembers-culps-hill/

 

[Zack]

On the battlefield, historian Eric Dean explores the ways in which rage manifested itself in the soldiers in his book "Shook Over Hell":

"Once men actually entered combat and began to fire their weapons, however, there was a radical transformation as fear and anxiety evaporated and gave way to rage, anger, and a sense of disembodiment. One Federal soldier recalled: 'As soon as the first volley was fired all dread and sense of personal danger was gone.' As the line surged forward in one assault, a Union officer noted great hysterical excitement, the eagerness to go forward, and a reckless disregard for life: 'The soldier who is shooting is furious in his energy. . . . The men are loading and firing with demoniacal fury and shouting and laughing hysterically.' Another Union soldier participating in such an attack heard his comrades shrieking like demons. Standing on a defensive line, Rice Bull of the 123rd N.Y. Infantry recalled that feeling of fearlessness and rage took the place of nervousness and timidity; as the Rebel attackers approached to within twenty yards of the Union line, one soldier accidentally fired his ramrod: 'He looked a good deal surprised, and shaking his fist in the direction of the Johnnies yelled, 'Take that you – and see how you like it.'' Another Northerner observed a hellish scene: 'Some of the men, with faces blackened by the powder from the tearing open of cartridges with the teeth in the act of loading their rifles, looked like demons rather than men, loading their guns and firing with a fearful, fiend-like intensity; while others, under an intense, insane excitement, would load and fire without aim.' Seeing one of his comrades killed, one Union soldier remembered that a savage desire for revenge and retaliation drowned out the finer emotions, and he was eager to put this new desire into execution.

Commenting on his rage as well as an obliviousness to personal danger, Franklin H. Bailey of the 12th Michigan Infantry wrote to his parents: 'Strange it may seam to you, but the more men I saw kiled the more reckless I became; when George Gates . . . was shot I was so enraged I could have tore the heart out of the rebal could I have reached him.'

.....
On another occasion a Confederate fleeing before a Union attack at the Battle of Antietam was frantically trying to climb over a fence to escape when he was brought down by rifle fire; so infuriated were the pursuing Northerners that numerous men in their band continued to shoot or bayonet the body of the doomed Rebel, even after he was already dead.
In other recorded incidents, Confederates took aim at a Federal running for his life on a battlefield several hundred yards away, and shot the man in the back, watching calmly as the stricken soldier stopped in his tracks and dropped to his knees. In another such episode, a Confederate trapped an unarmed Union soldier, who, with tears running down his cheeks, pleaded for his life while attempting to hide behind a tree; the Rebel calmly took aim and prepared to shoot and kill the Union man until he was restrained by a comrade."

Yes, these are stories from combat, when emotions ran high and life was on the line. So what of off the battlefield?

 

[Zack]

Much is said in Bell Irvin Wiley's The Life of Billy Yank about Northern sentiment towards their Southern foes, and not much of it is positive:

"The character of the Southern country was the subject of extensive comment on the part of the Northern soldiers, and the reaction of most was unfavorable. The thing that impressed the visitors most was the general backwardness of the South. 'The country is behind the times 100 years,' observed a New York soldier stationed near Richmond, while a New Hampshire man writing from Bladensburg, Maryland, remarked that 'they dont have eny stoves here and half of them have no wagons but go horse back it is at least 150 years behind new england.'

A Norwegian boy serving in a Wisconsin regiment wrote from Dalton, Georgia, that 'everything is a hundred years behind the times. . . . The land is very uneven and ugly. . . . I would not give one farm in Koshkonong for the whole South.' This Wisconsin-reared lad, in comparing the South with his own community, indulged in a practice that was widespread among the invading soldiers. And it goes without saying that the land of Dixie suffered considerably by the contrast. A Michigander serving in Northern Virginia found the land miserable and farming methods wasteful and antiquated. 'A man is no farmer at all,' he said, 'unless he has fifteen hundred acors of land, 60 or 70 n****** and the same amount of Jack-a****. The man licks the n***** and n****** the jasacks, and in that way drive business. . . . It is like spring here all winter,' he concluded, 'but I would rather live in Mich or even at the Nort pole than here.'

A Minnesotan's appraisal was even more damning. 'I don't like this country nor the people that live here at all,' he wrote from Chattanooga, 'and wouldn't live here if they would give me the best farm in the State and the prettiest Girl in the State for a Wife throwd in. No not I. I had rather live in Minn. with no farm at all.'

The Midwesterners were hard enough on the South, but disdain reached its peak among the New Englanders. 'You would laugh to see their wagons and harness tied up with leather strings,' remarked one Massachusetts soldier, while another observed loftily that 'it would probably be more than one generation before any of these slave-cursed states will rival New England in those elements which have made that little corner of the world of so much importance as affecting the human race.' A third son of the Old Bay State hit the jack pot of disparagement; writing from near Opelousas, Louisiana, this man observed: 'There is a good deal of this part of the world that the Lord has not finished yet. He meant the snakes & aligators to hold possession for a thousand or two years more before man [was allowed] to occupy it. The region from N.O. to Berricks bay is a part of this unfinished section. It is half land & half water.'"

The Southern people too were regarded harshly:

"Expressions of opinion concerning Southern people were more frequent and in general more extensive than those about the country. In view of the emotion-charged atmosphere of the late fifties and early sixties in which Billy Yank's attitudes had been shaped, and considering the fact that during the war he was away from home, in a hostile country, and engaged in an unpleasant task, it is not surprising that most of his comment was unfavorable.

No quality of the Southern inhabitants elicited more frequent or more disparaging comment than ignorance. Innumerable soldiers remarked on the dearth and poor quality of schools in Dixie. Further evidence of ignorance was found in the Southerner's rustic speech, his provincialism and his unawareness of time and distance. John P. Sheahan of the First Maine Cavalry reported that residents of Maryland 'don't know anything atall, the don't know a mile from two miles, ask them how far it is to such a place and they will at once say, 'well right smart distance I reckon,' and that is all you can get out of them for that is all they know, and you can't get more out of anyone than what they know.' Of Marylanders, also, another Yank remarked: 'I dont believe the inhabitants even know the day of the week.'

A Connecticut soldier who on a short raid below Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1863, encountered people who ate their food with their hands and who never read newspapers was told by a comrade that the farther south the proceeded the less learning he would find. Pondering this suggestion, the New Englander concluded: 'I cant form an Idea what they are in New Orleans if they continue 2 grow ignorant as they go South recollecting we onley went 26 miles from our Camp.'

When letters written by Southerners fell into Northern hands, great amusement was had in passing them about and making fun of their shortcomings in grammar and spelling. After such diversion a young Connecticut officer wrote his mother: 'The ladies are so modest that they write of themselves with a little i. . . . Southern babies send their papas 'Howdy,' . . . a certain perfidious [stay-at-home] . . . is 'cortin the gall' of one of the brave palmetto soldiers.' He concluded with the comment: 'Above all penmanship, spelling and composition showed that the greatest need of the South is an army of Northern Schoolmasters.'
.........
Another fault found with the Southern people was physical frailty which in some instances was attributed to the climate and in others seems to have been regarded as a congenital condition aggravated by bad habits. One soldier depicted men of the New Bern, North Carolina, areas as being 'all tall, lean, sallow, ugly-looking fellows,' while another described Middle Tennesseans as 'the poorest looking specimens phisically that I have ever seen - tall, thin, sickly looking mortals with hardly life enough to move.' But the most expressive commentary on this trait was that of a Michigander serving near Little Rock who wrote that 'the people look as though they had the ague all their life.'

An impressive number of Yanks found Southerners to be lazy and indolent. An Ohioan whose comment is typical of many stated, after a tour of duty in Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama: 'The men are a very lazy trifling set; too lazy to work themselves but willing to sit around the store-doors whittling, smoking, and drinking. . . . The money comes from the labor of women of all ages from fifteen to fifty years and upwards, in the field, hoeing, plowing, and planting.' This man found evidence of indolence among all classes. On one occasion he wrote of having viewed some splendid houses, but added:

With all the elegance and appearance of wealth, there is an air of "shiftlessness" around, hardly perceptible at first, but which never fails in forcing itself on you after looking closely. There is a paling out here, a window-blind hanging by one hinge there, a gate propped up with both or something else with ruffles on it, stuck into the window here a pane of glass is broken.
........
Not a few invading soldiers found the South to be a land abounding with sin. From Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a Massachusetts sergeant wrote to fellow members of a temperance organization back home that 'almost every one (I do not know of an exception) drink their wine or their beer. . . . Even the women drink in the bar-rooms here, it is of common occurrence, & they must to it to be fashionable & respected.' Another soldier from the Bay State noted that many Southern women 'can swear like troopers,' and 'the children swear and smoke precociously. . . . Children get blase at the age of 10.'

An animal quality in sexual relations was seen by some in the unusual fertility of the Southern race. An Illinoisan after citing an instance of a Georgia woman with eleven children, the eldest of whom was nine years old, remarked: 'This is a great stock country.' But the evidence most commonly offered of impure and unrestrained passion among Southerners was the multitude of mulattoes encountered throughout the country. An Illinois surgeon was 'quite sure' that he could see white blood in half the Negro children about Pulaski, Tennessee, while a chaplain from Massachusetts reported that the streets of Thibodaux, Louisiana, 'were full of its hybrid population.'

Instances of horrible treatment of slaves were cited by some to illustrate Southern brutality. These included the tying of a Negro to a tree by a Georgian, who first turned his dogs loose on the hapless slave, then lighted fires about him, and finally suspended him from a limb; a planter's wife who 'kept her hand in practice by flogging some mulatto girls'; and an owner who punished his Negroes by nailing their ears to a tree, and by flogging them and leaving them tied naked to trees for the flies and mosquitoes to feed on their lacerated flesh.

With such stories as these circulating in Union camps, it is not surprising to find a Massachusetts blue blood exclaiming: 'Honestly, papa, I do not see how anyone can say that the Southern people are civilized.'
........

But in many cases censure of the invaded land was accompanied by expressions of unmitigated hatred. As a Michigander put it: 'Everything looks as if it is going to the devil & I know the citizens ought to, & I have faith they will.' Interesting for the light thrown on later Reconstruction policies was the satisfaction manifested by some of the soldiers at the destruction being wrought in Dixie, and the sentiment evidenced by them that the work should be continued until full penance had been done for the South's sins against the nation and against humanity. An Illinois soldier declared: 'I think it is perfectly right to take the hog and leave them none and then if they ain't Satisfied I am fore banishing ever Rebel and rebel simpathiser from the U.S. I . . . believe in giveing the rebels a lesson to be remembered in after generations then we will never be troubled with Civil War again.' A Yankee diarist of rhyming bent stated his position thus:

Emancipation without deportation
Sequestration without Litigation
Condemnation without mitigation
Extermination without procrastination
Confiscation without Botheration
Damnation without reservation
And no hesitation until
there is a Speedy termination
to this Southern Confederation

Certain Southern groups elicited more vengeful utterances than others. South Carolinians were singled out for special damnation because of the leading part borne by them in the secession movement. An Ohioan who had just entered South Carolina in February 1865 wrote his homefolk: 'We will make her suffer wors than she did the time of the Revolutionary war we will let her know that it isened So Sweet to Secede as She thought it would be.' And a Hoosier whose sister informed him that she had named her newborn son for him wrote in reply: 'I fear you cannot get him into the service soon enough to help us in this war, but theare may be other wars hereafter be sure you teach him to despise South Carolinians & there is no danger of his ever fighting on the wrong side.'
...........

But wherever they took up their peacetime abode, and whatever their post-bellum attitudes, the men in blue left an enduring record of their wartime impressions in their letters and diaries. The South as portrayed in these documents, many of which are now fragile and faded, was in the main a land of extremes: the people were wealthy or poor, well-educated or illiterate, refined or crude, righteous or sinful. The country was one of light and darkness, with far more of the latter than the former. Immediate shadings were only rarely discerned. This is not surprising, however, in view of the emotion-charged atmosphere of the period in which the impressions were formed and recorded. It is worthy of note that tolerance increased with continuing service in the occupied country, and soldiers who remained in Dixie for two years or more often were able to achieve a fair degree of objectivity and accuracy in their observations. Certainly their attitudes were more friendly than those of later years, when hatreds were aroused to unprecedented intensity by scheming politicians waving bloody shirts. On the whole the wartime reactions of Billy Yank compare favorably in interest and accuracy with those of other nineteenth-century visitors, and even with some of recent times."

These sorts of casual denunciations of Southern people and culture may not seem like much, but added together and combined with the natural rage elicited from combat, and it becomes clear how so many were able to put aside the commandment "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and gun down their foes with rage and anger and in appalling numbers.

 

[Zack]

I'd like to conclude this post with a mathematical experiment that should go a long way towards shedding a new light on North-South relations during the war. It was inspired by some of the bolded comments above describing the environment in which the soldiers formed their attitudes of their enemies:

One of the most common tropes of the Civil War was that it was a war that pit brother against brother, father against son, etc. There are certainly examples of this happening (one need look no further than the unfortunate Wesley Culp, whose brother William enlisted in the 87th Pennsylvania, survived the war, and refused to ever speak his brother's name again) and there are a myriad of stories of soldiers trading between the lines and otherwise being friendly. That said, I would like to offer a counter-narrative that complicates this.

The average soldier age of a soldier at the Battle of Gettysburg was 19-years-old. We'll round to 20 to make this easier. Let's suppose for a second that children first start to really become invested in the world they live in around the age of 13. That's approximately when they start thinking about politics, etc. Some may have started far younger, but the thesis still holds nonetheless.

A soldier who was 20-years-old in 1863 would be thirteen in 1856. We'll also factor in that most soldiers were famers who did not travel more than 50-100 miles from their home before enlisting in the army.

What world did they grow up in?

1856 – 13-years-old

In 1856 the conflict in Bleeding Kansas had been raging for two years.

The first thing they would have read about in the papers or heard from their teachers or parents would have been the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of Congress by Preston Brooks. They would have opened their newspapers in the North and read: "The South cannot tolerate free speech anywhere, and would stifle it in Washington with the bludgeon and the bowie-knife, as they are now trying to stifle it in Kansas by massacre, rapine, and murder" (Cincinnati Gazette). Or perhaps from the New York Evening Post: "has it come to this, that we must speak with bated breath in the presence of our Southern masters?...Are we to be chastised as they chastise their slaves. Are we too, slaves for life, a target for their brutal blows, when we do not comport ourselves to please them?" In the South they would have read reports such as that in the Richmond Enquirer, which stated that Sumner should be caned, "ever morning," and that the attack was, "good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequences." It went on to denounce, "these vulgar abolitionists in the Senate" who "have been suffered to run too long without collars. They must be lashed into submission."

Northerners would have heard about or perhaps even attended rallies of thousands in Boston, Albany, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, and Providence in support of Charles Sumner.

Southerners would have heard about or even sent Brooks hundreds of canes in endorsement of his assault, with some subscribed, "hit him again."

They also would have heard about the Pottawatomie Massacre perpetrated by John Brown – the murder of five pro-slavery settlers in Kansas who were hacked to death with swords.

1856 was also an election year, that brought into office what would turn out to be a useless president, but which during the election illustrated divisions in the nation. The Democrat James Buchanan defeated Millard Fillmore and John C. Frémont. The Democrats threatened secession and civil war if the Republicans won while the Republican platform read, "Free speech, free press, free soil, free men, Frémont and victory!" Ultimately, the South voted mostly democrat; the North mostly Republican – none of the Southern states voted at all for Frémont (who might as well not even have been running as far as the South was concerned – ten of the fourteen slave states with a popular vote saw none cast for Frémont, the rest less than 320 each).

1857 – 14-years-old

They would have watched their parents worry during a brief financial panic. They would have heard about the Dred Scott decision and all the backlash that it brought.

1858 – 15-years-old

Lincoln gives his House Divided speech and debates Douglas about slavery.

1859 – 16-years-old

John Brown attacks Harper's Ferry and is defeated and executed. Wild passions stirred on both sides.

1860 – 17-years-old

Election year! In their tens of thousands young men donned black capes and carried torches to campaign for Lincoln in the North. Amateur militarism sweeps the nation during these past few years.

Not one Southern state voted for Lincoln, instead casting votes for Breckenridge.

The Chester County Times in Pennsylvania reported "A clean sweep! Corruption ended! The Country redeemed! Secession is Rebuked! Let the Traitors Rave!"

One month later, South Carolina secedes from the Union.

1861 – 18-years-old

The failure of the Great Compromisers. The country slips further and further towards war as ten more states secede. The situation in Charleston Harbor grows tense and finally erupts in gunfire.

1862 – 19-years-old

They enlist in the army if they have not already.

These boys grew up in a period of such intense dispute between the North and the South that it ultimately erupted in war. They read headlines raving with cries for blood and secession and war.

And they likely never traveled more than 50-100 miles from their homes.

A boy growing up in New York felt no camaraderie or shared sense of citizenship at all with someone from Massachusetts, let alone South Carolina, universally hated by Northerners for precipitating the war.

What I mean to suggest is, I don't believe that very many soldiers at the time understand the war to be a war of brother against brother. Everything that they had learned growing up taught them to at least view with suspicion and at worst hate those living across the Mason-Dixon Line.

Now, a shared sense of suffering while in the army and good humor naturally leads to the numerous fraternizations mentioned between the lines, but I think it's important to remember that nobody fights a war that claims the lives of 750,000+ people and lasts four years with somebody that they fundamentally like and respect (even in the 19th Century with all of its supposed honor). Soldiers may have liked their opponents on a singular level, but as a collective I believe there must have been hostility.

What do you guys think? I know I hold a rather controversial opinion.....

 

[archieclement]

"Before the war he had been a hatter in St Louis, and the Scotch energy of him had found vent in driving hard bargains with a big profit"What took him into the army unless it was the inherited love of carnage is hard to conjecture. Certainly not a love of liberty or country, for he had no understanding of the former, and for him to have loved anything, even as a abstraction , seems at this distance to have been a physical incongruity, and in fact an impossibility. He was one of the monstrosities that are always born to civil strife, to scourge and chasten. There was but one cure to him for the woes of the times. To kill and kill often, was his curative gospel, and he preached it consistently with rifles and death files wherever the opportunity offered. He loved the smell of human blood

The other man in the buggy had a fat face, the face of a pig. Cunning cruel little eyes hidden behind rolls of bloat. The hands were swollen with drink, were short chubby and sleek. They were the hands of weakness, almost as soft as those of a woman. His neck, every gland of which was distended from the absorption of alcohol, was short almost to deformity, and had already begun to show signs of the unmentionable disease that finally ate out his life and left him a thing to be shunned by his fellowman. The mouth had a droop of long indulgence and lack of restraint. The body wrapped in its rolls of burned and suffering tissue, breathed out a constant suggestion of flesh. The animalism of the man overcame and repulsed. His very clothes exhaled the vileness of excess in liquor and hung upon him after the fashion of a howdah cloth, yet above all and behind all was evidenced cunning, cruelty, and vanity, the three dominant attributes of little minds."

Description of General John J McNeil and Provost Marshall Strachan, the butcher and the beast