How are the mighty fallen in the midst of battle.
—2 Samuel 1:25
The official numbers were sobering if not devastating: 1,284 dead, 9,600 wounded, 1,769 captured or missing, for a total of 12,653 Union casualties. The victors had also paid a high price: 595 killed, 4,061 wounded, 653 captured or missing, for a total of 5,309 Confederate casualties.1 The figures required analysis, but even on their face, as crude measurements of the performance of each army and its commander, they revealed as much about the battle of Fredericksburg as any consideration of strategy and tactics. But to comprehend the losses beyond the cold statistics meant listening to soldiers discussing the casualties in the camps and hearing the news filter back to thousands of homes. It meant looking, without turning away, at all those bodies in front of the stone wall. It meant accompanying the dead back home and hearing the funeral sermons. It meant pondering the idea of Christian soldiers. It meant thinking anew about courage and maybe even cowardice.
Despite deceivingly precise figures, measuring the battle’s final toll was in fact tricky. Even if an initially accurate count of the dead were possible—and it was not—the mortally wounded sometimes died weeks or even months later. Perceptions presented an even larger problem. As the army was re-crossing the Rappahannock, soldiers began calculating the losses for themselves. The most sanguine northern observers placed the total Federal casualties at around 12,000, but many thought them much higher.2 Men who had seen little action guessed that the totals ran to 15,000 or more.3 Other soldiers, however, overestimated the actual numbers by nearly 60 percent, claiming that losses had reached 20,000 or more. Because so many men had been able to see so much of the fighting, the carnage had been seared into their minds. Soldiers who cynically discounted newspaper casualty reports often assumed the “real” numbers had to be higher. Several bluecoats suggested Federals losses anywhere from three to ten times those of the Confederates.4
Rebels guessed the ratio had been around five to one. Typically, Lee’s soldiers agreed with many of their foes across the river that Burnside had lost around 20,000 men. A few even pushed the Federal figure nearer 30,000. Whatever their estimates, to Lee’s soldiers the numbers signified a smashing victory, and they eagerly shared the news in exultant letters home.5
Southern civilians therefore received wildly unreliable reports of Federal casualties. “The Yanks lay in perfect heaps in front us,” one of Kershaw’s men wrote home, and he placed Union losses at more than 20,000 men. Soon vivid descriptions (a soldier correspondent to a Georgia paper reported how “the Yankees were slaughtered like hogs”) and inflated numbers circulated throughout the Confederacy. Only a few days after the Federal withdrawal from Fredericksburg, official Richmond considered the figure of 20,000 Union casualties authoritative.6
But the Yankees hardly knew the correct figure themselves. The New York Tribune reported a remarkably accurate 13,500 casualties on December 18, but some Republican editors, worried about sagging morale and the political consequences, published much lower figures. Ironically this fed skepticism among press-wary soldiers. It also played into the hands of Democrats who plausibly claimed the actual numbers were much higher and reflected the Lincoln administration’s mismanagement of the war. Conservative editors could therefore use the widely bruited figure of 20,000 to badger Republicans while patriotically and safely praising the common soldiers’ unparalleled valor.7
Yet sectional and political prejudice did less to skew the reported numbers than did the location of the bodies. Unlike battles where the dead lay scattered through thick woods, at Fredericksburg innumerable bodies lay in plain view along the railroad, in the streets, and especially in front of the stone wall. Tromping over the field, some Rebels even tried to count the bodies. A sergeant in Kershaw’s brigade tallied 900 Federal corpses, but a lieutenant colonel in the same outfit heard that 1,300 bluecoats had been buried near the stone wall. Despite divergent estimates, Confederates agreed they had never seen so much carnage.8
The profusion of corpses made a lasting impression on Lee’s men. Confederate descriptions emphasized three features of these killing fields. First, the dead covered many acres. English observers told Stuart they had never beheld anything comparable on European battlefields. Even the streets of Fredericksburg, one private commented, were “choked” with bodies.9 Second, Confederates noticed heaps of bodies; one of Stuart’s men counted 85 in a single pile. Such ghastly accumulations seemed to magnify the slaughter.10 Third, Rebel accounts emphasized how “thick” the dead lay in particular areas: more than 100 bodies in a large garden; about 450 scattered across four acres. Many soldiers reverted to the old cliché about being able to walk on corpses for a quarter-mile or even the entire length of the stone wall without having to touch the ground.11 Despite such vivid descriptions, however, folks at home must have struggled to grasp the extent of the butchery.
Soldiers could hardly forget the sights—hands, legs, arms and heads shot off and bodies mangled beyond recognition—reminding one Rebel of hog-butchering time back home. Yet these putrefying remains had once been human beings—whose final agonies appeared in glazed eyes, bent knees, or fingernails buried in cheeks.12
A few young men on their way to becoming seasoned veterans appeared (or at least pretended) to take these impressions in stride. Riding over the battlefield, one of Longstreet’s staff officers noted how he “enjoyed the sight of hundreds of dead Yankees” and how it had done “my soul good.” Anyone who had grown accustomed to a battlefield, one Georgia captain coolly informed his wife, considered such sights “grand.” Christian soldiers reconciled hatred and revenge with their faith. Had not the vandal scum cruelly bombarded and sacked the town? Had not God Almighty (and General Lee) now visited them with just retribution? After seeing the ruined town, many Confederate soldiers concluded that the people of Fredericksburg had been rightly avenged. A Virginia infantryman from a most respectable family spoke for many others: “I hate them more than ever.... It seems to me that I don’t do anything from morning to night but hate them more and more.” The carnage no longer elicited much pity even from women. Standing near her gutted house, Mayor Slaughter’s wife pointed to several dead Federals lying nearby and remarked, “I am repaid for all I have suffered by the sight of these.”13 It was a cruel and misleading statement. Hatred could for a time assuage the feelings of loss among both soldiers and civilians, but people could not entirely surrender to blind fury even as the war appeared to spiral out of human control.
A young Virginian contrasted the affectionate tone of a letter to his wife with a battlefield covered with dead bodies. Even wartime passions could not harden his heart against such horrors. Soldiers who rode over the bloody ground and noted the individual remains readily imagined loved ones at home awaiting the return of men being anonymously buried. Picking up a letter written by a northern woman to her now-dead husband, Milo Grow of the 51st Georgia mused that Fredericksburg would “cost a world of pangs and sorrows.” The Yankee wife would never receive a response to her loving missive, and Grow could not help but empathize with the grief on the other side.14
Even a great victory carries many sorrows, one Richmond editor philosophized, and soon southern families suffered the anxiety of scanning newspaper casualty lists while praying to be spared the sight of that one sacred name among the dead or wounded or missing. In Milledgeville three newspaper columns recorded the losses from various Georgia regiments. Richmond and Charleston newspapers reported casualties almost immediately, but nothing appeared in many North Carolina or Georgia papers for another couple of weeks. The Richmond Daily Enquirer had the worst timing: three columns of casualties on Christmas Eve and two more on Christmas. In the Confederate capital, fragmentary reports dribbled out bad news to anxious family and friends, thus lengthening the agonizing suspense. Across the hinterlands, of course, word traveled still more slowly.15
In the North the news spread too quickly. An earlier attempt to have the Associated Press compile accurate casualty reports had foundered on the highly competitive nature of the newspaper trade. Reporters attempted to compile lists from regimental muster rolls, but clearly the emphasis was on speed rather than accuracy. On Monday, December 15, as the Army of the Potomac prepared to recross the Rappahannock, the New York Tribune’s front page contained nothing but finely printed casualty lists and dispatches detailing a bloody battle at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Over the next several days all the New York papers filled their columns with the names of the dead, wounded, and missing. Some editors shielded their readers a bit by placing this information on a back page, but people gathered at newspaper offices for updated lists. Within a week the smaller papers were publishing casualty reports from their states and letters from particular regiments including more detailed information.16
Name after endless name in long printed columns drove home the costs of war. In Charleston, South Carolina, by December 20 the first meager battlefield reports appeared with telegrams tersely announcing the fates of particular soldiers. Young Emma Holmes found that her diary had become “nothing but a record of death.” In New York City that same day, Elizabeth Freeman, though grateful for the safety of her son, commented about how word of heavy casualties at Fredericksburg had depressed everyone. From Lancaster, Wisconsin, Catherine Eaton advised her husband that only God’s “restraining power” had saved his life. News of a great battle always cast families into pits of helpless anxiety. There was no way for anyone to be ready for the worst news if it came and their darkest fears were realized.17
After receiving the first accounts of a bloody battle in Virginia, a Michigan woman cried for three days before learning that her son had emerged unscathed. Many soldiers sent short notes to relieve the anxiety at home, but impatient families clamored for immediate news. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow fretted over his wounded nephew, a sergeant in the bloodied 20th Massachusetts. But he received no answer to a telegram sent to the Sanitary Commission and so wrote to a nurse in Washington and Senator Charles Sumner begging for information. All too often no word came—no name on a list and no account of a regiment’s losses. Prayers and hopes became focused, selfish, and almost superstitious. A Maine volunteer perceptively remarked, “The peculiar feature of war is that each expects someone else to fall.”18
Though soldiers often wrote home about the possibility of falling in battle and could identify with fallen comrades, they had trouble imagining their own deaths. They rarely avoided the normal denial and ambiguity that prevent people from dwelling on their mortality and allow them to go on with life in the midst of great dangers. Even Federals advancing against those solidly entrenched Georgians and Carolinians behind the stone wall often assumed that they would somehow survive.19 Perhaps the “bravest” men simply avoided commenting on the subject, if for no other reason than to avoid frightening their nervous families.
As soldiers themselves recognized, rumors and false reports heightened fear at home. Men reported to have been badly wounded or killed might in fact have come through the battle without a scratch. On the other hand, a soldier would be listed as slightly wounded or rapidly improving on one day, and the next day he would be dead. In Madison Parish, Louisiana, Kate Stone learned that a Lieutenant Stone—not related to her family—had been killed at Fredericksburg. On Christmas morning an elderly neighbor informed the family that the dead man was, in fact, Kate’s brother. A hastily procured newspaper soon confirmed the earlier account. Despite their relief, the Christmas celebration was ruined. The family later learned that their boy had been slightly wounded after all.20
Wounded soldiers still able to write reassured loved ones at home that they would survive. Their letters generally exuded a bluff optimism about their injuries and a pride in having done their duty. Yet sometimes the news was both indirect and less assuring. When Philip Hacker of the 5th Michigan was hit in the right groin by a minié ball, his brother quickly informed their parents. On the last day of the year Hacker was able to write but screamed in agony when anyone changed his bed. Stoically thankful that his wound was not worse but admitting that it was bad enough, he asked his mother to be brave. By the end of January, still in severe pain, he had submitted to God’s will but bitterly complained that “this cursed war has blighted the hopes of being anybody.” Less than a month later Hacker died of dysentery and complications from his wound.21
Hacker had slowly slipped away from his parents at a distance, but other families learned about their loved ones’ fates firsthand. Only a few days after the battle, relatives began arriving in Falmouth. A Philadelphia woman who thought her son was dead wept profusely upon learning that he was recovering nicely. When his brother’s name appeared on a list of wounded, Walt Whitman scoured field hospitals only to discover that George Washington Whitman had received a gash in his cheek from a shell fragment and was doing fine. But the saddest tidings awaited others. A New York woman bringing food to her wounded son found his name scratched on a wooden grave marker. Federal officers escorted ladies across the Rappahannock in fruitless searches for men already tossed into burial trenches. In an age when most people died in their beds, families deprived of a final farewell longed for the details of their boy’s last moments. They needed to know where the body lay and sought reassurance that the sacrifice had not been in vain. Patriots still linked their relative’s death to a sacred cause.22
Families cherished accounts from anyone who had been with their boys to the end. Friends and chaplains would assure loved ones that soldiers killed in battle or who had died right after an amputation had not suffered long. Their letters typically portrayed the men as calm, prayerful, and resigned to their fate. One comrade even included Capt. Washington Brown’s dying words: “Oh Lord receive my spirit! Goodbye Eliza, dear mother and all the dear ones at home, I wish to meet you all in Heaven. I have prayed for you. Goodbye I am done.” Piety, love of family, hopes for a reunion in the afterlife—Brown’s words touched on many of the period’s central images and values. Letters from superior officers usually described how such men had carried the colors, inspired the regiment, or succored the wounded. Death transformed nearly everyone into a brave hero who had spoken lovingly of home and family. To dismiss this as sentimental Victorian mush overlooks an idealism and loyalty that soldiers on both sides would not have found unusual. Men who died in battle were the bravest of the brave, and so it became all that much harder to inform a man’s loved ones that the body had been thrown into a shallow grave or remained in enemy territory.23
Families therefore made Herculean efforts to bring their loved ones home. A man detailed from the regiment sometimes accompanied an officer’s corpse on a boat or train; more commonly a relative journeyed to retrieve a body. Generally, embalming or some other expedient took place beforehand. A surgeon in French’s division used a case made of hardtack boxes and filled with charcoal to prevent an already badly mangled corpse from putrefying. What a religious periodical termed the “melancholy harvest” of war reached the grieving families soon enough. By custom, on Nantucket Island a steamer arriving with such ghastly cargo flew its flag at half-mast; eight men from that small place had been killed at Fredericksburg.24
As bodies returned, the funeral business North and South prospered. On Christmas the corpse of Lt. Leander Alley, a member of the 19th Massachusetts who had been killed in the street fighting on December 11, arrived on Nantucket Island. From the wharf a flag-draped hearse topped by a gilt eagle wound through the streets to the family home, where hundreds of people paid their respects. The next day schools and businesses closed, and after “impressive funeral services,” scores of children followed a procession to the Unitarian cemetery. A few days later a three-mile-long cortege in Richmond accompanied the metallic caskets of Francis Dunbar Ruggles and two other men from the Washington Artillery. In the beleaguered Confederacy, however, even mourning cloth was in short supply, and often a brief prayer service at home (usually without the corpse) had to suffice. Even though nineteenth-century Americans had considerable experience with premature death, great battles laid a blanket of sorrow simultaneously on thousands of households.25
Too often the anguish was geographically concentrated; in New York City on January 16, 1863, a crowd packed St. Patrick’s Cathedral to bid farewell to the dead of the Irish Brigade. The majestic simplicity of the building and its stained glass windows added to the somber atmosphere. Amidst strains of the “Dies Irae” from the Mozart Requiem sung by a choir led by Father Thomas Ouellet of the 69th New York, a large catafalque crowned with six tapers and a velvet pall embroidered with a white cross stood in memory of the brigade’s more than 100 dead. Some of the wounded attended to honor their fallen comrades. A long and ornate sermon praised the soldiers for serving their “adopted country” and defending the Constitution. After the mass Meagher hosted a dinner at Delmonico’s Restaurant. In a eulogistic address fueled by several toasts, the good general could not forgo political commentary and praised his men for bravely serving during a crisis for which Democrats bore no responsibility. Political recrimination would not take a day off for mourning.26
Protracted grieving followed any great battle, and horrific news or no news at all ruined the holiday season for thousands of families. On December 20 in Greensboro, Alabama, Fannie Borden wrote to her husband about her brother Ruffin “Bud” Gray, who was serving in Barksdale’s brigade and about whom she had heard nothing. By Christmas, word had arrived that Bud had been mortally wounded by an artillery round. “How horrible to think of dying among strangers with no dear friend or relative near,” she lamented. It was a common sentiment. Her inconsolable mother kept saying how much Bud must have suffered without warm clothing over the past several months. Fannie especially regretted that he had never made an “open profession of religion.” At last the metal coffin reached Greensboro, and though the boy’s mother wanted it opened for the funeral, that could not be done. A few pieces of gray hair clipped from his head showed how much he had aged during two years’ service.27
* * *
In several senses “boys” had grown into men, but the youthfulness of the casualties seemed particularly appalling. Newspaper obituaries dwelled mournfully on the virtues of soldiers cut down in the prime of life, their future promise unfulfilled. Tender age and touching nobility became inextricably linked, especially in public statements about such losses. Whether they had been sturdy sons of New England following in their revolutionary ancestors’ footsteps or scions of Virginia responding to honor’s call, the dead soldiers left families struggling to cope with their obscenely premature deaths and repeatedly asking, “Why?”28
Why, especially, would the Lord allow so many Christian soldiers to suffer and die? The men’s piety, lovingly sketched in many accounts, made the sacrifice of life all that more poignant. Some soldiers had professed their faith at a young age and even in the army had maintained close ties with pastors and local churches. Their eulogies featured long lists of virtues: how they had overcome the temptations of vice, had shunned swearing, and had dutifully observed the Sabbath. A Roxbury minister praised Lt. Edgar M. Newcomb of the 19th Massachusetts for avoiding the coarser features of camp life by exhibiting an almost “womanly purity and refinement.” Although Confederate preachers emphasized similar qualities, they lifted up the ideal of the “Christian gentleman” in a more masculine fashion.29
Whatever the differences in emphasis, however, such model soldiers embodied a stern devotion to duty that could even conquer life’s ultimate fear. Countless eulogies spoke of mortally wounded soldiers calmly facing death, submissive to God’s will and with minds turned toward heaven. “All is well—my way is clear—not a cloud intervenes,” a Georgia captain reportedly testified on his deathbed. Such men especially wished their families to know that they had died in full assurance of the resurrection. “It is all light ahead,” Lieutenant Newcomb quietly said. Knowledge that loved ones retained their spiritual confidence to the very end proved a great comfort to God-fearing families. At Newcomb’s funeral back in Boston a choir even sang, “I would not live alway.”30
Religious and patriotic themes became inextricably entwined. Evangelical catchphrases and set-piece eulogies transformed wartime deaths into rituals of sacrifice. In dying for country, one also died for God. Saving (or creating) a nation exacted an awful price; by giving up their lives for their respective causes and comrades, soldiers reenacted the Easter drama—and with the same assurance of eternal life. Their suffering and deaths sealed the promise of salvation. From hospital beds some men claimed that they had required an amputation to bring them to repentance. Pain atoned for past sins. “I lost my arm, but I have found a savior,” one soldier told a member of the Christian Commission. The effusion of blood signified the redemptive power of sacrifice. A few men experienced conversion literally in their last moments of life. The death of a sickly and badly wounded young volunteer in a Washington hospital on Christmas highlighted the spiritual significance of such vast carnage.31
The loss of so many devout young men (after a battle few bothered to note the thousands of soldiers who fell short of that standard) cast a pall on both sides, but particular deaths seemed to cast an even longer shadow. In official reports and soldier letters, many Confederates mourned for Tom Cobb, who had died commanding the Georgians behind the stone wall. They remembered him as a fine gentleman, a capable general, and above all a model Christian. At an elaborate funeral in Athens, Georgia, a mass of lawyers, judges, politicians, University of Georgia faculty, Masons, and firemen gathered to pay one last tribute. While a local editor lauded Cobb as a “Christian hero,” a weeping crowd seemed overcome with grief. Lafayette McLaws remembered the Georgian as a “religious enthusiast,” always seeking a “visible sign that Providence was with us.” Such an exemplary life and its abrupt end led one soldier to muse that “the ways of God are past finding out.”32
For Confederates, the Almighty’s inscrutable nature manifested itself most dramatically in the deaths of young officers. Promises of divine protection made with such confidence early in the war now gave way, if not exactly to doubts, at least to a more complex theology. Even the triumphant Rebels had to acknowledge that many Christian soldiers had fallen. Randolph Fairfax, a private in the Rockbridge Artillery, had died instantly when struck in the corner of his left eye by a shell fragment. Confirmed in the Episcopalian faith at fourteen, he had shown a religious devotion and seriousness rare in one so young. In tortured fits of conscience he had worried about studying too hard and not preparing well enough for the last judgment. An excellent student at the University of Virginia, he had read scriptures at the local poor-house and carefully observed the Sabbath. Eulogized by the Reverend Philip Slaughter as a fine soldier and a model Christian, Fairfax had led a blameless life that proved how military duty and religious devotion were both compatible and complementary. Such deaths, however, had a sobering effect. Fairfax had been variously described as a “beautiful youth” or “lovely boy” or “Christian hero” almost too fine for a corrupt world. Lee considered Fairfax the very embodiment of “self-denial and manliness” and tried to soften the loss by pointing out that he had been “translated to a better world.”33 Nonetheless, Fairfax’s death also suggested that during a battle the Lord would not necessarily safeguard even his most faithful servants. Such examples of selfless devotion to duty would become part of the edifying history of the war for southern independence.
Sadly, eulogists on neither side remarked on the tragedy of devout young men killing one another in fratricidal war. Yankee preachers proved as one-sided in their recognition of sainthood as their southern counterparts. Cyrus Augustus Bartol, for example, extolled the virtues of Maj. Sidney Willard of the 35th Massachusetts, who had been wounded during Ferrero’s advance on December 13 and had died the following day. In a memorial tribute delivered at West Church in Boston a week later, Bartol declared that Willard—“a good husband . . . a good soldier, a good Christian, a good man”—had fallen a martyr to the cause of civil and religious freedom. A superb student raised in the church who would leave a room to avoid foul language, he had nevertheless been patient with weaker comrades who yielded to the temptation of strong drink. He had bravely marched south to free the slaves, fully realizing the unfinished struggle for equal rights in the North. Like the Confederates, northern ministers and politicians hoped such lives would inspire young people to perform deeds of valor, but they also wondered why such an exemplary young man had been struck down in his first fight.34
Yet in contrast to Confederate civil religion, the northern variety seemed more equivocal, and eulogies sometimes carried divisive political messages. With emancipation still hanging fire, the deaths of soldiers with abolitionist convictions became opportunities to promote the antislavery cause. Although he had recently received a medical discharge, Chaplain Arthur B. Fuller, brother of famous transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, had insisted on crossing the pontoons on December 11 with some Massachusetts troops. He had died instantly when struck by several bullets, leaving a wife pregnant with their fourth child. Fuller’s tragic story became a religious and political object lesson. As a brave Christian, a teetotaler, and an indefatigable supporter of Sunday schools, Fuller had lived a life that embodied what one minister called “practical Christianity.” The Reverend James Freeman Clark likewise insisted that Fuller had died to rid the United States of slavery, an example that should lead others to buckle on the armor of righteousness in the fight for universal liberty.35
Given the volatile political atmosphere and recent Democratic gains at the polls, such conclusions could never go uncontested. On one level, the story of Gen. George D. Bayard’s death simply evoked sympathy. Throughout the war he had struggled with various physical ailments, including an old arrow wound from his days fighting the Kiowa in Nebraska territory, but at Fredericksburg he commanded a cavalry brigade. Wondering if he should really be in a hospital, Bayard had written to his father less than a month before Fredericksburg that “honor and glory are before me—shame lurks in the rear.” Moreover, he had already postponed his marriage to the West Point superintendent’s daughter three times. On December 13, leaning against a tree in front of Franklin’s headquarters and seemingly oblivious to danger, he suffered a severe hip wound from a ricocheting solid shot. He calmly asked how much longer he had to live, then wrote a farewell note to his parents. Bayard died the next morning. The funeral services took place on the day of his scheduled wedding. Yet this story offered more than poignant coincidence. Radical Republicans considered Bayard a martyr; Greeley claimed that he “died in full Anti-Slavery faith, converted on his many fields of battle.” But a Cincinnati newspaper reported that Bayard said, “Tell McClellan that my last regret, as a military man, is that I did not die serving under him.” In a battle for historical memory, Little Mac’s friend Franklin and other conservatives claimed Bayard as one of their own.36
Confederate eulogists faced different problems in sorting out sometimes conflicting social and political values, especially in treating a well-known officer of uncertain spiritual conviction. Such was the case with Maxcy Gregg, a man who had never professed Christianity and had been mortally wounded as Meade’s men poured into the gap on the Confederate right. In the early morning hours of December 14, Stonewall Jackson visited Gregg and urged him to “turn your thoughts to God and to the world to which you go.” In great pain, Gregg nevertheless refused to cry out or show any emotion save resignation to his fate. His reputation as a man of inflexible will only grew among officers who gathered at the bedside during his final hours and heard him dictate a note to Governor Francis Pickens expressing his readiness to die for South Carolina.
Lee praised Gregg’s “disinterested patriotism and unselfish devotion,” but a man such as Gregg required a more grandiloquent eulogy. At the Presbyterian funeral service in Columbia on December 20, the Reverend Benjamin Morgan Palmer grappled with the significance of the general’s life and death. He praised Gregg’s perfectly balanced personality and his classical virtues that typified the state’s leadership class. The general had been a “true man” whose “courage, honesty and strength were tempered with the softer graces of gentleness and love.” Gregg resembled an honorable Roman hero “incapable of falsehood,” with a finely tuned sense of justice; he was a “polished and courtly gentleman” whose quiet reticence concealed a steely inner core. Gregg had preferred the scholarly repose of the study to the base cunning and unseemly ambition of the world. Palmer had to skirt questions about the general’s Christian convictions by assuring the audience that Gregg had expressed interest in religion and had no doubt privately made peace with his creator. Such a life should inspire all Confederates to redouble their efforts in the holy war against a “bold and infidel fanaticism [that] has undertaken to impeach the morality of God’s administration, and with reckless blasphemy denounces as profligate the government of the universe.”
Palmer had tried to conceal a real problem in a flood of rhetoric because the general’s life clearly illustrated more stoic than Christian virtues. Gregg the fire-eating orator had exuded an almost primal sense of honor, but try as he might, Palmer could not really make him into a Christian martyr. The stern rectitude of a Carolina gentleman, the demands of relentless war, and the ideal of the Christian soldier just would not fit together.37
Regardless of such contradictions, the horrors of Fredericksburg could not undermine the era’s prevailing evangelical dogmas. Survivors of the carnage on both sides remained convinced that God had protected them. Hence their only legitimate response was humble gratitude followed by trust that somehow the Lord would also keep them safe the next time. Soldiers who still held that God had specifically spared them could thus cope with the chaos of combat. These convictions, moreover, brought them closer to the home folks. Men took comfort in the thought of families in prayer; by the same token, images of Christian soldiers sustained civilian morale. A Virginia woman affirmed that God had miraculously spared her brother, and a Massachusetts lieutenant declared that nothing could have saved him but a mother’s prayers.38
Faith-based certitude buttressed daily life in the midst of civil war, and even the sternest tests did not necessarily shake the foundations of spiritual assurance. But for some Federals after Fredericksburg, nagging doubts crept into letters home. A New Jersey volunteer still affirmed that God’s “unflinching protection... never will fail while we put our whole trust in him,” which was the only way he could explain how he had survived when “the bullets were flying so thickly.” But whether this was spiritual or physical protection remained unclear because admittedly there had been “nothing to protect the union soldiers but the protection that Christ throwed around us when he said it is finished.” The hope of resurrection could partially replace the old conviction that the Lord would spare the humble private’s earthly life. A New Hampshire recruit decided that it was best not to think about such matters but instead to “obey orders and leave the rest to the God of battles.” Yet the question remained: why did one man escape all injury when so many were falling around him? Obviously, Christian soldiers seemed to receive no special protection. Two notably pious friends in the 5th Pennsylvania Reserves, for instance, who had been struck down during Meade’s advance eventually died as Rebel prisoners.39 The war was testing religious conviction beyond what anyone could have imagined just a year earlier. Doubts did not necessarily signify a loss of faith, but they did reveal that the confidence of even the most devout Christians could hardly remain unfazed amid such vast destruction of life.
* * *
Because of the terrain at Fredericksburg, soldiers had observed wholesale dying firsthand. Normally men saw little beyond their own regiment or even their own company, but the wider vistas of this battlefield had intensified the horror.40 Yet like all soldiers, they found combat nearly impossible to describe. “I was going to write about my feelings in going into battle,” a Pennsylvania private told his mother, “but it cannot be done.” Surrounded by smoke and noise, the men easily became disoriented. Once the first shot was fired, a Confederate remembered simply standing with his company and doing what he had to do.41
But even veterans believed they had never heard such artillery and musket fire, and the incessant volleys shredded nerves. One member of the Pennsylvania Reserves had exerted himself so much during his regiment’s advance and retreat that he vomited in a ditch. Clausewitz once described war as “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity . . . a blind natural force” nearly beyond human understanding or control. In the midst of a battle, an ordinary soldier reacted with savagery, a hatred of the enemy that could drive him to extraordinary feats of endurance and valor. During combat men entered a nameless world of unimaginable chaos. Planning, leadership, and religious faith counted for little; fate and luck ruled. Chance held everyone in its fickle hands—not only troops in the front lines but also men in the rear, who might be snuffed out by a random shot.42
Close calls became staples of campfire conversations and letters home. Stories about a diary, a folded letter, a hard biscuit, or even a stolen copy of Pilgrim’s Progress stopping a potentially fatal bullet were legion. Such incidents fed prevalent superstitions, though Fredericksburg did not produce the usual tales of pocket Bibles saving lives.43 Belts, swords, musket butts, and even tin cups deflected minié balls; bullets sometimes sliced harmlessly through knapsacks or bedrolls. Any man emerging unscathed from such heavy fire and counting a half-dozen or more bullet holes in his clothing had been both lucky and courageous. Now he was blessed with irrefutable proof that he had held his ground when the lead flew.44
How men had dealt with the all-pervasive fear was another much-discussed subject. One Sixth Corps soldier told of watching boys cook their dinners while shells struck nearby; they would hit the dirt and “then rise as if nothing happened.” Such composure impressed soldiers who acknowledged—at least to themselves—that everyone was scared. Men were not supposed to admit fear, but some simply could not move when the orders came to advance. Others nervously twitched or broke into a sweat. Getting through the ordeal—“no longer a slave to the fear that at first had nearly overpowered me,” in the telling words of a Maine recruit—created a strange exhilaration, an intense appreciation for life. Officers typically and misleadingly described their bravest men as “fearless,” but a whole gamut of emotions from terror to panic to bloodthirstiness to elation surged through soldiers under fire. Many men might have once defined courage as the absence of fear, but a battle such as Fredericksburg inevitably changed such ill-formed notions. Soldiers soon realized that they could not always coolly face the foe, but duty, loyalty, and devotion to the boys in the company could temporarily overcome basic instincts for self-preservation.45
In a sense, honor could likewise inspire bravery. A cook in the 19th Massachusetts had begged to join his comrades because he did not want anyone telling his wife back in Lynn that he had toted a kettle while his regiment was shouldering arms. Soldiers responded indignantly to the slightest imputation against their courage. The idea of an “honorable death” did not seem either ludicrous or pointless because noble examples fostered a more selfless patriotism. After all, soldiers in both armies claimed to be fighting for their homes. Families and friends would soon learn whether a man had done his duty or skulked in the rear. As a mortally wounded seventeen-year-old corporal was being carried off the field on a house shutter, he simply declared, “No man can call me a coward.”46
Courage helped assuage the pain of failure, and even after a terrible whipping, honor remained. “We were defeated because bravery and human endurance were unequal to the undertaking,” declared a soldier in Griffin’s division. Everyone on the field at Fredericksburg had learned the sanguinary lessons about human limits; valor could not stop a bullet. Honor could not guarantee victory.47 Fearless charges against strong positions increasingly seemed like madness.
Although soldiers on both sides spoke the language of honor, Confederates did so with a distinctly southern accent. Daring, gallantry, audacity, and a firm conviction that Rebels fought more fiercely than Yankees increasingly defined national identity. Col. Clement A. Evans of the 31st Georgia proudly reported that his men had “behaved with a courage characteristic of the Southern soldiers.” According to other officers, their men had upheld the fighting reputation of particular states. Assuming a direct link between casualties and courage, a South Carolina colonel said of his regiment, “Ours is a bloody record, but we trust it is a highly honorable one.”48
Thus ancient definitions of courage survived even in the face of horrific combat. Experience, disillusionment, and hardening might alter traditional notions of patriotism, but they did not destroy them. At the beginning of the war, many men had imagined battles as dramatic clashes between knightly heroes, and though such chivalric notions could not survive long, at the same time people wanted to believe that massive bloodshed could have some redeeming qualities. Sacrifice and even martyrdom still sounded like noble ideals, but romantic impulses clashed with harder reality. A Fourth of July militia drill back home was “boy’s play” compared with the “work” of battle, thought Pvt. Edwin Wentworth. To read about combat “is well enough in a pleasant room,” he mused, “but to face the music is quite another matter.”49
Interestingly enough, Wentworth still chose a euphemism—“face the music”—to sum up his experience. With no intended irony or apparent reservations, many others talked simply of doing their duty and serving their country. Even the most melodramatic descriptions, such as General Sully’s tribute to the 19th Maine, “who for the first time smelt gunpowder, and apparently did not dislike the smell of it,” stirred pride. But officers had to do much more than recognize courage. Their own bravery solidified companies and regiments; leading by example worked much better than flowery exhortations. At the same time, however, a more democratic style had replaced aristocratic ideas of knightly valor. A captain in the Irish Brigade expressed the new ethos best: “Even the humblest private may be styled a hero.”50
Whatever his rank, a courageous man was supposed to behave with humility and go about his duty without fanfare. Often the quiet soldiers found unexpected reservoirs of strength. As Yank and Reb alike noted, men who loudly boasted of their courage often quailed, cowered, or even ran off once the bullets started flying. In striking contrast, the best soldiers unostentatiously stayed at their posts even if they were dangerously wounded.51
Courage, according to Clausewitz, is an “emotion” essential for “moral survival.” Indeed, both combat effectiveness and physical well-being rested on disciplined courage. Preserving character and preserving life became equally compelling goals, though not objectives that could be rationally reconciled or weighed. Battle inevitably created emotional turmoil. Seeing one’s friends fall produced a rage that drove men to become “heroes” despite their better judgment. Once the first rushes of enthusiasm and adrenaline passed, the sight of the dead and wounded seemed far less impelling. Just as formations fragmented in hopeless charges, so, too, did combat spawn mental confusion as soldiers reacted unexpectedly. Some felt unusually collected in the midst of combat and seemed almost disappointed by their lack of excitement. A Massachusetts private marveled that though aroused to a fever pitch, he remained strangely calm at the same time. He would have run had he not been surrounded by comrades, he said, but like so many others, he feared appearing scared. Even this lowest common denominator of courage pushed soldiers to the limits of endurance. “Our men did all that flesh and blood could do,” a Pennsylvania officer wrote to his sister.52
Not all flesh and blood withstood such trials, and despite many heroic examples, some men could not respond to duty’s call. Anticipating combat was often the most difficult challenge. Court-martial records suggest that troops not directly engaged and under sporadic fire were the most likely to desert during a battle. Several Sixth Corps soldiers simply disappeared for a day or more. Likewise, some men in Howard’s, Griffin’s, and Sykes’s divisions who had witnessed the early charges toward the stone wall broke for the rear. A few soldiers exaggerated the number of “cowards” in their ranks, perhaps to puff up their own valor, but it is likely that a third or more of the men in any regiment at Fredericksburg never fired a shot.53
Some men took to their heels whenever artillery rounds landed nearby, or they cowered behind trees or in ditches as their regiments moved to the attack. Every man knew of skulkers who somehow disappeared as soon as the shooting started, but many also acknowledged the thin line separating courage from cowardice. Some boys could literally not get off the ground. A Maine volunteer watched a comrade “gather himself together, gain his place in the ranks, and again drop behind.” The man fell to his knees, tightly grasping his musket, yet he seemed to be paralyzed. He indignantly rejected the taunts of “coward” but literally could not move. Other men cried piteously for their families back home. Some refused to pretend. “I know I’m a coward, and a damned coward,” wailed a Massachusetts soldier as he dodged the blows from the flat of an officer’s sword and kept running. An equally candid fellow informed an astonished provost guard near one of the pontoon bridges that he was the “most demoralized man in the whole of the Army of the Potomac.”54
Few soldiers could be so shameless and instead pretended to be wounded, refusing to be examined by a surgeon and stumbling toward the rear. As Gibbon’s men withdrew from the woods, two stretcher-bearers carried off a large New Yorker, but he scampered away when they stopped for water. One cowardly lieutenant first claimed to be wounded and then ill before he was finally arrested. Other men hoped for some slight injury to justify an honorable withdrawal from combat. General Taliaferro cursed one fellow hiding behind a tree waving his arms who announced that he was “feelin’ for a furlough.” A few wounds were undoubtedly self-inflicted.55
The question of who would die in any given battle was not only fraught with theological difficulties but raised doubts about fate, luck, and justice. Many people believed that God decreed the hour of one’s death, but many also placed much stock in superstitious portents. Soldiers would inevitably declare before every battle that they were goners for sure this time. A South Carolina infantryman bathed and changed his underwear because he did not want to be buried in dirty clothes. Like many others, a Pennsylvania adjutant scrawled final instructions for his family before becoming absolutely “prostrated” when a shell shattered a nearby tree. Some soldiers prayed quietly, convinced that the hour of their death rapidly approached. After Fredericksburg, stories circulated of men with such forebodings who had been killed instantly once their regiments were engaged.56
If enlisted men knew of comrades who had to be shamed or driven into battle, they also realized that their superiors occasionally blanched, broke into a sweat, pretended to be wounded, or even scurried to the rear. Such officers immediately lost the respect of their troops and often had to resign. Concern about one’s reputation at home drove many hesitant company commanders into battle. When a letter to a Rochester newspaper reported that a lieutenant in Griffin’s division had hidden behind a fence during the battle, he heatedly denied the charge, but the damage had been done. Even helping a wounded comrade off the field (a common dodge by shirkers) often opened a soldier to vicious gossip that quickly reached local communities. After a Maine officer was cashiered for cowardice, army officials sent details of the case to newspapers closest to the man’s home.57
Leaving the ranks during a fight was a serious offense, but given the gruesome realities of combat, generals were often lenient. Two lieutenants who had reportedly abandoned their posts on December 13 received only a reprimand; derelict privates often lost a month’s pay or were fined some other small amount. Yet sentences varied significantly between divisions. Courts-martial in Whipple’s division, for instance, generally imposed $10-a-month fines for three months, but in Sykes’s division the period was twice as long. Other commanding officers favored public humiliation. A man might be forced to wear a placard or barrel labeled “coward” or “skulker” for a month or more, or have his forehead inscribed with a “D” or a “C” in India ink. General orders announced the punishments during roll calls, and public humiliation of cowards brought derisive laughter from some of the troops. In the Sixth Corps several deserters had to carry around a twenty-pound ball and chain or a heavy log for a month. Besides these punishments, sergeants and corporals were often busted to the ranks and fined. Stiffer sentences included hard labor for periods ranging from a month to the duration of a soldier’s enlistment. Some enlisted men were drummed out of their regiments and imprisoned; a few officers were cashiered. Soldiers clearly had reservations about the more severe penalties, but a Massachusetts volunteer spoke for many others: “I rejoice to see the cowards humbled.”58
At least the appearance of justice reestablished some sense of order in a chaotic world, but refined definitions of courage or cowardice did not necessarily help soldiers or their families sort out the meanings of so many deaths. The battle of Fredericksburg elicited fear, anxiety, and cruelty. Hundreds may have died, thousands more may have sustained grotesque injuries, but in the larger scheme of things, individual agony seemed irrelevant. As Clausewitz coldly noted, “We are not interested in generals who win victories without bloodshed.” Some soldiers embraced this philosophy. A Confederate captain in Kershaw’s brigade mournfully contemplated all the fine men killed since the beginning of the war. His affirmation that “they died [for] a Just Cause” seemed stock but also sincere. Yet even devout Christians had difficulty explaining the bloodshed. Men would not fully understand all the war’s sacrifices, explained the Reverend J. O. Means at Lieutenant Newcomb’s funeral, until the completion of God’s master plan. But the plan was inscrutable, and its completion was submerged in an ocean of blood. For the time being, Means admitted, it seemed that the boys had simply been sacrificed and “nothing gained.”59 The dead at least no longer had either to suffer or to ponder. For the painfully wounded, however, both the agony and the hard questions had just begun.