Oh! that my heart was a fountain of waters
that I might weep it away for this my ruined country.*
For most antebellum Americans, disunion was, to use one of their favorite metaphors, a dark cloud brooding endlessly on the horizon, a storm ever building, never breaking. To be sure, a few eyed it greedily, imagining its power to reorder lives and circumstances. But far more viewed it as a peripheral grimness. The cloud had been there every day of their national existence, and, while they did not like the look of it, they had had ample time to get used to it. When finally it crashed about their heads, they might have reacted with a weary fatalism. But the surprising thing is how surprised they were—how suddenly and powerfully secession gripped them and shook them. In the early fall of 1860, there was in most Southerners’ correspondence a stunning lack of attention paid to the election or its possible consequences. By December the subject was omnipresent, inescapable. “Nothing was talked of but secession,” remembered one Southerner, “in every company, at every street corner, whenever two people met that was the subject discussed.” How could Southerners not have seen secession coming, especially as they were, taken as a group, its architects? They did see it coming, of course. They voted and acted in ways that made it a likely, then an inevitable, then an accomplished fact. But they did not, could not, have foretold how it would feel.1
And how did it feel? In diary after diary, letter after letter, Southerners describe themselves as being in a state of what might be termed political shock. The particulars and timing, of course, vary from state to state, family to family, person to person—but the trajectory goes something like this. Passing references to political affairs begin to lengthen, deepen, and become more personal; the abstract busy-ness of everyday life takes on direction and then energy, surging, swirling, and building, until the writers find themselves at the epicenter of something mammoth and unknown to them. It is a curious feeling, so immediate and strong, so much larger than the little bodies that seek to apprehend it, direct it, join it. Eventually, when political affairs have achieved sufficient gravity, time begins to warp. The months that stretch out between the election and Sumter become a hurtling calm, a furious wait. Finally, the wait—timeless and brief, exhilarating and terrifying—is over. It will be War. The mammoth something has swallowed up all the little writers, leaving of each only a disembodied narrative voice to comment distantly on the life it has surrendered to the rush.
This was an aspect of the secession crisis white Southerners shared regardless of political stripe. They were, all of them, at the center of the furious calm, safe for the moment but watching nervously as a storm raged about them, beyond their power and their ken. Men who had dedicated their whole lives to Southern independence pinched themselves as events they had set in motion took on a life of their own—and then slipped quietly out of their control. Others more removed from politics were altogether thunderstruck, exhilarated and dazed by turns. In diary after diary, unionist and disunionist alike document a reaction that seems a lot like shock. “Things seem to progress in a slow but certain way,” Meta Grimball marveled from her South Carolina plantation. “Everything goes on as usual, the planting, the negroes, all just the same; and a great Empire tumbling to pieces about us.” North Carolinian William Bingham compared the feeling to that of being drugged. “I am in a sort of stupor as to the political state of things,” he noted, “and am waiting patiently for evils that are surely coming.” Virginian Judith McGuire felt equally helpless: “Can it be that our country is to be carried on and on to the horrors of civil war?… I shut my eyes and hold my breath when the thought of what may come upon us obstrudes itself; and yet I cannot believe it.” William Russell, a visiting Englishman, preferred a meteorological metaphor, claiming he’d been caught in the eye of a hurricane. “The chaos of opinions into which I was at once plunged over head & ears,” he noted, “was all so opposite & so violent that like opposing forces they produced at the unhappy centre to which they directed their course complete absence of all motion.” Here, in a freak calm within a funnel of whirling wind, Russell wrote, men gave themselves over to the storm, surrendering their destinies to the march of events. “Every man is an atom in a gale,” he explained, “overwhelmed & controlled by the force which has set it and its fellows in motion & can of itself effect nothing or go beyond the blind submission to chance.” Tellingly, these observers situated themselves at the quiet center of something inescapable and immense—Mrs. Grimball within a tumbling empire, Mr. Bingham at the patient forehead of evil, Mrs. McGuire before an unwatchable unknown, Mr. Russell within an atomizing gale—yet somehow their own centrality has the paradoxical effect of distancing them from the action—Mrs. Grimball potters about the empire’s ruin, Mr. Bingham blinks heavily through his stupor, Mrs. McGuire’s eyes are closed, and Mr. Russell can of himself “effect nothing.” In each case, the writer does not even touch upon politics. What has captured them is not a particular position or ideology but a feeling, a sort of political vertigo. Events have rushed far ahead, leaving their witnesses disoriented in the wake.2
Without question, political persuasion and economic interest played the largest roles in determining whether a person supported secession. Personality and the psychology of the individual, however, determined the style of that support. Those who took to disunion with a sort of devotional enthusiasm tended to believe in romantic risk generally. They were comfortable with long odds, reckless posturing, and doomed causes, at their happiest and best when cavalier. Pessimistic and risk-averse Southerners, by contrast, knew in their bones that nothing good ever came of destruction. They were comfortable with compromise, steady living, and the status quo, at their happiest and best when worrying—and in the coming of war they had worries aplenty. These differences in emotional style are critical to understanding secession as an experience. As each would-be Confederate state seceded, the Southerners within it had to secede too.
Secession, then, was a mosaic of a million American unbecomings, each with its own peculiar dynamics. To Dolly Lunt and Louisiana Burge, disunion offered an opportunity to feel and speak in ways altogether new to them. The girls were cousins and playmates situated on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon line. In the winter of 1860–1861 they exchanged a series of bitter letters, seizing, as they put it, the “chance for vehement language.” They wrote as if their opposing views of secession were “final and unshakable,” as if their former love for each other meant nothing amid the chaos of the times. “It was bombast on both sides,” remembered Dolly Lunt. “We flew to trample and intimidate…to ride roughshod, and crush underfoot by trenchant sarcastic bluster.” Partly, of course, they argued because they were ideologically opposed to each other’s position. But the way they argued was an indulgence; they were drunk on rhetoric, tight with politics, delighting in damning the proprieties of the well-mannered lady in their epistolary howlings. And, as Dolly later admitted, they had imperiled their love for each other not because it meant nothing, but because it meant something, as all true sacrifices must. In these girls’ secession psychodrama, their love for each other was the most important prop—in dashing it they made real their claim to have turned their backs on an entire section of the country they knew less well than they despised it.3
Secession was a particular godsend for the South’s adolescent boys. This is not to say that most were fire eaters; they weren’t. But for anyone waiting for something dramatic to happen—and this would include most of the young men of any period—the wait was over. “We did not think; we were not capable of it,” Samuel Clemens remembered. “As for myself, I was full of unreasoning joy to be done with turning out of bed at midnight and four in the morning… grateful to have a change, new scenes, new occupations, a new interest. In my thoughts that was as far as I went; I did not go into the details; as a rule [a young man] doesn’t.” Ill suited or ill disposed to their schoolwork and their clerkships, most of the South’s young men, like Clemens, put aside the mundane drudgery of building a career and took up indulgent visions of adventure and fame. “Every man,” remembered George Eggleston, “was a hero in immediate prospect.” War had not yet come—it might never come; and in the posturing and bravado of arguing the secession line there was a sort of bristling manliness that better comported with their sense of who it was they wanted to be in the eyes of others. Southern prep schools and colleges, particularly, became hotbeds of secessionism. Buoyed by the spirit of student rebellion endemic in any age, Southern schoolboys happily poured their adolescent angst into a newly legitimated political form. Away at the West Military Institute in Nashville, C. O. Bailey wrote home that the town and the university were practically at war over a secession flag the boys had raised over the school. Bailey and his friends eventually took the flag down, but they published an article in the local paper taunting the townies and challenging them to a brawl. “The challenge has not been answered yet,” noted a disappointed Bailey, but if it ever was he promised the boys would be ready. John Henderson was equally determined to take his stand against the establishment. Barely fifteen, Henderson was a student at the Alexander Wilson academy in Melville, North Carolina. “This evening I wore my [secession] cockade in to supper,” he wrote his parents, “which offended young Dr. Wilson so much that he told me to take it off.” Henderson refused, explaining to the headmaster that he had not intended to give offense and was merely expressing his own opinion. Dr. Wilson informed the boy that he had given offense and intimated that only men knew enough of themselves and the issues to wear such things. Needless to say, Henderson’s cockade remained right where it was, and, raging, he marched out of the dining room. Still livid the next day, Henderson consoled himself with the fact that his friends had been so impressed by his stand that they had all determined to wear cockades. In the spring of 1861, boys like Clemens, Henderson, and Bailey flooded into hastily organized drilling companies, blithely leaving parents and sisters to worry for their welfare. “I am I own loth to see him engage in [such things],” wrote Amanda McDowell about her brother Fayette’s joining up, “[but] I know it is hard…for a young man with any spirit to stay away now they make so much noise.” Thus it was that across the South an army of children dropped their dusty books and took up the only role they knew to be worthy of men—fighters for freedom—and they knew it to be worthy because their books had taught them so. For any still curious as to why young men fought in the Civil War, they need look no farther than this—they fought because they were young. “It was such a ‘Crossing of the Rubicon’ as rarely happens at so early an age,” remembered Randolph Shotwell. “It was more than the mere giving up of school, acquaintances, property, comfort; it was the complete cutting loose from boyhood to assume the responsibilities and perils of manhood; both magnified by youth’s inexperience.”4
Middle-aged men were by no means unaffected by this heady spirit. When Laurence Keitt received the telegram that South Carolina had seceded, he leaped into the air and waved the paper about, trumpeting that he felt “like a boy let out from school.” Many of the South’s thirty-somethings felt the same way. Their youth slipping away from them, their ambitions faded and dulled, secession was a chance to go through the male rite of passage again and this time get it right. When Georgia-born Lordy King set off for Harvard in 1848, he promised his father that he would be the pride of the family. “It may sound ridiculous to say so now,” he claimed, “but I hope or rather think that I will be one of these days or years a great man, whether a Washington or a Napoleon, a Bishop or a Tom Paine.” On his twenty-ninth birthday in 1860, after twelve years of billiards, whist, drinking, smoking, whoring, and carousing, and after three years of hapless studying for the bar, Lordy woke to an awful truth. “How little have I done to be proud of,” noted the would-be Napoleon, “how much to be sorry for.” Needless to say, Lordy King took to secession like a drowning man to driftwood. For Edward Butler it was not a birthday but a New Year’s that triggered this personal stock checking. “These annual summings up are unpleasant enough to those who are prosperous and happy,” he wrote a friend in 1860, “but to those who are the reverse, who are discontented with themselves, and find their youth passing away with nothing done, no victory gained in the great battle of Life, surely the reflection can bring nothing but remorse and bitterness.” By year’s end Edward was in uniform. “I joined the Army,” he admitted, “because I found I was good for nothing else.” Daniel Hamilton didn’t need a holiday to tell him he was on the wrong track. “It will be but a few days more and my connection with Government will cease,” he wrote his son. “I am heartily glad for it has been a galling service, and I pant for the disenthralment of the South.” The ease with which Daniel conjoins his own independence to that of the South is, of course, revealing. One wonders which was more important to him—the disenthralment of the South or the disenthralment of Daniel Hamilton. It need hardly have mattered, of course—they were, for the moment at least, one and the same.5
In late November 1860, Virginian William Thomson wrote his son, William Jr., in Tennessee, decrying the foul work of the fire eaters. The peace and business of the country, he claimed, were being threatened with destruction by madmen, and he begged his son to “keep cool and unexcited amidst the wrath.” In his response, William Jr. told his father not to worry—“those … in favor of disunion are mostly a lawless set,” the son agreed, stirred up by “bustling politicians” hellbent on rule or ruin. Having secured a sympathetic ear, the father then fired back another antisecession harangue. “I begin to think there is almost as much fanatic sentiment in the South as in the North,” he claimed. “The nigger question and the everlasting nigger is about to drive many crazy and turn our country into a huge insane hospital.” But William Jr.’s sympathetic ear suddenly turned deaf. Every day, he wrote his father, the locals were becoming “more and more embittered against the north, until at last they have come out for secession openly.” William Jr. had himself converted to secessionism while participating in a debate over the question, “Has any state a right to secede from the Union?” There were five or six speakers scheduled to answer the question in the negative and only two or three in the affirmative, so he had taken the affirmative. When all the other speakers had taken their turn, there were, William Jr. claimed, “loud cries for ‘Thomson’ so I took the stand, and spoke, until I was from the bottom of my heart a secessionist, and I guess you are too.” He guessed wrong. “Well, you say you are for secession,” William Sr. wrote dejectedly. “I am not at all.”6
Throughout the winter of 1860–1861, the Thomsons exchanged long letters, attempting to win each other over. The son’s letters are a veritable laundry list of secession’s typical tones and phrases: Cotton was King, the South was unconquerable before its hearthstones, the Northern masses were about to rise up, and civil war was preferable to the alternative—seeing “the dusky sons of Ham leading the fair daughters of the South to the altar.” Young Thomson even took “Better death than dishonor” as his personal motto. William Sr.’s arguments were more personal; he was fighting not for the union but for his son. It was as if the boy had joined some kind of cult and had, with the standard-issue secession kit, set about building airy castles on borrowed rhetoric. “The young and sanguine are rapidly carried away into dreamy fields and flawed visions,” the father warned. “Let yourself down to earth; don’t take pictures for realities. … Cotton is not King, it is a vulgar error; by its frequent repitition the cotton states have come to look upon the words as facts. … Calm down! Down! Don’t by the plaudits of the thoughtless carry yourself or permit yourself to lose sight of ancient and holy remembrances.” But William Sr. understood that “ancient and holy remembrances” were fusty nothings to a young man full of pluck and that the real draw of secession was not what it was but what it was not—the humdrum everydayness of William Jr.’s new profession. William Jr. had gone west to Tennessee to become a schoolteacher, but several of his students were as old as he was, and their parents were annoyingly intractable on questions of discipline and curriculum. “My scholars are over me too much,” William Jr. admitted in one letter. “Some of them will come to school with no lessons at all, and if I say a word to them, they will insult me; and if I attempt to carry out any rules the parents get angry and if they don’t learn they are angry.” Responding to such complaints, William Sr. folded career counseling into his antisecession argument, understanding that secession and schoolteaching were competing professions in the young man’s mind. If he could make schoolteaching sound suitably dramatic, he seemed to think, secession might lose its allure. “The icebergs and rough seas [young men] encounter,” he told his son, give them “often a greater staunchness and sagacity in navigating unexplored regions than those who are accustomed to smooth waters and close to shore sailing. … Lay yourself down to the work of acquiring greater endurance and double determination and you will rise equal to all difficulties that present themselves for your conquest.” But most important, William Sr. advised, “Don’t be hurried by the plausable appeal of young or old and artful secessionists… into placing your hopes of advancement and gratification of ambition on anything that may be offered in this destruction.”7
Exchanges like the Thomsons’ were rife in the winter of 1860–1861. “John has resigned and gone to town to offer his services to the Governor,” Meta Grimball grumbled of her son in December. “He is very much enchanted at getting rid of a profession his heart was not very much interested in.” James Petigru thought he discerned the same impulse animating his nephew Johnston. He has given “into the general sentiment,” Petigru wrote of the young man, “and being put the head of a regiment of Volunteers is no longer a pale inmate of the obscure building in St. Michael’s Alley, where he used to pore over dusty books in a foreign tongue; but bestrides a gallant steed, with gay trappings, long spurs and bright shoulder knots.” While such grumblings undoubtedly contain more than a grain of truth, their tone suggests that parents sometimes underestimated the depth of their sons’ predicament—and their resolve. “You must not take up the erroneous idea that all this is a mere freak,” Virginia-born Richard Corbin wrote his mother on running off to join the Confederacy. “My future happiness depends upon this step [for] if I don’t shake off this dull sloth, my life will for evermore be embittered by the most galling and humiliating regrets. … Just think that if you have now any affection for your idle, useless son, how much more that affection will be enhanced if it is mingled with a little pride at his manliness.”8
Men’s enthusiastic embrace of soldiering, then, is easy to understand. Unlike their prewar professions, the war combined with a felicity too perfect to be possible the twin drives of the masculine enterprise. To be sure, men joined the army to fight for cause, comrades, and country, and they gave fealty to these motives in their public remarks. But privately they were fighting, as they always had, for women and for eminence, and they confused the two as liberally as ever. “I always thought that you deserved something better,” boasted William Pender to his wife on receiving a colonelcy. “I would like to be a great man for your sake.” Their prewar professions had demanded discipline and patience and offered only sluggish prospects for advancement. The war, by contrast, demanded only an assent (I will join) and offered the possibility of a meteoric rise to distinction. Where antebellum society had condemned Southern men for their drinking, sloth, sin, and miscegenation, the war would reward them for the open-tempered expression of masculinity’s most basic impulses to conquer and kill. And, most important, their drive for distinction and their role as women’s protectors would be synonymous in a way they had never known. “I shall fight [the Yankees] as if they were entering your dwelling or ready to give the deadly blow to my dear wife and child,” promised one Georgia recruit in a letter to his beloved. “I tell you, I shall feel like I am fighting for home, sweet home.”9
So it was that across the South, each county seat became a muster ground, ostensibly dedicated to drilling but more particularly to a celebration of the opportunity God occasionally gave a man to rise and be counted. The Confederate army would eventually become quite good at the grit and the grimness of war, maiming and killing as effectively as any that had come before it. But in the spring of 1861, this transformation lay well in the future. For now men were content to pose as soldiers rather than kill like them, standing more fixedly, more splendidly, before the daguerreotypist than ever they would before the enemy. Decked out in uniforms hand-tailored by their sisters and sweethearts, sporting “epaulets of gorgeousness rarely equaled except in portraits of field-marshals,” they stared into the future with that rare certainty—they were, for the moment at least, exactly where they wanted to be. And why not? Marching and maneuvering was, after all, a blithe respite from their books and their professions, and they obeyed the commands of the drillmaster “not so much by reason of its being proper to obey a command,” George Eggleston remembered, “as because obedience was in that case necessary to the successful issue of a pretty performance in which [we] were interested.” In the evenings, the married men threw themselves into their letters home with all the fire of their early courtship, loving all the more intensely for the fact that their wives were some distance away. “Sitting down to write you a love letter carries me back to old times,” James Williams told his wife. “You ought to be delighted at my occasionally leaving you,” noted William Pender in a letter to his beloved, “for it shows me more plainly than anything else that you are my wife indeed.” Reconfirmed in their patriotism, their manhood, and their marriages, the Penders and Williamses could then sit back to enjoy their cigars, tug at their hipflasks, chat with their fellows, or avail themselves of the camp’s many sporting women. The times were festive, death loomed just close enough to make life taste the sweeter, and all indiscretions could be explained away as the wages of patriotism. “Henry and I, after dinner, started off to hunt a good bathing place,” Edgeworth Bird informed his wife from camp. “After steering over country, passing a few farm houses, a sick camp, or so, a great many fine views from high hill tops, and sundry well-opened chinkapin bushes, we found ourselves by a clear, cool branch, some 3 miles from camp.” Stripping to the “natural man,” Edgeworth and Henry plunged into the river and “by dint of soap and violent manipulation… became new creatures.” Washed of their camp dirt and clad in clean garments, the men picked out a clover patch and sat down to enjoy some teacakes and “a little rye juice from a flask accidentally found in a pocket.” They lit up their meerschaums and had begun to drift off to sleep when it began to rain. “Before we dreamed of it, so comfortably were we lolling and puffing away, the rain was upon us,” Edgeworth noted. “Through rain and slush we tramped it to camp, forgetful that we had turned out pleasure seeking and thoroughly impressed with the belief that we were two flaming lights on the altar of patriotism, breasting the storm and fatiguing forced march for our country’s good.” So it was with most would-be Confederates. Forgetful that they had turned out pleasure seeking, they strutted about in their uniforms content in a world that made sense, a world where men did the fighting and women did the worrying.10
What they were ill-prepared for, however, was the world of dying they had unwittingly embraced. The political ideology of the average Confederate could be—and often was—boiled down to a simple phrase: death before dishonor. As the war ground on, however, many Confederates discovered a fatal contradiction in this simple sentiment—death, in and of itself, could dishonor a man. How much nobility is there in dying of dysentery? How much grandeur in a gurgling gut shot? As their fellows and friends were shot to pieces next to them, the soldiers left standing were forced to admit, even through their grief, that a dead man’s sacrifice was not pretty when viewed up close. In the maimed, mangled, and decomposing patriots left to rot on the field, there was a sort of dishonor to the body that ate into the honor one gained in dying for cause and country. “This fight beggars description,” James Edmonston wrote home after Shiloh and the Seven Days Campaign, “I have never before witnessed anything to compare to it and I pray God that I may never witness anything like it again. On the battlefield men are lying in great piles dead [and] mangled horribly in every way [and] decomposition has gone on so far that it is almost if not impossible to go upon the fields.” It was not the prospect of dying, per se, that had shaken Edmonston; it was the fact that, heedless of the cause for which a man might fall, death remained intractably corporeal. “A death upon the battle field would lose half of its horrors to me,” he noted, “were it not for the fact that I have no very near relatives here who would or could attend to me, and the probability is that I would lie rottening upon the battle field unburied.” Even if a soldier could steel himself against the corporeality of death, however, there was the matter of its indiscriminacy, impersonality, and randomness. For many Confederate soldiers, death came suddenly and unceremoniously, catching them unaware, picking them out of a crowd with a sniper’s bullet, a rogue shell, a ricochet, or friendly fire. In more than a few cases, a man was killed while chatting amiably with friends who could only stare on in wonder as he fell. Intelligence or decency could not guarantee a man’s survival; bravery and mettle could not guarantee a good death. Ordered to drop back behind a tree line, Joshua Callaway and most of the Twenty-Eighth Alabama did as they were told. One member of the company, however, decided to contradict the order, not wishing to be seen fleeing before the enemy. “One of our boys told him if he did not get behind a tree he would be shot,” Callaway noted, but he just “smiled & replied, ‘I am not afraid of them.’” A minute later a ball struck the man in the privates, putting an end to his defiant gesture and unmanning him rather completely. Needless to say, this was not what most men had in mind when they proclaimed their willingness to pour out their all on the altar of patriotism.11
The indignities of random, impersonal, and gory death were not the only ones a soldier had to bear. Smaller, daily indignities added their share of miseries as well. The life of a soldier, William Nugent noted, consisted mostly of “mud, filth, rain; every imaginable species of vermin crawling all around you; little sleep, hard work & fed like a race horse; constantly annoyed with stray bullets, whizzing shells & pattering grape; dirty clothes and not a change along; little or no time to wash your face and hands and very little soap when the opportunity offers.” Nugent was even plagued by his government-issue underwear. “I have three pair of drawers purchased from Government,” he noted, “which have become all unsewed and hang very loosely about my person. They are about 2 sizes too large and are perfectly loose.” Edwin Fay had the same reaction to his Confederate undergarments. “If you have an opportunity of sending me you had better send me a pair of drawers,” he wrote home. “Those I drew from the Government would not fit any body in the world.” These might seem petty concerns for soldiers under fire, but it was a little difficult for a man to screw himself up to an honorable death with his underwear down around his ankles.12
If death and soldiering did not look good up close, neither did the army itself. Victorian Americans were not a cynical people; they tended to confuse easily at the notion that moral ends could be achieved by immoral means, and an army was undoubtedly an immoral instrument. Confederate soldiers were horrified, for instance, at the effect their own armies had on the countryside they were supposed to protect. “A country could hardly have a worse curse or plague than to have a large army march through it,” Joshua Callaway wrote home. “We completely eat it out as we go. The locusts of Egypt were not more destructive.” Other Confederates agreed. “Amanda, I never knew how mean the army could do in a country,” noted one Georgia recruit. “I believe our troops are doing as much harm in this country as the Yankees would do. … Where this army goes the people is ruined.” Another Louisiana recruit described the damage inflicted by the army on its own supporting populace as “scarcely inferior” to any the poor farmers might fly to. This was particularly troubling given the fact that many of the soldiers had themselves been simple farmers before they volunteered. Then, too, like any bureaucracy, the Confederate army was plagued by imbeciles and their concomitant nonsensities. Generals were often drunken and foolish, politicians were often wrangling and petty, and soldiers were often left to be governed by policies that defied common sense, a subject on which every man considered himself an expert. Edwin Fay described a typical army catch-22: A sick man, he said, could not be discharged unless he was on his deathbed. By then he was too sick to move and would be sent to a hospital where he could not be discharged until he got better. Once better, he would be put back on active duty until he got sick again. Governed by policies like these, soldiers were left to wonder if they would be discharged when they died or if they would still be required to muster for reveille. “I believe that after I am done being a solider,” noted James Williams testily, “I’ll be a philosopher!” After all, he figured, “I have learned to submit my will and my personal comfort even—to men who are fools.”13
Civil War armies were composed of amateur soldiers—men who kissed their wives, slung their rifles over their shoulders, and headed out to scare some Yankees. Most of their soldiering experience was limited to spotty militia service and desultory reading in the romances of Sir Walter Scott and the epics of Homer, books whose heroes rose in valorous rage, slaying at will and single-handedly carrying the field. Confederate soldiers were not fools, however. Such festivals of gore might make for compelling reading, but even the schoolboys knew that the Romans provided the best model for an army. In the Roman scheme, each soldier was an interchangeable part of a larger unit; victory was more important than heroism, the army was more important than the man. European tactics had codified the system, but this was the basic philosophy behind Civil War armies. Drilling was about stamina, obedience, discipline, and, within these, the subsuming of the self. The cadences of drum, voice, and march were designed to facilitate this process, to play and replay the same tired rhythm until the individual did not act or react but was simply carried along in the hypnotic motion of the multitude. Thus it was that a collective collapsed into a singularity—a regiment, a division, an army.14
Discipline, of course, was not something grown Southern men were accustomed to receiving, especially at the hands of other men. The most convenient model for such a relationship—one man directing the labor of another—was slavery, which undoubtedly rubbed some Confederates the wrong way. “It grinds me to think that I am compelled to stay here,” Joshua Callaway remarked typically. “I’ve got a dozen masters, who order me about like a negro.” The twenty-first-century sensibility seizes on such vocabulary instantly—an Old Southerner comparing himself to a negro!—but the truth is Southerners compared themselves to slaves all the time. The least little chore—toting a bucket, roofing a house, digging a ditch—was apt to invite the comparison. In fact, given a sufficiency of ill humor and a moment’s reflection, every white bucket toter in the South probably indulged the idea that such things were unworthy of his whiteness. As an index to disgruntlement, then, such language is easily overread. Callaway himself followed up the comment about his dozen masters with, “But I talk very plain to them occasionally”—something slaves rarely did with impunity. “To all this [discipline],” he noted in another letter, “[the soldier] soon becomes accustomed and, if naturally ambitious and resolute, he is jolly at all times and under all circumstances.” So, if it was slavery, it didn’t really chafe all that much. An army did not work without discipline—Joshua Callaway understood this; following orders was not submissive and the directives of a superior officer were not personal affronts (the sticky point in the South). Discipline, moreover, went both ways—from the top down, certainly, but also from the bottom up. “An officer has to be very careful of his reputation for courage,” William Nugent informed his wife, “for upon that in a great measure depends his efficiency & ability to command the soldiers under him. When once the troops lose confidence in the bravery of their Commanders they necessarily have an utter contempt for him, and will not cheerfully obey his orders. I know I would dislike to have a cowardly Captain over me, and I presume my Subs are pretty much like me in disposition.” So long as they were devoted to a common cause (whatever that might be), most Confederate soldiers were willing to accept army discipline.15
But if soldiers accepted the discipline, they resisted the loss of themselves. The notion that men were interchangeable flew directly in the face of Southerners’ self-beliefs. Depersoning was supposed to be a Yankee phenomenon, like soulless machines, soulless men, and the cult of interchangeable parts. In the South, a man was supposed to be able to find his own way, claiming for himself all that his decency and his dignity demanded. But to their frustration, soldiers found that the loss of self was an impersonal enemy; try as they might, they could not locate its source in the actions of a man who could be challenged or knocked down. Rather, it seemed a part of the air they breathed or the dirt they slept in, elemental, an inalienable part of the project itself.
Lafayette McLaws’s dissolution of self began almost instantly. In June 1861, he boarded a Virginia-bound train with 116 volunteers from Lowndes County, Georgia. Sweltering in the hot cars, the boys removed their shirts, then their shoes, then whatever they chose. The resulting odor, McLaws noted, was “tremendous,” and the fact that the boys sang and cheered most of the way only contributed to the all-out assault on his senses. Disoriented by the bellowing yells and the stifling smells, McLaws began to lose himself in the general press of humanity; a tangle of limbs, a stew of sweat, a symphony of patriotic huzzahs, the occupants of the train car were one man, singing with one voice, stinking with one stink. “From that time,” McLaws noted, “there was an end of all individuality.” From then on men marched and ate and died just the same. The abstracting process was so irresistible that some men even began to forget what they looked like. “I have no opportunity of judging of my appearance,” James Williams complained to his wife. He had seen “the reflection of a dirty dust begrimed face once or twice in a glass,” but could he even be sure that it was his own face he saw? “You can hardly tell one man from another,” Joshua Callaway noted. “Everybody’s hair, whiskers, skin and clothes are the same color.” Eating, drinking, sitting, sleeping, living, and dying in dirt, men finally just seemed to become dirt, vacant golems with pretty dreams. The whole experience convinced Edwin Fay that Moses had been right—men were composed of the dust to which they would surely return. In the case of soldiers, however, God had added a generous portion of some more substantial element. “I think the ‘dust’ of which soldiers… were made must have been comminuted atoms of iron,” Fay told his wife. “No man whose sinews are not of triple steel and whose frame is not of Brass can stand a 3 yrs. Campaign if I judge from my experience.” Fay had been physically toughened by the war. He could make daylong marches without food or break, then throw himself down and sleep soundly on the ground. But did the war stop there? If it was making steel of his sinews and brass of his frame, what was it making of his softer organs? Collapsed on the ground, Fay had ample time to consider what he had become. “I am not worthy to live,” he wrote his wife helplessly, “I am unfit to die. My heart has become harder than the nether Mill Stone. I have no love for anything save you and my child.” But did he not also fear that he had become too hard even for this last love? A metallicized Fay might survive the war, might even find his way home, but of what use was a metal man to a wife of flesh and blood? Was such a man worthy of her affections, her touch, her bed? “If I come home,” Fay told his beloved, “I think I shall bivouac for the future in your flower yard.” Perhaps that was as close as a golem dared dream of being to something so much softer than himself.16
Across the South, the war remade men in its unforgiving image. “War is fast becoming the thing natural, tho’ abhorrent to my feelings,” noted William Nugent. “I go at it just as I used to go at lawsuits. Still I am not by any manner or means fond of the profession. The idea of being continually employed in the destruction of human life is revolting in the extreme. Necessity imperious and exacting, forces us along and we hurry through the dreadful task apparently unconscious of its demoralizing influences and destructive effects both upon… nation[s] & individuals.” In distancing themselves from the death they caused and witnessed, men found themselves also at a disconcerting distance from their own decency, and it was a gap they wondered if they should ever close. “[We are] hardly allowed to sigh at the fall of our friends and relatives,” noted Joshua Callaway, “and if we do happen to shed a tear secretly, it is soon dried up to make room for one for some one else. We never will have time to contemplate and comprehend the horrors of this war until sweet, delightful peace is restored to us, & we can take a retrospective view.”17
It has long been maintained that such demoralization was mitigated by the fact that Civil War soldiers volunteered, fought, and died alongside kinsmen and townsmen. A unit was composed not of strangers but of friends and relations who had known each other all their lives. The privates were all schoolmates; their captain was the local grocer, planter, lawyer, or alderman. They had joined up together; they would see it through together; they were comrades. Yet, in reading soldiers’ correspondence, one is struck not by the deep familiarity but by the deep dysfunctionality of such all-male ensembles. Camp living was, for the most part, womanless living, which drew its expected share of complaints. “Occasionally a woman passes camp and it is three days wonder,” noted Edwin Fay. Tally Simpson echoed the sentiment: “There is not a woman that passes camp but there are a hundred men, more or less, huddled together, gazing with all their eyes.” When Willie Bryant was finally transferred to a post in a town, he shuddered to think of going back to camp life: “For 10 months I had not held half an hours conversation with a woman, not two conversations with the same woman; that alone shows that I must have been unfortunately and unhappily situated.” But if the unrelieved womanlessness was a problem so was the unrelieved maleness. Men smelled bad; they drank too much, talked too much, cursed too much, played too hard, couldn’t cook, couldn’t wash a dish, didn’t respect property, and tended to spit on the floor. This was all an accepted, even a celebrated, aspect of male/male society, but when taken to extremes it began to compromise the project itself.18
A crude sketch from a soldier’s pocket diary. In panel 1, three soldiers are engaged in a pitched battle: one of them has been shot while trying to fire, and another has crawled behind a tree to die. Panel 2 depicts a tombstone and a fresh grave, presumably the artist’s, as the date of death has been left blank. In panel 3 the soldiers have returned from battle and contentedly amuse themselves with a louse race. Forced by circumstance to adapt themselves to vermin and death, soldiers like this artist recognized, at least unconsciously, that their new world consisted of more grimness than glory. Harry St. John Dixon Diary, May 19, 1864, Southern Historical Collection, UNC.
To be sure, plenty of younger men enjoyed the mud fights and wrestling matches that were an inevitable part of camp life. But for the vast majority, some combination of age, natural reserve, and social standing made such pastimes seem a trifle undignified. Men kept each other at a distance; that was the point—the distance was the measure of the other man’s respect, and in consequence the measure of one’s own self-respect. Normally, of course, women were available to fill in these emotional distances and help mediate men’s relations with each other. But in a womanless camp, all this distant self-respecting made for a very lonely life. “In contact with men I am philosophic, to a certain extent stoical and self possessed,” William Nugent wrote his wife Nellie, “with you I am swayed by an impulsive affection, and the simple story of love.” None of this is to say that men were never impulsive or affectionate with each other, but most preferred not to do so for prolonged periods. “I would be the gladdest person in the world to see you all and talk with you a while,” Benjamin Jackson wrote his wife, Martha, “for I see nobody here but men and they appear to be very sorry company for me.”19
Isolated within themselves, touchy and standoffish, men stewed in their self-imposed distances, deploring from afar their touchy and standoffish comrades. These men were sharing, as Oliver Wendell Holmes would later put it, “the incommunicable experience of war,” an experience most of them would remember and celebrate the rest of their lives. But while they were sharing it, they were not much inclined to share with each other; however mammoth the experience that bound them up together, each man felt dependent on himself alone. “In these times the best motto is take care of Number One,” argued John Fort. “Generosity has ceased to be a virtue, for you can lend or give anything away and have nothing yourself.” “I have never seen so selfish a place as a camp,” Edwin Fay reluctantly agreed. “No one seems to care much for any one else.” Some of this selfishness, certainly, originated in the nature of war itself. So much misery and deprivation, indignity and death, throws each man back on himself alone, severing the ties that bind him both to individual men and to humanity generally. Isolation becomes the soul’s best defense against the corrupting influences of the world around it. “There is so little of that human nature which makes the whole world kin, nowadays,” William Nugent explained, “that we cannot rely upon any one with certainty. The distress everywhere prevailing… [has] thrown every individual upon his own resources for a support and have had the effect to isolate, it seems, every human being.” Other men, though, were less willing to excuse such selfishness as a product of the extreme circumstances of war. They believed they discerned within it a familiar pattern, a pattern that had dogged them in their professions and in their schools, a pattern that lurked not in war or in humanity generally, but in the hearts of men specifically. “I tell you, it is awful to think of the wickedness and corruption attending an army,” noted William Dickey. “I sometimes think there is not enough goodness to save us from being destroyed. I believe if the country is ever saved, it will be from the many prayers of the good women of our country. Don’t understand me to say there is no good men. But there is comparatively speaking, so few.”20
The remedy for all of the common consequences of war—the brutality of death, the depersoning of soldiers, the selfishness of men—was simple: a man needed to find his way back to his sweetheart, to the decency she symbolized and the succor she provided. At the beginning of the war, each man had planted his patriotism in the sturdier soil of his love of woman. It was for her that he was fighting; it was for her that he would suffer and die. Let the men spit and the politicians wrangle; let the generals drink while the soldiers fought—it was all endurable while she could make sense of it. Rejecting a subordinate’s request to visit his dying spouse, Stonewall Jackson famously put it to the anxious officer that a man’s devotion to his country was more important than his devotion to his wife. From all indications, Jackson was one of the few Confederates who felt this way. “A man’s family is dearer to him than anything in the world,” noted Edwin Fay, “at least mine is & 40 Confederacies may go to the devil if I am to be kept away from all I hold dear during the rest of my life.” William Nugent concurred: “May the remembrance that I have so gentle and noble a creature for my life companion,” noted Nugent, “ever buoy me up amid the many trials through which I am called to pass and nerve my arm in the dread hour of a battle. Dear is my country to me, yet dearer far is [the] treasure [I have] in [my] little woman.” Indeed, for most Confederate soldiers choosing between wife and country was impossible, ridiculous. Their woman was their country and their cause, the reason for which they fought and killed. Choosing between them was like choosing between female virtue and manly honor—silly on the face of it because they were mutually reinforcing. “What would poor man do,” asked Walter Taylor, “what would he be worth but for the softening, purifying, all powerful influence of his most precious gift, his highest treasure—woman!?” Taylor worked as an adjutant on General Lee’s staff, and his duties could be petty, pesky, and often beneath him. But Bettie made them all sufferable, gave them a larger, more tangible purpose that he could grasp and hold on to. “Whenever I am harassed by an accumulation of miserable paper calling for my attention,” he wrote his sweetheart, “or annoyed by any imaginary unreasonableness or ill temper on the part of my Chief, how much it adds to my patience and stimulates me to greater efforts to perform my duty manfully with a single eye to the good of our cause, when I imagine your face looking over my shoulder with its encouraging smile and an approving look in those dark fathomless eyes, so pure, so irresistible in their expression? Ah! My good angel, it is a sweet and yet a sad reflection to me, to think of the unlimited control exercised over my whole life, my every act, by my intense desire to win and be worthy of you.”21
In woman, then, a man could rejuvenate himself and his cause, finding in his love of her the grounds for his love of country. The key to this process of romantic renewal was letter writing. In the exchange of letters between swain and sweetheart, a man was given a chance to rekindle his enthusiasm—for love, for life, for dying in defense of them both. In writing to his beloved, a man poured out his heart, damning those who deserved damning, rewarding those who deserved rewarding, remembering, as the words and phrases tumbled onto the page, that there was individuality and dignity within him yet, and that there was at home something to live for, fight for. Composing a letter, however, was no mean feat. Pens were as apt to cut the paper as to ink it. Ink was as apt to smear or trail off invisibly as to render a smooth stroke. In winter, pens froze to hands so numb they could barely be forced into operation. “It is cold enough this morning to freeze the hair off a cast Iron dog,” one soldier remarked acerbically, “my ink is ice and fingers here in the open are not far short of it.” In summer soldiers had the opposite problem—papers were soaked with sweat and pens were slippery as men baked their brains in stifling tents or browned their skins under a merciless sun. “The weather, Lizzy,” noted a member of the Twenty-First Alabama, “demands a ‘mere-mention’ to-day, as having attained [a] degree… compatible with [the] existence [of no] one but a Salamander or the Fire King.” Rain and snow, of course, added their own miseries, particularly for those in leaky or nonexistent tents.22
Regardless of shortfalls and heedless of inconveniences, however, soldiers and their sweethearts persisted in writing—on anything, with anything. Men who had foresworn scavenging among the Yankee dead made an exception for writing materials. Others crushed strawberries for ink and sharpened sticks for pens. One soldier promised his wife that if they had to take pencils to corn shucks they would always write to each other. “O you have no idea how it helps me to get a letter from you,” Joshua Callaway wrote his wife. “Really it is all my solace.” George Peddy felt the same way: “You cannot tell how well I like to read [your letters],” he told his beloved Zerlina. “The lines you write look like they are written with gold & the words seem to mean volumes to me.” Letters were all-important; nothing took precedence. One soldier told his wife to let their farm go to seed rather than shorten her letters: “Letters are to be attended to before work,” he commanded. “Work can be put off.” Another soldier consumed a letter rather than his dinner, though he admitted he was half starved. “Although I was very hungry and had eaten but one mouthful,” he wrote his wife, “I rushed to a smouldering oak fire to devour the contents of the long looked for epistle.” One man even went so far as to claim that if he received a letter during battle, he would not hesitate to stop, drop, and read. It did not particularly matter what the letter said. The letter was important even as a thing. It had mass, though little, dimension, though unimpressive, and substance, though frail; but, most important to the soldier, it had a point of origin—a world away. This frail little something came from somewhere else, proving thereby the existence of a place beyond the trenches and the minié balls, a place delicate and undefiled, capable still of making such wonderful things out of paper.23
But the attempt to find one’s way home by mail was fraught with problems beyond material shortages and inconveniences. The Confederate mail service was slow and unreliable, and, particularly late in the war, a man might go a month without hearing from anyone. In the long stretches between letters, Tally Simpson remembered, a man’s mind could go dormant, as if in some kind of hibernation. “Inactivity, indolence, and various other things,” he wrote home, “have very nearly reduced me to the lamentable state of a nontalkative Quaker. I lay my back upon my pole bed, lost to every thing around me like a snake in winter time, and am only aroused from my stupor by a call to dinner (if a few biscuits & a little rank bacon gravy can be called dinner) or the tap of the drum to roll call. But I must confess that the reception of a letter from old P [his hometown] moves my spirit, and Quaker-like I must up and speak for myself.” Then, too, the war had a way of disrupting the letter-writing process, and with it the metaphysical journey home. Seated in his tent, Winston Stephens was just beginning a letter to his young bride when he became aware of a man at the door. “Through courtesy I invited him [in],” Winston noted, but “he came in with his pipe in mouth and then Gabe Priest came among and in he walked with his pipe in his mouth.” Pretty soon it seemed to Winston as if the men had chosen his tent for some kind of smoke-off, making it impossible for him to lose himself in a letter to his beloved. Edgeworth Bird was also deeply offended at the intrusions of men upon his epistolary reveries. “As lovely a Sabbath day beams upon us this morning, my darling, as is ever the good fortune of mortals to witness. It is bright, cool, and bracing. Of late, we’ve had fine rains, there is no dust and the fields are putting on a fresh suit of velvet green.” One can almost picture Edgeworth, settling into this pastoral rhythm, preparing himself for a long, letter-sponsored daydream of home. His own words begin to lift him, transport him to some spring meadow near his house in Hancock County, itself resplendent in a suit of velvet green. He puts his back against a familiar tree…he laces his fingers behind his head… and soon… he is drifting… drifting… And then, just like the man in the meadow, Edgeworth is suddenly startled from his reverie—the wind has shifted over the meadow, bringing with it the telltale odor of some nearby cow pasture. “The strong passions of men sweep like a desolating sirocco over all this… beauty,” he wrote his wife peevishly, “and there is no pleasure, no peace.” For James Williams, it was not pipe smoke or a “desolating sirocco” that cramped his epistolary pleasure but the constant teasing at the hands of his “comrades.” “They make so much fun of me for writing so often to you,” he wrote his wife, “that I sometimes do it almost on the sly: taking time when Col. Cayce is absent, or spreading out some report before me, that I might appear to be copying.”24
Even if time and materials could be found, a man needed someone to write to. Letters to and from fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers were important, but it was the exchanges with a sweetheart that fired a man’s self-belief. His love for her was the foundation on which he could build and rebuild his love of country; his all-consuming belief in her provided the sacred space in which he could surrender and reclaim his soul, remembering himself and the reasons for which he fought. But what could a man do if he had no sweetheart? How could he fire his patriotism and steady his arm if he had no woman to anchor and make meaningful his many sacrifices? The case of John Floyd King (known by his middle name) and Lin Caperton illustrates the lengths to which a man would go to find a female focus for his war effort. Floyd met Lin while attending school in Virginia. Their courtship was perfectly typical up to a point, progressing easily along a trajectory that had launched many a successful Victorian marriage. Floyd requested permission from Lin’s father to write to her, didn’t exactly get it, but wrote her anyway; they exchanged photographs; and finally Floyd confessed his love for her in the parlor of the Caperton’s Elmswood plantation. The problem, though, was that Lin was quite young, had grown to know Floyd as a family friend, was somewhat confused when his affections turned so grave, and would probably have agreed with her father when he noted that she was too young even to know her own head aright.25
It was at this point, while Lin did not know her own head aright, that Floyd was swept into the army. There Lin became the center of his world. “The severities of the service softened by your influence are by no means unpleasant now,” he wrote in one of his weekly letters, “and my duties no matter how irksome, when I think of you pass off as lightly as possible.” “You and you alone engage my thoughts and the tenderest of my heart’s joys,” he noted in another. “Of you and you only…can I think, and dream, and live.” Lin’s letters to Floyd were more cautious, tepid. She could not return his love, she said, but she did appreciate it. “I know myself too well not at least to respect the love of your very generous heart,” she told him. Even while respecting his heart, however, she sought to deflate it a little, as if it was some beautiful balloon, risen to dizzying heights on nothing but air. “Tis your own goodness… that can ascribe to me qualities which I regret sadly not to possess,” she informed him, “but I will say nothing more upon this subject tho’ I do feel so deeply.”26
Lin’s demure responses only complicated an already confusing situation for Floyd. Floyd claimed that his affection for Lin was perfectly “celestial.” Undoubtedly it was. But his missives also contain some rather earthy overtones. “I shudder! lest my love, in the innocence of its nudity, may press too much upon you,” he wrote Lin in one letter. “I cannot resist making [confessions of love] whenever I commence writing you,” he told her in another. “My pent-up emotions, always pressing to be relieved, rush to my pen, the moment I give them the slightest opportunity.” Floyd was not aware of these overtones, of course. He would himself have been rather shocked at the nudity rushing in on his celestial Lin. His was a torrential prose style; the words came in an ecstatic surge, undisciplined and unself-conscious. What was this thing that had seized him? He seemed powerless to stop it, powerless to explain it. Even when he tried, he seemed only able to pair his own inconsistencies with the word yet. “My heart is so full I do not know what to say, yet I am urged by a resistless desire to express myself.” “How tiresome my confessions must be to you!… I feel it, yet I cannot resist.” “I cannot see why I had any hope of your returning my affections and yet I would think you cruel if you did not.” “I would do all, yet I dare not know what to do to win your heart. Can you not tell me?” But Lin could not tell him. There was after all nothing to tell. She did not love him. And yet… How could this be? She had become everything to Floyd. “Through vicissitudes and through grief,” he wrote her, “through the din of cities and through the pleasures of home; through the changes of traveling by land and by sea; through the duties of garrisons and the long fatigue of marches; through the rain and cold of the midnight watch, through the camp and through disease, and through death I have ever loved you constantly, and with my whole heart!” The Confederacy could not warm him in the snow; slavery could not give him a reason to march; honor could not explain disease or death. Lin explained the war to Floyd; she made sense of it. He was fighting for her. “My devotion to you is based upon my love of country,” he confessed, “for were it to be conquered, and disgraced, with what power, or with what conscience could I come forward to claim your hand? A degraded soldier I would seek obscurity in some distant hemisphere, never forgetting you, and, ever holding you dearest in my heart, I should live in the unhappy knowledge that you and my country had been taken from me by the force of arms alone.” Lin sustained Floyd’s war effort, through rain and snow, disease and death, until finally—after enough rain and snow, disease and death—she simply became his war effort.27
And it was at this point that Lin’s head righted itself, and she requested that Floyd not correspond with her anymore. Floyd was incredulous, furious—even though he had on occasion described his love for her as unrequited. “Dearest Miss Lin, my beloved, what can you mean? Have you raised me to Heaven merely to cast me out again?… Surely, surely you love me still. Oh!, I am too embittered to speak, yet I must write on.” Floyd begged her to reconsider, or to at least postpone her decision. He needed from her only a shred to hope on, but he needed that shred. “Tomorrow, our Generals say we will have a battle here,” he noted, shameless now. “What do you think will be my feelings when riding down the lines of action to be conscious that I have been discarded and disgraced for no reason by the one I love & whose honor I am fighting for?… Should some considerate ball find my heart, remember thro’ life how I have loved you.” But did he love her? Certainly he loved the opportunity she gave him to love himself, to know himself, to feel himself. And he loved the meaning she gave the war. But somewhere within his torrential prose lurked the truth. “At times when I have shut out all others save yourself from my mind,” Floyd wrote his beloved, “I wonder whether I am laboring under a mental aberration or whether my dreams are real.” Floyd did not want Lin; he wanted a dream; he wanted the version of her that helped him through the snow. What’s more, he expected her to give it to him. “I desire only to understand you,” Floyd lied, “yet I would rather remain in darkness than to be enlightened as to any conclusion of yours that would be disastrous to myself!! You see selfishness rules me still. I want you to tell me all, yet only that which is to render me happy! Oh, Miss Lin, what would life be without you? Surely it would be a day without a sun.”28
Floyd King sustained himself on a romance he in part invented. Tally Simpson, a soldier in the Third South Carolina Volunteers, sustained himself on a romance he wholly invented. Tally had been excited early in the war by the attentions paid him by women, attentions that formed no little part of his enthusiasm for the war itself. “Ladies at little stations, and even in towns and cities,” he wrote his sister of his trip to Richmond, “go up to the soldiers, any and every one, and converse with them as familiarly as old friends.” Shortly thereafter, however, Tally’s regiment settled into camp and suddenly there were no women at all, at least no available or respectable ones. His sense of womanlessness was further aggravated in 1862 when his brother and fellow volunteer Dick Simpson married and was discharged from the army due to ill health. Now trudging through the war alone, Tally became all the more envious of the married men around him, but he was himself without prospects, and camp was no place to look for a wife. “I am entirely without a gal,” he lamented. “My future is a blank, but if my life be spared and I reach home safely after peace has been declared, that blank shall be filled if there is any gal in all this big world fool enough to say y-e-s.” Tally spent some time fantasizing about this as yet faceless fool, but he needed some more fixed point on which to focus his imagination. Rained on and shot at did not mean much without a woman, and if Tally died before he found one, for what, for whom, would his life have been sacrificed?29
Finally, it was Tally’s aunt who dispelled his ennui, writing richly embroidered missives about a young woman she felt would be perfect for him if ever they met. Tally was beside himself. “Your description of Miss Fannie is truly charming,” he wrote his aunt gratefully, “and my feelings have already been enlisted in her favor. Tho you say it is impossible for me as any young man to fall in love with a girl without seeing her first…I place implicit confidence in what you say and [your letters] have created curious as well as pleasant feelings in my heart.” After a few more of his aunt’s letters, Tally owned that he had completely fallen for Fannie, a woman he had never met and never corresponded with, a woman who quite possibly didn’t know his name and quite definitely didn’t know the depths of his feelings for her. Tally’s sisters apprised him of the impropriety of loving a woman to whom he had not been introduced and questioned whether he could know her character well enough to consider bringing her into the family. None of this mattered to Tally. “I picked up a pamphlet some time ago and found a portrait of a most magnificent looking lady,” he wrote a cousin, “[and] I showed it to Harry, and he declared that it looked exactly like Miss F. I looked at it hard and studied it well. Then I cut it out and put it carefully away to look at it every now and then for my own gratification. It is before me now, and I imagine I see Miss F in all her glory.” Tally did not need an actual woman; all her quirks and faults might even have gotten in the way. What he needed was a focal point on which to specify his love for women generally—and through them his love for life. Miss Fannie suited this purpose admirably. Precisely because he did not know her, she became Everywoman, a divine amalgam of woman’s best traits. Yet precisely because she did exist, out there, somewhere, drawing her beautiful breath from a place he longed to be, she helped to anchor his dreams of outliving the war. In flying to her, he flew home, a way he could not find so easily without her. Miss Fannie was Tally’s life wish, drawing its breath from that place beyond the camps and the killing. And that was a place worth defending. “Tis woman’s influence that chastens the orator’s eloquence,” noted Tally, warming to his favorite subject, “that increases and exalts the statesman’s patriotism and compels him to exert his great intellectual powers for the promotion of the nation’s welfare. Tis her influence that nerves the arm and emboldens the heart of the warrior and causes him to give full utterance to the noble expression, ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,’ [It is sweet and seemly to die for one’s country].”30
Southern soldiers began the war with a sense of simple synonymity between their love of woman and their love of country. They were encouraged in this by period propaganda, but it was a conflation they made easily, routinely, well before the war. As this study has suggested, antebellum men were accustomed to seeing women as an essential part of the masculine enterprise; women were witnesses to male becoming, sponsors who allowed a man to feel that his acts of self-love were acts of self-sacrifice, thus bolstering his self-belief. The Civil War amplified these basic dynamics, borrowing against the enormity of death to transform Love, Sacrifice, and Belief from the merest platitudes into the constituting elements of a man’s life. The distracting mundanities of the antebellum period melted away and masculinity’s twin drives—a love to fill the heart and a bid to live forever—were renewed, reenergized, and felt, perhaps for the first time, in all their purity and power.
A Confederate’s patriotism, then, was planted in sturdy soil; his love of country was anchored in his love of woman, which was his love of self in part. Even early in the war, this cozy arrangement proved susceptible to certain pressures. Instead of facing Death, Confederates faced Inconvenience, Unpleasantness, and Discomfort, adversaries hardly more appropriate as a test of manhood than the ones they had faced in their prewar professions. As important, their comrades fortified their will to die (in maddened charges on entrenched enemies) but could not give them a reason to die. Only a woman could do this. To be sure, men understood themselves to be dying for some ideology or other, and so they were. But the meaning of that sacrifice, their emotional experience of it, was, like all men’s sacrifices, only possible because a woman bore it witness. So long as a man could see himself through the idealized eyes of a woman, he would continue to fight. If ever he could not, romance and patriotism, love of woman and love of country, might become disaggregated, and then he would be forced to choose between them.