America Aflame (50 page)

One month later, during the Christmas season, Charles J. and Isaac Tyson placed an ad in a Gettysburg newspaper: “BATTLEFIELD VIEWS: A full set of our Photographic Views of the Battle-field of Gettysburg, form a splendid gift for the Holidays.” They were among many engravers, artists, and photographers who sought to capitalize on the Gettysburg name during the Christmas shopping season.
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Walt Whitman had seen enough. One day in the fall of 1863, he viewed a line of Confederate prisoners passing up Pennsylvania Avenue under armed guard. He wrote to his mother, “Poor fellows, many of them mere lads—it brought the tears; they seemed our flesh and blood too, some wounded, all miserable in clothing.” He could no longer countenance the war no matter what the cause. Whitman's experience had taught him that war was “about nine hundred and ninety-nine parts diarrhea to one part glory; the people who like the wars should be compelled to fight them.” One night, at the home of friends, he cried out, “I say stop this war, this horrible massacre of men.” William Henry Channing, a Unitarian minister, tried to calm him down. “You are sick; the daily contact with these poor maimed and suffering men has made you sick; don't you see that the war cannot be stopped now?” When another friend added, “The issues are not settled yet; slavery is not [everywhere] abolished,” Whitman flew into a rage. “I don't care for the niggers in comparison with all this suffering and the dismemberment of the Union.” Whitman took temporary leave from his hospital and government posts and went home to Brooklyn.
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The tens of thousands of young men who died on the battlefields and in the hospitals did consecrate a new nation. It remained to be seen whether that new nation would be dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, thereby transcending the sectarian and racial prejudices of white Americans, as Lincoln hoped, or whether America reborn would assume a different character. The senselessness of war drove men to rationalize it in religious or political terms. Those who worked in the hospitals, fought on the battlefield, and grieved at home believed they worked, fought, and grieved for a cause greater than themselves. Was there a point, or a time, when the blood would overwhelm the rationalization? Walt Whitman had reached that point by the fall of 1863. So had many other Americans.

Abraham Lincoln had hoped that the blood would enable Americans to transcend their differences, that they would now unite in a nation reborn, under God, indivisible, and grounded in the truths of the founding. That time had not arrived in the fall of 1863. The New York City draft riots, the mixed responses of Union soldiers and civilians to emancipation and to the recruitment of African American troops, and the feeling among many, especially, though not exclusively, in the South, that the black man was somehow responsible for all this misery indicated that transcendence was still elusive. The words of the Declaration of Independence remained an ideal. God had not yet decided to end the conflict. The war would go on.

CHAPTER 13

A NEW NATION

RICHMOND, THE CITY OF SEVEN HILLS,
had fallen into a valley of despair. The downward spiral of Confederate military fortunes infected the capital's mood and appearance. The city government, strapped for money and overwhelmed with needs, could not keep up with basic maintenance. Infrastructure crumbled, crime escalated, the homeless population grew, prices soared, and want walked everywhere. Richmond's leading industry was health care. Every spare building became a hospital. The largest hospital, Chimborazo, named after a volcano in Ecuador for an unknown reason, sprawled over forty acres on one of Richmond's hills. Hollywood Cemetery, the city's largest burial ground, perched on another hill. Frequent discourse occurred between the two. In the early months of the war, solemn military funeral processions made their way up to Hollywood, accompanied by a brass band deserving of dead heroes. By the second year of the war, deaths escalated and the ritual ceased.

Civility, for which the Old South was allegedly famous, became another casualty of war in the Confederate capital. Consumers charged that merchants hoarded goods to drive up prices; merchants blamed currency inflation and the deteriorating distribution system; and everyone blamed the government. Confederate impressment policies exacerbated the problem as farmers hid food crops or grew less. A Louisiana farmer confessed he preferred “seeing the Yankees to seeing our cavalry.” Regardless of fault, there was genuine distress in Richmond, especially among the working class. A Richmond diarist recorded this conversation. “A poor woman yesterday applied to a merchant in Carey Street to purchase a barrel of flour. The price he demanded was $70. ‘My God!' exclaimed she, ‘how can I pay such prices? I have seven children; what shall I do?' ‘I don't know, madam,' said he, coolly, ‘unless you eat your children.'”
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Deferential women, another southern staple, could no longer defer starvation. Living without men meant living without livelihood for many women. On the morning of April 2, 1863, a group of working-class women met at a Baptist church in Richmond. Unable to feed their families, they resolved to march to the governor's mansion to seek redress. Their numbers grew as they walked, joined also by men and boys. A Richmond woman happened on the procession and asked a young girl, “Is there some celebration?” “There is,” the girl replied. “We celebrate our right to live. We are starving. As soon as enough of us get together we are going to the bakeries and each of us will take a loaf of bread. This is little enough for the government to give us after it has taken all our men.”
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The governor met with the women, expressed his sympathy, and wished them a good day. Dissatisfied with the interview, the women produced knives, hatchets, and pistols from their pocketbooks and skirts and proceeded to ransack shops within a ten-square-block area of the capitol. The women then turned their attention to the city marketplace, where a group of reserve Confederate soldiers confronted them. The rioters pulled a wagon across the street as a barricade against a possible assault from the troops. A tall, balding man in a black suit appeared and climbed onto the wagon, tossing all the coins he had into the crowd to get their attention.

Jefferson Davis glanced at the soldiers behind him and turned to the women. “We do not desire to injure anyone, but this lawlessness must stop. I will give you five minutes to disperse, otherwise you will be fired upon.” The crowd froze. After a minute or two, the captain of the reserve guard gave the order, “Load!” The women slowly left. Davis ordered the newspapers and telegraph operators to remain silent about the disturbance. The Richmond city council blamed the riot on “outsiders,” though the episode prompted them to initiate a program to provide food for the poor at the city's expense.
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“Bread riots” spread to cities across the Confederacy from the spring through the fall of 1863. When rumors of impending trouble surfaced in Mobile in September, the local newspaper assured, “There is enough food to carry army and people through to the next harvest.” Two days later, a mob surged through the streets of the city bearing signs demanding “bread or blood” and looting shops along the way.
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The desperation of the women was evident and understandable. After Greensboro, North Carolina, authorities arrested twenty armed women about to descend on city shops, Nancy Mangum, a member of the group, wrote to Governor Zebulon Vance, “A crowd of we Poor women went to Greenesborough yesterday for something to eat as we had not a mouthful meet nor bread in my house what did they do but put us in gail—I have 6 little children and my husband in the armey and what am I to do?” Other women of higher social standing understood the dilemma. Anne Morehead, relative of a former governor of the state, wrote, “I do not see how our poor women & children are to be fed, & we have so many whose husbands are now in this unholy war, & no hope of its ending shortly.”
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Poor women, it turned out, had leverage to reduce the Confederacy's ability to wage “this unholy war.” As Nancy Mangum put it to Governor Vance, “We wimen will write for our husbans to come home and help us we cant stand it.” A Georgia woman watching her daughter growing thinner and thinner, and her son crying out in hunger, wrote to her husband serving in the Army of Northern Virginia, “My dear Edward—I have always been proud of you.… I would not have you do anything wrong for the world, but before God, Edward unless yo come hom we must die.” Edward came home.
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Most letters to the front did not put the choice so starkly. Southern women were aware of society's expectations of them as uncomplaining supporters of their men regardless of the hardships they endured. They could not, however, conceal their emotions or the reality of their situation for long. Marion Fitzpatrick's wife wrote that their children went without shoes and her spinning wheel had broken down with no spare parts available. She tried to make ends meet by killing a hog, but how much of it she should sell, and when, she was uncertain. Her husband could not help. “I am at a loss how to advise you about anything now. Just do the best you can.” When she wrote of her loneliness and of how difficult it was to manage a household and a farm, he replied, “You must cheer up and hope for brighter days.” The letters gnawed at him. He was helpless. As a man, he should be there to support his family. And he missed them terribly. When his wife wrote that their young son cried out for him, he wept.
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Most rural southern women, regardless of class, lived with a sense of foreboding as the war progressed. Deserters and Union armies raided farms. Despite all the brave talk about loyal slaves, women on plantations worried about their safety. Mary Chesnut wrote of her butler, “He looks over my head—he scents freedom in the air.” As for the other slaves, “They go about in their black masks, not a ripple or an emotion showing—and yet on all other subjects except the war they are the most excitable of all races.” Another plantation mistress admitted she was “always thankful, when morning comes, that the house has not been fired during the night.”
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The volume of correspondence from southern women encouraging desertion increased as the Confederate war effort faltered and their own misery increased. Several weeks after the fall of Richmond in April 1865, a young man came across a bag in the city's post office crammed with undelivered letters. The vast majority of the correspondence came from women urging men to desert.
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The Union army experienced desertion as well. The difference, however, was that the Federals could easily replace a departed soldier. Soldiers extended their furloughs, disappeared, walked home, or were simply unaccounted for among the numerous anonymous battlefield and hospital deaths. The number accelerated in 1863. An estimated hundred thousand Rebel soldiers were absent without official leave by the end of the war. In Alabama, ten thousand armed deserters roamed the northern part of the state. Similar groups existed in Tennessee and North Carolina. Slaves hid deserters, as did wives and extended families. Confederate authorities resorted to brutal interrogations to pry information on the whereabouts of deserters. In North Carolina, Colonel Alfred Pike described the treatment he visited upon one suspect wife, tying “her thumbs together behind her back & suspending her with a cord tied to her two thumbs thus fastened behind her to a limb so that her toes could just touch the ground.… I think [then] she told some truth.” So much for chivalry.
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Women responded to shortages and inflation in ways other than violence. A vigorous barter system emerged. Sorghum substituted for molasses and sugar. Rye, wheat, and peanuts comprised a coffee substitute. Women learned to cure bacon with ashes instead of salt. In an unintentional upgrade, families replaced calomel (basically mercury) as a standard medicine with roots and herbs from the forests. Straw and palmetto became raw materials for hats. As the weather turned colder in the fall of 1863, women lined their old dresses with rags and newspapers to keep the wind out.

Creativity could only go so far. Middle-class women did not typically participate in the bread riots, but everywhere in the urban South, merchants reported an alarming rise in shoplifting. Others sought to drown out the deprivation and death by partying. Kate Cumming reported that her brother, on furlough in Mobile for a week in early 1864, attended a party every night. The
Richmond Enquirer
in February 1864 noted disapprovingly that the city seemed to be a “carnival of unhallowed pleasure” and condemned these “shameful displays of indifference to national calamity.” The festivities could only mask the reality temporarily. In early 1864, a Confederate official informed Jefferson Davis that civilian “deaths from starvation have absolutely occurred.”
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Not all southern women turned away from the war. Phoebe Yates Pember, a young widow from a prominent southern Jewish family, served as chief matron for Richmond's vast Chimborazo Hospital. She wrote to her sister Eugenia, “The feeling here against Yankees exceeds anything I could imagine.” She related the conversation at an evening gathering of women. “One lady said she had a pile of Yankee bones lying around her pump so that the first glance on opening her eyes would rest upon them. Another begged me to get her a Yankee skull to keep her toilette trinkets in.” Pember told the women she was fortunate “at being born of a nation and a religion that did not enjoin forgiveness on its enemies, that enjoyed the blessed privilege of praying for an eye for an eye.… I proposed that till the war is over they should all join the Jewish Church, let forgiveness and peace and good will alone, and put their trust in the sword of the Lord and Gideon.”
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By early 1864, there were fewer signs of bravado among southern civilians. A woman wrote to the
Montgomery
(Ala.)
Advertiser
in June 1864 that during the early months of the war women had rivaled “the other sex in patriotic devotion,” but “Oh what a falling off is there!… The Aid Societies have died away.… The self-sacrifice has vanished; wives and maidens now labor only to exempt husbands and lovers from the perils of service.” “The Confederacy!” Emily Harris confided to her diary in 1864, “I almost hate the word.”
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Life was different in the North. Walt Whitman had spent the better part of eighteen months shuttling from his office to hospitals in Washington. Heading back to Brooklyn in November 1863 on his self-imposed furlough, he quickly left the war behind. Passing through Baltimore and Philadelphia, he marveled at the scenes out his train window. “It looks anything else but war, everybody well dressed, plenty of money, markets boundless & the best, factories all busy.”
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When Whitman stepped out of his rail car in Manhattan, the pace of the city nearly overwhelmed him. Southerners had predicted that the loss of the cotton trade would beggar New York. The city scarcely missed a beat. Shipyards boomed, building vessels for the naval blockade. Local contractors and manufacturers supplied the army. Brooks Brothers, a Manhattan clothier already notable for its ready-made clothing, won a contract to provide twelve thousand blue uniforms at $19.20 apiece in four sizes for the state's soldiers. The sewing machines of Elias Howe and Isaac Singer mechanized the garment trade. Shoemaking machines allowed manufacturers to produce several hundred shoes a day instead of the few finished by hand. The city's railroad companies handled record shipments of grain from the West, sending manufactured goods back in the other direction. Crop failures in Europe and the feeding of one million soldiers spurred a lively grain trade. New York became the export center for petroleum, a new industry that emerged after the discovery of oil at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. Thousands of northern families lit their homes with kerosene lamps during the war, a marked improvement over other forms of illumination such as candles and whale oil. “There never was a time in the history of New York when business prosperity was more general,” the
New York Sun
boasted in early 1865.
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Cyrus McCormick, the Virginian who revolutionized wheat harvests with his mechanical reaper, moved his factory to Chicago before the war. Taking advantage of greater proximity to wheat and the skilled labor and technology to build his machines, he could not turn out reapers fast enough once the war began. Farmers all over the Midwest, buoyed by the high prices of grains and short of labor, mechanized their operations, gaining efficiency and volume. The nation, including the South, produced 173 million bushels of wheat in 1859. In 1862, the northern states alone exceeded that total.

Had Whitman visited Chicago, he would have seen the western version of New York's energy. The crop bonanza, the need to feed a large army—the beginning of the city's reputation as “hog butcher of the world”—and the line of boxcars heading east generated a construction boom. Chicago shipped twice as much grain and meat east in 1862 as it did in 1860. The
Chicago Tribune
reported, “On every street and avenue one sees new building going up: immense stone, brick, and iron business blocks, marble palaces and new residences everywhere.… The unmistakable signs of active, thriving trade are everywhere manifest.” Men became wealthy overnight. One enterprising young man, Philip Armour, became a millionaire selling pork to the army.
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