American Experiment (154 page)

Few escaped the long reach of near-total war. Booming war industries absorbed tens of thousands of immigrants still flooding into American ports. Many thousands of women went to work in textile and other factories, hospitals, government offices, and Sanitary Commission projects in the North. During the war, it is estimated, the proportion of women in the manufacturing labor force—mainly textiles and garment-making—rose from about a quarter to at least a third. As usual, women’s wages lagged behind men’s. Toward the end of the war, a New York City woman using a sewing machine and furnishing her own thread, working fourteen hours a day, made 16 ¾ cents a day, while a male “common laborer” could make $1.25.

To the newcomers threatening their jobs—especially to immigrants and youths—white male workers reacted with fear and anger, all the more so because of the sharp decline in real wages during the war. In the first heady days, whole local unions of workers had gone off to war. “It having been resolved to enlist with Uncle Sam for the war,” the secretary of a Philadelphia local recorded in the minutes, “this union stands adjourned until either the Union is safe or we are whipped.” Later in the war, unionists were marching off to picket lines as well. Some of their strikes helped white males to keep ahead of inflation; a few were broken up by Union troops.

So feverish was much of the nation’s activity during the war, both north and south, that it spawned a grand myth: the Civil War as the economic “takeoff,” as the creator of a new industrial nation, as the “second American revolution,” as indeed “a social war,” in Charles Beard’s words, “ending in the unquestioned establishment of a new power in the government, making vast changes in the arrangement of classes, in the accumulation and distribution of wealth, in the course of industrial development, and in the Constitution inherited from the Fathers.” More sober analysis has shown that the war brought mixed and uneven development. Some economic activity was spurred, some depressed; some people’s
earnings—especially makers of war goods—rose, those of others dropped; some moneylenders prospered, most did not. On the whole, industrial capitalists thrived, finance capitalists suffered, from wartime inflation. The great decade of innovation and expansion had been that of the 1850s; in the sixties the war brought relatively few key technological advances, uneven expansion of production, but in some cases—such as boots and shoes—rapid mechanization, often involving interchangeability of parts.

Yet, about halfway through the war, the nation seemed to pass from one economic and social watershed to another. By this time—mid-1863—soldiers by the hundreds of thousands were mixing with men of different origins, backgrounds, religions; the public’s attention was riveted on a national effort as never before; newspapers were giving more attention to far-off battle actions than local dogfights. The mystic chords of union were being fashioned along the endless supply lines and battle lines, north and south. Sections of the economy were being accelerated, modernized, consolidated, if not revolutionized. Change was both slow and dynamic, always uneven and chaotic. The Confederacy experimented with various forms of state control, the North encouraged or permitted extremes of laissez-faire, including extensive private-enterprise trading across enemy lines. Perhaps if one word,
improvisation,
sums up the national effort during the first half of the war,
mobilization
sums up the second—a social and economic mobilization that had its roots in the 1850s and before, and its chief impact during the stupendous economic expansion that would come in the North after the war.

Just as old soldiers chinning in veterans’ halls would later argue which campaign or strategy had been decisive, so historians have searched for the decisive causal forces in Southern indomitableness and final Northern success. In the seamless web of history, every effort was critical. Yet some factors are more critical than others, and the supreme paradox of the Civil War is that agriculture was probably most critical. The economy was still founded on agriculture; no sector of the economy was not linked in some way with agriculture. Farm boys provided much of the soldiery on both sides, and countless farm women took their places in the fields. Farm products were still the main source of vitally needed foreign revenue. The great canal and railroad networks had been shaped to meet agricultural needs. And if agriculture was decisive positively in the North, it was negatively so in the South. The shortage of farm labor was more acute there. Unlike his Northern counterpart, the Southern farmer found labor-saving machinery cut off; so were his outlets to Europe as the Northern blockade tightened.

While the war was becoming increasingly a mobilization of men, money,
machinery, and munitions, to an astonishing degree it was finally won and lost on the grain fields of the North and the cotton fields of the South.

As for his spirits, Private John N. Moulton wrote his sister from his camp near Vicksburg early in 1863, “I cannot Boast of their being very high. There is the most down cast looking set of men here that I ever saw in my life.…” Six weeks later he felt no better. “I am lonesome and down hearted in Spite of my Self. I am tired of Blood Shed and have Saw Enough of it.”

A soldier in Nashville reflected bitterly, “When we Enthusiastically rushed into the ranks at our Country’s call, we all Expected to witness the last dying struggles of treason and Rebellion Ere this.” But his hopes had been dashed. “Over 200,000 of our noble soldiers sleep in the silent grave. Almost countless millions of treasure has been Expended in the Unsuccessful Effort of the Government to put down this Rebellion. But after all this sacrifice of valuable life and money, we are no nearer the goal…than we were at the first booming of Sumter’s guns.”

From a camp opposite Fredericksburg, M. N. Collins, a Maine officer, wrote: “The newspapers say that the army is eager for another fight; it is false; there is not a private in the army that would not rejoice to know that no more battles were to be fought. They are heartily sick of battles that produce no results.”

Soldiers railed against their leaders. The men, said Moulton, were beginning “to talk openly and to curse the officers and leaders and if the[y] go much farther I fear for the result. They are pretty well divided and nothing But fear keeps them under.…” Wrote a Maine soldier stationed in Virginia just before Christmas 1862, “All though I am wel and able to do duty I am in a very unhapy state of mind.” His “delusive fantom of hope” had at last vanished. “The great cause of liberty has been managed by Knaves and fools the whole show has ben corruption, the result disaster, shame and disgrace.” He was always ready to do his duty but “evry thing looks dark, not becaus the south are strong but becaus our leaders are incompitent and unprincipled.” A Massachusetts private wrote of “incompetent leaders & ambitious politicians.”

What were they fighting for? For Union and patriotism, but this did not seem enough. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not help most white soldiers. He was thoroughly tired of the war, a Pennsylvanian wrote in February 1863, and if he had known that the issue would become freeing the slaves, as it seemed to have become, he “would not have mingled with
the dirty job.” An Illinois soldier belittled the Administration’s yielding to radicals favoring emancipation and Negro recruiting: “I have slept on the soft side of a board, in the mud & every other place that was lousy
&
dirty … drunk out of goose ponds, Horse tracks &c for the last 18 months, all for the poor nigger, and I have yet to see the first one that I think has been benefited by it.” Other soldiers’ comments on emancipation were even harsher.

If most Southern soldiers were fighting against emancipation, and few Northern men fully supported it, black people north and south were enlisted in the struggle, and on both sides. The drain of white manpower to the front made Southern agriculture heavily dependent on slave labor, while nearly 180,000 former slaves enlisted in the Union armies. Organized into separate “Colored” regiments officered mostly by whites, the black soldiers appeared to suffer fewer morale problems than whites—doubtless because they saw their stake in the outcome more clearly. “When God made me, I wasn’t much,” one black recruit said, “but I’s a man now.”

Many white soldiers desperately sought a way out. Some shot off their toes or trigger fingers, until discharges were no longer given to self-maimers. Others hoped for a compromise peace, any kind of peace that would enable them to go home. Even in his regiment, out only five months, wrote a Massachusetts man, “I don’t believe there are twenty men but are heartily sick of war & want to go home.” Wrote the Nashville soldier: “Many of the boys here are in favor of a Compromise, some are of the opinion that the Southern Confederacy will soon be recognized by the U.S. Alas! for our beloved Republic!”

Just about the time this Yankee in Nashville was exhibiting his brand of defeatism, a Confederate soldier from Alabama was displaying his. “If the soldiers were allowed to settle the matter,” John Crittenden wrote his wife, “peace would be made in short order.” On the average, Confederate spirits were probably a bit higher than Unionist, but from the early flush days of martial ardor and Southern pride, morale fell as the months and years passed. A Georgian home on sick leave wrote his brother that if he did not receive a third extension of his furlough he would stay home anyway. “There is no use fighting any longer no how,” he wrote, “for we are done gon up the Spout the Confederacy is done whiped it is useless to deny it any longger.” The men from North Carolina, another Georgian wrote his wife from his post with Lee’s army, were threatening to rejoin the Union and “the men from Ga say that if the enemy invade Ga they are going home….” Perhaps the worst blows to Confederate morale came from wives’ letters telling of hunger and cold at home.

How to persuade such men to reenlist when their terms expired?
President Davis and other leaders visited the camps to boost morale. Grand parades and even sham battles were held, patriotic speeches intoned. While a conscription law was ultimately passed, compelling reenlistment, some officers wanted to carry on the spirit of volunteerism. A favorite stratagem, Bell Wiley found, was to assemble men for dress parade, deliver a patriotic speech, move the Stars and Bars up a few paces ahead, and then urge all the patriots in the ranks to step up to the colors and reenlist for the duration. Few could resist such blandishments—but many regretted their action later.

On both sides it was the wretched life in camp, rather than the days of combat, that crushed soldierly spirit. For most soldiers the Civil War was both an organized and a disorganized bore. Days of dull routine, during which the men could at least build tiny nests of creature comforts, were punctuated by sudden and often inexplicable departures, followed usually by long marches to a new camp and the old tedium. Rain was the enemy—rain that seeped through tent sides and shed roofs, turned campgrounds into quagmires, penetrated every boot and uniform. A Union colonel, John Beatty, recited the daily routine of his camp—and of all camps: reveille at five, breakfast call at six, surgeon’s call at seven, drill at eight, recall at eleven, dinner at twelve, drill again at four, recall at five, guard mounting at five-thirty, first call for dress parade at six, second call at six-thirty, tattoo at nine, taps at nine-thirty. “So the day goes round.”

Soldiers occupied their spare hours in time-honored ways: grumbling, gambling, sleeping, reading, foraging, cleaning equipment, washing clothes. Confederate men, it was said, had a special love for singing. Eating was another diversion, but not a very pleasant one. During the early years of the war, soldiers lived mainly on the old army ration of salt pork or beef, hard bread or hardtack, coffee, dried peas or beans, and in the South, grits. Hardtack was a grim joke; it could hardly be broken by teeth or hand, and was best mastered by soaking in soup or water. Especially in the North, as the Union commissary became better organized, the old rations were supplemented with vegetables and fruit. After authorities sent appeals throughout the Northwest for food to prevent scurvy, hundreds of barrels of vegetables, jellies, and dried fruit were soon on their way down the Mississippi to Grant’s regiments. Both Yanks and Rebs lived off the country, picking berries in season, stealing from orchards and gardens, buying from the ever-present sutlers. Cooking was often improvised.

Improvising, indeed, was the test of the good soldier—resourcefulness in adjusting to new conditions, ingeniously rigging up devices for keeping warm, cooking food, procuring clean water, washing clothes, warding off
insects. He was a jack-of-all-trades, mending his clothes, tending to horses, cutting wood, digging fortifications, rigging up shelters, keeping his rifle clean by greasing it with a piece of bacon. Sometimes he had to rise to heights of inventiveness, as when Pennsylvania volunteers ran an entire mining operation, from surveying the ground to setting the charges, or when other infantrymen—mostly landlubbers—took over an enemy riverboat and ran it.

The army, above all, was a school for practical affairs, where men learned the arts of survival through organization, self-discipline, leadership, followership, collective and cooperative effort. The war had an immense nationalizing and homogenizing impact, bringing together not only Westerners and Easterners but farmers and industrial workers, teachers and storekeepers, college students and common laborers. The war was a geography lesson in which men from Maine occupied islands off Texas, men from Florida marched through the fields of Pennsylvania, men from New Orleans discovered snow and snowballs. The war was a regional exchange in which accents, attitudes, habits collided, coexisted, even coalesced. To a degree the war was a leveling process, though racial and class conflicts persisted and occasionally erupted. Ultimately habits and outlooks were reshaped that would prove indispensable in the organization of the nation’s industrial and financial life in later years. Future workshops of peace were being shaped in the workshops of war.