Upon the Altar of the Nation (21 page)

A Geography for Beginners
articulated the just cause of the war and its divine destiny:

Beyond patriotic pride and celebration of leaders, the texts offered little moral commentary on the war. Military themes and history predominated. For example, children learned math by computing company and brigade size and armaments. The
Dixie Speller
explained to its young readers that “[a] Battery is used in war to protect the gunners.
Cavalry
are soldiers who fight on horseback, and
infantry
are those who travel on foot.” The effect, as the historian Rachel Stillman has pointed out, was to “emphasize the manhood, bravery, loyalty and sometimes the invincibility of Confederate soldiers.”
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Although patriotism dominated commentary on the war in Confederate textbooks, moral commentary did appear in two forms. The first was unstinting loyalty to Christian orthodoxy as the foundation of the nation. Children were enjoined to read the Bible as the inspired Word of God and to have daily devotions. “Bible morality” became the watchword for daily behavior and the Ten Commandments were recited in classrooms daily. Mathematics textbooks included exercises utilizing Bible texts and chapters.
¹⁷

The second moral theme developed in Confederate texts was the rightness of slavery. Children would be taken through the same Bible texts adult theologians argued to justify biblical precedents for the institution. But alongside these standard defenses and denigration of abolitionists were en-joinders to treat the slaves as human beings with moral dignity. God would not rain defeat on the Confederate cause for slavery, but He would punish the South if they refused to see His image in the slaves’ souls.

Marinda B. Moore’s
Primary Geography
insisted that slavery was not sinful, as the North wrongly claimed, but that the slaves’ common humanity needed to be respected: “Let all the little boys and girls remember that slaves are human, and that God will hold them to account for treating them with injustice.”
¹⁸
Texts told stories of slaves who were “liberated” by Union soldiers only to return to the safety and security of their masters. This happened, children learned, because good masters treated their slaves well and took care of them. Children too must be “kind” to their “servants” or God would hold them accountable.

Ironically, amid all the defenses of slavery in white textbooks, the Civil War marked one of the first times that Southern educators talked seriously about educating blacks. Ministers—especially Baptist ministers—pushed their conventions to pass resolutions that would promote the repeal of laws banning slave literacy. To this end, the resolutions would encourage church members to urge their legislators in that direction. Clearly worried that God’s favor depended on just treatment of the slaves, Confederate moralists sought to expand slaves’ opportunities in ways that would encourage God to smile on His Confederacy In so doing, proslavery leaders recognized they needed to appear more humanitarian in the eyes of a larger world—especially Britain.

Among Presbyterians, the moderator of the Southern Presbyterian Assembly, James A. Lyon, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Columbus, Mississippi, placed at the top of his priorities “a manifesto on slavery and the religious instruction of negroes.” Though emphatically proslavery, Lyon was intent on reforming the institution, particularly in regard to education. He even went so far as to recommend mixing whites and blacks in existing public schools. Although his clerical peers supported him in the general assembly, the laity balked and the reforms were put on hold.
¹⁹
The laity understood only too well what they were fighting for, and it was not to affirm the humanity of the Negro.

Clearly Northern and Southern children could have been spared the raw details of battles. Neither did they have to wallow in pools of patriotic romanticization. But this war would rapidly become a total war, and that dictated that children, no less than adults, would experience it directly. It also required that restraining moral considerations not be allowed to silence the drumbeat for ever-greater battles, and glory for all.

 

Throughout the war much of the child-rearing and household maintenance fell perforce on the women. As accounts of battles reached every town and city, the pressures on the home front could prove intolerable. Historians are only now comprehending and chronicling the toll on wives and children. In her December 1861 letter to her husband, George Frederick, Nancie Jourdan included entries from her diary to convey to him the effects of war at home:

The toll was equally steep, and far more direct, in the South, where rich and poor women alike suffered. The derogatory term “refugee” was first applied to wealthy planters who, when faced with invading Federals, fled with their slaves, sacrificing patriotism for possessions. But soon the term took on a more gendered meaning as the majority of dispossessed were female. Although often resented for their class and aristocratic attitudes toward work and station, many women were left penniless and forced to throw themselves on the mercy of the state.
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An especially poignant window into white Southern women’s experience in the Civil War are the letters from them seeking employment with the Confederate States Treasury office “for signing and numbering Confederate notes.”
²²
Applicants were instructed to write to Christopher Gustavus Memminger, secretary of the Confederate Treasury, with assurances that priority would be given to those with the greatest need (and acceptable handwriting).

In a letter to Treasury Secretary Memminger seeking employment with the agency, L. E. Hughes captured the plight of rearing children with a husband in the field:

Many of these letters describe the immediate suffering imposed by the loss of a husband or sons. On October 3, 1862, Eugenia Hyde wrote: “I am a widow, with three sons in the army, and finding that a prolonged exile has contracted seriously my former income, I venture to apply for a situation as clipper of Treasury notes, such as I understand you have already bestowed on many in similar circumstances.” An accompanying letter of reference from George Woodbridge read: “Mrs. Hyde is a lady of great worth and excellence of character. She belongs to the old Fairfax family, one of the first families in the state. Her home has been entirely destroyed by the enemy, and her three sons now in the war, are unable to render her any assistance. If there be a situation to confer upon any lady now, it could not be conferred upon one more deserving or more destitute.”
²⁴

From many of the petitions it is clear that the war devastated all ranks of Southern society However much troops might complain about a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” there was more than enough suffering among all classes. When Mary Gifford applied for work with the department, her reference, W. M. Tucker, told the following story:

Husbands in the field often complained about the delays or infrequency of letters from home. When placed in the context of Southern petitioners it becomes clear that the war had become as much a war of civilian suffering as military. The same was true in the North. Assuming that 30 percent of Union and Confederate soldiers were married, the number of women widowed by the war would be at least 108,000. Still, the momentum for war ran strong in the civilian populations as both the North and the South contributed and received patriotic reinforcements on all sides.
²⁶

If women at home were praised for their virtue, women on the other side were villanized even more than the men. This was particularly true of Southern women who far more frequently came into direct contact with enemy soldiers. When not excoriating soldiers’ sins in the South, many Northern moralists fixed a damning eye on Southern women. In a sermon delivered on the anniversary of the surrender of Fort Sumter, Henry Ward Beecher seared the Confederate woman:

The exalted role of woman provided a powerful national emblem or symbol in both the North and the South (as did the denigration of the enemy’s women). A column for the New York Times on “The Women and the War” opened:

The same editorial accused the women of the South of “amazing ferocity and bitterness,” and traced it to the same source:

E
ven as soldiers, statesmen, mothers, and children geared for a rapidly escalating war, artists were more than willing to lend their hands to the cause. The arts proved as captive to the war as print and oratory, and they were boxed in the same rhetorical traps. In both the North and the South, music had long thrived. So a citizens’ war was inevitably a patriotic musical war on the battlefront no less than the home front. Lydia Maria Child, the staunch abolitionist and writer, recognized that “nothing on earth has such effect on the popular heart as Songs, which the soldiers would take up with enthusiasm, and which it would thereby become the fashion to whistle and sing.... Old John Brown, Hallelujah is performing a wonderful mission now.”
¹

In his history of music in the North, Kenneth A. Bernard estimates that during the first year alone, at least two thousand compositions were produced, and “by the end of the war more music had been created, played, and sung than during all our other wars combined.”
²
Despite Southern shortages of paper and printers, this was as true in the South as in the North. Patriotic songs aligned martial spirit and sectional loyalties to become anthems of war. In the North, “Hail, Columbia,” “Yankee Doodle,” the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and Henry C. Work’s “Marching through Georgia” would give voice to the Union cause. In the South, it would be Daniel Emmett’s “Dixie,” “Maryland,” and Harry Macarthy’s “Bonnie Blue Flag.”