Embattled Courage

The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War

Gerald Linderman

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781439118573
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Linderman traces each soldier's path from the exhilaration of enlistment to the disillusionment of battle to postwar alienation. He provides a rare glimpse of the personal battle that raged within soldiers then and now.

ONE
Courage’s War

1 Courage at the Core

A young private of the Richmond Howitzers, Carlton McCarthy,⁷ recognized immediately how the soldier was expected to bear himself in the Civil War: “In a thousand ways he is tried … every quality is put to the test. If he shows the least cowardice he is undone. His courage must never fail. He must be manly and independent.”¹

Numberless other soldiers joined Carlton McCarthy in filling their journals, their letters home, and their memoirs with the moral values they knew to be at issue in the conflict between North and South: manliness, godliness, duty, honor, and even—among the best-educated on both sides—knightliness. At their center stood courage.

Such words often seem irrelevant to contemporary thought. Americans continue to invoke “honor” and “courage” on ceremonial occasions—the Fourth of July, perhaps Memorial Day—but do so with a sense that they are not terms with which we need contend in our daily lives. When they are employed by a government agency, a specialized group, or others who would enlist them in behalf of their limited enterprises, we are often skeptical of their appropriation. The terms retain their old aura of importance, but their meanings seem elusive and their usages vaguely discredited. On the eve of the Civil War, however, Americans had hardly begun to confront the industrial transformation that would enlarge experience, multiply the categories of knowledge, and introduce processes requiring behaviors so much more complex that the older, obvious line separating the “right” and the “wrong” would grow indistinct. Prior to the rush of moral relativism that followed in the wake of industrialization and urbanization, conduct remained subject to standards both broad and precise, measures of comportment thought as easily applicable to the pursuits of war as to those of peace.

The constellation of values in 1861, with courage at its center, was not a perfect circle. Not all other values were equidistant from courage. Some stood very close and were almost identical with courage; others were distant and shared with courage only one or two components. But they all served, albeit in varying degrees, to support in the mind of the volunteer soldier the centrality of courage.

Manliness was only slightly removed from courage. Indeed, many soldiers used “courage” and “manhood” interchangeably. A Georgia soldier found in the “grand-glorious” sight of Tennessee regiments intrepidly repulsing Sherman’s attack at Kennesaw Mountain “the sublimity of manhood.” A Texas private, disappointed at his failure to act courageously in the field at Gettysburg, spoke plaintively of his efforts “to force manhood to the front.” Many soldiers called combat the test of manhood. They often spoke of courage as the “manliest” of virtues. In corroboration, the 1861 edition of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language identified as virtues “much valued” by Americans, “chastity in females” and “bravery in men.” A failure of courage in war was a failure of manhood. A Union staff officer warned that cowardice robbed the soldier of all his manhood. Another Federal apologized for his pusillanimity at Antietam with the statement that it had been the only battlefield “I could not look at without being unmanned.”²

In the minds of numerous Civil War soldiers the connection between courage and godliness was almost as intimate as that between courage and manliness. Many thought of their faith as a special source of bravery; religious belief would itself endow one with courage. Such conviction especially permeated the more homogeneous Confederate armies, whose largely Protestant rank-and-file noted that those of their commanders whose spirituality was most ardent were those who possessed, in the words of a Southern artilleryman, “the most intense spirit of fight.”³ Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and J. E. B. Stuart, with their fervor for combat and their equanimity under fire, seemed to demonstrate that God bestowed courage directly on those of great faith.

Others’ courage might be enhanced obliquely via a related conviction that God protected those who believed in Him. Many a soldier was certain, in the words of a South Carolinian, that God’s “unseen hand” had carried him safely through a furious battle. A Louisiana sergeant, Edwin Fay, the target of Federal balls that narrowly missed, did not “believe a bullet can go through a prayer,” for faith is a “much better shield than … steel armor.” The common understanding was that the more complete the soldier’s faith, the greater would be God’s care. Perfect faith seemed to offer the possibility of perfect safety. If only my comrades and I possessed Stonewall Jackson’s faith, a Confederate reasoned, we would find it unnecessary to give thought to our personal safety.⁴

Such conviction of God’s direct interposition was itself an inducement to courage, for soldiers agreed that a prime enemy of courage in battle was the apprehension rooted in fear for one’s safety. Accordingly, it was common to find in both armies on the eve of battle numbers of men who sought to shore up their courage by attempting to reinforce their religious faith. George Armstrong Custer was one who felt that by professing his belief he consigned himself to God’s keeping. His anxiety, he wrote his wife, Libbie, was thereby dispelled. Because his fate thenceforth rested “in the hands of the Almighty,” he was made brave.⁵ One could not always tell, of course, if one’s faith were sufficient to ensure survival, but with the outcome resting with God, soldiers felt relieved of a burden that would otherwise inhibit heroic action. “Leave all to Him” was a formula on which many drew for battle; courage.

Those of less substantial faith often promised greater attentiveness to religious prescriptions in return for divine protection. Bargaining with God, soldiers approaching battle threw away their decks of cards and vowed that if they were allowed to live they would never again gamble or utter a profane word or smoke a pipe, that they would control their tempers or carry to the spring all their comrades’ canteens or share food with others or go to services or live moral lives or declare publicly for Christ or become ministers.⁶

Godliness bore not only on individual survival but on the outcome of battles. A conviction of wide currency was that God would ensure the victory of the army whose collective faith was sturdiest, a notion requiring no complex extension of logic. As William Poague, an officer in Virginia’s Rockbridge Artillery, expressed it, he and most of his men had placed themselves in God’s hands: While “the good Lord [shields] our heads in the hour of peril,” the Confederates would be wounding and killing Yankees, making inevitable the enemy’s defeat on the field. Indeed, soldiers on both sides professed confidence that the benefactions of godliness would manifest themselves on every social level—that the faithful soldier would survive combat; that the army of greatest faith would win the battle at hand; that the cause whose adherents possessed the faith indomitable would prevail in the war. When at the battle of Stone’s River Federal troops realized that the Confederates had begun to retreat, a member of the 64th Ohio began to sing the Doxology. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow” was taken up first by his comrades, then by the regiment, and then ran up and down the line.⁷

As courage and godliness were linked, so were cowardice and disbelief. The Catholic chaplain of the 14th Louisiana was convinced that none were more cowardly than those who failed to renew their faith and relieve themselves of mortal sin by taking the sacraments prior to battle. A Protestant soldier of the 47th Illinois was equally certain that the Bible enjoined courage: The soldier’s “standard of manhood is high, and he found it in the Book his mother gave him: ‘If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy faith is small.’” Such thought found a deft summation in the words of George Gary Eggleston, who, though Indiana born, fought for the Confederacy. Cowardice, he said, “is the one sin which may not be pardoned either in this world or the next.” In the mind of the soldier, godliness sustained courage and victory; doubt underwrote cowardice and defeat.⁸

Duty would seem a value more comprehensive than courage, but that inclusiveness denied it the focus and force of courage as a prescription for behavior in war. A precise definition of duty is difficult. Civil War soldiers, particularly those of officer rank, spoke as if they knew their duty, but they seldom felt it necessary to discuss or dissect it. They most often referred to duty to country, but generally the objects and the degrees of obligation remained elusive. Webster’s 1861 dictionary identified duty as “that which a person is bound to pay, do or perform,” but to whom or to what? Duty to God? To the Northern or Southern cause? To the Union or Confederate government? To one’s unit, the regiment? To one’s comrades? To one’s family at home? There had been in the American experience no encounter with feudalism, and thus there remained at mid-century not even a residue of a hierarchy of duties. The prewar period, moreover, had been a time of expansive individualism, and duty was one of those categories in which individual definitions varied—and prevailed. Though men felt duty’s weight, its nature remained amorphous. What emerged, however, was an impetus to persist—to remain at soldiering, to continue to heed combat orders, to persevere in battle. Whatever the individual might conceive to be the object of his duty, the principal way to satisfy it was to act courageously. As the Brahmin Stephen Minot Weld made clear when, wrestling with prebattle suspense, he conceded that “I had all I could do to keep myself up to my duty,” actions that met duty’s demands also met the claims of courage.⁹

Honor too yielded to the centrality of courage but was of a still different quality. Courage, as we shall see, possessed clear definition, but within the meaning of honor—as within duty’s—there were broad areas of intangibility, at least to the mind of the twentieth-century observer. The compilers of Webster’s dictionary, failing—or perhaps assuming it unnecessary—to define honor, instead described it. The most important of the fourteen annotations they devoted to it represented honor as “True nobleness of mind; magnanimity; dignified respect for character, springing from probity, principle, or moral rectitude; a distinguishing trait in the character of good men.” While courage had to be demonstrated, honor did not. Notions of honor so suffused the opening of the war that the honorable nature of the soldier—especially the Northern and Southern volunteers of 1861-62—was widely assumed. In the works of the South’s writer-soldier John Esten Cooke, participation in the war was held to be in itself a mark of honor. An accompanying assumption, held most prominently by those in command positions, was that the forthcoming conflict would in its essence be a contest between gentlemen. Such convictions created for the soldier a task unlike that imposed by the requisites of courage. Assumed to be honorable, he had to act so as to escape any imputation of dishonor. It was not a simple matter; one risked dishonor in many ways—by employing coarse language, by exhibiting disrespect for women, by dropping from the line of march—but by far the gravest lapses—fleeing from battle, for example—were those that revealed cowardice. Thus the single most effective prescription for maintaining others’ assumption that one was a man of honor was to act courageously. Seldom could the soldier with a reputation for courage be thought dishonorable, so incompatible did those traits seem. Perfect courage was thus the best guarantor of an honorable reputation.¹⁰

The linkage between honor and courage manifested itself in Civil War soldiers’ frequent references to the “honorable death”—inevitably the courageous death—and the “honorable wound”—inevitably suffered in the course of courageous action.

Wounded at Ball’s Bluff, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., contemplated with joyful pride the prospect of dying a “soldier’s death.”¹¹ The soldier’s desire to uphold his society’s values shines forth in such responses, especially when the honorable wound is contrasted with the “million-dollar wound” so prominently referred to during World War II. Clearly, Civil War soldiers gave highest importance to the context in which the wound was sustained, whereas the twentiety-century soldier first measured its severity—serious enough to require evacuation home, not so serious as to kill or disable permanently. The former was prized as a badge of honor and the latter, in a war of vastly different combat experience and broader-based armies less susceptible to middle-class values, as a passport from jeopardy.

Honor more than other values within the soldier’s moral constellation possessed aspects that did not attach themselves to courage but were nevertheless critical to the good soldier—the sanctity of one’s word of honor, for example. That it should so frequently have been offered with good intent and accepted by others without suspicion struck close to how nineteenth-century Americans thought of themselves. Today it seems remarkable that they so trusted the personal pledges of others—enemies in war—that they would build on that confidence arrangements critical to the war effort. Prisoners of war, for example, were often paroled pending exchange. Ulysses Grant released the Vicksburg garrison on parole. Each was liberated solely on the basis of his assurance that he would not return to soldiering until informed that a captive held by his own side had been released, freeing both to return to duty. In the interim the paroled soldier was expected to proceed on the basis of his word of honor—to go home or, in a few cases where states forbade the return of parolees, to report to one of the detention camps maintained by his own side.

After his division had led the disastrous charge at Gettysburg, George Pickett was angered by orders assigning its remnant to guard Northern prisoners, so “I instructed my Inspector-General to parole the officers and give them safeguard to return [to Northern lines], binding them to render themselves prisoners of war at Richmond if they were not duly recognized [as exchangeable] by their government.”¹² There was no mockery in the expectation that a Northern officer released in Northern territory would, if unexchanged, make his way to the enemy’s capital and report for incarceration.

Henry Kyd Douglas, a Confederate officer wounded at Gettysburg, was captured and then freed on parole. Very soon, however, he wrote to Washington, D.C., requesting outright release on grounds that a year earlier he had discharged a Union major from parole. (The major’s letter of attestation was enclosed.) But here Douglas overtaxed the bonds of trust. Washington, demurring at paroles individually negotiated, refused his request.¹³

Captain Edward Hastings Ripley and his men, part of the Union garrison at Harper’s Ferry, surrendered in September 1862 to attackers under the command of Stonewall Jackson. Jackson’s men treated the Federals “like gentlemen”—“Not by a word or expression did they give us any indications that we were captives and they the captors”—and took their paroles. Their home state, Vermont, was one of those that did not permit parolees to return home until exchanged, so Ripley’s men waited at Camp Douglas in Chicago, separated only by a partition from unparoled Southern prisoners of war and treated identically—that is, abysmally. Conditions were harsh. At least fifteen of Ripley’s company died of typhoid. The men gave vent to their wretchedness in fighting and in acts of insubordination and incendiarism, and Ripley complained of the delay in exchange, but apparently no one thought it outrageous that personal pledges should cost soldiers their freedom and expose them to severe and sometimes fatal treatment in the midst of an altogether friendly and sympathetic population. No, they had given their word, and there they remained for six months. Although such instances were rare, they do establish a willingness early in the war to endure much to uphold a conception of personal honor.¹⁴

When a “foolish” attack spurred by an overzealous color-bearer at Falling Waters, West Virginia, resulted in the capture of 735 Confederates, Wayland Dunaway of the 47th Virginia was one of the Southern officers invited to dinner by their captors, “as friendly as men who had been companions from childhood.” At its end, the guests pledged good behavior and were sent without a guard to rejoin the other prisoners. The Confederates were tempted by so easy an opportunity to escape, but “though our bodies were for the moment free, our souls were bound by something stronger than manacles of steel,—our word of honor. We groped our way back.”¹⁵

Intrinsic to a gentlemen’s war was the conviction that enemies no less than comrades merited honorable treatment. Accordingly, prisoner interrogations were gentle affairs based on the proposition that a soldier had no right to ask questions whose answers would compromise the integrity of the prisoner or damage his cause. Francis Amasa Walker, a future president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was captured by rebels during Wilderness combat in 1864. His captors were “exceedingly cordial,” so much so that he was able to escape. Swimming the Appomattox River, however, he landed among other Confederates, whose colonel aske...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Introduction
• PART ONE COURAGE’S WAR
• PART TWO A PERILOUS EDUCATION
• Epilogue
• Dramatis Personae
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index