Hatred of Yankees helped keep Rebels fighting on.
Eighteen-year-old Robert W. Banks worried about doing his duty. He seemingly had every reason to fight to preserve slavery as well. His father, a wealthy Mississippi attorney and planter, owned 78 bondspeople. When he wrote to his father after the Battle of Shiloh about joining the army, he said little about his country or honor, and nothing about his wealth, the family’s slaves or women. Instead, the young student stressed the reality that Union troops had crossed the border into Mississippi and were approaching his Columbus home. Given that invasion and the dark character of those carrying it out, it was time for him to join the army. ‘‘ ‘Our own Sunny South,’ ’’ he proclaimed with the oratory of a collegiate debating society, ‘‘with all her flourishing institutions of a short time back is now in a perilous condition—about to be overrun by a merciless and implacable foe, and ’tis the duty of every ‘freedom loving’ son of hers to rally to her rescue, and drive the hireling invador back, or nobly perish in the attempt, as did many a gallant brave on the bloody field of Shiloh.’’
Banks was hardly the only Confederate soldier to cite the Union invasion as both an initial and sustaining motivating factor. Later-enlisting Confederates believed by 1862 that Union soldiers were merciless hirelings and bloodthirsty barbarians who would make war on women and children, wreak havoc on their property and the Southern landscape, free the slaves to enact their own vengeance and leave nothing but desolation. They had to be turned back.
White Southern men, crucially including those who had not enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861, confronted a war at the beginning of 1862 that not only was spreading into the Lower South but was also evolving rapidly into a conflict increasingly characterized by attacks on property and what they deemed theft and vandalism. As Joseph Glatthaar has explained, such ‘‘plundering cut to the very core of their sense of masculinity.’’ The early rhetoric regarding Northern barbarians now rang increasingly true in Southern ears. As white Confederates angrily reacted to emancipation, they also responded simultaneously to other facets of ‘‘war in earnest.’’ Indeed, they were parts of a whole. Foraging, pillaging and similar depredations committed by Union soldiers against Southern people and property, coupled with emancipation and local invasion, finally spurred some men to enter the Army in 1862.
Most of them were older men with a real stake in the outcome. Virginian John Dooley was one of only a handful of youths who enlisted citing even in part enemy depredations. He condemned the destruction in his native state committed by his ‘‘ruthless foes….A wanton cowardly foe whose brutal orders have been too faithfully executed by a depraved and savage soldiery.’’ Later in the year, Dooley compared his enemies to demons.
Enlisting in the 60th Tennessee near the end of 1862, 20-year-old East Tennessean Private John Earnest, a former student at Emory & Henry College and the grandson of a prominent local slaveowner, likewise cited the alleged crimes of Yankee invaders. To him they were ‘‘vandals…infernal hordes’’ who aimed to wreak ‘‘vengeance upon an unoffending people.’’ Texan Thomas C. Smith echoed similar sentiments when he referred to Federal soldiers as ‘‘the vile invader’’ after he joined the 32nd Texas Cavalry.
When his brother Willie was captured by ‘‘our much detested foe’’ early in 1862, George H. Chatfield enlisted as a private in the 37th Alabama after failing to raise a company of his own. It was time for other men to do the same, he said, as the ‘‘threat of immediate invasion’’ made it necessary for his neighbors ‘‘to defend their wives and children, their homes and friends….Methinks I can almost hear the voice of my brother saying to me: Brother, will you let me stay here in the hands of our enemy and not try to help me by giving them a full sound of the best cartridge from an old Enfield? Then my blood boils and the face will answer no.’’
Less poetically, 15 older men in the sample (correspondence from a total of 320 Confederate soldiers) condemned Union soldiers during 1862 with the same angry slurs repeated again and again: ‘‘villains,’’ ‘‘vandals,’’ ‘‘devils.’’ As Jason Phillips points out, history books, Southern religious periodicals, spread-eagle nationalist speeches and editorials and Confederate popular culture all effectively propagated certain words and concepts that then were endlessly recycled and repeated by individual Johnny Rebs. So it was with the notion of Union soldiers as property vandals. To be sure, men added their own favorite epithets. To Lieutenant William L. Nugent of the 28th Mississippi Cavalry, the ‘‘ruthless’’ blue-coats were also murderers and thieves, ‘‘the poor deluded victims of a false and aggrandizing policy.’’
They were cowards as well. Private E.A. Penick of the 38th Virginia described Federal soldiers on the Peninsula as ‘‘skulking behind logs and trees with their long range guns,’’ while Private William Ross Stilwell depicted enemy soldiers before the Battle of Fredericksburg as ‘‘afraid to fight us.’’ It was Northern soldiers’ theft and destruction of property, however, including the ‘‘theft’’ of slaves, that raised the greatest ire.
‘‘What a horrid specticle is presented here,’’ ultranationalist Sergeant John Thurman wrote from west Tennessee, ‘‘how madning & sickning to the heart of a Patriot. Beatiful residences as rent & torn by the shells & balls from the Enemys Gun Boats Beatiful gardens & fields left to go to ruin as the tread of the invader comes.’’ Thurman, within days, fought in the Battle of Shiloh. He wrote to his wife afterward, thanking God ‘‘that it is as it is with one that I am still spaired to give what aid I can in freeing my Country & avenging the wrongs that are inflicted on us by a merciless foe.’’ Later in the year, Sergeant J.B. Sanders of the 37th Mississippi defended his decision to enlist by pointing to ‘‘how many poor women are passing through our lines to escape the disgrace of the federals soldiers.’’
No one in the Western Theater exhibited more hatred for Union soldiers than the Harvard-educated Edwin Fay, the son of a Vermonter, who repeatedly condemned them as ‘‘abolitionists,’’ ‘‘Yankee abolitionists,’’ ‘‘double dealing Yankees,’’ ‘‘vandals’’ and ‘‘vandal hordes.’’ After speaking with some Michigan prisoners in June 1862, Sergeant Fay concluded that ‘‘they would lie as fast as a horse could run.’’ Two months later he condemned Union soldiers for ‘‘destroying everything, stealing negroes… ransack ing houses…leaving the country almost a wilderness. Cursing and insulting the men and sometimes proceeding to even greater lengths with the women.’’ Worse still, he added, they were giving white people’s clothing to former slaves. By the end of the year, Fay’s rage was reaching fever pitch. When he found a dead Union officer after a cavalry fight, Fay ‘‘printed Abolitionist on an Oak Board and stuck it at his head for the Yankees to see.’’
Beginning with Ulysses Grant’s Army of the Tennessee at Vicksburg during the early weeks of 1863, Union commanders began to order the systematic, large-scale confiscation of food, livestock and other property. They also called for the complete destruction of railroads, factories and anything else useful to the Confederate war effort. The goal was less to feed Union soldiers than to deny vital supplies to the uniformed enemy, break Confederate civilians’ will to continue the fight and thus hasten the end of the war. Instead of occupying territory with troops needed elsewhere, Grant as general in chief also called for a series of massive and destructive raids across the Confederacy that would crush the rebellion. William Tecumseh Sherman’s Jackson, Miss., campaign of July 1863 heralded the new policy, and he refined it in February 1864 in his Meridian campaign. The March to the Sea, as well as Philip Sheridan’s campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, marked the pinnacles of hard war.
Indeed, the hatred expressed by Confederates in 1863, including later enlisters, rose proportionally and developed regionally with the destruction occasioned by the rise of hard war, thus becoming a significant sustaining mechanism. From the vicinity of Vicksburg in January 1863, Lieutenant John Earnest of the 60th Tennessee again condemned the ‘‘vandals’’ in Grant’s army. ‘‘The infernal hordes call for more blood,’’ he proclaimed, ‘‘their fiendish appetites are still insatiate, though the accomplishment of their object is now grown into despair. Yet, with no other object than vengeance upon an unoffending people [they] rush on to desolate more hearthstones and make more lonely hearts.’’
The already deep hatred of Mississippi native and Greeneville attorney Lieutenant William L. Nugent for Grant’s army increased dramatically in 1863. Where once they had been ‘‘vandals’’ and murderers, the Yankees were now in his estimation ‘‘cannibals’’ as well. They also were ‘‘voracious,’’ not to mention ‘‘haughty.’’ Sergeant Edwin Fay meanwhile continued his tantrums. Frustrated with both home front Confederates and his government in Richmond, he asserted that ‘‘there is only one thing keeps me there’’ in the army, ‘‘and that is absolute hatred of the infernal Villains’’ who had invaded the South ‘‘for desire of gain.’’ In his letters, Union soldiers alternately were ‘‘dastardly Yankees,’’ ‘‘damnable villains,’’ ‘‘Vandals,’’ ‘‘Vandal hordes,’’ ‘‘abolitionists,’’ ‘‘Abolition scoundrels,’’ ‘‘an accursed race’’ and ‘‘devils incarnate.’’ Many were ‘‘low bred dutch some of whom cannot understand a word of English.’’ Others wrote letters home laced with ‘‘vulgarity.’’ Overwhelmed with rage, Fay vowed never to give quarter. ‘‘I expect to murder every Yankee I ever meet when I can do so with impunity,’’ he swore, ‘‘if I live a hundred years…peace will never be made between me and any Yankee if I can kill him without too great risk. The Thugs of India will not bear a comparison to my hatred and destruction of them when opportunity offers. There can be no fellowship be tween us forever.’’
By the late spring, such dire sentiments were common back East as well. Private Samuel Pickens lambasted Union soldiers as thieves and foreign hirelings. James Michael Barr verbally skewered ‘‘the nasty low lived Yankees’’ and declared that ‘‘there is no honor or justice abot the Yankees. If they cannot take off, they will burn up.’’ Sergeant John French White of the 32nd Virginia lamented to his wife in May 1863 that ‘‘we are separated by a wicked and cruel enemy.’’ Reacting to the death of Maj. Gen. Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville during that same month, Lieutenant John Dooley cursed ‘‘the dastardly government against which he drew his unblemished sword.’’
The winter of 1863-64 brought much more of the same. Sergeant Major Marion Hill Fitzpatrick condemned Federal prisoners as ‘‘devils’’ and described some of them as ‘‘the sorriest looking men I ever saw. It makes me mad to even think of submitting to such demons in human form.’’ In October Sergeant W.Y. Mordecai of the Richmond Howitzers described the destruction in and around Culpeper, Va., in a letter to his mother, writing, ‘‘We cannot tell what kind of buildings stood between the great number of blackened chimneys on every side through Fauquier and Culpeper [Counties], but in addition to these there is the framework of many a handsome residence stripped of all that could be useful to these fiends in building hovels & the walls, where they remain, covered with obsenity—How much longer will the just retribution for these things tarry?’’
The 1864 Atlanta and Overland campaigns, beginning in early May 1864, brought a new round of vicious fighting and also verbal condemnation. Confederate soldiers, including late enlisters, continued to describe their foes as thieves and vandals, criminals against property whose valor came from the whiskey bottle. Lieutenant Thomas J. Moore of Holcombs’ South Carolina Legion mourned the death of a friend at the ‘‘foul hands of a despicable foe!’’ To Lieutenant William L. Nugent, the Yankees were now ‘‘outlaws.’’ A group of prisoners taken from Sherman’s army, he added, were ‘‘wretchedly uniformed, miserable specimens of humanity. They look more like cut-throat mercenaries.’’
Like other soldiers, both Lieutenant F.B. Ward of the 5th North Carolina Cavalry and Sergeant Absalom Burum of Thomas’ North Carolina Legion attributed the courage of Federal soldiers to their being drunk. Captain Thomas Key meanwhile continued not only to condemn the enemy at every opportunity but to suspect that their real intentions involved spoiling the purity of Southern white womanhood. Not only were Northern soldiers thieves and vandals, they were ‘‘Abolitionists’’ and race mixers as well, ‘‘the base and amorous race of Puritans which has degraded itself and villified and slandered the Southern ladies.’’ The real goal of the ‘‘misceginators,’’ he maintained, was to provide black men with white Southern women. Sherman meanwhile was ‘‘one of the most heartless men that has ever disgraced a nation….He is as great a brute as Butler, save in a different way.’’
Key saved his most personal venom, however, for one unfortunate Yankee, Sergeant Leroy L. Key of the 16th Illinois, then a prisoner at Andersonville. When he received a letter from the desperate Union soldier, who evidently hoped that the Confederate artillery captain was a lost brother who might help him, the latter wrote back, ‘‘you are no brother of mine, and if you were I would disown you.’’
Hatred, to be sure, was not an all-powerful emotion. As postwar reconciliationist accounts indicate, fraternization between soldiers did occur as well, and hands really did reach across the proverbial bloody chasm. Yankees in the flesh could seem less diabolical than in theory. Battlefield courage could be acknowledged. After battles, sympathetic soldiers sometimes gave wounded foes food and water and provided medical aid. Others joined together to bury the dead. During informal truces they swapped tobacco for coffee, exchanged newspapers and ‘‘jawed’’ with the men across the lines.
Complaints about officers, anger at the politicians, shared religious sentiments and expressed wishes to give up killing and go home all could create a temporary degree of solidarity. James I. Robertson maintains that fraternization increased steadily during the war, peaking in 1864, while Gerald Linderman goes beyond him in asserting that mutual suffering created bonds that outweighed antipathy.
Linderman aside, however, historians from Bell Wiley and Robertson to Jason Phillips have warned against inflating the true degree of fraternization between Johnny Reb and Billy Yank. As Randall Jimerson suggests, the simple fact that such incidents were so unusual helps explain the many accounts that survive.
Wiley himself implied that Southern soldiers’ hatreds were deep and less easily jettisoned than those of Northern men. ‘‘Hatred and fighting,’’ Wiley concluded, ‘‘far outweighed friendliness and intermingling,’’ as far as Confederates were concerned.
Such wariness seems justified, for later enlisters at least were not especially interested in making friends across the lines. Only 15 of the sampled later-enlisting Confederates (5 percent) described moments of fraternization, generally involving trading among pickets. Most of the descriptions—10—were written in 1863, suggesting that for them the practice peaked earlier than for the set of men Robertson studied and did not survive the brutal campaigns of 1864. Private Richard Henry Brooks of the 51st Georgia, for example, described how Confederate and Union soldiers at Fredericksburg made ‘‘little sail boats an put tobacco in them and Let them sail across the river to them and they will put in Coffee an Soda an Pocket knives an many other Little things and send it back to us. They say they are tired of the war an so are we.’’
Lieutenant E.B. Coggin of the 47th Alabama described a Christmas truce during which Federals actually crossed the river to ‘‘Swap or Boys Coffee and Shugar for tobacco that seam to Bee as friendly to us a that ar to one another.’’ From Petersburg, South Carolinian Lieutenant Thomas J. Moore described speaking with ‘‘Billy’’ on picket as well as arranging local nighttime truces.
Even when it occurred, however, fraternization had its limits—often literally. Almost half the accounts include mention of an intervening river or entrenchment. There were less visible barriers as well. Officers consistently frowned on the practice. Private James Michael Barr was willing to acquire goods he wanted across the lines but continued to hate Yankees just the same. Private John W. Cotton meanwhile worried that by trading with the enemy, he was helping to augment their presumably scarce provisions. His fellow Alabamian, Sgt. Maj. Harden Cochrane, suspected that erstwhile friendly pickets were in fact spies, and accordingly lied about the location of his camp as well as the whereabouts of other units.
The threat of violence also remained during every encounter. Lieutenant Coggin was wary of crossing the river himself ‘‘for ther is Dainger of them taking us prisners ef ther head officers was to hapen tu Be there.’’ Such fears were not unfounded. Corporal Thomas J. Newberry of the 29th Mississippi wrote from Tennessee that Union pickets across Lookout Creek were ‘‘very anctious fer a conversation and want to trade coffee for tobacco. We have orders not to speake to them some of the boys talks to them and trades them tobercco for cof – fee….Sometimes the boys gets them to come over to trade and then they take them priseners.’’
Human sympathy, a sense of shared suffering and neglect, and the desire for scarce coffee, in short, could occasionally bring combatants together, but those factors only went so far in mitigating later enlisters’ fervent hatred of the Yankee. In most cases Johnny Rebs, including later enlisters, only sympathized with Billy Yank when the man in blue was wounded or else expressed his Christian faith or, better still, doubts about his own cause. Balanced against the 17 soldiers in the sample who more or less spoke sympathetically of Union soldiers once encountering them, in short, are the close to 60 who by and large did not change their minds at all about their loathing of the ‘‘vandal hordes.’’
Comparatively speaking, hatred of the invading enemy in sum motivated about as many later enlisters in the sample as did political ideology and involved all of the facets of soldier motivation from enlistment to battle. When one remembers that so much of that hatred involved the same Union Army tactics and strategies that also brought about the collapse of slavery, it is difficult not to conclude that states’ rights ideology, the even more broadly held determination to preserve slavery and protect home, and the hatred that developed toward those who seemingly went to war to bring down both were inexorably linked in a tangled web of initial and sustaining motivations.
The lawless vandals of Confederate rhetoric, after all, were not just fanatics and hirelings who threatened the home folks, but were also allegedly abolitionists and miscegenationists as well.
Excerpted from Reluctant Rebels: The Confederates Who Joined the Army After 1861, by Kenneth W. Noe, © 2010 by the University of North Carolina Press, used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu.
Auburn University Professor Kenneth W. Noe spent eight years researching Reluctant Rebels: The Confederates Who Joined the Army After 1861, in which he seeks to understand the motives of Rebels who enlisted after the first naive rush to war. Basing his conclusions on the correspondence of 320 common soldiers, Noe finds that the later enlistees went off to fight to defend slavery and their homeland and also for religious reasons, among others. This excerpt takes a look at yet another motivation—deep-seated hatred of the enemy.
Originally published in the August 2010 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.
