"The army is not near so much demoralized as the country is": Soldiers in the army of Northern Virginia and the confederate home front

The View from the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers

Volumn , Issue , 2007, Pages 91-120

  Laskin, Lisa ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 79957380879     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (103)

1. These assumptions and this essay are drawn from research done for my dissertation, "Good Old Rebels: Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1862-1865" (Harvard University, 2003).
2. Author unknown, "The Old Unreconstructed", lyrics cited from the liner notes to Songs of the Civil War, Columbia Records, 1991.
3. Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), Daniel E. Sutherland examines in minute detail the war world of Culpeper County, Virginia, one of the most fought over patches of land in the Confederacy.
4. William Blair's Virginia's Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) is another excellent example of a deeply researched community study relevant to the ANV. The narrow focus of such works makes it problematic to apply their conclusions to the entire nation, but they do emphasize the range of Confederate wartime experiences.
5. John Tyler, journal, September 4, 1862, Diary of Lt. John Tyler, MS 6150, Special Collections, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (hereafter UVA).
6. Harvey Black to wife, September 26, 1862, in Glen McMullen, ed., A Surgeon with Stonewall Jackson (Baltimore: Butternut and Bine, 1995), 43.
7. Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
8. Paul D. Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), especially ch. 4.
9. A. Frederick Fleet, September 28, 1863, in Betsey Fleet and John D. P. Fuller, eds., Green Mount: A Virginia Plantation Family during the Civil War, Being the Letter of Benjamin Robert Fuller and His Family (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1962), 272.
10. William Edward Wiatt, journal, September 16, 1863, in Alex L. Wiatt, ed., Confederate Chaplain: William Edward Wiatt, an Annotated Diary (Lynchburg, VA: H. E. Howard, 1994), 103.
11. James Booker to cousin, January 1, 1864, Civil War Letters of John and James Booker, UVA.
12. William J. Rheney to mother, February 5, 1864, William J. Rheney Papers, SCL;
13. Noel C. Fisher, "Definitions of Victory: East Tennessee Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction", in Guerillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front, ed. Daniel E. Sutherland (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999), 100-101.
14. Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers: Their Expectations and Their Experiences (New York: Touchstone, 1988), 155-57.
15. Larry J. Daniel does not address the topic in his Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee: A Portrait of Life in a Confederate Army (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
16. The subject is likewise absent from Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943);
17. James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997);
18. and Georgia Lee Tatum, Disloyalty in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934;
19. (Civil War Soldiers, 132-38).
20. Joel Wright to mother, June 15, 1862, James M. Wright Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, NC.
21. Sutherland, Seasons of War, 98, 264.
22. Daniel M. Brown to wife, March 17, 1863, Isaac Brown Collection, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Archives and History Division, Raleigh (hereafter NCDAH).
23. Harry Lewis to mother, February 15, 1863, Harry Lewis Papers, 222, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (SHC).
24. Richard Henry Watkins to Mary, January 12, 1864, Richard Henry Watkins Papers, reel 42, Joseph T. Glatthaar, ed., Confederate Military Manuscripts Series A: Holdings of the Virginia Historical Society (hereafter CMM/A);
25. Henry F. Wilson, journal, March 14, 1864, Henry F. Wilson Mobile Rifles Diary and Notebook, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, AL (hereafter ADAH);
26. William Hawkins Welch to mother, May 21, 1864, Elliott Stephen Welch Papers, Duke University;
27. Edwin Kerrison to sister, September 30, 1862, Kerrison Family Papers, ms. 6209, SCL;
28. Sutherland, Seasons of War, 359-60.
29. Harry Lewis to mother, June 22, 1863, Harry Lewis Papers, SHC.
30. Henry Calvin Connor to Ellen, January 4, 1865, Henry Calvin Conner Papers, SCL;
31. Jefferson Stubbs to father, January 5, 1865, Jefferson W. Stubbs and Family Papers, reel 18, Joseph T. Glatthaar, ed., Confederate Military Manuscripts Series B: Holdings of the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Louisiana State University (hereafter CMM/B).
32. John O'Farrell, journal, June 5, 1862, John O'Farrell, diary, Diary Collection, MOC.
33. George Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 121-28.
34. Drew Gilpin Faust analyzes the meaning of nursing and administrative work for elite women in Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 92-112.
35. Bartlett Yancey Malone, journal, May 8, 1863, in William Whately Pierson Jr., ed., Whipt 'em Everytime: The Diary of Bartlett Yancey Malone, Co. H, 6th N. C. Regiment (Jackson, TN: McCowat-Mercer Press, 1960), 81;
36. Fred A. Brodé, November 19, 1864, Fred A. Brodé Letters, MOC;
37. Mark Holland to father, December 3, 1864, Holland Family Papers, MS 902, UVA;
38. Robert A. Moore, journal, September 14, 1863, in James W. Silver, ed., A Life for the Confederacy: As Recorded in the Pocket Diaries of Pvt. Robert A. Moore, Co. G, 17th Mississippi Regiment, Confederate Guards, Holly Springs, Mississippi (Jackson, TN: McCowat-Mercer Press, 1959), 166;
39. William Hawkins Welch to mother, May 21, 1864, Elliott Stephen Welch Papers, Duke University.
40. Reuben Allen Pierson to sister, December 23, 1862, in Tomas W. Cutrer and T. Michael Parrish, eds., Brothers in Gray: The Civil War Letters of the Pierson Family (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 140.
41. Jno. Lewis to mother, July 21, 1863, Harry Lewis Papers, 1222, SHC.
42. Charles Fenton James to sister, February 13, 1865, Charles Fenton James Letters, VHS.
43. Taliaferro Simpson to Ma, June 13, 1863, in Guy R. Everson and Edward H. Simpson Jr., eds., "Far, Far from Home": The Wartime Letters of Dick and Tally Simpson, Tird South Carolina Volunteers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 245.
44. James M. Magruder to Eva, August 8, 1863, John Bowie Magruder Papers, Duke University.
45. James W. Albright, journal, June 8, 1864, James W. Albright Books, 2008, SHC.
46. Michael B. Chesson, "Harlots or Heroines? A New Look at the Richmond Bread Riot", Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 92(April 1984):131-75.
47. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 617
48. and E. Merton Coulter, The Confederate States of America, 1861-1865, vol. 7 of A History of the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1950), 422-23.
49. Rable, Civil Wars, 108-11.
50. ("Harlots or Heroines?" 132).
51. Drew Gilpin Faust suggests that the foreign connection to mass misbehavior is also evident in condemnations of profiteering. "'Sliding in the World': The Sin of Extortion and the Dynamic of Confederate Identity", in The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 41-57;
52. Louis-Hippolyte Gâche, March 8, 1863, in Cornelius M. Buckley, ed. and trans., A Frenchman, a Chaplain, a Rebel: The War Letters of Pere Louis-Hippolyte Gâche, S. J. (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1981), 159-61.
53. Robert P. Tutwiler to Nettie, April 3, 1863, T. C. McCorvey Papers, #452-z, SHC;
54. Charles Kerrison to sister, April 9, 1863, Kerrison Family Papers, ms. 6209, SCL;
55. Daniel M. Brown to wife, April 12, 1863, Isaac Brown Collection, NCDAH;
56. William Lyne Wilson to parents, April 17, 1863, in Festus P. Summers, ed., A Borderland Confederate (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), 55;
57. and John Francis Shaffner to friend, April 21, 1863, Shaffner Diary and Papers, PC 247, NCDAH. Historians have taken good advantage of hindsight and a broader range of sources to demonstrate that the Richmond riots, though containing a lawless element, were in fact driven by real hunger and need.
58. Chesson, "Harlots or Heroines?" 170-74.
59. Milton Barrett to brother and sister, April 14, 1863, in J. Roderick Heller III and Carolyn Ayres Heller, eds., The Confederacy Is on Her Way up the Spout: Letters to South Carolina, 1861-1864 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 96.
60. Drew Faust applies this idea of an accepted narrative about women's sacrifice and patriotism more broadly in "Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narrative of War", Journal of American History 76, no. 4(March 1990):1200-28;
61. Marion Hill Fitzpatrick to Amanda, April 17, 1863, in Henry Vaughan MacRea, Red Dirt and Isinglass: A Wartime Biography of a Confederate Soldier (privately published, 1992), 404-5.
62. Jean V. Berlin, "Did Confederate Women Lose the War? Deprivation, Destruction, and Despair on the Home Front", in The Collapse of the Confederacy, ed. Mark Grimsley and Brooks D. Simpson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 168-93.
63. Charles H. Wesley, The Collapse of the Confederacy (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1937;
64. Charles W. Ramsdell, Behind the Lines in the Southern Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1944);
65. Coulter, Confederate States of America, 566-67;
66. Bell I. Wiley, The Road to Appomattox (Memphis: Memphis State College Press, 1956), ch. 10;
67. Escott, After Secession, chs. 4-7;
68. Emory Tomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861-1865 (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), ch. 11;
69. and Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still Jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986).
70. George C. Rable, "Despair, Hope and Delusion: The Collapse of Confederate Morale Reexamined", in Grimsley and Simpson, The Collapse of the Confederacy, 129-67.
71. Blair provides the counterargument in Virginia's Private War, 4.
72. Jasper A. Gillespie, November 27, 1862, Jasper A. Gillespie Civil War Letters, 2351-18c, ac 65-404, Georgia Department of Archives and History, Morrow (hereafter GDAH).
73. Ben W. Coleman to parents, April 26, 1863, Ben W. Coleman Letters, Civil War Collection, Confederate, Tennessee State Library and Archives.
74. J. J. Wilson to father, August 10, 1863, J. J. Wilson Papers, 677mf, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson.
75. R. Conley to father and family, December 25, 1863, Conley Civil War Letters, Civil War Soldiers Letters, LPR 78, Box 1, ADAH.
76. Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1989).
77. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 141-42.
78. Wesley, Collapse of the Confederacy, 68-71
79. and Coulter, Confederate States of America, ch. 11.
80. Eli Pinson Landers to mother, July 31, 1862, in Elizabeth Whitley Roberson, ed., In Care of Yellow River: The Complete Civil War Letters of Pvt. Eli Pinson Landers to His Mother (Gretna, VA: Pelican Publishing, 1997), 91.
81. Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb, 136.
82. Lewis Sylvester Branscomb to sister, December 2, 1862, Branscomb Family Letters, 1851-65, ADAH.
83. James M. Wright to sister, April 4, 1863, James M. Wright Papers, Duke University;
84. Charles Kerrison to sister, October 24, 1863, Kerrison Family Papers, SCL.
85. Josiah Blair Patterson to daughter, August 18, 1863, Josiah Blair Patterson Civil War Letters, mf 147, ac 61-210, GDAH.
86. James M. Wright to sister, April 4, 1863, James M. Wright Papers, Duke University.
87. Shepard G. Pryor to Penelope, April 25, 1863, Mills Bee Lane IV Papers, ms. 1291, box 1, Georgia Historical Society, Savannah.
88. J. W. McLure to Kate, July 19, 1862, McLure Family Papers, SCL.
89. Theodore Augustus Honour to wife, April 6, 1863, Theodore Augustus Honour Papers, SCL.
90. Micahjah Woods, journal, November 5, 1862, Micahjah Woods Papers, UVA.
91. James Zachariah Branscomb to sister, June 8, 1863, Branscomb Family Letters, 1851-65, ADAH.
92. Peter McDavid to Nellie, August 15, 1863, Peter McDavid Papers, Duke University.
93. Edgeworth Bird to Sallie, August 28, 1863, in John Rozier, ed., The Granite Farm Letters: The Civil War Correspondence of Edgeworth and Sallie Bird (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 145.
94. William H. Ker to sister, July 14, 1864, William H. Ker Letters, reel 10, CMM/B.
95. John F. Sale to aunt, January 23, 1864, John F. Sale Papers, Library of Virginia, Richmond.
96. J. M. Simpson to wife, August, 4, 1864, Allen-Simpson Family Letters, M-929, SHC.
97. Henry Calvin Connor to Ellen, October 18, 1864, Henry Calvin Connor Papers, SCL.
98. William G. Hinson, journal, January 27, 1865
99. in Joseph Ivor Waring, ed., "The Diary of William G. Hinson during the War of Secession", South Carolina Historical Magazine 75, no. 2(January, April 1974):115.
100. Abner Embry McGarrity to wife, March 6, 1865
101. in Edmund Cody Burnett, ed., "Letters of a Confederate Surgeon: Dr. Abner Embry McGarrity, 1862-65, Part 4", Georgia Historical Quarterly 30, no. 1(March 1946):62.
102. Gary Gallagher has made a small industry out of his excellent studies of the ANV and its famous leadership, but perhaps his most relevant works on this topic are "Lee's Army Has Not Lost Any of Its Prestige: The Impact of Gettysburg on the Army of Northern Virginia and the Confederate Home Front", in The Tird Day at Gettysburg and Beyond (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)
103. and especially The Confederate War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).