This Republic of Suffering (40 page)

13. Some historians cite the range of the new rifle as up to a thousand yards, but Gary W. Gallagher of the University of Virginia believes three hundred yards of effective use is a more accurate way to understand its capacities. My thanks to him for his help on this question. James M. McPherson estimates that 20 percent of the Confederate army and 8 percent of the Union army were draftees and substitutes. McPherson,
Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), pp. 182–83.

14. Grossman,
On Killing,
pp. 24–25. Debate has raged about soldiers' firing rates since the work of S. L. A. Marshall on nonfirers in World War II. See Grossman's response to these debates on p. 333. See also S. L. A. Marshall,
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War
(New York: Morrow, 1947), and John Keegan,
The Face of Battle
(New York: Viking Press, 1976).

15. Val C. Giles,
Rags and Hope: The Recollections of Val C. Giles, Four Years with Hood's Brigade, Fourth Texas Infantry,
1861–1865, ed. Mary Lasswell (New York: Coward-McCann, 1961), p. 208.

16. S. H. M. Byers, “How Men Feel in Battle: Recollections of a Private at Champion Hills,”
Annals of Iowa
2 ( July 1896): 449; Henry Abbott, July 6, 1863, in Robert Garth Scott, ed.,
Fallen Leaves: The Civil War Letters of Major Henry Livermore Abbott
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991), p. 188; Hess,
Union Soldier in Battle,
pp. 55, 52. On wounds, see George Worthington Adams,
Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War
(New York: Henry Schuman, 1952), p. 113.

17. Kenneth Macksey and William Woodhouse, eds.,
The Penguin Encyclopedia of Modern Warfare:
1850
to the Present Day
(London: Penguin, 1991), p. 111. On the changing nature and size of battle, see also John Keegan,
The Face of Battle
(New York: Viking, 1976), pp. 285–336. On tactics, see James M. McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 474–76, and Brent Nosworthy,
The Bloody Crucible of Courage: Fighting Methods and Combat Experience of the Civil War
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003).

18. William Drayton Rutherford to Sallie F. Rutherford, June 23, 1864, William Drayton Rutherford Papers, SCL. On requirements, see Gerald Smith, “Sharp-shooters,” in David and Jeanne Heidler, eds.,
Encyclopedia of the Civil War
(Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC Clio, 2000), vol. 4, p. 1743. “To the Sharp Shooters of Windham County,” August 19, 1861 (Bellows Falls, Vt.: Phoenix Job Office, 1861), reproduced in
Letters from a Sharpshooter: The Civil War Letters of Private William B. Greene,
1861–1865, transcribed by William H. Hastings (Belleville, Wis.: Historic Publications, 1993), p. 4.

19. Isaac Hadden to Brother, Wife and All, June 5, 1864, and June 12, 1864, Misc. Mss. Hadden, Isaac, NYHS; Henry Abbott to J. G. Abbott, July 6, 1863, in Scott, ed.,
Fallen Leaves
p. 184. On snakes, see Richard Pindell, “The Most Dangerous Set of Men,”
Civil War Times Illustrated,
July–August 1993, p. 46.

20. Petersburg paper quoted in William Greene to Dear Mother, June 26, 1864, in
Letters from a Sharpshooter,
p. 226; De Forest,
Volunteer's Adventures,
p. 144. On sharpshooters see also Hess,
Union Soldier in Battle,
pp. 106–7, and Michael Walzer,
Just and Unjust Wars
(New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 140. On sharpshooting and its very personal nature, see “On the Antietam,”
Harper's Weekly,
January 3, 1863, reprinted in Kathleen Diffley, ed.,
To Live and Die: Collected Stories of the Civil War
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 128–32. On changing technology of sharpshooting, see Ron Banks, “Death at a Distance,”
Civil War Times Illustrated,
March–April 1990, pp. 48–55.

21. Howell Cobb to James A. Seddon, January 8, 1865, in
War of the Rebellion,
ser. 4, vol. 3, pp. 1009–10; Mary Greenhow Lee Diary, April 3, 1864, WFCHS.

22. Thomas R. Roulhac quoted in McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom,
p. 566;
Arkansas Gazette
quoted in Gregory J. W. Urwin, “‘We Cannot Treat Negroes…as Prisoners of War': Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in Civil War Arkansas,”
Civil War History
42 (September 1996): 202–3; W. D. Rutherford to Sallie F. Rutherford, May 2, 1864, William D. Rutherford Papers, SCL; Urwin, “We Cannot Treat Negroes,” pp. 197, 203. Whether or not Fort Pillow was a massacre has been debated since the day after the event itself. Recent historical work has established persuasively that it was. See John Cimprich,
Fort Pillow: A Civil War Massacre and Public Memory
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); John Cimprich and Robert C. Mainfort Jr., “The Fort Pillow Massacre: A Statistical Note,”
Journal of American History
76 (December 1989): 831–33; and Andrew Ward,
River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War
(New York: Viking, 2005). For casualty statistics, see Cimprich,
Fort Pillow,
app. B, pp. 130–31, and table 7, p. 129. See also the official federal investigation: U.S. Congress,
House Report
(serial 1206), “Fort Pillow Massacre,” 38th Cong., 1st sess., no. 63, 1864. On killing black soldiers, see also Gary W. Gallagher, ed.,
Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 462, 465, 487.

23. George Gautier,
Harder Than Death: The Life of George Gautier, an Old Texan
(Austin, Tex.: n.p., 1902), pp. 10–11.

24. John Edwards cited in Urwin, “‘We Cannot Treat Negroes,'” p. 205; Henry Bird to fiancée, August 4, 1864, Bird Family Papers, VHS, quoted in Chandra Miller Manning, “What This Cruel War Was Over: Why Union and Confederate Soldiers Thought They Were Fighting the Civil War,” Ph.D. diss. (Harvard University, 2002), p. 27.

25. Seddon quoted in John David Smith, “Let Us All Be Grateful That We Have Colored Troops That Will Fight,” in John David Smith, ed.,
Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. 45. See Kirby Smith to Samuel Cooper, in
War of the Rebellion,
ser. 2, vol. 6, pp. 21–22.

26. William Marvel,
Andersonville: The Last Depot
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 155.

27.
Christian Recorder,
July 30, 1864, p. 121; April 30, 1864, p. 69; August 22, 1863, p. 133.

28. W. E. B. DuBois,
Black Reconstruction in America
(1935; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 110;
Christian Recorder,
August 1, 1863, p. 126; Letter from Henry Harmon,
Christian Recorder,
November 7, 1863, p. 177; Alice Fahs,
The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of North and South,
1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 175. See Andrew K. Black, “In the Service of the United States: Comparative Mortality Among African-American and White Troops in the Union Army,”
Journal of Negro History
79, no. 4 (Autumn 1994): 317–27.

29.
Christian Recorder,
August 15, 1863, p. 131. On Cailloux, see “The Funeral of Captain Andre Cailloux,”
Harper's Weekly,
August 29, 1863; “Funeral of a Negro Soldier”,
Weekly Anglo-African
(New York), August 15, 1863; James G. Hollandsworth Jr.,
Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience During the Civil War
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995); Stephen J. Ochs,
A Black Patriot and a White Priest: Andre Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).

30. “The Funeral of Captain Andre Cailloux,”
Harper's Weekly,
August 29, 1863, p. 551; see also
Weekly Anglo-African,
August 15, 1863.

31. George E. Stephens in Donald Yacovone, ed.,
A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 203.

32. “The Two Southern Mothers,” in
Weekly Anglo-African,
November 7, 1863.

33. David W. Blight,
Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), pp. 113, 115. The Covey story is in Douglass,
My Bondage and My Freedom
(1855; rpt. New York: Dover, 1969), pp. 246–49.

34.
Christian Recorder,
February 20, 1864, p. 29; December 19, 1863, p. 203.

35. Cordelia A. Harvey to Governor James Lewis, April 24, 1864, Cordelia A. Harvey Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison.

36.
Christian Recorder,
April 30, 1864, p. 69; July 9, 1864, p. 110; February 4, 1865, p. 18.

37. Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” in
Lincoln: Speeches, Letters and Miscellaneous Writings, Presidential Messages and Proclamations
(New York: Library of America, 1989), pp. 686–87.

38. Aunt Aggy tells this story to Mary Livermore in Livermore,
My Story of the War
(Hartford, Conn.: A. D. Worthington, 1889), p. 261. On black vengeance, see also Louisa May Alcott, “The Brothers,”
Atlantic Monthly,
November 1863, in Diffley, ed.,
To Live and Die,
pp. 191–208, and “Buried Alive,”
Harper's Weekly,
May 7, 1864, in Diffley,
Live and Die,
pp. 284–88.

39. Daniel M. Holt,
A Surgeon's Civil War: The Letters and Diary of Daniel M. Holt, M.D.,
ed. James M. Greiner, Janet L. Coryell, and James R. Smither (Kent, Ohio: Kent University Press, 1994), p. 188; Howells quoted in Gerald Linderman,
Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War
(New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 128; James Wood Davidson to C. V. Dargan, August 6, 1862, Clara Dargan MacLean Papers, RBMSC; Charles Kerrison to his cousin, July 19, 1862, Kerrison Family Papers, SCL; statistics from “Bull Run, First Battle of,” in Heidler and Heidler, eds.
Encyclopedia of the Civil War,
vol. 1, p. 316, “Shiloh, Battle of,” vol. 4, p. 1779, and “Casualties,” vol. 1, pp. 373–74. See also James McDonough,
Shiloh: In Hell Before Night
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977), and Larry Daniel,
Shiloh: The Battle That Changed the Civil War
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). On Confederate losses, see
The War of the Rebellion,
ser. 2, vol. 27, pp. 338–46; Kent Masterson Brown,
Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics and the Pennsylvania Campaign
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), p. 2. Lee's losses at Gettysburg, which he systematically understated, can only be estimated. John W. Busey and David G. Martin conjecture 23,231 in
Regimental Strengths and Losses at Gettysburg,
4th ed. (Hightstown, N.J.: Longstreet House, 2005), p. 258; James M. McPherson suggests between 24,000 and 28,000; personal communication to the author, December 27, 2006.

40. Colonel Luther Bradley to My dear Buel, January 5, 1863, letter in possession of Robert Bradley, Somerville, Mass.; Frank,
“Seeing the Elephant,”
p. 120; Henry C. Taylor to Father and Mother, October 1863, Henry C. Taylor Papers, WHS.

41. William Stilwell to his Wife, September 18, 1862, in Mills Lane, ed.,
“Dear Mother: Don't Grieve About Me. If I Get Killed, I'll Only Be Dead”: Letters from Georgia Soldiers in the Civil War
(Savannah, Ga.: Beehive Press, 1990), pp. 184–85. Indiana soldier quoted in Hess,
Union Soldier in Battle,
p. 119; James B. Sheeran,
Confederate Chaplain: A War Journal,
ed. Joseph T. Durkin (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1960), pp. 88–89; W. D. Rutherford to Sallie Rutherford, July 3, 1862, SCL; Robert Goldthwaite Carter,
Four Brothers in Blue: or, Sunshine and Shadows of the War of the Rebellion
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), p. 325; James Wood Davidson to C. V. Dargan, August 6, 1862, Clara Dargan MacLean Papers, RBMSC; George G. Benedict,
Army Life in Virginia: Letters from the Twelfth Vermont Regiment
(Burlington, Vt.: Free Press Association, 1891), pp. 190–91.

42.
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly Newspaper,
May 24, 1862, p. 98; Ulysses S. Grant,
Personal Memoirs
(1885; rpt. New York: Library of America, 1990), p. 238;L. Minor Blackford,
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Story of a Virginia Lady
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 213. On stepping on bodies, see
Christian Recorder,
July 18, 1863; L. S. Bobo to A. Bobo, July 7, 1862, Bobo Papers, CSA Collection, ESBL; Mary A. Newcomb,
Four Years of Personal Reminiscences of the War
(Chicago: H. S. Mills, 1893), p. 43; John Driscoll to Adelaide, April 18, 1862, Gould Family Papers, WHS; Alexander G. Downing,
Downing's Civil War Diary
(Des Moines: Historical Department of Iowa, 1916), p. 325.

43. John O. Casler,
Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade
(Guthrie, Okla.: State Capital Printing Co., 1893), p. 29; Thompson in Gregory A. Coco,
A Strange and Blighted Land: Gettysburg, the Aftermath of a Battle
(Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1995), p. 54; Chauncey Herbert Cooke,
A Soldier Boy's Letters to His Father and Mother,
1861–1865 (Independence, Wis.: News-Office, 1915), p. 97; Pierce in Gregory A. Coco,
Killed in Action: Eyewitness Accounts of the Last Moments of
100
Union Soldiers Who Died at Gettysburg
(Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1992), p. 112; Walker Lee to Dear Mother, June 15, 1862, in Laura Elizabeth Lee Battle,
Forget-Me-Nots of the Civil War
(St Louis: A. R. Fleming Printing Co., 1909), p. 355.