This Republic of Suffering (7 page)

Far from finding reluctance about killing among his comrades, H. C. Matrau of the Union's Iron Brigade explained to his parents how military training seemed only to enhance an innate brutality. A month of drilling in bayonet attacks led him to conclude, “It is strange what a predilection we have for injuring our brother man, but we learn the art of killing far easier than we do a hard problem in arithmetic.” Surprised at this discovery, Matrau began to revise his understanding of human nature and its capacities. Many soldiers found that society's powerful inhibitions against murder were all too easily overcome.
¹¹

Yet the particular social and technological circumstances of the Civil War posed significant challenges to the art of killing as it had been practiced in earlier conflicts. Armies of the mid-nineteenth century were accustomed to fighting in ordered ranks to control soldiers and compel their firing and killing. The mechanism of drill and the almost automatic movements imposed by military discipline worked together with the organization of troops in close ranks to lessen soldiers' self-doubt and inhibitions about killing—as well as any desire or chance they might have to flee. Men acted as part of a whole, which both removed an element of agency from the individual and encompassed him within the pressures and solidarity of the group. As a Confederate soldier waiting to enter combat cried to a rabbit he saw loping across the battlefield amid heavy fire, “‘Run, cotton-tail…If I hadn't got a reputation to sustain, I'd travel too!'”
¹²

But the Civil War departed in significant ways from what had come before. It was fought with new weapons, significantly more technologically advanced even than those generally available in the Mexican War a decade and a half earlier. Instead of the smoothbore musket, which could accurately reach targets up to about one hundred yards away, almost all Civil War infantry North and South were, by the middle of the war, equipped with rifles with an effective range of a three hundred yards. By the end of the war the introduction of breechloaders, chiefly among some units of the Union army, further enhanced lethality by permitting soldiers to reload rapidly, rather than at the pace of two to three shots a minute common with muzzle-loading rifles. Civil War armies marked a significant departure from previous conflicts as well, for this war generated a mass mobilization of common citizens and forces of unprecedented size. The approximately three million Americans North and South who ultimately served in the course of the conflict were not trained professionals, schooled in drill and maneuver, but overwhelmingly volunteers with little military knowledge or experience.
¹³

Combined with the enhanced firepower and range of Civil War weapons, the minimal training of volunteer forces and the sheer size of the armies brought increased disorder to battle and less direct control by officers over troops. In addition, most Civil War battlefields were not open terrain but were covered with woods and scrub that undermined the orderly command of long battle lines. Although costly frontal assaults remained common till nearly the end of the war, by the latter stages of the conflict troops began to be employed in looser order and even in trench warfare, as the construction of earthworks and field fortifications became routine. As a result, soldiers became far less likely to fight in close-order battle formation where they fired on command; they had more independence in deciding when and whether to discharge their weapons.

Dave Grossman suggests that this independence may have prompted many Civil War soldiers to express their aversion to killing by failing to discharge their weapons. He cites as evidence the discovery of 24,000 loaded rifles on the field after Gettysburg; half these weapons held more than one load. Given how long it took to load and fire a rifle—using powder, ball, ramrod, percussion cap—he calculates that 95 percent of these soldiers should have been shot with an empty weapon if they had indeed been actively engaged in trying to kill the enemy. Grossman believes that “most of these discarded weapons on the battlefield at Gettysburg represent soldiers who had been unable or unwilling to fire their weapons in the midst of combat and then had been killed, wounded, or routed.”
¹⁴

There is little surviving evidence with which to assess the accuracy of Grossman's assertion about high rates of nonfiring by Civil War soldiers; his claim is based chiefly on extrapolations from studies of other wars, studies that are themselves contested. The intriguing puzzle of multiply loaded guns may have other explanations: for example, a soldier's pure panic, or his failure amid the din of battle to realize a weapon had not discharged. But some anecdotal evidence of resistance to firing does exist. One Confederate soldier at Chickamauga made a dramatic show of his refusal to kill. Instead of aiming at the enemy, he shot straight up into the air while “praying as lustily as ever one of Cromwell's Roundhead's prayed.” When his captain threatened to shoot him, a comrade reported his reply: “You can kill me if you want to, but I am not going to appear before my God with the blood of my fellow man on my soul.” Willing to remain “exposed to every volley of the enemy's fire,” the soldier was ready to give his life rather than take that of another.
¹⁵

Subsequent wars introduced forms of combat with levels of impersonality and anonymity that reduced the burden of individual responsibility endured by Civil War infantry. Many of the bombs and missiles used in twentieth-century warfare, for example, almost entirely separated the killer from his victims. The crew of the
Enola Gay
or the specialists targeting precision weapons in the First Gulf War had a very different relationship to killing than the Civil War soldier—or the twenty-first-century enlisted man on the ground in Afghanistan or Iraq. Physical distance between enemies facilitates emotional distance from destructive acts. But fewer than 10 percent of Civil War troops were artillerymen, who lobbed shot, shell, or canister toward a distant enemy, and even these targets were usually close enough to be clearly identifiable as men. Most Civil War wounds were inflicted by minié balls shot from rifles: 94 percent of Union injuries were caused by bullets; 5.5 percent by artillery; and less than 0.4 percent by saber or bayonet. Although Civil War weapons did have significantly increased range, infantry engagements, even as they grew to involve tens of thousands of men, remained essentially intimate; soldiers were often able to see each other's faces and to know whom they had killed. Historian Earl Hess asserts that despite the capabilities of the new rifles, most combat occurred at a distance of about one hundred yards, even though, as one Yankee soldier explained, “when men can kill one another at six hundred yards they generally would prefer to do it at that distance.” S. H. M. Byers of Iowa remembered one terrible battle where “lines of blue and gray” stood “close together and fire[d] into each other's faces for an hour and a half,” and after Gettysburg, Union soldier Henry Abbott wrote his father of opposing “rows of dead…within 15 and 20 feet apart, as near hand to hand fighting as I ever care to see.”
¹⁶

The growth in size of battlefields between the Civil War and the two World Wars of the next century influenced the kinds of interactions that took place upon them. In Civil War engagements,
The Penguin Encyclopedia of Modern Warfare
calculates, the ratio of soldiers to space on the field averaged one man per 260 square meters; by the end of World War II, the ratio rose to one per 28,000 square meters. With its large volunteer armies, its longer-range weapons, and its looser military formations, the Civil War thus placed more inexperienced soldiers, with more firepower and with more individual responsibility for the decision to kill, into more intimate, face-to-face battle settings than perhaps any other war in history. Absent the reassurance provided by distance or controlling discipline or combat experience, many Civil War soldiers were likely to have struggled as they decided when and even whether to fire at men who were visibly very like themselves.
¹⁷

For many soldiers, the horror of killing was exemplified by sharpshooters, whose work appeared simply to be “cold blooded murder.” Sniping was a fundamental reality of Civil War military life, and rifles made marksmen accurate up to a distance of almost half a mile. Other technological innovations, the telescopic sight and the breech-loading rifle, further enhanced the sharpshooter's lethality. Confederate sharpshooters' units required men to be able to hit a target at six hundred yards with open sights. A Vermont recruiting poster for “The Sharp Shooters of Windham County” announced, “No person will be enlisted who cannot when firing at the distance of 200 yards, at a rest, put ten consecutive shots in a target, the average distance not to exceed five inches from the centre of the bull's eye to the centre of the ball.”
¹⁸

Soldiers often described bullets whizzing by even as they sat composing their letters home. “Dear Brother, Wife and All,” Isaac Hadden wrote to his family in New York from Virginia in June 1864, “There was a man this moment shot in the belly 20 feet from me which is nothing unusual in this country. It is worth a man's life to go to sh-t here.” To shoot a man as he defecated, or slept, or sat cooking or eating, or even as he was “sitting under a tree reading Dickens,” could not easily be rationalized as an act of self-defense. Soldiers in camp wanted to think themselves off duty as targets as well as killers, and they found the intentionality and personalism involved in picking out and picking off a single man highly disturbing. Union sharpshooting units customarily wore green uniforms to serve as camouflage, and Confederates came to refer to these marksmen as “snakes in the grass.”
¹⁹

The cool calculation, the purposefulness, and the asymmetry of risk involved in sharpshooting rendered it even more threatening to basic principles of humanity than the frenzied excesses of heated battle. When twelve soldiers from a regiment of Union sharpshooters were taken prisoner in Virginia in 1864, a local Petersburg newspaper argued for their execution: “in our estimation they are nothing but murderers creeping up & shooting men in cold blood & should receive the fate of murderers.” After enduring twenty-four days of steady and debilitating sniper fire between Union and Confederate troops near Port Hudson, Louisiana, John De Forest confessed, “I could never bring myself to what seemed like taking human life in pure gayety.” Men who had displayed great courage in battle had broken down “under the monotonous worry” generated by sniper fire. De Forest judged it a “sickening, murderous, unnatural, uncivilized way of being.” Men who could kill others in this way were not men as De Forest had before the war understood them to be; they violated his assumptions about both human nature and human civilization; he believed they undermined what defined their human selves.
²⁰

“The Army of the Potomac—A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty.” Engraving from an oil painting by Winslow Homer.
Harper's Weekly,
November 15, 1862
.

Dehumanizing the enemy is a common means of breaking down restraints against killing. Military training and propaganda often explicitly encourage such behavior, and soldiers themselves are inventive at differentiating and demeaning those whom they are assigned to destroy—be they Krauts or Nips or Slopes, to cite three twentieth-century examples. In the mid-nineteenth century, racism served to place African American soldiers in particular peril. Even in the Union army the 180,000 black soldiers who enlisted beginning in 1862 faced degrading inequalities in pay and opportunity. Constituting nearly 10 percent of federal forces, they served under white officers and were overwhelmingly assigned to labor details and fatigue duty rather than entrusted with the responsibilities of combat.

For Confederates, black troops represented an intolerable provocation. To permit blacks to serve as soldiers, Howell Cobb of Georgia declared, suggested “our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” These inferior beings, he believed, were incapable of the courage required for battle. But for white southerners, the issue was not primarily one of racial theories. The terrifying actuality of a force of armed black men seemed equivalent to a slave uprising launched by the federal government against the South. White southerners feared and detested African American troops. Mary Lee, who had endured three years on the front lines in embattled Winchester, Virginia, felt “more unnerved” by the appearance of black Union soldiers in 1864 “than by any sight I have seen since the war [began].”
²¹

Confederate soldiers regarded black troops as “so many devils,” whose very presence in the South justified their deaths. As the
Arkansas Gazette
proclaimed, “Arming negroes, as soldiers or otherwise, or doing any thing to incite them to insurrection is a worse crime than the murder of any one individual: Therefore, all officers and soldiers…guilty of such practices…should be punished as murderers.” Southern soldiers did victimize black Yankees, with atrocities that ranged from slaughter of prisoners to mutilation of the dead. W. D. Rutherford of South Carolina boldly declared his intentions in a letter he sent to his wife before an 1864 engagement with a regiment of U.S. Colored Troops: “The determination in our army is to kill them all and spare not.” The Fort Pillow massacre of April 1864, when Nathan Bedford Forrest's men killed nearly two-thirds of the approximately three hundred black soldiers present, most after they had surrendered, was only the most notorious of such incidents. Others were perhaps even more grisly. At a battle at Poison Springs, Arkansas, which occurred in the same month as Fort Pillow, the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry lost 117 dead and only about half as many wounded. This was a suspicious ratio in itself, as numbers of wounded almost always far exceed numbers of slain. A Confederate officer described bodies “scalped …nearly all stripped…No black prisoners were taken.” A Union soldier confirmed “that the inhuman and blood thirsty enemy…was engaged in killing the wounded wherever found.” But a local newspaper defended the Confederate actions as entirely consistent with the larger purposes of the war, “We cannot treat negroes…as prisoners of war without a destruction of the social system for which we contend…We must claim the full control of all negroes who may fall into our hands, to punish with death, or any other penalty.” Slavery required subordination and control, and arming men elevated and empowered them.
²²