Thursday, February 24, 2011

Life In Civl War America - Eastern Acorn Press

Wartime is by nature abnormal. As Americans learned most recently from their Vietnam experience, even a distant war deranges the routine of life at home. Men leave to fight, and some never return. Episodes of heroism and cowardice, sacrifice and exploitation color the moral landscape in extremes. Civil liberties usually taken for granted are suddenly challenged, even restricted. Nothing in life seems to move in its normal groove so long as the war continues.

Civil war compounds these problems and adds new ones. The conflict is not remote but fought within a nation's own borders. Every casualty is a citizen, every piece of damage a national loss. The struggle pits brother against brother, friend against friend. The carnage of war drenches familiar landscape, leaving scars and wounds that will not heal for generations. It is as if some form of madness has seized the land and wreaks bloody destruction until it drops at last of exhaustion.

Northerners and Southerners faced common problems during four years of madness: how did they cope with the horrors and uncertainties of Civil War?

For most northerns the war was a distant but not remote event. Except for Lee's brief invasions of Maryland in 1862 and Pennsylvania in 1863, some fighting in the western border states, and a few raids, their cities and farms escaped the devastation that blighted large areas of the South. Seldom did the din of combat reach their ears or the menance of invading troops disturb their daily routines. Life went on, not as usual, but at least with a minimum of disruption.
But distance from the battlefield could not protect Northerners from the effects of war. The ordeal of sustaining so massive a struggle intruded upon people's lives in countless ways. The most obvious of these was of course the absence of friends and kinfolk in the service. Every town and hamlet watched its young men depart for the front, some to die and others to return home with maimed bodies or broken spirits.
Concern for the safety of loved ones permeated households throughout the North.
The slowness with which accuate details and casualty lists reached home after a major battle aggravated their distress. In this was distance from the seat of war bred anxiety as well as security. The pain of loss often found expression in popular culture. Two Civil War composers, George F. Root and Henry Clay Work, depicted it in their songs. One immensely popular turn by Root included the following lyrics (written by Henry Stevenson Washburn):

At our fireside sad and lonely
Often will the bosom swell
At remembrance of the story
How our noble Willie fell;
How he strove to bear our banner
Through the thickest of the fight,
And uphold our country's honor
In the strength of manhood's might.
(Chorus)
We shall meet, but we shall miss him,
There will be one vacant chair;
We will linger to caress him,
When we breathe our evening prayer.

The presence of men in uniform, whether home on leave or forming into newly organized units, served as constant reminders to civilians. Soldiers could be found on the streets of towns and villages everywhere. In a city like Washington they were essential for keeping order, one report declared that without them, "This District would have been simply uninhabitable." Returning wounded also brought home stark evidence of their ordeal in combat. Rare was the town that did not welcome home a veteran minus an arm or leg or worse.
Hospitals filled with wounded had a similar effect. As the city nearest the eastern theatre, Washington endured the greatest crush of incoming casualties. Sick and wounded soldiers overflowed the hospitals into converted rooms in churches, the insane asylum, government buildings like the Patent Office and even the hallways of the Capitol. At times their number exceeded 50,000, "a population," Walt Whitman observed, "more numerousin itself than the Washington of ten or fifteen years ago." Creaking carts lumbered through the streets every night bearing their cargoes of dead to the cemeteries.
Some towns alsow housed army camps or prisoner-of war compounds. Another agent of war, the conscription officer, began appearing after 1862 once the enlistment enthusiam had passed. These officers became objects of loathing and often violence in many places, as did officers searching for deserters. During 1863 draft riots plunged New York City into turmoil, and in the lower midwest resistance to the draft led to riots, the murdering of several draft officers,and a string of "outrages, robberies, incendiary fires."
The conflict had its psychological effects as well. In 1863 the superintendent of the Illinois State Hospital for the Insance argued tha the strain of war had brought a "vast invigoration of the American Mind...national athleticism on a grand scale." But the shocks and dislocations of wartiem did not find true reflection in mental instituions, partly because so few of their victims ended up there. A more perceptive judgment came from historian H.C. Hubbart, who conclued that "the West and the nation as a whole was torn by war-strain, indecision, party faction and demagogism,anxiety, sacrifice, devotion, suffering, insanity, and death. Democracy was in convulsion."
Apart from its advantage in men and guns, the northern war effort depened upon its superior industrial and agricultural might. In terms of productivity the war was fought as much at home as on the battlefield, and this struggle enlisted men, women, and children alike. The increased demand for goods, coupled with the drain of man power for military service, meant that there were fewer people to do more work. Farm and factory responded to thi need by increasing their use of machinery to replace human labor and by putting more women and children to work.
The North relied upon its staple crops both to feed its people and army and to produce surpluses which could be sold abroad for badly needed gold. As thousands of men left their farms to fight the war, women, children and older men took up the field work. As a popular song enjoined:

Just take your gun and go;
For Ruth can drive the oxen, John,
And I can use the hoe!

Revelation after revelation rocked the public, prompting the New York Herald in June 1864 to denounce the "gross corruption prevailin in nearly every department of the government." Large commissions went tomen whose only service was to obtain lucrative government contract for firms.
On the stock and gold exchanges, speculators thrived on the uncertainties of wartime. Gold and security prices, like public morale, fluctuated with ebb and flow of news from the front. Hordes of speculators, including some women braving ridicule in a traditonally male arena, plunged into the treacherous currents of Wall Street seeking a quick fortune. One crafty manipulator, Daniel Drew, recalled that "Along with ordinary happenings, we fellows in Wall Street had the fortunes of war to speculate about. ...It's good fishing in troubled waters." Another financier put the case more bluntly: "The battle of Bull Run makes the fortune of every man in Wall Street who is not a natural idiot."
Not all northern businessmen were dishonest, and not all made fortunes. But the war created a free-wheeling atmosphere that invited opportunism and abuse. It is important to remember that not all northerns bothered to fight the war or evern tender it active support. Some people lacked strong interest in the conflict and either ignored it as best they could or resented it as an intrusion into their private affairs.
Among this group were men who found the wartime situation a golden opportunity for self-advancement. These ambitious young entrepreneurs used the war years to establish themselves while their peers were absent at the front. Some made fortunes even before the war ended, while others planted the roots of what were to be long and prosperous careers.
Within this group could be found a surprising number of the business titans who were to dominate the economy, and therefore much of American life, during the next half century.
To most of these men wartime opportunities brought financial nest eggs from which huge fortunes later hatched. For them as for many others who advanced their prospects during these years, prosperity was anything but illusory.
Society reflected this mood of prosperity, especially in the cities. As the war dragged on through month after weary month of bloody battles that produced defeat or indecision, northerns grasped eagerly at diversions to dispel the gloom of uncertainty that clouded the future. So frenetic did the pursuit of gaiety and amusement become that public spirited citizens periodically denounced this apparent indifference to the suffering and hardships endured by soldiers at the front. Even a foreign observer, the correspondent for the London Times, expressed his disgust in 1863:

There is someting saddening, indeed revolting, in the high glee, real or affected, with which the people here look upon what ought to be...agrievous national calamity. The indulgence in every variety of pleasure, luxury, and extravagence is simply shocking. The jewelers' shops in all these cities have doubled or trebled their trade; the love of fine dresses and ornaments on the part of women amounts to madness. They have the money, well or ill gotten, and must enjoy it. Every fresh bulletin from the battlfield of Chickamauga during my three weeks stay in Cincinnati brought a long list of the dead and wounded...many of whom, of the officers, belonged to the best families in the place. Yet the signs of mourning were hardly anywhere perceptible; the noisy gayety of the town was not abated one jot.









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