Category: Costs of War

Fredericksburg’s Field of Death

In mid-December 1862, Abraham Lincoln dispatched an army of over 122,000 men under Gen. Ambrose Burnside to northern Virginia with orders to defeat Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army of 72,000 near Fredericksburg. The debacle that followed cost Lincoln the lives of nearly 13,000 men, another 10,000 wounded, and the virtual end of voluntary northern enlistments. This forced Lincoln to resort to large financial bounties to attract mercenaries, and substitutes could be bought for northern men to escape conscription.

Fredericksburg’s Field of Death

The commander of a Maine regiment wrote of the battle’s aftermath:

“We had to pick our way over a field strewn with incongruous ruin; men torn and broken and cut to pieces in every indescribable way, cannon dismounted, gun carriages smashed or overturned, ammunition chests flung wildly about, horses dead and half-dead still in harness . . .” Col. Joshua Chamberlain

Also, poet Walt Whitman visited the aftermath of Fredericksburg in search of his wounded brother George:

“Fredericksburg had turned into a massacre. [General] Burnside sacrificed wave after wave of his troops against the strong Confederate positions – only to be stopped short, again and again, in bloody carnage at a sunken road beneath Marye’s Heights . . . From this chaos came row upon row of cold, stone grave markers still covering acres of highlands over Fredericksburg City. Some 13,000 of Lincoln’s soldiers dead.”

Began my visits among the camp hospitals in Burnside’s army. Outside a house used as a hospital, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the entrance, I noticed a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc. – a full load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie nearby [with] each covered by a brown woolen blanket. In the dooryard, towards the river, are fresh graves, mostly of officers, their names on pieces of barrel staves or broken boards stuck in the dirt.”

“Death is nothing here. As you step out in the morning from your tent to wash your face, you see before you on a stretcher a shapeless, extended object, and over it is thrown a dark gray blanket. It is the corpse of some wounded or sick soldier of the regiment who died in the hospital during the night; [or it might be] a row of three or four corpses covered over. No one makes an ado. There comes a detail of men to bury them; all useless ceremony is omitted. The stern realities of the marches and many battles of a campaign make the old etiquette a nuisance.”

(Josiah Volunteered. A Collection of Diaries and Letters. Arnold H. Sturtevant. 1977, pp. 75-81)

 

A Distinguishing Mark of Gentle Nurture

A Distinguishing Mark of Gentle Nurture

“Of course, what was to all true Confederates beyond a question a “holy cause,” “the holiest of causes,” this fight in defence of “the sacred soil” of our native land, was to the other side “a wicked rebellion” and “damnable treason,” and both parties to the quarrel were not sparing of epithets which, at the distance of time, may seem to our children unnecessarily undignified; and not doubt some of these epitheta orantia continue to flourish in remote regions, just a pictorial representations of Yankees and rebels in all their respective fiendishness are still cherished here and there.

At the Centennial Exposition of 1876, by way of conciliating the sections, the place of honor in the “Art Annex” was given to Rothermel’s painting of the battle of Gettysburg, in which the face of every dying Union soldier is lighted with a celestial smile, while guilt and despair are stamped on the wan countenances of the moribund rebels. At least such is my recollection of the painting; and I hope that I may be pardoned for the malicious pleasure I felt when informed of the high price the State of Pennsylvania paid for that work of art. The dominant feeling was amusement, not indignation.

But as I looked at it, I recalled another picture of a battle-scene, painted by a French artist, who had watched our life with an artist’s eye. One of the figures in the foreground was a dead Confederate boy, lying in the angle of a worm fence. His uniform was worn and ragged, mud-stained as well as blood-stained; the cap which had fallen from his head was a tatter, and the torn shoes were ready to drop from his stiffening feet; but in the buttonhole of his tunic was stuck the inevitable toothbrush, which continued even to the end of the war to be the distinguishing mark of gentle nurture – the souvenir that the Confederate soldier so often received from fair sympathizers in border towns.

I am not a realist, but I would not exchange that homely toothbrush for the most angelic smile that Rothermel’s brush could have conjured up.”

(The Creed of the Old South. Basil L. Gildersleeve. The Johns Hopkins Press, 1915, pp. 17-19)

The Union’s “Veteran’s Corps”

In some northern States the amount of total bounty money for one man had risen to $1500 – a very large sum in 1863. If one consults Robert L. Dabney’s “Discussions, Volume IV (1897), he states: “the Secretary of War wrote that “after May 1, 1863, there were 1,634,000 enlistments. And if the cost of each enlistment was $300, which is far below the average bounty, somebody had to pay them a total of $490,000,000. It is then likely the “bounty jumpers” as it is well-known, perpetrated immense frauds with the number of bounties paid being far larger than that of the enlistments.”

The Union’s “Veterans Corps”

“In early November 1863 the veteran northern troops occupying Plymouth, North Carolina first read of financial incentives to reenlist, made necessary due to high bounties paid for new enlistees. To avoid mass desertions of veterans the US War Department needed incentives for existing troops. The following month a New York soldier recorded in his diary that “those regiments whose time expires next fall are asked to reenlist for three years or the war’s duration.” He wrote that the men “were lured by money in sums not imagined earlier: payment of an unpaid original bounty of $100, a new bounty of $400 plus a $2 recruiting premium paid in $50 installments every six months.

This was at a time when the annual family income in New York may have been $350. In addition to the $402 financial incentive was a month-long furlough home to see loved ones while wearing the blue uniform adorned with a gold sleeve chevron of the new “Veterans Corps.” Once at home, the soldier would also receive a $50 bounty from the State of New York and whatever bounty was offered by the soldier’s county and town. The total sum of $750 or more was sufficient to “build a house on his little farm on the road up home.”

As a town or county did not require residency to receive the bounty-paid credit, the soldier home on reenlistment furlough could shop area communities and counties for the highest amount and credit his reenlistment to them. Civilians unwilling to enlist and employers wanting to retain trained workers both contributed to each town’s bounty account to attract substitutes.

Some blowbacks did occur as some “Veteran Volunteers” visiting home would credit themselves to another community so as to not shelter those they considered “shirkers” in their hometowns who avoided the draft.”

(Plymouth’s Civil War: The Destruction of a North Carolina Town. John Bernhard Thuersam. Scuppernong Press, 2024, pp. 160-161)

Wartime Destruction at Williamsburg

Virginia’s historic colonial capital, Williamsburg, was established upon the former Middle Plantation in 1699 and named in honor of England’s King William III. In 1722, the town was granted Royal Charter as a “city incorporate” which is believed to be the oldest charter in the United States. The College of William and Mary is older than the town, founded in 1693 under royal charter issued by King William III and Queen Mary II. It is the second-oldest institution of higher learning in the US and ninth oldest in the English-speaking world.

Wartime Destruction at Williamsburg

“The early morning of February 6th [1864] found us in line, and we marched into Williamsburg. [Our column] was comprised of 139th and 118th New York regiments, two regiments of colored troops, and I believe a single battery, all under command of Col. Samuel Roberts.

As we marched through the town it was plain to be seen that it had suffered from the effects of the war; few inhabitants were left, many houses deserted and many burned. William and Mary, one of the oldest colleges in America, had also been destroyed by Union soldiers in revenge, it was said, for having been fired on from its windows. Though the walls were mostly standing, it was completely ruined.

Our picket line extended from the York to the James Rivers, about four miles; and with gunboats on either flank was a strong one. The object of the expedition seems to have been making a stand at Bottom’s Bridge while the cavalry made a dash at Richmond and burning the city if possible.

One of the pickets posted at Williamsburg was at the old brick house one occupied by Governor Page of Virginia. It was built of brick imported from England. The library in the mansion was a room about eighteen by twenty feet, and the walls had been covered with books from floor to ceiling; but now the shelving had been torn down, and the floor was piled with books in wretched disorder – trampled upon – most pitiful to see. In the attic of this old house the boys found trunks and boxes of papers of a century past – documents, letters, etc.

Among the latter were those bearing the signatures of such men as Jefferson, Madison, Richard Henry Lee; and one more signed by Washington.”

(25th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion. Samuel H. Putnam. Putnam, Davis and Company, Publishers. 1886, pp. 245-250)

Mankind’s War Fetish

 

English author and commentator H.G. Wells began writing newspaper articles in August 1914 commenting upon what was to be termed the “World War”; the articles would become assembled in a book entitled The War That Will End War. Arguing that the Central Powers led by Germany and Italy commenced the war, he saw that only the destruction of German militarism could end the conflagration.

American intervention – pursued by a president who was elected on a promise of keeping us out of the war – was decisive as cash advances to Britain, France and Russia amounting to some $9.6 billion stoked the fires. Postwar, America became the world’s banker with net foreign assets of around $11 billion by the end of 1919.

In 1918, Germany was defeated, its Kaiser banished, and punitive peace terms burdened the German people. Predictably, a nationalist arose within Germany who rebuilt his country’s military and ironically with French assistance through the Czech’s Skoda Works. Only twenty years after the Versailles Treaty, it was back to war. What is called World War Two – more accurately called the second half of the World War – led to an estimated 56 million military and civilian deaths, and an additional 38 million dead from war-related disease and famine.

Below, author Emil Ludwig cites the costs of the war to end war.

Mankind’s War Fetish

“The World War, which was on the verge of breaking out in the very first opening years of the opening century, is the great liquidation of debts created in the previous era and we desire and demand that it be associated with the nineteenth century. The second Hague Conference of 1907 was only a farce. During the weeks for which the third meeting was set in the summer of 1915, oratory could no longer be heard in The Hague due to the nearby thundering of cannon in Europe.

The cost of armament during the years from 1910 to 1914 amounted to 1.8 billions of dollars for Austria and Germany together and 2.4 billions for France and Russia – more than 4 billion. Yet these were small sums compared with those piled up by the War. On land and sea and in the air, 12,990,570 soldiers were killed in the World War. The war cost the combined combatants 250,000,000 billions of dollars – half of their combined national wealth. Thus, within four years, for no reason and without any essential consequences, Europe had sent up in smoke half of all it had gathered together during the preceding centuries. How should we characterize an act of this kind on the part of a large bank or a powerful family?

In so far as the victorious powers are concerned, France was a creditor nation to the extent of 30 billions before the war and a debtor to the extent of 31 billions afterward. During the struggle, the French national wealth decreased by a third; that of England by one fourth. Even the United States government had to expend during two years more than it had laid out in the course of over a century; and if in spite of this fact it remains today the creditor of the world, the reason is not participation in the second half of the war but rather abstention during the war’s first half. The smaller countries which remained neutral are in a relatively better position than any of the imperialist states.

With the exception of America, all the warring countries lost millions of men and billions of money; and any territory gained in the process at the expense of the conquered peoples is of intrinsic worth only in the case of new states established at the end.

Even the single positive result of the World War – the destruction of four realms anachronistically ruled by emperors, and the creation of eleven republics – was therefore purchased at a price which, in civil life, only an insane person would pay.”

“We punish an individual guilty of assault or murder, but the massacre of a people is considered a glorious deed.” Seneca

“Standing armies should in time cease to be, for they constitute a perennial threat of war to other states . . .”  Immanuel Kant

(Whither Mankind: A Panorama of Modern Civilization. Charles A. Beard, editor. Longmans, Green & Company, 1928, pp. 178-179)

 

Conditions Just After the War

North Carolina’s wartime Governor Zebulon Vance wrote the following postwar letter to an Australian friend. Importantly, he mentions the South’s fear of a similar massacre of white persons as occurred in mid-1790s Haiti – with the Nat Turner massacre as an example of abolitionist-inspired revolt. The northern States did not want black migration to their section as the ex-slaves would work at low wages and take jobs from white workers.

Conditions Just After the War

“Of course I cannot give you much criticism upon the war, or the causes of our failure; nor can I attempt to do justice to the heroism of our troops or of the great men developed by the contest. This is the business of the historian, and when he traces the lines which are to render immortal the deeds of this revolution, if truth and candor guide his pen, neither our generals nor our soldiers will be found inferior to any who have fought and bled within a century.

When all of our troops had laid down their arms, then was immediately seen the results which I had prophesied. Slavery was declared abolished – two thousand millions of property gone from the South at one blow, leaving four million freed vagabonds among us – outnumbering in several States the whites – to hang as an incubus upon us and re-enact from time to time the horrors of Hayti and San Domingo. This alone was a blow from which the South will not with reasonable industry recover in one hundred years.

Then too, the States have been reduced to the condition of territories, their Executive and Judicial (and all other) officers appointed by the Federal Government, and are denied all law except that of the military. Our currency, of course, is gone, and with it went the banks and bonds of the State, and with them went to ruin thousands of widows, orphans and helpless persons whose funds were invested therein.

Their railroads destroyed, towns and villages burned to ashes, fields and farms laid desolate, homes and homesteads, palaces and cabins only marked to the owners eye by the blackened chimneys looming out on the landscape, like the mile marks on a great highway of desolation as it swept over the blooming plains and happy valleys of our once prosperous land!  The stock all driven off and destroyed, mills and agricultural implements specially ruined; many wealthy farmers making with their own hands a small and scanty crop with old artillery horses turned out by the troops to die.

But, thank God, though witchcraft and poverty doth abound, yet charity and brotherly love doth much more abound. A feeling of common suffering has united the hearts of our people and they help one another.  Our people do not uselessly repine over their ruined hopes. They have gone to work with amazing alacrity and spirit. Major Generals, Brigadiers, Congressmen, and high functionaries hold the plough and sweat for their bread. A fair crop was the reward of last season’s labor, and there will hardly be any suffering for next year except among the Negroes, who, forsaking their old masters, have mostly flocked into town in search of their freedom, where they are dying and will die by the thousands.”

(Conditions Just After the War, letter of Zebulon Vance to John Evans Brown of Sidney, Australia, reprinted in the Raleigh News & Observer, Confederate Veteran Magazine, June 1931, pp. 215-216)

Shaping the Demand for Revenge

Late-war and early postwar Northern propaganda attributed the basest motives to the American Confederacy as the Republican Radicals prepared their punishments for the defeated. They asserted that “it was not merely the Southern people . . . they were abetted by their government . . . a congressional investigation reported that “there was a fixed determination on the part of the rebels to kill the Union soldiers who fell into their hands.” The US Sanitary Commission declared that “the conclusion is unavoidable . . . that these privations and sufferings [in prison camps] have been designedly inflicted by the military and other authorities of the rebel government.” Both reports were publicized by the North’s infamous “Loyal League.

Shaping the Demand for Revenge

“Northern opinion was thus rigidly shaped in the belief that “tens of thousands of national soldiers . . . were deliberately shot to death, as at Fort Pillow, of frozen to death at Belle Island, or starved to death at Andersonville, or sickened to death by swamp malaria, as in South Carolina.” Horror passed into fury and fury into a demand for revenge.

The New York Times insisted that “every rebel official who had been concerned, directly or indirectly, in the torturing and murdering of our prisoners” should be excluded from the terms of presidential pardon. Secretary of War Stanton ordered officers of armies advancing into the South to arrest the “inhuman monsters” most prominent in management of prisons. The archfiend of iniquity, for so the North considered him, Major Henry Wirz, was hanged as a murderer.

It was not until 1876 that the publication of R. R. Stevenson’s “The Southern Side, or Andersonville Prison” and J.W. Jone’s “The Confederate View of the Treatment of Prisoners” gave to such unbiased minds as might wish to know an adequate exposition of the Southern side. It was not difficult to find, however, material in these years that indicates the South received the Northern charge with sullen hatred. Typical is an article contributed to the Southern Review of January 1867:

“The impartial times to come will hardly understand how a nation, which not only permitted but encouraged its government to declare medicines and surgical instruments contraband of war, and to destroy by fire and sword the habitations and food of non-combatants, as well as the fruits of the earth and the implements of tillage, should afterwards have clamored for the blood of captive enemies, because they did not feed their prisoners out of their own starvation and heal them in their hospitals [devoid of medicines].

[When the facts of the deliberate and inexorable non-exchange of prisoners and refusal of food and medicines for Andersonville prisoners is realized], men will wonder how it was that a people, passing for civilized and Christian, should have consigned a Jefferson Davis to a cell, while they tolerated Edwin M. Stanton as a cabinet minister.”

So, the endless argument continued. The wounds remained unhealed festering their poison in unforgiveness. While Northerners blamed the evil genius of slavery for the war, Southerners pointed the finger of responsibility to “those men who preached the irrepressible conflict to the Northern people” and “helped to bring on that unlawful and unholy invasion of the South.”

(The Road to Reunion, Paul H. Buck. Little, Brown and Company, 1937, pp. 46-48)    

Lincoln’s Rotten Borough Political Device

Credit should be given to New York Governor Horatio Seymour for immediately seeing through Lincoln’s 10-percent plan of “reconstruction” of the United States, that is, creating loyal States out of conquered provinces. Even the Radical Republicans saw that Lincoln’s plan would only increase executive power while restricting their predatory raids on Southern property.

Lincoln’s Rotten Borough Political Device

“From the night of the October 1863 elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Lincoln kept his eyes glued on the coming contest. Two days later he was back in the War Department discussing political prospects.

The first development in the campaign was a Presidential proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction for the Southern States. On December 8 Lincoln announced that any person in the South – with the exception of high-ranking civil and military officers of the Confederacy – might be granted amnesty if he took an oath of allegiance to the United States. Moreover, whenever ten percent of the population of any State had taken the oath, they might hold elections and establish a State government, which the President would recognize.

The political implications of the proclamation were immediately evident to both Radical Republicans and Democrats. Horatio Seymour of New York perceived it as a new assault on popular liberties. In his January message to the legislature, he pointed out that the arbitrary military power of the federal government was growing steadily. Moreover, every measure to pervert the war into a war against private property and personal rights at the South had been paralleled by claims to exercise military power at the North.

He enumerated them: there was the emancipation proclamation for the South, and the suspension of habeas corpus at the North; the Confiscation Act for the South, and arrests, imprisonment and banishment for Northern citizens; the claim to destroy political organizations in the South, and the armed interference in Northern elections.

These acts against Northern liberties had been justified as necessary, but the government had given up no powers when the emergency had passed. In fact, “more prerogatives are asserted in the hour of triumph than were claimed as a necessity in days of disaster and danger.” The doctrine of Southern degradation, explained the Governor, “is a doctrine of Northern bankruptcy . . . it is a measure for lasting despotism over one-third of our country, which will be the basis for military despotism over the whole land.”

As for Lincoln’s reconstruction program, Seymour saw it as a political device. The minority of one-tenth in reconstructed States would be kept in power by the North’s arms and treasure. There would be no motive, prophesied the Governor, to draw the remaining population into the fold; instead, “there will be every inducement of power, of gain, and of ambition, to perpetuate the condition of affairs.”

Moreover, it would be to the interest of the national administration to continue this system of government. Nine controlled States in the South with 70,000 voting population would balance in the House of Representatives and in the electoral college one half the population of the United States. Fourteen hundred men in Florida would balance New York in the Senate.

Thus, the nine States mentioned in Lincoln’s proclamation, together with Pierpont’s [western] Virginia would constitute a system of rotten boroughs that would govern the nation.”

(Lincoln and the War Governors. William B. Hesseltine. Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. Pp.-350-353)

The Irish Brigade

Ironically, New York’s Irish Brigade was led by Thomas Meagher, a rebellion leader in the 1848 drive for Irish independence. Captured and sentenced to death – though commuted to life in prison – he escaped to America and organized a unit of New York Irishmen. Many Irish emigres served in the Southern armies, greatly concerned that northern victory would bring a flood of emancipated slaves northward to obtain the low-paying jobs on which they depended.

His brigade was decimated at Fredericksburg in December 1862 while advancing on Lee’s well-defended position at Marye’s Heights with 1600 men and soon retreating with barely 1000 able to walk. After further decimation at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, Meagher’s brigade was reduced to well-under regimental strength with 600 men.

Postwar, Meagher was appointed Secretary of State for the Montana Territory by Andrew Johnson, and later as Territorial Governor. He fell off a steamboat and drowned in 1867 under mysterious circumstances, believed to be intoxication, suicide or possibly a political murder.

Irish Brigade

“At Fredericksburg the Irish Brigade was almost wiped out. When it became apparent to [its] leader that there was no prospect of being allowed to recruit new members for the New York regiments of the brigade, it was decided to consolidate the three regiments with perhaps 300 effective men into a battalion of six companies and muster out [unneeded] officers. General Meagher had previously asked leave to resign, as his brigade no longer existed except in name.

Meagher thought it a mockery to keep up a brigade with the few men left and great wrong to consolidate regiments that had attained great renown. Although its 63rd Regiment served through the Wilderness Campaign – its ranks being recruited by the addition of three new companies and by augmentations – as a distinctive Irish organization it may be regarded as nonexistent after Meagher’s resignation.”

(Foreigners in the Union Army & Navy. Ella Lonn. LSU Press, 1951. p. 122)

 

Gen. Hardee’s View – Spring 1865

Gen. Hardee’s View – Spring 1865

“A correspondent for the New York Herald, Theodore C. Wilson, had been at General Kilpatrick’s headquarters in Durham Station, awaiting an opportunity to get into the Confederate camp. General Joseph E. Johnston had agreed that he might come if he could find means of transportation. Early the next morning . . . Wilson somehow managed to secure a seat in the car with [General William J.] Hardee and [aide-de-camp Thomas B.] Roy and now headed off to Greensboro with them.

Exploiting his opportunity, probably as Hardee breakfasted, Wilson asked him for an interview, which Hardee granted, receiving him “in a very cordial, generous, unreserved manner.” In reply to a general question about the war and slavery, Hardee said:

. . . “I accept this war as the providence of God. He intended that the slave should be free, and now he is free. Slavery was never a paying institution . . . For instance, my wife owned about one hundred negroes; forty of the hundred were useless for work, yet she had to feed [clothe and maintain the health of] these forty to get in order to get the work of the other sixty. The negro will be worse off for this war. Will any of your abolitionists . . . feed and clothe half-a-dozen little children, in order to get the work of a man and woman?

Sir, our people can pay the working negroes a fair compensation for their services, and let them take care of their own families, and then have as much left at the end of the year as we had under the old system.”

(General William J. Hardee: Old Reliable. Nathaniel C. Hughes, Jr. LSU Stat University Press. 1965, pg. 297)