So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War–Era North 9780823264506

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So Conceived and So Dedicated

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The North’s Civil War Andrew L. Slap, series editor

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So Conceived and So Dedicated Intellectual Life in the Civil War–Era North

Edited by

Lorien Foote and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai

Fordham University Press New York 2015

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

The editors dedicate this volume to the historians who shaped their intellectual development. Lorien Foote: Robert Shalhope, Paul Gilje, and David Levy Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai: Gary W. Gallagher, Edward L. Ayers, and Patrick Rael

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Contents

Foreword by Joan Waugh Acknowledgments

xi xiii Historians and Intellectual Life in the Civil War Era Lorien Foote | 1 U.S. Sanitary Commission Physicians and the Transformation of American Health Care Kathryn Shively Meier | 19 Civil War Cybernetics: Medicine, Modernity, and the Intellectual Mechanics of Union Susan-Mary Grant | 41 To Save the Afflicted Union: Race, Civic Health, and the Sanitary Front Richard Newman | 64 John Codman Ropes: A Lawyer’s Historian Richard F. Miller | 87 Save a School to Save a Nation: Faculty Responses to the Civil War at Midwestern Universities Julie Mujic | 110 Lessons of War: Three Civil War Veterans and the Goals of Postwar Education Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai | 129

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“The Rebels’ Last Device”: Theodore R. Davis and Faithful Representations of Black Soldiers during the Civil War Niki Lefebvre | 153 For Their Adopted Home: Native Northerners in the South during the Secession Crisis David Zimring | 174 Thomas F. Meagher, Patrick R. Guiney, and the Meaning of the Civil War for Irish America: The Questions of Nationalism, Citizenship, and Human Rights Christian G. Samito | 193 “This Most Unholy and Destructive War”: Catholic Intellectuals and the Limits of Catholic Patriotism William Kurtz | 217 Notes List of Contributors Index

237 289 293

Foreword Joan Waugh

George M. Fredrickson’s untimely death on February 25, 2008, elicited an outpouring of admiring tributes to his long and distinguished scholarly career. Most singled out for praise Professor Fredrickson’s ground-breaking use of comparative history in White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History, published in 1981. His legacy is firmly rooted in subsequent works exploring the powerful effects of racism within a global context. Seldom mentioned in the testimonials was the first of his eight books, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union. Appearing in 1965, and reprinted in 1993 with a new introduction, Fredrickson’s slender volume has continued to exert an astonishing influence over fifty years and two generations of Civil War scholarship. This influence is amply on display in the collected essays of the young and talented cadre of historians enlisted by editors Lorien Foote and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai titled So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War–Era North. Professor Foote’s splendidly comprehensive introduction makes it unnecessary to catalog the many lines of intellectual inquiry spawned by Fredrickson’s study of a generation of selected New England intellectuals wrestling with the vexing issues of the Civil War era. Suffice it to state that The Inner Civil War has inspired scholars, including the ones whose works appear herein, across disciplines and fields to explore and expand the core issues of nationalism, loyalty, individualism, and authoritarianism addressed in the book’s chapters. In preparation for writing this small foreword, I pulled the paperback copy of The Inner Civil War off my bookshelf. My copy is heavily marked and underlined, with copious notes in the margins. I recalled how its ideas shaped my dissertation, and later monograph, on Josephine Shaw Lowell, who, along with several family members, was prominently highlighted in one of the book’s sections. Fredrickson portrayed Lowell’s postwar career in charity harshly, consistent with his contention that many New England elites carried with them a determination to punish and control the unruly aspects of their society in the decades after the conflict. As I prepared the manuscript for book publication, I worried that my much more positive take on Lowell, animated by the post-1965 scholarship on

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gender, would be dismissed or ignored by the many still swayed by the arguments advanced in The Inner Civil War. My fears proved groundless. In 1997, a newly hired assistant professor at UCLA, I was a last-minute addition to a conference commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the unveiling of the beautiful Shaw Monument in Boston, Massachusetts. The focus of the conference was on the African American experience in the Civil War, and the papers ranged far beyond the story of the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry Regiment, whose courageous actions were commemorated in bronze. There were many prominent historians present, including George Fredrickson. As I began my lecture on the Shaw family’s role in creating the monument, I surveyed my audience only to find Professor Fredrickson sitting in the first row! Nervously, but with growing confidence I put forward my own interpretation, which, although indebted to his scholarship, also differed and departed from it. Afterward, Fredrickson came over to me and said I had convinced him that he was wrong about Mrs. Lowell’s place in history. He then offered to read my manuscript with the objective of providing a blurb, an incredibly generous gesture that I accepted with alacrity and have never forgotten. I later learned that his kindness was characteristic of both the man and the scholar. Fredrickson’s final book, Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race, closed out his career with a return to the American Civil War. His beautifully rendered meditation on Lincoln’s changing views of slavery fittingly cautioned readers and fellow historians about the dangers of adopting an inflexible position regarding the people and events of the past. The authors of the essays of this book have surely benefited as much from George M. Fredrickson’s unselfish and open-minded approach to historical inquiry as from his prodigious scholarship.

Acknowledgments

Lorien Foote: I thank my co-editor, Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, for approaching me with the idea for this volume and for making the process so pleasant and so easy. He is a fine historian and a good friend. I would like to thank the series editor, Andy Slap, for answering many questions along the way and providing me, as he always does, with his expertise, guidance, and friendship. The entire staff at Fordham University Press deserves recognition for their professionalism, in particular Fredric Nachbaur and Will Cerbone. Thank you to Joan Waugh for writing the foreword to this volume and for modeling how to practice the historian’s craft. Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai: As one of the co-editors of this volume, I thank all the contributors for their hard work, the anonymous readers for their insightful suggestions, and Lorien Foote for her professionalism, dedication, and friendship. I also express my gratitude to the former series editor, Paul A. Cimbala, and the current series editor, Andrew L. Slap, for their consistent support and encouragement. Many thanks also go out to Fredric Nachbaur, Will Cerbone, and the professionals at Fordham University Press.

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So Conceived and So Dedicated

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Historians and Intellectual Life in the Civil War Era Lorien Foote

M

odern Americans often turn for ideological inspiration to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, in which Lincoln posits a nation dedicated to the “proposition that all men are created equal.” Lincoln asserted that an idea underlay the Union, one that he traced to its founding, and one that he asked the American people to save before it perished. Their task was to ensure the endurance of a nation “so conceived and so dedicated.” Although Lincoln claimed in his address that he sought to transmit a transcendent national “proposition” unchanged to the next generation, the historian Garry Wills argued that Lincoln’s words and the ideas behind them “remade America.” Before this signal address, Americans considered the Constitution and Liberty the underpinnings of their national idea; after it, they considered the Declaration of Independence and Equality their foundations. Lincoln sought a “new birth” for the Union grounded in the ideals passed down from the revolutionary generation, but other thinkers at the time of the Gettysburg Address believed that old modes of thought had already failed. They were in search of new propositions around which to organize the national life. These intellectuals were the subject of George M. Fredrickson’s seminal work, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union. First published in 1965 and reissued in 1993, the volume exerts enormous influence over how historians interpret intellectual life in the Civil War North. In research produced today, scholars continue to contend with Fredrickson’s work, either taking his conclusions for granted or explicitly challenging various aspects of his argument. No other work on northern intellectual life has matched the stature of Fredrickson’s monograph, despite the narrow social and geographical limits of his study, which encompassed a small group of New Englanders who enjoyed high social status, pursued intellectual accomplishments, and created an elite community of letters. Because of their wealth and status, Fredrickson’s subjects did wield national influence, but they were hardly representative of the Union’s geographically, socially, and ethnically diverse intellectuals.

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So Conceived and So Dedicated offers a more complete and updated picture of intellectual life in the Civil War–era Union and highlights recent and new directions in contemporary research. This volume follows the proliferation of recent monographs that assume the study of intellectual developments in nineteenthcentury America requires historians to move beyond the study of social elites who made a living through literary pursuits. Essays in this collection consider doctors, lawyers, sketch artists for popular newspapers, college professors, health reformers, and religious leaders. They were educated people for whom ideas mattered. They sought to disseminate their ideas, sometimes using commercial or popular venues, and they developed strategies, and often organizations, to implement what they believed. Without considering such people, we are left with the impression that the intellectual atmosphere of the Union consisted only of the rarefied air at the top, when in reality there were swirling currents that mixed and mingled at different layers. Another premise of this volume is that good intellectual history is often embedded within other subfields of the discipline of history. In the 1970s and early 1980s, intellectual historians confronted the impact of social history on the discipline and engaged in self-conscious debate about how to study ideas in the context of social developments and how to measure the influence of ideas. The fields of intellectual and cultural history are innately intertwined, since both are concerned with how people and societies construct reality and express meaning. Likewise, historians writing about nationalism, reform, politics, the legal system, and the environment inherently must consider what people think. The essays that follow thus intersect with important and burgeoning contemporary fields of research and could just as easily find a place in collections dedicated to medical history, the study of memory, or transnationalism. This volume is not intended to be pure intellectual history, in terms of the study of ideas, but rather is a study of intellectual life, of how northerners dedicated themselves to the work of living out their ideals. With these two premises as a background, So Conceived and So Dedicated offers perspectives from established scholars and young historians on a few of the weighty questions that historians must answer if we are to achieve any understanding of how northerners thought about, experienced, and responded to the Civil War. The first is to what extent educated Americans believed that the Civil War exposed the failure of old ideas and required them to adopt new patterns of thought and to what extent Americans persisted in applying antebellum modes of thinking throughout and after the conflict. The second is whether the Civil War promoted new strains of authoritarianism in northern intellectual life

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or whether the war reinforced democratic individualism. Finally, this volume addresses the question of how the Civil War affected northerners’ conception of nationalism and how the war altered northerners’ understanding of their relationship to the state. Fredrickson’s The Inner Civil War provided answers to all these questions as they applied to the New Englanders he studied, and after further exploration by his supporters and his critics over the decades, these questions remain vital and salient today. This unconventional introduction provides an overview of the various answers that historians, including those writing for this volume, have developed in the half-century since the publication of The Inner Civil War. Rather than providing an overview of the historiography and then separately summarizing the contents of this volume’s chapters, as do typical introductions to edited collections, this essay is organized around the three questions outlined above. It will weave together the perspective provided by previous scholarship and by the contributors in this book. Fredrickson’s work achieved its stature through its original interpretation of how the Civil War swept away old modes of thought and served as a catalyst for modernization. Fredrickson argued that New England intellectuals jettisoned the radical individualism of the antebellum years in favor of the bureaucratic, institutional, and organizational thinking that they believed was more appropriate to confront the challenges of war in an industrializing and urbanizing nation. The war transformed New England’s intelligentsia into a “self-confident modernizing elite” who boldly claimed and asserted authority with the goal of imposing order and discipline over an unruly and inefficient democracy. A centerpiece of Fredrickson’s study was his examination of the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) and his assertion that the organization exemplified the ideological goals and practical methods of these elites. Originally the brainchild of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and a meeting of the Women’s Central Relief Association of New York in 1861, the commission was co-opted by conservative male elites who used the organization to promote new values. Ostensibly the commission’s purpose was to investigate and report on sanitary conditions in the Union Army and to provide medical aid and relief to wounded Union soldiers through coordinating the efforts of female volunteers in the local chapters located across the country. But its male leadership, according to Fredrickson, intended the organization to revolutionize philanthropy by replacing democratic volunteerism with professional authority, by emphasizing efficiency over humanitarian concern for individual suffering, and by subordinating localism to the interests of the national state. The Civil War enabled these modern ideas to triumph quickly and decisively, Fredrickson writes, and New England’s intellectual elite emerged from

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the conflict assured that their mastery of ideas entitled them to be masters of the state. Fredrickson’s interrelated assertions—that old ideas had failed, that the Civil War promoted bureaucratic and authoritarian modes of thought, and that intellectuals conceived of the Union as an active centralizing state—received wide credence upon his book’s initial publication. In a seminal work published two years later, Robert H. Wiebe absorbed some of these concepts in his synthesis of U.S. history between the years 1877 and 1920. He posited that centralization altered every aspect of American life and that in response middle-class reformers developed bureaucratic values better designed to address the problems of a new social order. Variations on Fredrickson’s themes appear in more recent studies of northerners during the Civil War, and even today historians who disagree with these conclusions feel compelled to explicitly challenge Fredrickson within the body of their work. Fredrickson’s argument remains particularly relevant to historians who study the North’s prominent intellectual and literary figures, nineteenth-century reform movements (the USSC is practically a subfield in itself), nineteenth-century culture, or nationalism. A survey of work done on these topics demonstrates that historians have not reached consensus regarding how the Civil War affected northern intellectual life. The first question is whether the Civil War promoted sweeping intellectual transformation or whether antebellum modes persisted to a significant degree. Some historians have emphasized the changes wrought by war: how it inaugurated personal crises of faith and doubt and turned various groups of northerners away from sentimentality and romantic individualism. Randall Fuller’s study of writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Louisa May Alcott argues that the members of this group were haunted by the knowledge that their moralistic idealism had escalated the national crisis. Their pain and doubt about the war informed their later writings, and although they still employed romanticism, it had been transformed by an infusion of modern angst over war’s brutalities. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning work on four of the intellectual giants whose lives spanned the Civil War to the Great War (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey), Louis Menand goes so far as to claim that the Civil War “swept away the whole intellectual culture of the North.” The war left intellectuals searching to replace discredited antebellum ideas. They rejected transcendent truth and developed an “idea about ideas”: Ideas were socially constructed tools people used to help them adapt to the conditions of life.

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The skepticism and pragmatism of these intellectuals suited the social conditions of modern American life and changed how people thought. Few historians paint the stark contrast that Menand does between the antebellum and postwar periods. Scholars who engage with Fredrickson’s conclusions generally render a complex mixture of persistence and transformation in American intellectual life. Leslie Butler’s collective biography of elite New Englanders Charles Eliot Norton, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and George William Curtis places their lives in a transatlantic context. Butler argues that Menand totally missed the mark; for these four men the Civil War vindicated the liberal ideals the Union cause represented. They drew on their antebellum antislavery thought, which was infused with Enlightenment and Christian ideals, to promote a postwar liberalism that sought an opportunity for “cultivated advancement” to all persons. These intellectuals valued concepts of “fair play” and toleration, and as their thought evolved in the postwar era they incorporated principles of active citizenship and educative democracy that they garnered from their interaction with a transatlantic liberal community. In Butler’s rendering, the Civil War was not the catalyst for drastic change but a high-water mark in the long evolution of liberal thought that was shaped as much by international as by national factors. Nor is it fair to caricature these elites as advocates for social control; rather, they consistently believed in and asserted the values of democracy. Fredrickson never claimed that the Civil War introduced new ideas; he points out that strands of centralizing and institutionalizing thought existed in the antebellum era. He argued that these would not have triumphed as quickly or as completely without the spur of a war for national consolidation. For those who expand their sample set beyond New England’s literary and intellectual elite, however, the triumph of such ideas seems more incomplete, less diffuse, or less central than it did to Fredrickson. The cultural historian Anne C. Rose, for example, articulated a multifaceted legacy for the Civil War in her study of northern and southern middle-class Victorians. Rose believes that romanticism persisted after the war, but it had been altered by the central Victorian experience of the nineteenth century, which was not the physical conflict of war but a spiritual dilemma brought on by a crisis in faith. Christian ideas no longer provided meaning and purpose for Rose’s Victorians, who turned to careers to provide identity and the political process to explore and implement ideals. Their thought shifted from a search for transcendence in a “vertically structured universe” to the search for meaning through the human experience in a “horizontal world.” The Civil War did not redefine the central intellectual dilemma of the Victorians;

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rather it offered one method of resolution to the crisis that already existed. Victorians interpreted the war as a venue to achieve the personal meaning and glory they sought and as a struggle that revealed the value of human as opposed to supernatural effort. Thus Victorians extolled the heroism of ordinary people in the face of suffering and created narratives that honored the individual perspective. Rose takes for granted that the war encouraged bureaucratic organization, but at the same time it reinforced the romantic quest for intense personal experience. Historians who explore reflections of popular thought find even more evidence for the persistence of individualized, romantic, sentimental, and transcendent worldviews. In a significant challenge to the applicability of Fredrickson’s conclusions to broader strands of American thought, Alice Fahs asserts that the evidence garnered from popular and commercial literary productions points to the Civil War as an event that unleashed, rather than suppressed, individualism in intellectual life. In the plethora of poems, novels, and magazine stories that most Americans read, writers insisted that the meaning of the war was found at the individual level. Popular stories portrayed the nation in personal, rather than bureaucratic or centralized, terms and insisted that the war liberated individuals to seek and find adventure and personal glory. Americans continued to imagine the war through the conventions of melodrama, which proclaimed the dramatic significance of ordinary lives. Where Fredrickson’s intellectuals favored efficiency over compassion and approached suffering with a stoic sense of inevitability that emphasized suffering’s massive scale, popular thought was infused with a sentimentalism that privileged emotion and sympathy as it recognized the importance of each person’s suffering. Neither Fredrickson’s intellectuals nor Rose’s small sample of middle-class Victorians seems representative of northern thought when applied to questions of transcendence. George C. Rable’s comprehensive history of Civil War religion proclaims that the most remarkable attribute of Civil War believers was “their persistence and endurance in viewing their lives and the war itself as part of an unfolding providential story.” Recent works of cultural history have presented the greatest challenge to Fredrickson’s interpretation that war exacerbated changes in patterns of thought toward modern directions. Instead, these scholars assert, in Anne C. Rose’s words, “the power of culture to shape war.” From the perspective of those who study ideas as part of a cluster of values and assumptions that shape how humans assign meaning to events, Americans interpreted the war through powerful cultural lenses that inhibited and contained the emergence of the modern perspective on death, suffering, and the state. Mark S. Schantz argues that Americans lived in a “death-embracing” culture that actually facilitated the destructiveness

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of the Civil War. Because Americans prized resignation in the face of death, believed in a heavenly eternity of transcendent beauty where family awaited, and idealized heroic achievements and a sacrifice-based citizenship, it was easier for them to kill and be killed. Frances Clarke points out that the war stories northerners told in a variety of venues did not appreciably change over time, and she asks why they continued to tell sentimental, patriotic, and idealistic stories despite the high death tolls, widespread knowledge of flawed military leadership, the shift toward hard war, and massive protests on the home front. She argues that northerners mobilized stories in order to give meaning to their experience and to mitigate the war’s potential to overthrow their cherished beliefs. They idealized soldier and civilian suffering in order to affirm their faith and their cause. Rather than valorize efficiency and order, as Fredrickson’s intellectuals did, most northerners insisted the war had vindicated a moral republic of virtuous individual citizens. They continued to promote volunteerism over an active state and remained committed to social change through individual conversion rather than bureaucratic institutions. Several of the essays in this collection enhance our understanding of the ways in which northern thinkers confronted the potential of the war to alter established modes of thought. Two scholars demonstrate the persistence of antebellum patterns into the postwar era. In his study of the presidents of three postwar universities, Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai argues that Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, and Oliver Otis Howard drew on their antebellum academic training, which their wartime experience reaffirmed, to institute the character-based education for both blacks and whites that they continued to believe was essential for the preservation of American society. William Kurtz examines Catholic thinkers whose written words exerted influence over a significant segment of the American population. Because these thinkers filtered all other ideas through the rubric of their Catholic faith, conservatism and traditionalism rather than modernism was the hallmark of their thought throughout the Civil War era. Other essays in the volume explore what Frances Clarke termed “the paradox” that change and stasis exist side by side. Julie Mujic finds that the Civil War presented a serious threat to the viability of midwestern universities as student numbers plummeted. Faculty valued education over military service and developed strategies to ensure the viability and future growth of their institutions. They adopted the discourse of war to communicate the value of education, made innovations in the curriculum, and campaigned for state funds in a manner that created a symbiotic relationship between universities and the state. The war

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forced midwestern academic intellectuals to adjust prewar patterns of thought and their institutional expressions, but they did so in the service of unaltered basic values. It is worth noting that Mujic’s essay offers a new perspective on the reaction of northern intellectuals to the war. Whereas New England’s social and intellectual elite embraced the potential of military duty as a vital service to the nation, midwestern faculty articulated different priorities and insisted that young men remain in school. Finally, Niki Lefebvre’s study of “The Rebel’s Last Device,” a work by Harper’s Weekly sketch artist Theodore R. Davis, reminds us that thinking Americans held contradictory ideas at once. We must not simplify ideas as we chart the trajectory of intellectual change, a task that Lefebvre undertakes in her examination of racial stereotyping in visual culture. Davis’s portrayal of the dead body of a black Union soldier reflected a prevailing new standard of authenticity and dared to offer a new vision of African American humanity grounded in an imagination that could conceive of social equality. At the same time, Davis’s accompanying written text follows more conventional treatments that rendered black sacrifice anonymous and insignificant. Caricature and stereotype coexisted with respectful representations of African Americans. The second historiographical question developed after Fredrickson’s work is the role of intellectuals in promoting authoritarian modes of thought and in using organizations to assert elite control over popular impulses. Scholars who have studied nineteenth-century reform movements in particular have engaged with this question, in part because New England’s intellectual elite were important leaders in various reforms of the era, and thus Fredrickson’s work and thesis have remained relevant. Several studies of various groups of reformers in the Gilded Age emphasized the essential elitism behind their programs. John G. Sproat depicted Mugwumps as men who were trapped in the hierarchical moral thinking of the antebellum era and who opposed democratization. Nancy Cohen argued that radical agrarian and labor movements and the threat of authentic popular government after the Civil War frightened New England’s intellectuals. In response, they advocated and developed a regulatory and administrative state to promote the interests of their class and to remove decisions from popular participation. Lori Ginzberg accepted Fredrickson’s premise and applied it directly to elite women’s benevolent efforts after the war. Whereas antebellum reform used gendered language that presumed that women’s moral virtue could be the transforming force for social redemption, by the 1880s reformers employed class rhetoric geared toward new goals of controlling the poor they now believed would always be with them. The Civil War helped “wean” reformers from utopian idealism toward scientific and business models. Elite women abandoned

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gender difference to ally with men of their social class in order to administer an activist state that was immune from popular pressure. And in her study of nationalism, Melinda Lawson found a similar impulse in the creation of Union Leagues during the Civil War. Its elite founders sought to forge a united metropolitan upper class that could use a strengthened national state to control the increasingly unruly northern working classes. However, the current scholarship on reform movements questions both the extent of authoritarian thinking among elite reformers and the success of such modes of thought against popular resistance. In her biography of Josephine Shaw Lowell, a leader in scientific charity, Joan Waugh notes that gender remained central to Lowell’s program and that the movement’s leaders were never able to implement the policies they proclaimed so boldly in their literature. Waugh places Lowell’s thought in the context of a lifetime of social reform that stretched from antebellum abolitionist origins to the Progressive Era. The quest for social control never drove Lowell; instead, she sought a more democratic and inclusive society. Waugh reminds us that members of Lowell’s social class were never entirely elitist or paternal but rather blended these types of assumptions with democratic and liberal thinking. My own biography of Lowell’s father, Francis George Shaw, contends that radical perfectionism, utopianism, and communalism remained salient to those elite reformers who rejected authoritarian answers to the questions posed by social problems. And Leslie Butler’s collective biography of liberal intellectual reformers argues that historians have misrepresented them as skeptical of democracy, which they actually valued as the highest form of government. They sought to disseminate broadly intellectual cultivation to all classes and races, advocated open discussion as essential to popular government, and assumed that the state should respond to public opinion. Historians of the United States Sanitary Commission have done the most to reveal how resistance from various constituencies undermined the successful implementation of authoritarian ideas. Jeanie Attie agrees with Fredrickson that the male leadership of the USSC sought to use the commission to channel women’s benevolence toward the creation of robust central institutions tied to an active state under the leadership of cultivated liberal intellectuals. The president of the USSC, Henry Bellows, defined himself as a “cosmopolitan rationalist” who believed that the Civil War was the apex of a struggle between the forces of modernity and national unity on one side and the “rural” mentality, characterized by localism and religious excess, on the other. But Attie argues that the women volunteers of the commission subverted Bellows’s mission. They accused the commission of corruption in order to express opposition to a coercive cen-

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tral authority and thus hindered its effectiveness; local chapters ignored central directives and sponsored independent activities; and many women abandoned the USSC in order to work for the rival Christian Commission, an evangelical organization committed to traditional forms of benevolence. Judith Ann Giesberg further complicated the story that Fredrickson and Ginzberg told. Women ran the local and regional branches of the USSC and maintained independent command structures and day-to-day control over operations. Women of various social classes joined forces to create organizations that managed to preserve women’s autonomy and grassroots activism while creating a national community of women who transcended local interests to communicate a distinct women’s agenda. The USSC’s importance was not its role as a vehicle for the class interests of its male leaders; it was a vital transitional reform organization that laid the groundwork for the mass women’s movements of the late nineteenth century. The most recent assault on the interpretation that the USSC was instrumental in promoting ideals of authority and efficiency comes from Frances Clarke. She points out that during the Civil War civilians volunteered on a scale never matched in previous or subsequent conflicts. These volunteers did not want the state to assume responsibility for soldiers because they still believed in emotional connections between individual members of a community united in a cause anchored by the moral support of women. A widespread intellectual effort of the war years was for ordinary northerners, women and men, to create sentimental stories about volunteerism as a labor of love. Personal relief efforts and the stories told about them combated the bureaucratic and impersonal tendencies of the war. Clarke contends that scholars have accorded the male USSC leadership disproportionate attention considering that commission agents, inspectors, and nurses held diverse viewpoints. Even more important, the other voluntary groups that outnumbered and outspent the USSC remained wedded to personalized and affection-based volunteerism. Indeed, by the end of the war, in order to compete for public support, the USSC changed its program and altered its rhetoric. While using pragmatic arguments in the literature aimed at businessmen, other publications adopted sentimental and religious rhetoric, and the commission evolved into an organization that offered personal ministry and individualized support for soldiers and their families. The essays in this volume contribute significant perspectives on the question of whether the Civil War served as a venue for elites to impose authority and for professionals to implement control over popular ideas. Kathryn Shively Meier and Susan-Mary Grant present research that incorporates medical history, a field hitherto ignored by intellectual historians. Although the USSC’s purpose

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was to promote soldier health, Fredrickson and subsequent scholars overlooked the medical sphere of the organization and the doctors it employed. Meier’s and Grant’s new direction exposes previously unexplored ramifications of the Civil War on northern intellectual life. Meier examines the leading physicians of the USSC, young and ambitious elites with rising careers who faced a population that had asserted control over health care beliefs and practice during the antebellum era. Her research uncovers how these doctors orchestrated popular acceptance of a new type of medicine that combined science, university learning, and experimentation, and why the Civil War provided the perfect moment to enact such changes. USSC physicians were able to curb democracy and establish professional authority, but they did so through openness to some of the therapeutics that the public preferred. These doctors thus successfully promoted authority and the privilege of expertise, yet they did so through incorporating popular thought and forging personal connections with soldiers and civilians that garnered public trust. The story of Union army surgeons, the subject of Grant’s essay, contrasts on many points with the triumphal story of the USSC physicians, but likewise complicates Fredrickson’s crowning of a rationalist and nationalist ideology at the end of the war. On one hand, Grant places the medical profession squarely in the trend toward scientific and managerial modes of thought, and members of the official medical establishment of the Union did seek to extend professional hegemony over soldiers and civilians alike. Because of their brokerage role in the postwar pensions process and in securing prosthetics for amputees, doctors gained authority and helped forge the modern relationship between soldiers and the state. On the other hand, doctors in the Army Medical Department were out of line with elite intellectuals who created narratives of triumph to support their ideal of an ordered and unified nation. Instead, Union surgeons emphasized medical failures and broken bodies in a manner that contradicted the dominant northern story of redemptive suffering. Richard Newman’s essay in this collection, especially when read in conjunction with Meier’s and Grant’s, highlights an understudied aspect of intellectual life that scholars must incorporate into our understanding of how northerners thought about and interpreted the Civil War. All three demonstrate that northern thought was infused with the language of health and with the use of medical metaphors to communicate what was happening to the civic body. Additionally, as Meier points out, scholars need to unify medical and intellectual history because “the war became a locus for public and professional conversation revolving around heath.” Newman argues that the sanitary front formed a “universe

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of thought” that framed policy on emancipation, African American military participation, and Reconstruction. Nineteenth-century northerners, black and white, lived through a “revolution in health consciousness” and applied medical discourse to social problems related to race. Reformers thought in terms of the nation’s sickness and health, and whereas some used such metaphorical thinking to support emancipation, others viewed liberated blacks through the medical terminology of affliction and disability. Professional physicians yearned for order amid this widespread medical discourse and maneuvered to exert authority over popular thought regarding health. Richard Miller’s essay explores a similar process in a different arena: how John Codman Ropes and the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts (MHSM) asserted gentlemanly authority over the production of Civil War history. An amateur scholar, Ropes recoiled from the chaos of conflicting interpretations presented in the immediate postwar years. Because he believed in a Platonic ideal of historical truth, Ropes established a society where educated gentlemen could rise above the fray of personal agendas and political ideologies to establish objective facts and bring order to the historical narrative. The MHSM applied legal methods to arrive at sound judgments on historical questions and in surprising ways anticipated modern historical methodology. Questions of order and authority were thus central to northern intellectual life, but social, ethnic, ideological, and generational diversity among northern intellectuals undermined any attempt to implement a singular conception of these terms, apart from the popular resistance such efforts met. Two chapters in this volume, mentioned previously in this introduction, touch on these important themes as well. Whereas New England’s Brahmin intellectuals claimed authority through their mastery of ideas, their self-cultivation, and their social class, William Kurtz demonstrates that Catholic thinkers asserted the authority of the church in the interest of a conservative social order that had little in common with the modern values promulgated by many Protestant intellectuals. In the field of education, according to Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, the intellectuals-in-training at Bowdoin rejected the paternal authority of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and revolted against military drill on campus. His students successfully overthrew the lessons about discipline and order that Chamberlain took from the war. The third question developed in the historiography after Fredrickson asks how northerners understood nationalism and how the Civil War altered northerners’ understanding of their relationship to the state. Recent scholarship has recognized that nationalism is an intellectual as well as a political and an emotive

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process. Individuals and communities construct a definition of the nation and imagine the ties—whether ethnic, cultural, ideological, or historical—between people which will bind them together into a nation. The historian Paul Quigley, whose work is at the forefront of current studies, asserts that nationalism is a process and a fluid concept that shifts according to different contexts. Because of attempted nationalistic revolutions around the globe in the mid-nineteenth century, thinkers in the Civil War era were particularly concerned with articulating definitions of a nation and creating lasting national identities. As northerners confronted the problem of nationalism in the midst of a Civil War, they created various components to their national identity that were often defined against the negative example of the South. Northerners in the Civil War era found that what made them a nation was that they were not like southerners, a point of view that was problematic in fighting a war for Union that included the South. Yet historians widely agree that sectional identity was foundational to national identity. As Susan-Mary Grant noted in North Over South, northerners followed a typical global pattern in building a national identity through reference to an external threat. Northern thinkers addressed ideological and historical components of identity when constructing their national ideas. According to Grant, at the heart of northern nationalism were the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the legacy of the Founding Fathers; although northerners did not agree on what that legacy should be, they ultimately shared the perspective that the South had betrayed those founding principles. Melinda Lawson argues that northerners constructed a new American nationalism during the war that transcended other loyalties and that, unlike the antebellum era, produced emotional as well as ideological connections to the nation. Lawson agrees with Grant that northerners rooted their national identity in their revolutionary history and their republican traditions, and she adds that northerners believed their wartime sacrifice and suffering had sanctified the nation-state. Frances Clarke places ideas about suffering at the heart of the national identity that northerners developed during the war. Their moral superiority to the Confederacy rested not on battlefield bravery but on the exemplary suffering of their soldiers and the civilian volunteers’ admirable response to it, character traits born and nurtured in the nation’s homes and families. Intellectual historians have also grappled with questions of whether and how the war affected loyalty and an individual’s relationship to the state. Fredrickson’s perspective, in line with his other conclusions, was that the war sparked an abrupt shift toward the positive state, particularly in the arena of economic

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development (but not in social welfare or humanitarianism). Fredrickson’s elite intellectuals believed the ideology of the American Revolution was no longer relevant to American society and that once free institutions were in place, loyalty to the nation required absolute obedience to the state. Although other scholars agree with Fredrickson that the Civil War redefined the relationship between the individual and the state, they have found tensions and ambiguities amid sweeping change. The contribution of women to the war effort in the form of production, volunteerism, and the sacrifice of their men facilitated new connections between women and the state and incorporated them into the perceived community of the nation. At the same time, male and female northerners constructed women’s patriotism within the lines of the powerful antebellum rubric of female domesticity, and Nina Silber has argued that the war energized paternalism through creating women’s dependence on the state. The exigencies of war demanded loyalty and obedience to the nation, but sacrifice for the cause demanded the nation in turn provide a venue for individual adventure and success. In an essay for this volume mentioned earlier, Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai discusses how intellectuals assigned education the role of fostering national cohesion and emphasized that education would prepare individuals to fulfill their personal responsibilities to the state: whites through their military skills and African Americans through becoming productive working citizens. Northerners applied a panoramic lens to their view of nationalism. Some scholarship has emphasized the extent to which northerners developed their ideas in a transnational context and the degree to which northerners believed the war had international import. The early scholarship revising Fredrickson highlighted the personal and ideological connections between elite reformers and British liberals, and the global intentions of their reform efforts. Later scholars have demonstrated the transnational scope of popular northern thinking. Gary W. Gallagher explores what northerners meant by the concept of “the Union.” They conceived of their republic as a place of political liberty and economic opportunity, a unique beacon shining before the world. At stake in the war was not only the survival of the United States, but the survival of world democracy; if northerners failed, aristocrats on both sides of the Atlantic would demolish the principle of self-government. Andre Fleche finds that thinkers in both the Old and New Worlds believed that the nation-state would reach the apex of its development in the nineteenth century. In the context of the European revolutions of 1848, the American Civil War was a contest over the “meaning of nationalism and revolution in the Atlantic world.” Union thinkers initially sought to create an idea of nationalism that balanced liberal principles of freedom with conservative

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ideals of order and authority in order to justify war against secessionists. But after the Emancipation Proclamation, they emphasized that the Union’s success was vital to the world movement toward representative government. Southern slaveholders represented the North American version of the privileged aristocrats in Europe who stood in the way of modern nationalism, which was based on free labor, equality before the law, and an expanded franchise. European Americans drew on the legacy of revolution in their home countries when they interpreted the American conflict. Those who fought for the Confederacy did so in the light of a transnational quest for the right to self-determination; those who joined the Union Army fought a global war against the forces of privilege that sought to subvert civil liberties. Northern thinkers considered the transnational aspects of the war so fundamental that they expended resources to disseminate propaganda overseas. Fleche finds that more than 20 percent of the Loyal Publication Society tracts addressed international themes or made explicit comparisons between America and Europe. The society published a series of letters written by Thomas Francis Meagher (one of the subjects of Christian Samito’s essay in this volume) to the Irish people that explained why the slave power of the American South threatened the rights of white men around the globe. Frances Clarke emphasizes that Unionists responded stridently and immediately to perceived hostility from Europeans because such criticism proclaimed the failure of democracy and America’s role in the world. The defense rested on the extent of northerners’ compassionate and extensive volunteerism, which only a morally virtuous republic could provide. Clarke notes that historians, starting with Fredrickson, have missed that the United States Sanitary Commission was self-consciously participating in a transatlantic debate over the meaning of the war. Discussions of discipline and order in USSC literature were not about social control, as Fredrickson suggested, because they were preludes to the vital lesson that USSC leaders proclaimed to the world: Only a free people could have mobilized so extensively to support a shared goal. Richard Newman’s essay in this collection reinforces this point: Sanitary Fairs were intended to demonstrate the health of the Union cause through what they exhibited about northern volunteerism. The essays in this volume further our understanding of how important a transnational perspective was to northern thinkers who joined in the process of constructing northern nationalism. Christian Samito’s essay reveals how the Irish American thinkers Thomas F. Meagher and Patrick R. Guiney offered a reinterpretation of nationalism that assisted in transforming ideas about national identity and the state’s relationship to its citizens. Meagher and Guiney imagined

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an ethnically inclusive national identity that was centered on an individual’s devotion to republicanism. An immigrant’s choice to adopt an American identity based on loyalty to its ideals obligated the state to protect his right as a citizen on an equal level with those who were native-born. At the same time that Meagher and Guiney supported the integration of immigrants into the national identity, they also believed that immigrant loyalty to the United States furthered the liberation of Ireland and the cause of republicanism worldwide. Meagher’s and Guiney’s intellectual development during the war took them down the path of the Republican Party and its platform, a turnaround from their prewar Democratic Party allegiance; this turnaround highlights the fluid nature of identity in the era. The conservative intellectuals in William Kurtz’s study, in contrast, remained rooted in a stable Catholic identity but likewise thought from a transnational perspective. They feared that the Republican Party was part and parcel of a worldwide radical attack on established institutions, and their contacts with European Catholics informed their response to events in the United States. For Meagher and Guiney, American nationalism involved a choice to adhere to American values. David Zimring’s essay in this collection likewise emphasizes the role of choice in an era when identity was fluid and under construction. Although Zimring agrees with other scholars regarding the central role of sectional identity in nationalism, he points out that sectional identity was not a static concept in the Civil War era through his study of northern-born individuals who moved to the South as adults and chose to ally with the Confederacy. In the geographically mobile United States, 25 percent of the population lived outside of their birth state on the eve of the Civil War. The “power of timing” thus played a role in the formation of loyalty as native-born northerners had an option regarding their allegiance. Ultimately, the subjects of Zimring’s study identified with their adopted as opposed to their native section. Their choice was forged out of the effect of their immediate surroundings, their ideological agreement with the Confederate cause, and the belief that their personal and economic success as adults was tied to the South. These educated individuals ultimately appropriated a sectional national identity that was not originally their own—southern traits were the true “national” traits—and defined that identity negatively against the fanatical northerners who no longer represented true nationalism. Throughout the essays in this volume, we see how intellectuals lived out ideas. Lincoln’s concept of a nation “so conceived and so dedicated” is apt. “Adopted southerners” conceived of the nation through their adopted southern sectional identity and then dedicated themselves to the task of winning independence for the Confederacy. The gentleman John Codman Ropes conceived of an objective

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history of the war and dedicated the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts to its production. The faculty at the University of Wisconsin believed that education was more vital to the nation than military service and instituted reforms during the war to save their institution. Scholars who study the North’s vibrant intellectual life during the Civil War era have offered answers to vital questions that revolve around nationalism and the individual’s relationship to the state, persistence and transformation in thought, and authority and democratic individualism. The contributors to So Conceived and So Dedicated offer relevant and fruitful answers to the problems historians pose in their quest to interpret the nation’s intellectual history. Collectively, the essays in this volume suggest that antebellum modes of thought remained vital and tenacious well after the Civil War in the thinking of a broad spectrum of intellectuals, from university educators to conservative Catholics. Although some intellectuals and elites sought to assert their authority, the authors of the following chapters explicate the difficulties and the mixed successes of such efforts. Implementing ideas usually required some consideration of popular patterns and expressions of thought. In the medical sphere, doctors curbed democracy and established professional authority, but they did so through openness to the public’s preferences. Young men at universities rebelled when educators imposed requirements that did not meet with student approval. When addressing questions related to nationalism, the scholars in this collection point to the transnational and fluid nature of identity in the Civil War era and the importance intellectuals placed on loyalty to a nation’s ideals in defining identity and citizenship. The essays in this collection also suggest fruitful directions for future inquiry. Intellectual and medical historians need a further meeting of the minds, so to speak, and historians must incorporate the discourse of health into their understanding of intellectual developments. This volume reinforces the recent triumph of transnational history; never again should historians separate the ocean of thought in the Civil War North from its international currents. Because identity in this era now appears fluid, it would be helpful for future research to continue a study of the process by which northerners built constructions of nationalism. The lives of the northerners who appear in these pages suggest that historians must be comfortable with paradox in our interpretations of intellectual developments. The human beings we study were not consistent (nor are we), and their lives were not straightforward; we should abandon rigid lines of historiographical debate. The essays presented here collectively demonstrate that the Civil War fundamentally changed American intellectual life and that there was much that did not change at all. Historians practice a discipline that is inherently about

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change. But to trace that change we also acknowledge persistence. The Civil War was both a wrenching passage that altered people’s ideas and a vindicating experience through which people maintained much of what had been before. As we reach the end of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial, historians of northern intellectual life will continue to explore the complex depths of an event that can contain all of its interpreters’ seeming contradictions.

U.S. Sanitary Commission Physicians and the Transformation of American Health Care Kathryn Shively Meier

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y the mid-nineteenth century, American health care for the sick had become fundamentally associated with democratic expression. Americans could choose among a dizzying array of healers, from the traditional to legions of alternative practitioners, but most commonly relied on family members and folk cures. Even the medical licensing system crumbled under the weight of Jacksonian zeal, as homeopaths encouraged most states to repeal their licensing laws by the 1830s, eroding the very notion that medical expertise could exist. The Civil War, however, provided a singular opportunity for professional physicians to reassert their authority in Americans’ lives, especially in the North, which developed a powerful and sprawling medical bureaucracy to support the more than two million soldiers who would bear arms on its behalf. The leading physicians of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a civilian organization authorized by the U.S. Medical Bureau to buttress military medicine, seized on the crisis of war to impose order on what had become an intimidatingly diffuse medical landscape. These doctors, many of whom were young and ambitious elites with rising careers, would not only increase their own reputations as experts but also encourage popular acceptance of a new strain in medicine that elevated science, university learning, and experimentation over the traditional professional values: reputation and experience. Thus, although there were two major threats to professional medicine at the time of the Civil War—one from the democratic masses and the other from sectarianism—it was the former that Sanitary Commission doctors would largely resolve within the four years of war. The latter problem lasted well beyond the Civil War and has been extensively addressed by medical historians. That commission doctors orchestrated popular acceptance of medical science and empiricism has been virtually ignored by scholars, in part because we have

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struggled to put Civil War medical and intellectual history into a meaningful dialogue. The intellectual historian George M. Fredrickson’s enduring The Inner Civil War provided a framework for understanding how northern elites, including those of the Sanitary Commission, imposed order on what they deemed the excessive democracy of the political and social spheres, but Fredrickson did not probe the medical sphere to reveal a similar impulse among physicians. The U.S. Sanitary Commission’s foremost purpose was to support soldier health; therefore, it is only sensible to reinfuse commission history with its medical history contexts. Richard Newman’s and Susan-Mary Grant’s chapters in this volume also confirm a need to unify intellectual and medical history during the Civil War, because the war became a locus for public and professional conversations revolving around health. As Newman points out, an American vocabulary littered with metaphors related to health emerged as a vehicle for interpreting the principal issues of the war: most important, secession and race. To Susan-Mary Grant, Civil War surgeons, who faced substantial criticism during the war, were able to challenge their detractors by asserting their distinctly modern role in the conflict as “calibrat[ors] and count[ers of] the true physical cost of the conflict,” a reaffirmation of their value as professionals. The Civil War proved the perfect moment for commission physicians to enact their professional agenda because traditional doctors, who often opposed changes to the medical field, were largely tied up at the warfront as surgeons, overwhelmed by their daily obligations to the sick and wounded. In contrast, commissioners had the benefit of observing, analyzing, and supervising information largely from afar. They were further able to garner northern civilian support for their empirical approach, because their wartime paper campaign embraced openness, or multiple theories of disease causation and therapeutics, appearing to be compatible with the populace’s preferred democratic approach to health care. Indeed the commission’s medical program subsumed the most important tenets of folk healing and middle-class reform: Namely, (1) most diseases were at least partially environmental in origin, requiring environmental management both in and out of doors; (2) medicine should involve prevention in addition to treatment of sickness; and (3) because the body and mind were interconnected, elevating spirits could improve physical health. By presenting a wide array of approaches to health with which the public was familiar and comfortable, the commission doctors could then inject their pet principles of science, experimentation, and advanced education as important components of expertise without appearing distastefully elitist. Because of its grassroots origins and intentional strategies devised throughout the war, the commission also success-

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fully forged personal connections with civilians at home that solidified this public trust. The Prewar Decline of Professional Medicine From the 1820s to the Civil War, Jacksonian-era enthusiasm for democracy bled over into social involvement, prompting a nationwide do-it-yourself ethos and, in the North, enthusiasm for moral reform. In the medical realm, this meant Americans seldom relied on professional health care. The populace generally preferred home care from family members, usually women, who shared their faith in environmental explanations of disease that could be confirmed by experience and observation. Even the least educated embraced the Miasma Theory, which linked fevers and diarrhea to bad air emanating from swamps or garbage, or other explanations for sickness that mirrored the changes they observed on their farms, such as the proposition that climate, weather, and seasonal shifts produced diseases and mental ailments. The country remained predominantly rural, and many Americans lacked access to physicians. Most people avoided hospitals, which were more akin to almshouses for the sickly poor, itinerant, or unloved than sites of healing. If laypeople attempted treatment for sick family members, they relied on domestic manuals, newspapers, and word of mouth, as many matriarchs kept personal recipe books of folk cures. Because death was a common outcome of disease, individualized home care provided dignity and comfort to the ailing. Further, when treating sick family members at home, laypeople increasingly made case-by-case choices about whether to call on a traditional doctor or an alternative practitioner. Northern reformers rooted in the Second Great Awakening had initiated a wide array of alternatives to orthodox medicine, many of which emphasized disease prevention over treatment—a more effective approach to health care, considering how poorly disease was understood. From the public health movement, which urged urbanites to clean up trash and water pollutants, to the diet fanatics, such as Sylvester Graham, who encouraged personal discipline in eating and sexual habits to avert disease, middle-class Americans welcomed a preventative and do-it-yourself ethos that connected moral decency and mental fitness to good physical health. In this period of social reform, “The power and prestige of the regular [medical] profession were declining.” Whereas there had always been alternative “quack” healers who offered their services in opposition to professional doctors, the Jacksonian era of reform and enthusiasm for individualism finally produced several coherent, substantial threats to medical orthodoxy. The American herb-

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alist Samuel Thomson’s medical program, which gained wide popularity in the first decade of the nineteenth century, championed the spirit of folk healing by elevating botanical- or water-based cures above chemicals and emphasizing serving as one’s own doctor. The German Samuel Hahnemann’s homeopathy, which involved administering minute quantities of undiluted medications to produce mild symptoms of the diseases they were meant to treat, grew even more popular among alternative healers once it was introduced into America in the mid1820s to 1830s. Homeopathy posed the greater threat to the old medical school of thought not because it encouraged popular political or cultural expression, as Thomson’s program had done, but because its practitioners waged a direct war on orthodoxy. The homeopathic movement derogatorily reframed traditional medicine as “allopathic” and successfully persuaded “state legislatures to repeal virtually all legal regulation of medical practice.” Homeopaths meant to displace not coexist with traditional doctors. By 1861, homeopathic medicine had amassed over 2,500 healers (compared to 30,000 orthodox healers), five monthly journals, six medical colleges, and a national medical society—a significant rebellious empire that had gained at least equal footing in the court of public opinion. It was not the revolt against licensing so much as the dismantling of professional medical identity that concerned orthodox practitioners; traditionalists had never been able to adequately enforce licensing. The traditional medical identity that required reassertion was grounded in experience rather than a special claim to scientific knowledge. As the historian John Harley Warner has termed it, practical knowhow, personal morality, and interaction with patients constituted a “rationalist” physician’s reputation, and reputation was one’s professional identity. Even in the period of licensing laws before the homeopathic onslaught, the medical community made exceptions for rural doctors with little to no training. Apprenticeship was widely valued, as medical colleges were sparse, and their standards varied dramatically. Although the practice of bleeding patients was on the whole in decline by midcentury, Warner argues that the fracturing of professional medicine produced a vocal reaffirmation of faith in heroic medicine, which sought to balance bodily fluids (or humors) by purging, particularly by proscribing large doses of often mercury-based drugs. Orthodox doctors cast their very visible treatments and results in opposition to the gentler homeopathy. The majority of surgeons who would constitute the U.S. Medical Department in the Civil War would be of this so-called rationalist ilk. In the 1840s, the rationalists turned to creating new voluntary associations to reassert their former identity in opposition to alternative medicine and laypeople’s abandonment of the profession, a movement that culminated in the

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creation of the American Medical Association (AMA) in 1847–48. The AMA’s original code of ethics betrayed a manifest hostility to outsiders. A large segment of the code outlined the proper behavior of patients toward their doctors in an attempt to dictate the behavior of the masses. For instance, the “first duty of a patient” was to “select as his medical adviser one who has received a regular professional education”—in other words, to forgo consulting a homeopath or Thomsonian. As an additional check on democracy, the patient was to remain faithful to one physician only. Further, “a patient who has thus selected his physician, should always apply for advice in what may appear to him trivial cases, for the most fatal results often supervene on the slightest accidents”; and patients were not to trust in their own intuitions or “permit [their] own crude opinions” to influence their fulfillment of doctors’ prescriptions. Though there were legitimate reasons to mistrust orthodox medicine, the AMA codes insisted on the traditional physician’s absolute right to authority. Not only should a patient “after his recovery, entertain a just and enduring sense of the value of the services rendered him . . . for these are of such a character, that no mere pecuniary acknowledgment can repay or cancel them,” but physicians were “justly entitled to the utmost consideration and respect from the community.” There is little to suggest that laypeople read the code or had any reason to follow its precepts. At the core of the document lurked insecurity at the rationalist’s loss of status without a corresponding plan for the enforcement of standards or elevation of knowledge that might bring about renewed faith in the profession. Well into the late nineteenth century, the AMA would counterproductively continue to advance exclusion as its main tactic of professional protection. The Rise of the Empiricists In contrast, the group of physicians that would inhabit Sanitary Commission leadership would learn to neutralize the threat of the people by embracing multiple therapeutics. They were of a new strain in the medical profession who valued university education, hospital training, and continuing studies abroad, particularly in the French school of thought. French medical education emphasized openness to a variety of treatments, especially natural therapeutics, and required extensive scientific experimentation before turning to more aggressive interventions. The resulting doctors fostered a growing enthusiasm for empiricism over rationalism in the United States. Further, in their early careers, they tended to work in large, urban hospitals or in the army, signaling their interest in managing the chaotic sector of public health. Many of the Sanitary Commission

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doctors would be younger empiricists, who had received their medical degrees in the late 1840s through the mid-1850s. Youth most likely played some role in openness; these doctors were developing their personal identities at the same time as their public identities, allowing them to move beyond the old professional constraints. The most influential physicians in the commission fit this new empiricist mold exactly. Cornelius R. Agnew, for instance, was a founding member of the commission and served on its directory board. Agnew was a high-class New Yorker and received his medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City in 1852. He interned in a New York hospital to develop an ear and eye specialty and studied abroad in London and France. By 1858, he had enjoyed a meteoric rise to New York State surgeon general, putting him in position to become a high-profile Sanitary Commission doctor. Similarly, his colleague Dr. John S. Newberry attained the prestigious position of Sanitary Commission Western Department secretary. He had been born to a rich Connecticut family and graduated from Cleveland Medical School in 1848. He completed his medical education in Paris and, on his return, indulged in his interests in geology and ecology. Commissioned as assistant surgeon in the U.S. army, he served as botanist on a California expedition but retired to become chair of chemistry and natural history at George Washington University before the Civil War. Dr. John F. Jenkins, who served as commission assistant secretary and eventually succeeded Frederick Law Olmsted as general secretary in September 1863, earned a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1848 after attending Brown University and Union College. He studied an additional year at Harvard and took an eight-month tour of England and France, after which he set up a renowned private practice in Yonkers, New York. Even William A. Hammond, who became the Sanitary Commission’s choice for replacing Charles Finley as surgeon general of the United States in 1862, had a strong science background despite an extensive military career. After receiving his medical degree in 1848 from University Medical College of New York, he became an assistant surgeon of the U.S. army for the next eleven years. While in the field, he conducted laboratory experiments and collected specimens, which he sent back to friends at the Philadelphia Academy of Science and the Smithsonian. He also chose to spend a sick leave studying in Europe. In 1859, he withdrew from the army to accept a teaching position at the University of Maryland as chair of anatomy and physiology. Although these influential physicians were younger at the time of the war, even the more aged commission physicians tended to champion therapeutic

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openness, had served as university professors, and displayed concern for managing public health. Dr. William H. Van Buren, who authored many commission medical treatises and was offered the position of surgeon general in 1862 before suggesting Hammond in his stead, had studied at the New York City School of Medicine and in France. When Civil War broke out in 1861, these doctors did not volunteer to serve as surgeons in the Medical Department, but rather remained at their civilian practices to be courted by the Sanitary Commission leadership. In April 1861, the renowned Unitarian minister and upper-class reformer Henry Whitney Bellows presided over meetings of the Woman’s Central Association of Relief (WCAR), a New York–based ladies’ aid society that collected and distributed supplies to Union soldiers, was elected WCAR’s president, and then commandeered the entire operation. By June, Lincoln had approved Bellows’s newly dubbed United States Sanitary Commission (USSC). A corps of inspectors would gather information on sanitation and environment in the field and conduct a paper campaign to educate the military on the prevailing problems they observed, compiling general statistics on soldier bodies in the process. Wooing the president and the medical bureau had been no easy feat, as each feared civilian meddling would impede rather than enhance the already sprawling military medical bureaucracy. Yet to make its case for incorporation of the USSC into military operations, the commission presented data from the Seminole, Mexican-American, and Crimean Wars, proving that sickness was by far the greater killer than battle wounds: “As a general rule, four soldiers die of disease incident to camp-life for one that falls in battle. . . . Among volunteers it will be found much larger.” The commission report further emphasized the role of environmental management and hygiene in preventing disease as the best way to curb wartime sickness. Here the commission had its fish on the line: Military medicine necessarily focused on battlefield wounds, evacuation, and surgery, but the murkier realm of disease—also the deadlier killer—required time, study, and distance from the war front that only the commission could provide. During spring 1861, USSC President Bellows assembled an impressive array of prominent intellectuals to sculpt civilian intervention in the military-medical realm. The first physician he brought on as corresponding secretary, Dr. Elisha Harris, was a pioneering sanitarian who had trained at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City in 1849 and served as superintendent and physician in chief at the Quarantine Hospital on Staten Island beginning in 1855. Bellows also recruited a Wall Street lawyer, George Templeton Strong, as treasurer; Strong served on the USSC’s standing committee along with Bellows, Dr. Van

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Buren, Dr. Agnew, and Wolcott Gibbs, a Harvard professor of chemistry, for the duration of the war. The social leader and city planner Frederick Law Olmsted came on as general secretary, followed by other empiricists, such as Newberry and Jenkins. Although Bellows had no scientific training, he frequently socialized with the commission doctors to keep himself apprised of the latest trends in the medical field. The union between social reformers and empiricist physicians was shrewd. After all, their projects shared a secondary aim: bridling excessive democracy. In the case of social reformers, they sought to channel the unruly masses toward a nationalism molded by the elite. Commission Treasurer George Templeton Strong explained that “in a national life like our own, a democracy, where the people take a universal part in political affairs . . . the popular affections and sympathies will force themselves into the administration of army and all other affairs in times of deep national awakening.” According to Strong, “The practical question was not, is it best to allow the army to depend in any degree upon the care of the people, as distinguished from the Government”; rather, it was “how shall this rising tide of popular sympathy, expressed in the form of sanitary supplies, and offers of personal service and advice, be rendered less hurtful to the army system, and most useful to the soldiers themselves?” As Fredrickson has pointed out, Strong and like-minded commissioners thus hoped to educate the populace about the merits of discipline and subordination that appeared to be missing from democratic life. The historian Jeanie Attie has likewise proven that President Bellows had been preoccupied with social control for many years; he once stated that “the worst portions of our people” were in danger of unseating property owners and tearing down society with mob violence. He eventually tempered his public statements, and in a series of lectures delivered in Boston in 1857 titled “Treatment of Social Diseases,” he prescribed religious, legal, and moral guidance to prevent poverty and crime. The Civil War provided a means by which the upper class could wrangle Americans into an orderly nation without hearkening back to calls for elitist government, an unpalatable idea that had fizzled with Federalism. Likewise did it provide empiricist physicians with the opportunity to push a potentially unpopular scientific agenda. The USSC and the Need for Military Medical Reform Initially distant from the chaos of war mobilization, the Sanitary Commission was able to immediately observe serious deficiencies in the military medical department and angled itself to correct them. Secretary Olmsted himself inspected

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the soldier encampments in the Washington, D.C., area and released a condemnatory report in December 1861. Olmsted homed in on the problem of surgeon quality, writing that fully fifty-three per cent. of the whole number [of the 1,620 soldiers from the Army of the Potomac discharged as unfit for service during the month of October 1861] were thus discharged on account of disabilities that existed at and before their enlistment, and which any intelligent surgeon ought to have discovered on their inspection as recruits. He followed with a litany of indictments of generals and officers for their lack of attention to sanitation and environmental factors. “Camp sites have been generally selected for military reasons alone, and with little if any regard to sanitary considerations,” Olmsted complained, and tents were too close together and often overcrowded with poor ventilation. “About eighty per cent” of the regimental officers “claimed that they gave systematic attention to the personal cleanliness of the men. . . . In very few instances—almost none—is this attention what it should be.” He cited dirty feet and, in 90 percent of the volunteers, dirty clothing. Structural problems underlay some of Olmsted’s critiques. Because the procedure for admitting surgeons to the ranks was not standardized, only some had been examined. Some surgeons were still medical students, and others were political appointees with no medical background whatsoever. Because of the historic emphasis on doctors’ reputations over knowledge, many Americans remained skeptical as to whether or not a test could effectively determine a doctor’s merit. Justification for continuing to appoint men without degrees or training was that “scholarship” did not determine “the measure of practical ability.” In one example of the prevailing attitude, an 1862 Valley Spirit newspaper chastised a Harrisburg-based medical board for designing an exam with irrelevant trivia, which could be easily passed by medical students but intimidated the experienced physicians, who had long since forgotten such minutiae. The American Medical Association did contribute some recruitment standards for surgeons but focused its most vigorous efforts on barring homeopaths from service. The issues of surgeon quality and other structural problems were first addressed in an April 1862 medical reform bill pushed through Congress at the behest of the Sanitary Commission. The bill replaced Surgeon General Finley, who was hostile toward the commission, with William Alexander Hammond, who would gladly serve commission mandates. The bill also called for a permanent corps of inspectors to investigate sanitation in hospitals and camps; instituted

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new hospital construction standards in the European pavilion style, which allowed for better ventilation and hygiene; organized an ambulance system under the medical department rather than the quartermaster department; and insisted that medical appointments be based on merit rather than seniority. The problem, however, remained that even the most deserving surgeons and well-meaning military officers required persuasion that they should manage hygiene and environment and concentrate on disease prevention. Further, a tangle of other issues prevented Civil War surgeons from adequately addressing soldier disease. Fatefully, the very sources of the surgeons’ incompetency made space for the Sanitary Commission empiricists to impose their agenda on military health care. Most of the commissioned army surgeons were rationalists of the old guard, who championed heroic stimulation—bleeding, purging, and high dosing of drugs and alcohol—so named for their dramatic effects on the body. This therapeutic approach often frightened away soldiers, who preferred gentler layperson methods of healing. The uses of whiskey and mercury, in particular, peaked during the Civil War, despite their general decline from therapeutic prominence. In a critical assessment of heroic medications echoed by many soldiers, cavalryman Pvt. Aaron E. Bachman expressed contempt for the “ten or fifteen grains of quinine and a lump of bluemass [a mercury-based preparation] as big as a cherry” he was administered for his “swamp fever.” He believed that “the doctor’s ‘dope’ fixed me completely, so I gave my blacksmith’s tools away and was taken to the hospital.” Sgt. Henry Keiser, from Pennsylvania, who was plagued by diarrhea, concurred: “I got two pills and a dose of vil from the Doctor which made me very sick all day.” Nor did soldiers trust the hospital as a venue in which surgeons would treat them with compassion. A Federal chaplain wrote, “Too often [hospitals] are cold, heartless places, to which, even when sick, the soldier is carried with great reluctance. As a consequence, the good soldier is wont to resist and stave off an approaching disease as long as possible, by a performance of ordinary duties.” In attempts to avoid surgeons and hospitals altogether, many soldiers passed around the ranks preventatives and remedies, such as boiling drinking water, bathing and washing clothes frequently, constructing elaborate shelters from the elements, gathering fruits and vegetables, using medicinal herbs, avoiding poisonous plants, and eradicating mosquitoes, lice, flies, and ticks. These techniques most often prevented but occasionally treated illnesses that the soldiers believed were caused by the southern climate, weather, miasma, water, and environmental exposure—all tenets of folk wisdom. The soldiers further turned to each other for nursing in a friendly tent, looked to private home care by nearby civilians, and relied on health information in newspapers and their correspon-

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dences with home. Thus, surgeons sometimes found themselves presiding over a population of malcontents. The army surgeons’ formal education was often fairly limited; as rationalists, they believed themselves qualified by experience, though few had served in the military and were accustomed to the ailments of army life. Their lack of knowledge and training had its benefits and drawbacks. Surgeon Alfred Lewis Castleman of the 5th Wisconsin Infantry complained of surgeons, whose only notoriety consists in their ability to stand up under the greatest amount of whisky; and also against their re-appointing surgeons under the same influence who, after examination, have been mustered out of the service for incompetency. Under such appointments humanity is shocked, and a true and zealous army of patriots dwindle rapidly into a mass of mal-contents. Yet Castleman’s own court martial exposed that he possessed only an honorary medical degree and a suspect license to practice medicine in Indiana. Despite his dearth of credentials, Castleman’s diary detailed his attentiveness to patients and his competency in prescribing medications. That is to say, he was a sufficient and perhaps even effective doctor according to the old standards. Further, in Commission Secretary Olmsted’s opinion, too much emphasis on personal prestige might interfere with a surgeon’s willingness to attend to the taxing and sometimes repulsive demands of Civil War medicine. Olmsted explained, “It is ludicrous to see the enthusiasm of the men who come here—on their arrival— about details, cleanliness, numbering, records of disease, pure water etc. and their entire forgetfulness and ineptness for more essential matters, food, bedpans and water of any sort.” In his opinion, “We don’t want doctors & nurses & philosophers, we want a man or two who could keep an oyster cellar or a barber’s shop.” Olmsted captured an important reality about military medical service—one was always responding to messy crises. It was often impossible for a surgeon to follow up with patients to determine if his medical treatments had even been successful. Surgeon Jonah F. Dyer of the 19th Massachusetts Infantry wrote, “Sick and wounded are as soon as possible transferred to general hospital, and as regimental surgeons are employed principally in the field, they rarely see their patients but a few times.” In short, the intellectual constraints on surgeons hindered their ability to make significant scholarly progress. Instead they fell back on what they knew: palliative care. It is also important to bear in mind that whatever the skill of Union surgeons, they were plunged into a situation nearly as taxing and threatening to their

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health as that of the soldiers they were meant to treat. Regimental surgeons and assistant surgeons camped with the armies, where thousands of men in close quarters spread contagious diseases and sanitary chaos reigned. The surgeons quickly fell ill or became exhausted from overwork. Surgeon William M. Smith of the 85th New York Infantry wrote, “I left camp this p.m. (about 3 o’clock) for a few days rest from the toil which I have for several months past undergone without an hours rest. My health has come to imperatively demand it. For many years, I have not been so entirely sick and never as worn out as now.” Others had to fill in for their sickly staff despite being chronically overworked. Dr. John F. Dyer complained that one of his assistants “has been sick a week with remittent fever. I have a good deal to do and find it very tedious to spend four or five hours at surgeon’s call.” Just five days later, his assistant was still sick, as was the brigade surgeon. “I . . . attend to the business of both,” Dyer recorded. Being a field surgeon meant surviving day to day—it was not a role that afforded the time and resources to sculpt scientific knowledge or public acceptance of professional medicine. This was a void that Sanitary Commission doctors were ready to fill. And yet commission empiricists would have to work with and through army surgeons, as those in the field retained the ultimate power to diagnosis and treat soldiers and address the health of camps. Sculpting Public Views of Medicine Physicians of the USSC would disseminate their scientific agenda through a wide-ranging paper campaign, beginning in 1862, aimed at surgeons, officers, and the civilian public. Before embarking on the campaign, commissioners focused on assembling initial data on Union encampments in the first year of war. The early camp inspection questionnaires revealed the type of medical information with which empiricists were most concerned. One prominent theme regarded environmental influence on disease. Inspectors were to scrutinize the minutest elements of topography, such as the location of soldier encampments on a hilltop, hillside, hill-foot, glen, plain, or slight elevation and the surrounding soil composition and drainage. Other questions prompted inspectors to note whether “location conditions [were] presumptive of malaria near a swamp? Near a pond?” A second theme in the reports stressed hygiene, emphasizing that good sanitation required officer enforcement. Questionnaires asked, “Do the men bathe frequently? . . . Are they required to bathe under the eye of an officer?” A final theme of the reports was bolstering soldier morale to improve health outcomes. Several questions addressed whether each regiment maintained a band,

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games, a library, and general good spirits. Weighted heavily toward disease prevention, these were the sorts of topics that had been popular with antebellum health reformers. They would remain cornerstones of all medical information elicited and addressed by commission doctors. The centerpiece of the USSC paper campaign in 1862 was a portable library, which would comprise nineteen treatises authored by the empiricists. Because imposing knowledge on traditional surgeons smacked of condescension, each treatise began with a message from Secretary Olmsted that the library was merely meant to replicate the books a doctor would have drawn on at home. The commission doctors peppered the treatises with the methods of middle-class reformers, folk healers, and new scientific knowledge, approaches that for the numerous rationalists among the ranks would have been suspect. For example, one treatise from the portable library on “military hygiene and therapeutics” urged surgeons, who excessively fancied the more gloried surgical aspect of their jobs, to turn their attention to the “less popular” topic of disease and sanitation. “The statistics of armies clearly reveal the fact, that a much larger number of soldiers die from disease, resulting from unfavorable hygienic circumstances, than from wounds inflicted in battle.” The report followed with detailed instructions for how surgeons might prevent disease by selecting salubrious campgrounds, locating clean water, avoiding swamps, constructing and arranging tents to protect against the weather, frequently burying excrement and offal, preparing food properly, and ensuring proper soldierly dress. This preventative focus echoed middle-class reformism and popular healing, but the commission took prevention one step further with its heavy-handed campaign to urge surgeons to dispense quinine as a prophylactic against malaria. The closest most rationalists came to employing preventatives was administering the small pox vaccine. Explained one treatise, instead of relying on quinine only as cure, three to six grains taken in one or more doses would prevent the disease in “a healthy person exposed to malaria”—a method tested in the “last twenty years in unhealthy localities in the West and South by planters, for themselves, their families, their overseers, and negroes.” At war’s end, the commissioners would consider the prophylactic quinine campaign to be one of their finest scientific accomplishments. Other treatises in the library also stressed the environmental origin of disease in concert with layperson thinking, while advocating more traditional chemical treatments. A range of fevers and bowel complaints—the most common army ailments—were often presented as topographical and seasonal in origin. For instance, the transition from summer to autumn generated the most cases of diarrhea, particularly for armies stationed near the marshes associated with miasma

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and, therefore, malaria. In response, prevention was urged over palliative treatment. Surgeons should help soldiers avoid exposure by using protective clothing, tents, and well-constructed beds and by minimizing contact with the lowlands. These techniques were also common habits employed by soldiers in the ranks. Commission doctors suggested that diarrhea and dysentery could be prevented with careful attention to diet and treated by warming the belly—packing it with heated flaxseed or wrapping it with flannel cloth; these preventatives and treatments were similar to the soldiers’ remedies. In addition to these popular healing techniques, commissioners recommended administering opium, Epsom salts, or even laxatives as more orthodox cures. Thus the treatises incorporated a bit of something for every therapeutic style. Another important aspect of the pamphlets was attention to body and mind as interrelated facets of health—a reformist approach. Particularly in the realm of mental health, the commission doctors could enjoy hegemony, as morale was incontrovertibly important to army efficiency, and yet the military lacked a coherent plan for addressing soldier spirits. In a treatise on typhoid fever, many sanitary precautions, from ventilation to the deploying of disinfectants, preceded a mandate to “from the first, and continually, call into operation all proper means for increasing the cheerfulness, hopefulness, and general morale of all patients and attendants.” The pamphlet on scurvy likewise cautioned surgeons to consider that the disease’s earliest symptom was “melancholy”—“in the first, the soldier . . . prefers the sitting or recumbent posture; he is not disposed to be moved by those things which ordinarily excite his mind.” The physicians therefore postulated that the disease had mental and physical origins, involving a threefold confluence of events: environmental conditions (darkness, cold, moisture, and impure air), moral issues (homesickness, anxiety, “despondency of mind,” and “mental depression”), and dietetic problems (“the deprivation of succulent vegetable food” or “the sameness of diet to which soldiers and sailors are so frequently subjected”). Avoiding and treating the disease therefore necessitated environmental management, attention to morale, and the addition of fruits and vegetables to rations. Still more information flowed from the surgeon general’s office to field surgeons via the Sanitary Commission’s chosen disciple, William Alexander Hammond. On a treatise regarding acceptable drinking water, Hammond did not shy away from explicit scientific instructions. “The only waters which are fit for drinking (excluding from this head the mineral waters, which are properly medicinal) are rain water, river water, and spring or well water,” or water that appeared colorless, odorless, and tasteless. The proper test for water quality followed:

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By ascertaining the specific gravity of the water to be tested, a rough idea of the quantity of solids contained in it can be obtained. Deduct from the specific gravity of the water the number 1000, and multiply the difference by 1–4, the product will represent the quantity of solid contents. The weight of fixed air must also be included. Hammond thus encouraged surgeons to move beyond simple observation to more advanced methods of calculation. In addition to informational communications with surgeons, other documents, such as Dr. Van Buren’s “Rules for Preserving the Health of the Soldier,” were directed at military officers, as the responsibility of “securing [soldiers’] health, safety, and comfort” fell to them. Always precariously situated as intermediary between the civil sphere and the military, the commission’s “Rules” maintained that it “will be found in no instance to conflict with ‘Army regulations,’ by which all ranks are governed, and with which every good soldier should be familiar.” In compliance with all commission directives, Van Buren highlighted environmental, sanitary, and mental principles. For instance, he advised that a campsite be selected “for the dryness of its soil, its proximity to fresh water of good quality, and shelter from high winds,” and beds should be constructed of “tarpaulin or India rubber cloth,” “straw or hay,” or “fresh hemlock, pine, or cedar boughs.” Officers were to attend to soldiers’ dress, as “the men should sleep in their shirts and drawers, removing the shoes, stockings, and outer clothing, except when absolutely impracticable. Sleeping in the clothes is never so refreshing, and is absolutely unhealthy.” And noncommissioned officers should be sure that the soldiers “keep [their] hair and beard cropped to spot vermin” and provide them with extra soap to this purpose. Campfires had a myriad of uses, for “purifying the air, for preventing annoyance from insects, for drying clothing, and for security against chilliness during the night.” Sports and outdoor leisure were encouraged to improve morale. The most emphasized rule, however, was the importance of proper food preparation and cooking to prevent disease. Acceptance of the Commission’s Medical Agenda The commission publications elicited a mixed response from the military. Although some regimental surgeons complied with USSC requests for sanitary statistics, medical histories, and even scientific samples of soil or water, others felt threatened. Chaplain Joseph H. Twichell observed that “the Sanitary Commission has done a great deal to mitigate the evil where they could get at

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it, yet there can hardly be said to be any cooperation in the matter, for the feeling displayed by Army Medical Officers toward this institution is anything but cordial.” One source of tension was that commissioners publicly criticized army surgeons. For instance, one question contained in the form inspection report asked, “Does the regimental surgeon understand that he is responsible for all conditions of the camp or regiment unfavorable to health unless he has warned the commanding officer of them?” This and other questions necessitated that each inspector make a personal and often critical evaluation of the regimental surgeon. Further, President Bellows, in typical commission fashion, addressed a large crowd at the Philadelphia Academy of Music, on February, 24, 1863: All the difficulties connected with the treatment of the sick and wounded, are due to the fact that the Medical Department of the United States Army . . . was necessarily diluted by the addition of 3000 medical men, with great hearts in their bosoms, and great determination and devotion to duty, but without that particular knowledge of all the regulations and details of army life. Military officers were similarly criticized: The unfitness of misplaced officers may sacrifice more lives than the shrewdest strategy or the most destructive weapons of their enemy in the field. Even in the best regulated European armies this criminal negligence and disregard of the soldier’s life and welfare are found. The appraisals did not sit well with medical and military officers who themselves faced extraordinarily difficult field conditions. The commission leadership did what it could to ease the resulting friction, expending a considerable amount of energy on softening its intrusive image in the military sphere in order to secure continued access to the warfront. One commission form letter addressed to officers read in the most conciliatory language possible: Your attention is earnestly and respectfully called by the undersigned to the pressing necessity for the strict observance of the rules of camp police, some of which may appear of trivial importance, yet in fact are details of discipline, which seriously affect the health of the camps, and concern the most vital interests of the whole army, especially during the present season, when

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every precaution should be adopted to guard against the obvious danger of epidemic disease. A later form letter from Dr. Jenkins addressed to commission field inspectors cautioned: In the performance of your duty as an Inspector of the Sanitary Commission, it is of the highest importance that you should, under all circumstances, be careful to show your respect for the regulations of discipline, order and rank in the army. . . . Criticisms of military men and movements are foreign to your official duties, and might be properly regarded as meddlesome and mischievous. Scrupulously avoid, therefore, all expression of opinion in regard to the merits of military officers or measures, except when such expressions of opinion shall become necessary, as a matter of duty, in your confidential reports. If commission doctors could not always win over the officers and surgeons, however, they accomplished the impressive feat of courting common soldiers and the general civilian populace to their particular brand of medical expertise. As commission fieldworker Frederick N. Knapp described in his diary, a typical day for him involved significant interactions with the men, attuning soldiers to the commissioner’s compassion for their plights. First thing in the morning, Knapp made arrangements for the sick and wounded to receive supplies to enhance their comfort as they boarded trains bound for hospital. Next, he distributed whiskey, blankets, hospital shirts, oranges, quinine, sherry, guava jelly, lemons, tea, fly nets, and farina to several regiments and their hospitals, despite being “quite sick” himself with diarrhea. Commission interactions with soldiers were reminiscent of the personal touch that soldiers believed official care lacked. Soldiers further noticed that where commission inspectors went, improvements to camp life followed. As Pvt. Ephraim Wood, a soldier in the Shenandoah Valley, wrote, “The Sanitary Committee were here day before yesterday. They condemned these ponchos tents and we have been ordered to make out requisitions for Libby tents, which will add to our comfort a good deal.” The influx of female nurses via the commission also had the soothing effect of reminding soldiers of privatized home care, which had generally been conducted by their mothers, sisters, and wives. As the war progressed, the commission’s attention to the needs of individual soldiers only increased. The USSC offered soldiers’ homes complete with veg-

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etable gardens and hospitals as havens for traveling or disabled Union soldiers. Perhaps the best encapsulation of the commission’s achievement in connecting personally with common soldiers came in the form of The Soldier’s Friend, a pocket-sized book distributed in 1865 to more than 105,000 men. It described the considerable range of aid the commission offered soldiers by the end of the war: providing medications, supplies, health care workers, and lodging; representing sick men before the military; and securing railroad tickets and safe passage home for discharged soldiers. It laid bare the persistent mysteries of army life by explaining the pay scale and rank system, the nature of discharges and pensions, and the organization of the medical system. Further, “in addition to the physical comforts referred to above, the commission desires to add to your moral and intellectual enjoyment by supplying a variety of reading matter, innocent games, &c.,” and included hymns, calendars, and stationery for soldiers to write letters to family members. A miniature token of affection, the book exuded concern for supporting the soldier’s mental and physical health and helped him process the dizzying experiences of war. By 1865, the commission appeared the common soldier’s greatest advocate, a truly respectable source of medical authority. The commission empiricists’ approach to converting the civilian populace to their scientific agenda was also diverse and far-reaching. At least for the early years of the war, it was evident that the Sanitary Commission had a monopoly over health information transmitted in the Union newspapers. Most articles communicating commission messages either presented statistics on sick soldiers or reiterated the important role of officers and surgeons in managing sanitation and environment in the ranks. Such articles established the commission as an authority in data collection and disease prevention and treatment. Further, it confirmed that commissioners were acting as surrogates, caring for civilians’ loved ones as they would have done. As one Harper’s Weekly article put it, “The sanitary care which, by the constant benevolence of all patriotic families throughout the country, administered by the unwearying attention of the Sanitary Commission, has followed our soldiers to the camp, received them from disaster, and soothed them in the final hour.” Also beginning late in 1862, commission physicians could funnel information to the public through the Sanitary Bulletin in the East and the Sanitary Reporter in the West. In addition to sharing stories from nurses and soldiers and reporting on where the supplies donated by civilians were sent, the newsletters provided a sense of including civilians in the policing of sanitary conditions at the front. The introduction to the first edition of the Bulletin read,

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There is a steady tendency to the neglect or ignoring of preventative methods. The condition of our barracks, transports, and camps needs incessant watchfulness, and a perpetual cry of warning must be raised in the ear of the responsible civil and military authorities. Yet the Bulletin was careful not to defame military medicine, as its surgeons remained some of the very people commissioners were seeking to convert: It is plain how exposed to misapprehension the Medical Department of so vast an army as ours is, how little credit it gets for the regular and successful performance of its duties, how much blame for its occasional failures to meet the exigencies of its affairs. To attempt to supply an army as a family, or a village, or a city is supplied, or to carry civil maxims or customs into the camp, is a pure impossibility. The Bulletin, like the other elements of the commission’s paper campaign, also provided anecdotes and tips about proper procedures for caring for the ill in the column “Nurse’s Notes.” By means of the nurses, commissioners could sculpt actual care by encouraging the familiar mantra of attention to environment, prevention, and the body-mind connection. Recommendations included keeping hospital windows open at night to allow in fresh air, protecting patients against a loss of “vital heat” by wrapping them in blankets, regularly airing out the sheets, and sealing chamber pots in between uses. While the commission doctors established their authority and wooed the public using publications, other commissioners lent the central medical cause sympathy through speeches, soldier’s fairs (carnivals that helped raise money for the suffering soldiers), and personal support networks for civilians at home. Women were often the targeted audience of calls to action, as they had been the typical caretakers before the war, as evidenced in Frederick Knapp’s October 1861 appeal: “You are called upon to help take care of our sick and wounded soldiers and sailors. It is true that government undertakes their care, but all experience, in every other country as well as our own, shows that government alone cannot completely provide for the human treatment of [soldiers].” This is not to say that the commission was inviting unchecked democracy into the war effort; women were to donate supplies or funds or serve as nurses, avenues to the warfront that were carefully structured and supervised by the commission. As an even greater personal link between soldiers and loved ones at home, the USSC created a hospital directory, which put civilians back in touch with

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soldiers who had fallen out of contact within the hospital system. Commission members associated with directory offices in Washington, D.C.; Louisville, Kentucky; Philadelphia; and New York received heartbreaking telegrams and letters requesting information on soldiers’ whereabouts and responded by reuniting civilians with their family members via correspondence. Commissioner Edward Abbott at Washington Hospital read the letter of one woman from Philadelphia, which lamented, “I am wild with anxiety and really distressed in my mind about my husband.” Another from Lamberville, New Jersey, wrote, “If you can inform us of our boy, you will be forever prayed for.” A resident of Charleston, Vermont, wanted to know, “Is our boy discouraged? Do you think he will recover?” Abbott’s sympathetic replies soon relieved them of the agony of uncertainty: “I found [your son] lying in a very comfortable ward of the Hospital (no. 29) sick with Bilious Fever. His face was much flushed—and his lip trembled when I told him I had a message from ‘home.’ ” Sometimes he relayed words from the soldiers themselves: “ ‘Tell them,’ said [the soldier], ‘that the doctor and the nurse are both very kind and take good care of me. . . . I am getting along well only it is slow work. I have been pretty weak—so that I could not write home—but I will as soon as I get a little stronger. Give my love to them all.’ ” Similarly, when soldiers died in the field, commissioners sent civilians registers and maps, so that they could locate their loved ones’ graves. In short, the commission proved experts could be both reliable sources of knowledge and compassionate, familiar friends. Northern civilians lavished the commission with praise, and the organization became an important fount of nationalism in the war effort. Among “acknowledgments” collected in the commission’s final report on Washington Hospital in 1866, an anonymous civilian lauded, “I have received three letters from you which is certainly taking a great deal of trouble in behalf of a perfect stranger and I must express my sincere gratitude for your disinterested kindness.” Another concurred, “I did not expect so much kindness. It is only by name that I know you, but that name shall always be by me held in grateful remembrance.” And finally, “Your kindness and friendship in this matter has won our lasting gratitude, and we will join as thousands throughout the land, in saying ‘God Bless the Sanitary Commission.’ ” Postwar Prestige and Professionalization The commission’s physicians had thus overcome their most difficult hurdle— arresting the democratic tide of health care by securing the public’s confidence. The USSC had proven that professional physicians could be a source of scien-

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tific authority while embracing a range of therapeutic techniques and serving as comforting caregivers. Professional medicine could champion data collection and experimentation but, at the same time, welcome disease prevention and attention to mental health, aspects of popular reform that traditional medicine had long ignored. Though the Sanitary Commission faded with the end of the war, the success of the commission doctors’ intellectual project was proven by their postwar careers. It was also apparent, however, that many traditional doctors continued to resist the new science. Following the Civil War, the most important commission physicians developed sprawling private practices, enjoyed considerable weight in the community, and influenced American medicine, as the entire country embarked on a period of intensified professionalization and specialization. John Newberry was inclined to pursue science rather than medicine and worked briefly at the Smithsonian and then accepted a chair of geology and paleontology at the School of Mines of Columbia in New York City, where he remained until his death. He established the school’s sizable museum and consulted frequently with the New York City government on public hygiene. William Hammond was removed as surgeon general in 1864, thanks to disputes with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and returned to New York, where he joined the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Later he was installed as chair of Bellevue Hospital Medical College and University of the City of New York and became one of the leading experts in diseases of the mind and nervous system along with collaborator S. Weir Mitchell. Hammond served in medical societies in the United States and Europe and held several high-profile social positions in Washington and New York. Despite his dismissal from the army, his great reputation allowed him to curry favor in Congress, and in 1879 he was restored to the army rolls as a retired brigadier general. Nearly all of the physicians associated with the commission enjoyed good reputations, but Cornelius Agnew established one of the largest and most lucrative private practices in New York City. After the war, he continued to prove his commitment to therapeutic openness by working with homeopaths. In fact, Agnew became one of a group of physicians who formed the Liberal Members of the Medical Society of the State of New York, advocating more rigorous scientific standards and rejecting the AMA’s exclusion clause. This led to friction and controversy with the AMA, which continued to hold fast to the old order into the late nineteenth century. But Agnew’s approach was with the tide of the future, as evidenced by his great sway in American medicine and in society. Not only would he advance sanitary and temperance reform, women’s hospitals, and mid-

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wifery education, but he would serve as YMCA director, elder in a Presbyterian church, and oversee the education of freed people and American Indians at the Carlisle Indian School. The Civil War could have been a moment of supreme chaos in medicine, in which the populace proved to themselves that they did not need to rely on professional medicine, but instead it created a rapt audience for the contemporary problems with health care. The empiricists’ project regenerated social clout for the profession. Doctors had long been among the most prominent and influential U.S. citizens, and losing social stature in the antebellum era had been traumatic for the profession. As Cornelius Agnew’s case exemplifies, some of the commission experts explicitly merged their professional and social goals. Agnew was a founding member of the Union League Club in New York City in 1863, one of a number of urban organizations that formed during the war to promote loyalty to Union nationalism. As George Fredrickson has explained, “The intellectuals [of the Union League] contributed a flood of sermons, speeches, and articles meant to convey a sense of what the situation demanded from the citizen in terms of loyalty and obedience.” This is what the AMA had been trying to achieve before the war for the profession of medicine but had failed to do. It is, however, exactly what Agnew, Harris, Hammond, Jenkins, Newberry, and other doctors of the Sanitary Commission achieved in just four vigorous years of effort. As George Templeton Strong explained, The education of our towns and villages in the principles of the Sanitary Commission, the overcoming of their local prejudices, their desire to work for this regiment, that company, this hospital, or that camp, has become an education in National ideas; in the principles of the Government itself; the great Federal idea for which we are contending at such cost of blood and treasure. By the same logic, the commission physicians had gotten the democratic masses to move beyond their localized preferences to view medical science as something familiar enough to be comfortable but intellectual enough to be beyond their capacity to master. The people finally admitted they needed experts to guide them.

Civil War Cybernetics Medicine, Modernity, and the Intellectual Mechanics of Union

Susan-Mary Grant You, we, all of us, are portions of a machine. —Silas Weir Mitchell, In War Time, 1885

I

n April of 1861, the month in which the surrender of Fort Sumter to Confederate forces signaled the beginning of the American Civil War, the Atlantic Monthly published a ground-breaking novella, Life in the Iron Mills, by Rebecca Harding Davis. Echoing Charles Dickens’s famous opening to Bleak House, but with the fog replaced by smoke that “rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries” of an unnamed mill town, Davis portrayed a grim image of human existence in an industrial world. This is a quasi-military world, alien even to those who live proximate to it yet remain ignorant of “the vast machinery of system by which the bodies of workmen are governed,” or the “watches that relieve each other as regularly as the sentinels of an army.” It is a world dominated by smoke and by fire “in every horrible form; pits of flame waving in the wind; liquid metal-flames writhing in tortuous streams . . . wide cauldrons filled with boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches . . . crowds of half-clad men, looking like revengeful ghosts in the red light. . . . It was,” as the anonymous narrator comments, “like a street in Hell.” Even as readers of the Atlantic Monthly pondered Davis’s morality tale, the nation was moving toward a conflict that would replicate her bleak vision of industrialism’s human cost, on the battlefields and through the bodies of its combatants. And this industrial war had its intellectual component: the emergence of new control systems that affected soldier and civilian alike. In intent as in implementation, these systems could be designated a form of Civil War cybernetics in the etymological sense of navigation or government. Both in their regulatory and organizational imperatives, they were, on one level, the necessary political and bureaucratic systemic structures that defined a new, centralized nation emerging through conflict. But they also functioned on a personal level. Over the course of

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the Civil War, the nation’s individual members became conceptualized as components of the Union’s war machine: replaceable parts of a larger unit, whose physical parts—in the form of artificial limbs—could themselves—and only because of developments in medical science—be replaced. The individual element in this process, however, has to date been subsumed in a larger, national narrative; the medical context has been almost entirely avoided. The Civil War was the conflict that, scholars generally concur, introduced a “new industrial discipline” to America. First identified by Allan Nevins in what he termed the “organized war” for the Union, the modern managerial impulse among northern elites was explored further by George Fredrickson and Leonard Curry in studies that focused on the intellectual and legislative “blueprint for modern America,” a subject recently revisited by Heather Cox Richardson’s analysis of Republican economic policies during the Civil War. Yet although Fredrickson outlined the evolution of the postwar relationship between “science and the new intellectuals,” and indeed later argued for the “intellectual foundations” of the modern state as residing “in a rationalistic scientific world view and a commitment to technological development,” the particular science of medicine was largely absent from these studies. Medicine—as has been argued by, among others, John Harley Warner, Bonnie E. Blustein, and Kathryn Meier in her perceptive essay on the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) doctors in this volume—was both instrumental in but also greatly benefited from the new nationalist imperatives inculcated by the Civil War, notably with regard to sanitary reform and public health in the context of the burgeoning urbanization of the postwar era. The work of medical historians has served to reinforce Michel Foucault’s famous assertion that “doctors were, along with the military, the first managers of collective space.” And in the American case, the collective space in question first consisted in the battlefields of the nation’s internecine conflict, the material and metaphorical ground on which the military and the medical met. Civil War scholars, however, have traditionally focused more on the former than the latter in their assessments of the war’s impact. Since the 1990s, historians have seen an outpouring of analyses of Civil War soldiers’ letters, diaries, and memoirs. It is the Civil War soldier who is deemed to represent “the most compelling and accessible aspect of the crisis,” his centrality in this regard predicated on the battlefield itself, “the arena exclusive to soldiers.” The battlefield, of course, was hardly exclusive to soldiers. Surgeons, too, operated, literally and figuratively, within that particular arena and could lay equal claim to that “authority over memory of the war” accorded its combatants. Yet they never succeeded in asserting it. As the veterans’ memories

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and memoirs shaped the way in which the Civil War entered national memory, the medical perspective—already becoming dialectically distinct during the war itself—retreated ever further into a world of its own. Through an analysis of newspaper accounts of Union medical care, frontline and home-front medical writings, and the multivolume Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (MSHWR), this chapter seeks to realign that world with the broader intellectual, literary, and cultural responses to the Union war. It argues that the medical perspective, both practical and professional, represented a central element in the development of a new national relationship, forged during the Civil War, between the individual and the national body and that this found both professional and public expression in the medical imperative to calibrate and count the true physical cost of the conflict. Yet within the developing discourse of war wounding defined by the public and professional reaction to the physical toll taken by both weaponry and disease during the war and disseminated through the press and in medical journals, the medical perspective increasingly diverged from that of the USSC. Through their official reports, their letters home, their professional publications, and most graphically in the form of the MSHWR, Union surgeons criticized even as they confirmed the nation’s technological and organizational progress. Consequently, although medical professionalization was undoubtedly a crucial component of the postwar scientific, managerial revolution through which the health of both the individual and the national body could be charted and improved, in their emphasis on medical failure rather than on military success during the Civil War Union surgeons challenged, indeed contradicted, the northern narrative of redemption through suffering in the cause of freedom. In War Time The American Civil War was barely into its second year before the American Medical Times started considering the conflict’s long-term legacy, anticipating that it would “furnish exhaustless themes for future aspiring historians. Its rise, progress, and downfall; its causes and consequences; its political and social bearings; its diplomacy; its romance and reality; its influence upon the progress of military, naval, and medical sciences.” These were just “a few of its features which will be deemed worthy of record.” And yet who, the writer went on to inquire, will recall “its bad surgery; the limbs wantonly sacrificed; the lives lost that would have been saved by timely operations; the unseemly incisions; the careless dressings; the neglect of medical treatment”? These, as the anonymous

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author in the American Medical Times concluded, “are not the most unimportant features of this war, but unfortunately they shun observation and record, and too frequently . . . quietly seek the oblivion of the grave.” Far from being relegated to the “oblivion of the grave,” however, the Civil War’s “bad surgery” was the subject of robust criticism by its contemporaries, and Civil War surgeons the focus of popular censure. This was, perhaps inevitably, especially the case after major military engagements. Following Antietam, for example, the New York Times opined that the medical support provided Union troops “would have disgraced the medical profession in the days when barbers monopolized the skill and science of the healing and surgical arts.” Jonathan Letterman, medical director of the Army of the Potomac from 1862 to 1864 and one of the main driving forces for modernization in battlefield medical care, was fully aware of the public relations challenge facing Union doctors. “The surgery of these battle-fields has been pronounced butchery,” he reported. “Gross misrepresentations of the conduct of medical officers have been made and scattered broadcast over the country,” he complained, and argued that “because of the incompetency and short-comings of a few” a great “injustice” to the many had been perpetrated. “No reader of the Northern daily papers,” bemoaned another doctor from Ohio, “can be ignorant of the opinion generally entertained of army surgeons. . . . Inefficiency, gross carelessness, heartlessness and dissipation are intimately associated in the mind of the Northern public with the medical officers of the army.” Indeed, so pervasive were such attitudes that on the rare occasion when praise was forthcoming the American Medical Times felt prompted to headline the fact: “Compliment to a Volunteer Surgeon,” it announced, possibly with a degree of relief. The passage of time has done little either to challenge or contradict such contemporary critiques. “This was a war,” one twentieth-century medical historian argued, “which gave very little to medicine, to surgery or to science, and whose memory” should “be kept green by its dreadful medical history.” Civil War soldiers, Frances Clarke more recently concluded, “found plenty to complain about when it came to their medical treatment,” largely because a “significant portion simply did not trust trained physicians.” If some of this mistrust derived from the suddenness of the transition from the private and personal to the public and professional in terms of medical treatment, she has nevertheless proposed that soldiers’ concerns were justified and that what Cheryl Wells has described as the “distressing reputation of surgeons” was fully deserved. Alfred Jay Bollet, by contrast, has expressed his dismay that Civil War historians, “apparently unimpressed by the momentous advances in medical science” between the Civil

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War and the First World War, persist in invoking comparisons between the two conflicts “as a basis for the condemnation of Civil War physicians.” Historians are not entirely to blame for this state of affairs. Medical writers, too, have sometimes dismissed Civil War medicine as “pre-Listerian surgery at its zenith,” and relegated it to a mid-nineteenth-century holding pen awaiting the improvements in wound management pursuant upon Lister’s work On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery (1867). The debate over the efficacy of Civil War medicine, however, may be missing the point. To position Civil War surgery within a premodern, almost medieval medical world, accept contemporary criticisms at face value, and deduce from this that all medical advances, procedural and professional, were located in the latter years of the nineteenth century distorts our understanding of the larger impact of the conflict. As Charles Rosenberg has stressed, the tendency to approach the past with a view to tracking “change as progress” may serve simply to obfuscate the evolutionary nature of the “system of belief and behavior participated in by physician and laymen alike” that constituted nineteenth-century therapeutic practice. Developing this point, Warner has proposed that in order to “understand how nineteenth-century American physicians fashioned individual and collective identities . . . we need to connect their rhetoric in medical journals, textbooks, and ceremonial orations with what they actually did at the bedside.” Of equal import, however, but barely glimpsed in the literature on the “therapeutic revolution” is what they experienced on the battlefield. This is more unusual since, chronologically, the Civil War is positioned in the middle of that crucial transformative period, circa 1820–80, during which traditional medical practices “began to be supplanted by strategies grounded in experimental science that objectified disease while minimizing differences among patients.” Granting that battlefield medicine is by its nature rather different from the bedside variety, nevertheless, to dismiss the Civil War as a mere stepping-stone on a path already laid out toward medical modernity is to miss the significance of the martial context within which Union surgeons were, both literally and metaphorically, operating. This rigorously hierarchical environment determined their responses to their allotted role, their authority over the health of Union troops, and their own public and professional status over the course of the conflict. Further, although a reassuring sense of progression is certainly achieved by contrasting the Civil War with, for example, the Spanish-American War in order to trace “how far the medical profession had developed in one generation,” this makes less sense when one considers that the same generation spanned both conflicts. Its knowledge may have increased, but its perspective on the Civil War did not

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alter; if anything, subsequent developments in medical science confirmed what it had perhaps only suspected during the war years themselves. That generation would hardly have disagreed with Michael Sappol’s assertion that the Civil War exposed many “diplomaed practitioners . . . as incompetent, unable to perform amputations, set fractures, remove bullets, and do other basic surgeries.” It was, after all, not just the northern public and Civil War soldiers but rather medical practitioners themselves who condemned the standards of Union medical care. Henry S. Hewitt, for example, a volunteer surgeon who was promoted to medical director of the Union’s Army of the Ohio in 1864 and a man normally robust in his assertions of medical competence, admitted that some of the medical treatment provided Civil War troops remained on a par with that of “the leeches of the days of Pepin, Clovis, and Charlemagne.” Hewitt’s concerns can be located in a widespread intellectual imperative promulgated by a varied cross section of the northern medical profession that loosely existed in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Rather than belonging to a coherent and preexisting medical elite, men such as Jonathan Letterman of the Army Medical Department, who had prior military medical experience, and others, such as John Shaw Billings and John H. Brinton, who had none, were brought into each other’s, and the nation’s, intellectual orbit only through the Civil War. At the same time, if the Civil War brought these men together, it also eventually drove many of them apart. Some, such as Brinton, would build on their experiences during the war to become established figures in their field. Others sought to distance themselves from the conflict altogether; for example, after Letterman wrote his memoirs of his years with the Army of the Potomac in 1866, he left for the West Coast and a new career as a coroner. And many others, such as Silas Thompson Trowbridge, surgeon of the 8th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, pursued more modest, peripatetic, postwar careers, and bequeathed only personal memoirs to posterity. Locating such a diverse group within the intellectual history of the Union war is potentially problematic. Yet it is also necessary, since its ultimate contribution to the internal dynamics of the new national system, the managerial, mechanistic imperative that defined the postwar nation was, arguably, more tangible in its long-term organizational outcomes than the more immediate but ultimately temporary medical and sanitary reforms instituted by the USSC during the war. Unlike the USSC surgeons examined by Meier, doctors such as Billings and Brinton were quick to offer their services to the Union, and were less obviously driven by the USSC’s broader social control agenda and more consistently focused on the opportunities the war offered for surgical education and experience. Their

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audience, in that respect, was a professional and not a public one. At the same time, much of the impetus for their argument for professional progress derived its energy from a combination of the widespread public, and at times professional, perception of Civil War surgery as “butchery” and the perhaps inevitable disenchantment that many of these surgeons expressed at the conditions they encountered in the field, conditions distinctly at odds with both the patriotic and professional assumptions that had brought them there in the first place. Trowbridge, for example, traced his decision to offer his expertise to the Union in his father’s Revolutionary War “achievements,” which, he later surmised, had probably informed his own “aims and aspiration for patriotic devotion.” For others, like Francis Wafer, a medical student from Canada, “a strong desire to see something of the reality of war” combined with the opportunity to acquire practical skills that would enhance their medical training brought them to the battlefield. “Think of the experience I shall gain!” enthused John Perry, another medical student, from Boston. And Billings, who became one of the war’s foremost surgeons, was, as he admitted, attracted by the “opportunity” the war provided him “to acquire a reputation and surgical glory.” It may not be surprising that, for many frontline Civil War surgeons, and especially for those with no prior exposure to medical care under conflict conditions, the reality of battlefield medicine proved to be a sobering, enervating, and in many respects frustrating experience. “Did I only consult personal comfort,” Moses Gunn, surgeon to the 5th Michigan Infantry observed in a letter home to his wife in 1861, “I should pronounce myself a very great fool for leaving home to become a pack-horse for a thousand men, for such,” he believed, “is a surgeon to a regiment in the field.” Nor did Gunn’s mood much improve over the course of the Peninsula Campaign. “I have never felt so small, so insignificant, in short so mean, as I have since I have been a thing to be ordered about,” he complained. “Could I leave the service to-morrow with credit to myself, or rather if the people of Michigan would be satisfied,” he advised his wife in the spring of 1862, “I should do it most assuredly. . . . Did any one dream for a moment,” he asked her, “that a surgeon’s field had aught of glory about it?” It was a rhetorical question, and Gunn swiftly answered it. “No! The glory consists of carnage and death,” and not in the surgical skill that, as Gunn pointed out, was called upon not just for the duration of a battle but far beyond that. “There is no glory for our profession,” he acknowledged. “We may brave the pestilence when all others flee; we may remain at our posts when death is more imminent than it ever was on the battle field,” he complained, “but who sings our praise!” Civil War surgeons, Gunn asserted, exhibited a “bravery unsupported by excitement or by the hope

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of fame,” and attempted, perhaps, to modify his litany of woes by concluding that there were “few of us so unsophisticated as to expect it.” Whatever Gunn himself had expected, army life certainly did not provide it; he resigned from Union service in the summer of 1862. Billings, by contrast, proved more robust in the face of his personal disappointment. Before the war he had been a demonstrator in anatomy and was initially sent not to the front but to Cliffburn Hospital in Washington, D.C. He came to the conflict expecting to have the opportunity to put the latest surgical innovations into practice. He brought with him, as he recounted, “three things . . . that none of the other surgeons had: A set of clinical thermometers . . . a hypodermic syringe, and a Symes staff for urethral stricturotomy.” Although he eventually found plenty of opportunity to use these, much of his time was devoted to creating a functioning medical environment out of the “extremely filthy and dilapidated” conditions that met him on arrival at Cliffburn in the spring of 1862. Billings found himself overseeing the construction of such basic necessities as barracks, the erection of hospital tents, and the digging of wells and a drainage system before he could turn his attention to medical matters. The situation was even more acute on the battlefield, as Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, noted abolitionist and professor of clinical medicine at Harvard, discovered when he responded to the call for medical support following the engagement at Chantilly (Ox Hill) in September 1862. He found “men dying from starvation and neglect of surgical attendance . . . suffering from gunshot wounds of every description, inflicted five or six days before. Two had been shot through the lungs; one through both thighs and scrotum; some through the abdomen.” Only four “surgeons of the army were in attendance,” Bowditch reported, “but from want of food and sleep they were nearly exhausted.” Under what became known as the “Letterman System,” however, medical care in the Union achieved a degree of organization commensurate with the requirements of the conflict—at least up to a point. The Union Medical Corps began to function with what one surgeon, Charles O’Leary, described as “a precision rare even in military organization.” The Union was not victorious at Fredericksburg at the end of 1862, but its medical department achieved a success of sorts in the face of the army’s defeat. The “wounded were brought without any delay or confusion to the hospitals,” and not “a single item provided for the organization of the field-hospitals suffered the slightest derangement.” This was in “pleasing contrast,” O’Leary noted, “to what we had hitherto seen during the war.” And although it is important not to diminish the significance of Letterman’s reforms post-Fredericksburg, neither is it realistic to assume that these produced an immediate change of conditions in the field for many soldiers and surgeons. By

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July 1863 John Shaw Billings had left Cliffburn Hospital and was with the Union army at Gettysburg, and on the battle’s last day (July 3), “the wounded began to pour in,” which necessitated his working “all that night without cessation.” Left in charge of some 800 wounded when the regiments moved on, Billings again struggled to find even basic necessities such as picks or shovels “with which to bury the dead or construct sinks.” It is hardly surprising, as he advised his wife, that he was “utterly exhausted mentally and physically.” He had, he told her, “been operating night and day and am still hard at work . . . trying to produce order out of chaos.” He was, he reported, “covered with blood and . . . tired out almost completely,” and wished he was at home simply in order that he might “lie down and sleep for 16 hours without stopping.” Yet if the surgical and sanitary challenges of the Civil War hardly matched the “glory” that Billings had initially anticipated, for medicine as a whole this provided an opportunity, not just to bring, as Billings had put it, “order out of chaos,” but to effect lasting change for the future. The medical imperative toward sanitary improvement, at first glance, seems little different from that espoused by voluntary civilian organizations such as the USSC, but in fact it had more far-reaching implications for the Union soldier and for the state that he served. Certainly, Union surgeons and the USSC could sound remarkably similar when it came to the care of Union troops. Neither group was “concerned with the relief of suffering as an end in itself,” and both recognized the need, as the USSC put it, “to economize for the National service the life and strength of the National soldier.” For Letterman, the “leading idea,” and the overriding remit of the military surgeon was to “strengthen the hands of the Commanding General by keeping his army in the most vigorous health, thus rendering it, in the highest degree, efficient for enduring fatigue and privation, and for fighting.” The “greater the labor given to the preservation of health, the greater will be the number [of soldiers available] for duty,” Letterman argued; the “more attention bestowed upon the sick and the wounded, the more speedily will they perform the duties for which they were employed, or be discharged from a service which they can no longer benefit.” Such attitudes, when expressed by the leading lights of the USSC have understandably attracted criticism for their apparent callousness in the face of individual suffering. Fredrickson, most notably, looked askance at the degree to which some of the USSC commissioners “not only accepted the necessary agonies of war but welcomed them as good in themselves,” and believed, along with USSC treasurer George Templeton Strong, that “without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.” This somewhat ministerial mind-set, however, did not

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inform the medical argument for sanitary reform. For Union surgeons such as Letterman, the soldiers’ suffering was more productive of a sense of frustration than any particular religious reaction, not least because so much of it was unnecessary. The scurvy epidemic that met Letterman on the Peninsula when he arrived there to take up his role as medical director of the Army of the Potomac in the summer of 1862 was a case in point: a medical crisis that, given the contemporary awareness of the importance of antiscorbutics, ought never to have occurred. “Some were unaware that they were even sick,” Letterman recalled, “yet their energy, their powers of endurance, and their willingness to undergo hardship, are in great degree gone, and they know not why.” In order to achieve the military and medical efficiency that the Union required, its surgeons, Letterman realized, had to extend their perceived remit and assert their authority over sanitary arrangements; surgical skill was not enough. “A corps of Medical officers,” he stressed, “was not established solely for the purpose of attending the wounded and sick,” but he realized that this was not the popular understanding of the surgeon’s role in the Civil War, or indeed generally. “It is a popular delusion,” he observed, “that the highest duties of Medical officers are performed in prescribing a drug or amputating a limb . . . and it were well if commanding officers would disabuse their minds of it.” Wilson Jewell, president of the American Medical Association, similarly, condemned the view “that sanitary science is not germane with that of medicine; is only approximate, and does not legitimately belong to the province of the physician.” For him, the “internecine war in which the country is now involved” had not only “awakened anew the enthusiasm of the sanitarian” but served “to promote a spirit of subordination and obedience to a thorough plan of military discipline” directed toward “the health, and vigor, and morale of the army.” “Military discipline and military hygiene,” Jewell proposed, were “twin brothers,” a position that Letterman reinforced in his argument, and implicit critique of USSC interference, that Union troops would suffer less frequently, and Union armies succeed more often if their commanders acknowledged the expertise and adopted the “beneficial advice of those who, for years, have made the laws of life a study.” Yet in seeking, in Letterman’s words, “to counteract the influences which so constantly tend to undermine the health of an army and destroy its efficiency,” the medical elite was operating at a tangent to the bureaucracy of benevolence built up by associations such as the USSC. Meier traces in this volume the ways in which USSC doctors successfully inculcated public trust in the new therapeutics largely because “their medical publications embraced openness, or multiple theories of disease causation and therapeutics, and therefore appeared

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democratic.” By contrast, there was little that was democratic about the official Union medical agenda. The medical elite sought to refine and reform the Union’s war machine, establish themselves as the crucial component to its success, and through it achieve systemic hegemony, not just within their own profession but, by extrapolation, within wider society, military and civilian alike. The regulatory systems envisaged by Union physicians, in short, were simultaneously self-serving and designed to serve the nation. Yet whether relating to medical education generally or military medical practice specifically, ultimately these grew out of frustration, both personal and professional, at the conditions Union surgeons encountered on the front line but also at the interference in military medical matters by bodies such as the USSC. Where the USSC perceived the potential for a new, national order emerging from the war, Union surgeons saw mainly war’s waste. In seeking to steer their own profession through this to its best advantage, many of them anticipated the development of its future along more scientific lines. At the same time, however, many surgeons felt far from positive about the prospects for individual, as for national, recovery and reconstruction, even as they struggled toward this end. Looking back at the Civil War from the perspective of 1885 in his novel, In War Time, the leading neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell has an anonymous surgeon explain the logic to the novel’s central character, Dr. Ezra Wendell. “You, we, all of us, are portions of a machine,” Dr. Wendell is advised. And although Dr. Wendell himself turns out to be a thoroughly unreliable cog, Mitchell’s point was that within the chaos and carnage of conflict it fell to the medical man to impose order. Ghosts in the Machine “It may truly be said,” the Cincinnati Lancet and Observer opined, “that our profession has been on trial during this rebellion,” and it was essential that it “demonstrate to the people of the country at large that we have been misrepresented by newspaper correspondents, and the travelling busybodies, and enthusiasts of so-called sanitary commissions” who “have exaggerated the mortality, decried the ability of the medical staff, and have even charged a want of humanity to it.” Encouraged by the resumption of meetings of the American Medical Association, which had previously fallen into abeyance, the journal looked to that body to help redress the imbalance in terms of professional respect, military rank, and financial reward that many surgeons like Gunn had found so galling, largely because, as Hewitt had argued, for them the “increase of responsibility in administrative positions brings with it no corresponding increase of rank.” For Hewitt, as

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for the Cincinnati Lancet, the problem was not one of medical procedure per se, but of public perception and professional position. “The military mind,” Hewitt argued, “fails to apprehend the change which has been wrought in the profession of medicine, or to understand how essential its honor and influence are to the well-being of troops, the efficiency of the service, discipline, the principles of humanity and real heroism. It would hardly seem to require the assertion,” he continued, somewhat ironically since, clearly, in his view it did, “that the medical department should be on a level, so far as rank, pay, and military respect are concerned, with the next honourable staff departments, and that medical officers . . . be required to correspond in attainments, character, and soldier-like qualities with that standard.” For Hewitt, it was partly a matter of remuneration but also one of professional recognition; the two were inextricably linked in his opinion, and the “great injustice” done to Union surgeons largely resided in “the absence of progressive promotion and increase of pay” that they suffered. For members of medicine’s elite, men like Letterman, Billings, Hewitt, and the then surgeon general William Alexander Hammond, the answer to this problem partly lay in establishing medicine’s position through an authoritative professional publication and a tangible resource, both of which would serve, if not as a solution to the immediate problem then certainly as a guard against future ones. Consequently, under the direction of Hammond, Union surgeons were charged not just with the recording of symptoms and the study of sanitary arrangements but the acquisition of “all specimens of morbid anatomy, surgical or medical . . . together with projectiles and foreign bodies removed, and such other matters as may prove of interest in the study of military medicine or surgery” with a view to compiling what became, in time, the multivolume Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (MSHWR) and the establishment, during the war itself, of the Army Medical Museum (AMM). “It is scarcely necessary,” Hammond argued, “to remind the medical officers of the regular and volunteer services that through the means in question much may be done to advance the science which we all have so much at heart,” and he “confidently expected” that no Civil War surgeon would “neglect this opportunity of advancing the honor of the service, the cause of humanity, and his own reputation.” Letterman concurred. The Civil War, he pointed out, afforded its doctors the opportunity of acquiring knowledge that would “go far toward filling the hiatus which exists in that branch of science in which we are now engaged, that of military surgery.” “Honor and reputation,” echoed Hewitt, “are the stimuli to intellectual labor, as they are to military daring.” All that was needed, he believed,

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was a “series of thoroughly reported cases . . . to enable us to present the world with the most perfect system of military surgery that has appeared.” This, Hewitt stressed, would render American medical “observation and experience the point of departure and the standard of comparison for the future.” Patriotism as much as professional recognition was at stake. In this respect, medical failure was as important as medical success; the dead, in short, were as crucial as the living. Certainly, as Sappol has argued, the Civil War advanced the case for anatomization, a subject of particular concern to both Hewitt and Trowbridge. “The demand which the war has created for educated and skillful surgeons,” Hewitt noted, “renders the present an exceedingly opportune moment for securing just State legislation on the question of dissection.” Yet it is the manner in which the case was made, and its accompanying assumptions, that prove the most revealing. Speaking to the Ladies of the Literary Library Association three years after the war, Trowbridge laid out his case for anatomization, highlighting the incongruities of laws that expected surgeons to navigate confidently through “all the channels of professional knowledge” and yet denied them the “legalized dissecting privileges” that would facilitate this process. The Union home front, he proposed, had been reassured by the knowledge that the battlefront medical support provided was in full “possession of all the essential outlines and minutiae of the anatomical man.” “The scalding tears of praying mothers at home,” Trowbridge proposed, “dried up one-half their acrimony when this was known, and valor took a bolder stand, backed, as it were, by surgical competence.” Trowbridge’s argument in defense of dissection was a clever one given his audience. Fundamentally it relied on the knowledge that the ideal he was proposing had not always been the case during the recent war, on the fact that what he was describing was hardly an accurate representation of the public, nor indeed the surgical, perception of battlefield medicine between 1861 and 1865. It was in this division between the ideal and the reality that Trowbridge perceived the opportunity to transform the negative into a positive. He understood that his case for anatomization, set in the context of the cost in human lives during the Civil War, was more likely to be heard. If antebellum America functioned, as has been argued, as “a society of free individuals, operating without institutional restraint,” the Civil War swiftly revealed the limits of such laissez-faire liberalism, for the medical profession no less than for others. For surgeons such as Hewitt and Trowbridge, their arguments for parity of pay and recognition for surgeons within the Union armies, and for proper professional training in civilian practice, derived from an acute awareness both of the general precariousness of their

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own professional position and the opportunity that warfare provided to rectify that, not, as another of their colleagues emphasized, “on account of mere personal advantage,” but for “the sole reason of the public good.” For some, of course, it was personal. Henry Bowditch, for example, who lost his son in the cavalry engagement at Kelly’s Ford, Virginia, in March 1863, largely, as he believed, because of the continuing lack of medical support for the Union wounded, constructed his case for improved medical care around the concept of citizen service and its implications. “The Senate and Government of this free people,” he charged, “decline to do for its citizen volunteer soldiery, what every despot of Europe carefully looks after, with reference to his conscripts or his hirelings.” Although each arrived at this point from different directions, both Bowditch and Hewitt realized that their case required a catalyst, and the Civil War provided it. “No opportunity was ever offered to the medical profession of a country to vindicate its own honor more favorable than the present,” Hewitt argued. “The country sees and recognizes the profession as it never did before.” This, he believed, would permit it to “assert its supremacy over all the forms of quackery and vindicate its claim to the gratitude of the nation, while it asserts its prerogative as the most enlightened and beneficent of all human institutions; can accomplish this by making its voice heard for the protection of the health and life of the common soldier.” Arguably, however, this argument relied for its efficacy and persuasiveness on one very specific aspect of the soldier’s experience, indeed the dominant motif in public perceptions of Civil War battlefield medicine: amputation. The centrality of this procedure in the northern public mind can perhaps best be understood in the reaction to one famous fictional character, Silas Weir Mitchell’s quadruple amputee George Dedlow, who appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1866 in an anonymously published tale that many contemporary readers accepted as fact. The eponymous hero of Mitchell’s tale, an assistant surgeon in the Union army, writing in the first person offers the reader “notes of my own case,” as he loses, first, an arm through gunshot injury, then both legs at Chickamauga, and finally his remaining arm to gangrene. Echoes of what Mitchell had already observed about gunshot wounds and nerve pain, and traces of what he would later write about causalgia, resonated in Dedlow’s assessment of the nerve damage he sustained, and the “strange burning” sensation that he experienced in his “dead right hand.” In addition, the extensive discussion of what Mitchell later described as phantom limb syndrome confirmed what many Civil War soldiers and their families knew by 1866: that Dedlow’s experience of this was relatively typical in cases of amputation. “The pain keeps the brain ever mindful of the missing part,”

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Dedlow surmised, “and, imperfectly at least, preserves to the man a consciousness of possessing that which he has not.” That the northern public, by 1866, was prepared to believe in the existence of Mitchell’s invented amputee is testament to its familiarity with the wounds of war, certainly, but it is also suggestive of the extent to which battlefield surgery served as a synecdoche for the sectional conflict from the start. The popular predilection for surgical metaphor, even among members of the medical elite, as a means of critiquing slavery and secession established the groundwork for this tendency. As Richard Newman argues in his chapter, secession was corporeally conceptualized by a northern intelligentsia who “read disunion as a disease,” a disease that at first threatened, and then necessitated, heroic medical procedures. It may be no surprise, therefore, that secession equated to political amputation, for to the New York lawyer and future treasurer of the USSC George Templeton Strong, who saw the danger in such division not simply in the destruction of “the amputated limb” but in the fact that the nation’s “vital center” was not yet determined between North and South. “Which is Body and which is Member?,” he enquired, concluding, “We may have to settle that question by experiment.” During the war itself, however, as the metaphor was made flesh, its political ramifications gave way to physical ones. For the surgeon and author Oliver Wendell Holmes the experiment in question, the war itself, was “the surgery of crime. . . . The disease of our nation was organic,” he asserted, “not functional, calling for the knife, and not for washes and anodynes.” And even as Holmes was employing this familiar trope to rhetorical effect in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly in July of 1863, on the battlefield itself the surgical reality was all too grimly apparent, as the German radical Carl Schurz, who served with the Eleventh Army Corps at Gettysburg, made clear: There stood the surgeons, their sleeves rolled up to the elbows, their bare arms as well as their linen aprons smeared with blood, their knives not seldom held between their teeth . . . around them pools of blood and amputated arms or legs in heaps, sometimes more than man-high. . . . As a wounded man was lifted on the table, often shrieking with pain as the attendants handled him, the surgeon quickly examined the wound and resolved upon cutting off the injured limb. Some ether was administered and the body put in position in a moment. The surgeon snatched his knife from between his teeth . . . wiped it rapidly once or twice across his blood-stained apron, and the cutting began. The operation accomplished, the surgeon would look around with a deep sigh, and then—“Next!”

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Schurz’s grim tableau was not, of course, available for public consumption at the time. His report, in common with that of Cornelia Hancock, who nursed at Gettysburg and similarly highlighted the surgical horrors of that battle, the operating tables running with blood and wagonloads of “amputated legs and arms,” was not published until the twentieth century, but fiction disseminated such images to the reading public before that. John W. De Forest, writing only two years after the war, placed Edward Colborne, his central character in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, proximate both to “pools of clotted blood, amidst which lay amputated fingers, hands, arms, feet and legs” and the surgeons themselves, who “already looked worn out with the fatigue of their terrible industry.” Contemporary reports, however, even from men supposedly inured to war’s vicissitudes, both described and expressed their horror at the procedure. Captain Edward Osborne Hewett, a European observer, who had seen action—although presumably not amputation—in the Crimea, was repelled by the operation, conducted by surgeons who seemed to him “more like the devils and machines than human beings.” Hewett was particularly appalled by the acquisition of the amputated limbs by medical cadets, or “fiends” in his view, who required them for dissection purposes or, possibly, for forwarding to the new Army Medical Museum in Washington. His reaction is surprising, however, since amputation was an outcome of conflict with which noncombatants, even children, were already quite familiar. On the day that hostilities commenced at Fort Sumter, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported on the upsurge of martial enthusiasm among boys “in their first pantaloons,” whose “military and warlike nature” prompted them to indulge in a form of parallel play with the events then taking place in Charleston via the construction of several miniature Forts Sumter which they enthusiastically defended and attacked. It was with something akin to parental pride that the paper described “that dawning of patriotism often noted in American boys, inherited from ancestors whose blood ran like water to secure freedom to their children.” And it was absent any additional comment whatsoever that it described the large “number of imaginary amputations” performed “with great celerity,” by the children; one “soldier,” it reported, “who had had his head amputated emerged a moment after and joined anew in the attack, performing prodigies of valor.” Those for whom amputation was no child’s game, however, made headline news in the northern press throughout the war. From the initial reports of First Bull Run onward, where the number of amputations almost seemed to be the main focus of interest, all the way through to the devastating accounts of Grant’s Wilderness (Overland) Campaign in the spring and early summer of 1864 and

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after every major battle in between, amputation became the gauge of an engagement’s gravity and the benchmark of medical skill. “Older practitioners do not jump to amputations as do the younger members of the profession,” opined the New York Tribune, clearly expecting the worst, in the war’s opening months. “ ‘Any man can cut off a leg,’ says the experienced Dr. Wood,” the paper reported, “but it requires skill to save one.” And when the New York Times critiqued the medical support provided in the aftermath of Antietam, it fixed on the stereotype of over-eager amateurs who “seized with morbid avidity the opportunity to test their dexterity with the knife,” thereby reinforcing the negative image of battlefield medicine that so dismayed many surgeons, including Letterman. For Union doctors themselves, of course, the issue was more complex. As Michael Flannery has emphasized, Civil War doctors were positioned within a “culture of contention that pitted allopathic or orthodox physicians against an array of heterodox sectarians who persistently challenged the legitimacy of the regulars’ art and science.” Yet medicine’s frequently internecine professional battles did not register in the public mind. The collective space of the Civil War battlefield may have been as Flannery describes it, “a complex environment of therapeutic contention and professional animosity, much of which rested upon positions of political power and authority rather than on issues of scientific standing and credibility.” For the northern public, however, only one procedure defined surgical skill, only one procedure defined the lack of it, and that was amputation. Modern assessments of amputation in the Civil War, however, perhaps too readily jump forward to the repercussions of the procedure rather than focus on its immediate impact. In their analysis of the collective space of the battlefield humanities scholars have tended to identify the origins of both the intellectual and industrial ideology of the modern American nation-state as that was expressed in the cultural products of the conflict. Photographs, prosthetic limbs, and prose are all held to exemplify the Civil War’s essence as a “proto-industrial experience,” that not only inaugurated “a new scale in organizational systems” but simultaneously overturned “older individualistic and local patterns.” Photographs are deemed to convey a “celebration of the North’s modern, rationalized system of warfare.” And American literature, at least as Edmund Wilson read it, responded to the war by abandoning its antebellum verbosity in favor of a more functional “language of responsibility” better suited to an industrial age. It is prosthetics, however, that are accorded the pivotal position in the modernist triumvirate of organizational development. The Civil War, David Yuan has proposed, “conflated the prosthesis and the soldier, as the industrial revolution conflated the prosthesis and the worker,” a form-facilitating-function paradigm

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as applicable to the individual as to the industrializing nation. This argument, looking forward as it does both to Ford’s assembly lines and post–World War I prosthetic development, interprets the Civil War as the catalyst for the birth of American modernity. It posits a new nationalist imperative that not only set the Union army apart from its Confederate opponent but established professional parameters for a future in which the industrialized body became simultaneously the symbol of and the support for the nation in terms of commerce as much as in times of conflict. And yet there are grounds for questioning the extent to which what Lisa Herschbach has described as “the logic of prosthesis” actually “reaffirmed Northern ideologies of free labour and industrial manufacture.” It is doubtful, indeed, whether this actually could “wed techno-scientific knowledge with humanistic visions of reform and progress” as defined by the victorious Union. In many respects, indeed, the logic led in a rather different direction altogether: back toward a form of slavery as adumbrated by Davis in her critique of northern industrial conditions, rather than forward toward a universal freedom predicated on the emancipation of the South’s slaves after the war. At its core, the new relationship that Union surgeons helped forge, not between the prosthesis and worker, necessarily, but certainly between the individual and the nation, was still about corporeal control. John H. Brinton, one of the Union’s most influential physicians, curator of the Army Medical Museum (AMM) and active in the initial compilation of what became the MSHWR, recalled how he had dealt with some of the opposition he had encountered in the collection of specimens for the museum. Challenged, “noisily and pertinaciously,” as he recalled, to return an amputated limb to its former owner, Brinton rejected the request on the grounds that, since the soldier had signed up for three years, and had time left to serve, the government was “entitled to all of [him], until the expiration of the specified time. I dare not give a part of you up before,” Brinton told him; “Come, then, and you can have the rest of you, but not before.” This was an admittedly rather extreme version of the challenge that many Union surgeons faced, not necessarily in the context of furnishing the AMM with specimens for study, more usually simply in the everyday course of providing medical care. The clash between state and citizens over medical care in the Civil War is hardly surprising. Wounded Civil War soldiers and their surgeons did not have the luxury of experiencing a gradual shift from rural self-reliance to a modern dependency on the comfort of strangers; for both, the transition was immediate and, given the context, frequently traumatic. Whether on the battlefield or in the hospital, the struggle to assert medical authority met with opposition from those who, inevitably, were unused to such direct intervention in their lives. Follow-

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ing the battle of Antietam, Letterman struggled to convince concerned relatives not to remove wounded soldiers from the hospitals in cases “when the life of the man depended upon his remaining at rest.” Mitchell, meanwhile, found himself struggling with some of the soldiers themselves, citing one case of gunshot injury, a “more wretched spectacle” of which “could hardly be imagined.” Mitchell was convinced that if the individual in question “had . . . been abandoned to his own wishes . . . he would have remained a helpless cripple.” It “is quite sure,” he stressed, “that nowhere, except under military rule, could he have been relieved.” Medical care during the Civil War, in short, was most effective when allied with military authority, and the symbiotic relationship that resulted was destined to be an enduring one, not least because for wounded soldiers seeking medical discharges or furloughs during the war or requiring pensions or prosthetics after it, the medical profession played a central role. Whether soldiers or their families trusted their surgeons during the war, after it they found themselves fast-tracked into one of the most significant aspects of medical modernity as surgeons assumed the role of “gatekeepers,” brokering the new contract of care between former soldiers and the state for the physical and financial support that so many veterans needed, the proof that their infirmities were the valid wounds of war. In that respect, both surgeon and soldier continued to function within that gulf between public and indeed surgical expectations of battlefield medical support during the Civil War. It was precisely through the conflict’s traumatic reality and its postwar legacy that Union doctors conceived the need for a publication such as the MSHWR and, partly through that, constructed their case for medicine’s position as, in Hewitt’s words, “the promoter of true civilization and the life of the state.” The official Union medical wartime agenda, indeed, can plausibly be positioned within the blood-sacrifice paradigm through which Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle have interpreted the Civil War as one of the two “most ritually successful wars in American history.” Nationalism, as they have argued, “is a community of blood and not text,” but over the course of the conflict, and especially after it, Union surgeons sought to blur the boundaries between blood, body, and text. Perhaps inevitably, however, given that for many Union surgeons their military role was a temporary one, there were limits to their success in this regard; but in one crucial respect they transcended these limits. An army, Marvin and Ingle assert, is not “a textual community,” but in the case of America’s Civil War that is precisely what it became, as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of official reports and letters, telegrams and orders, rosters, maps, and statistics that

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made up The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (ORA). Hardly matching this in scale, but more than compensating for it in terms of density of information, was the medical equivalent: Part memento mori, part survival guide for a nation at war, the sixvolume MSHWR contained within its pages everything about battlefield medicine that Civil War–era surgeons needed to know but that subsequent scholars have sometimes been afraid to ask. Both the ORA and the MSHWR combined blood and text, but the latter, in representing the damaged military body through a medical text, refracted the Union war through a record of individual disease, destruction, and dismemberment that would never easily align itself with the dominant narrative of a national body newly rendered whole by the efforts of those damaged physical bodies represented in its pages. The MSHWR was especially problematic in this regard. Although intended for the education of a medical audience alone, it was never, in a public sense, an entirely closed book. Many of the cases discussed in its pages found a very wide audience on the occasion of the nation’s centennial celebrations when the AMM displayed a selection of its medical photographs in Philadelphia. Even before then, however, the public could view the full “array of human anatomical and pathological specimens preserved in glass jars and stored in wooden cases, along with its extensive collection of medical images . . . human remains, paintings, photographs, and other reproductions” that, since they “originated from the tumultuous era of the Civil War . . . imbued them with a totemic significance,” according to Michael Rhode and J. T. H. Connor. Both “collectively and individually,” they argue, “the Museum’s holdings of smashed skulls, amputated limbs, deformed bone, and diseased tissue were iconic symbols of a battle-worn and badly injured American nation.” In a period when the famous images of the Civil War dead popularized by Matthew Brady’s studio had fallen out of favor, the wounded were, by contrast, everywhere visible, not only in person but in print. Photographic images in the form of cartes de visite of maimed soldiers were commonplace; enclosed with veterans’ letters, distributed among family and friends, and sold among the wider community, they were often used to elicit private charity or support official pension claims. It was against this background that medicine’s professional claims were situated; it was in the context of the damaged body that such claims achieved their resonance. In the postwar era, physicians were able to offer what Joan Burbick has termed, in the context of health and nationalism in the nineteenth century, a “secular version of salvation.” They could position themselves as the high priests of a medical modernity constructed around the bodies of its

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citizens, the “Temple of the Holy Ghost,” as Hewitt had put it during the war itself, even as they disseminated, among themselves and to a wider public, multiple manifestations of that temple’s destruction after it. In this context, it is worth recollecting that in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills, although it is the anonymous narrator who describes the quasimilitary industrial environment of the northern factory, it is the medical man, Doctor May, who seems most “vexed” and “puzzled” by it. This prompts the callous observation from another character, Kirby, that those “who do the lowest part of the world’s work should be machines—nothing more—hands. It would be kindness.” From a contemporary medical perspective, of course, and following the work of René Descartes, the body was already a machine, albeit one “that might easily be driven beyond its capacity.” And over the course of the Civil War, Union surgeons had ample evidence of the efficacy of conflict in that respect. On the one hand, as Mitchell argued, the Civil War had given medicine “a pride justified by conduct” that comprised “endless sacrifices and great intellectual achievements” at a crucial time for the nation’s “mental and moral life.” On the other, as Mitchell came to realize, those “who lived through those years remember them as men recall the quake of a convulsed earth, and almost are vexed that our children can smile and talk so lightly of what to us was living tragedy and to them is mere history.” It is unlikely that he was surprised. The “remembrance of pain as time goes by,” he knew, “is far less permanent than that of relief or of an hour of radiant happiness.” Nevertheless, over the course of the Civil War and in the years that followed, Mitchell and his colleagues bore witness to the individual price demanded by the “God of Modernity,” the nation-state. By complicating the Union narrative of national redemption, they became, in effect, the ghosts in the “vast machinery of system” that underpinned modern America. In a sense, Civil War medicine straddled a particularly awkward fence erected partly through its own efforts, between the antebellum Union and the postbellum nation. Oliver Wendell Holmes, for example, could bemoan the “melancholy harvest” of human limbs that the war produced even as he admired the “mechanical art” that provided their replacements. For the surgeon Stephen Smith, both surgical and technological advances were an undoubted improvement; in the past, he noted, “amputations were regarded as veritable mutilations . . . repugnant alike to surgeon and patient. . . . But in our time,” he enthused, “limbmaking has been carried to such a state of perfection that both in form and function they so completely resemble the natural extremity that those who wear them pass unobserved and unrecognized in walks of business and pleasure.” Smith had

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nothing but praise for the Union’s “munificent care of its soldiers,” evidenced by the extent to which it “gratuitously furnishes every form of artificial substitutes for lost parts,” without pausing to consider why these had been necessary in the first place. Holmes’s reaction to the implications of both prosthetic and wound was rather more equivocal; the wounds, unlike the prosthetics designed to disguise them, marked the soldiers “as belonging to their Country” at the same time as they emphasized the terrible price of belonging. And it was the wound, in the end, that exercised Union surgeons; it was the wound that they presented through the MSHWR and in the cabinets of the AMM. “It is not well for soldiers to think much about wounds,” observed Holmes’s son, the Civil War veteran and future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. The “book for the army,” he asserted, was “a war-song, not a hospital-sketch.” This, as Union surgeons well knew, was simply wishful thinking. Ultimately, in its emphasis on the corporeal cost of the Civil War, medicine’s contribution to the evolving organizational, industrial imperative of the later nineteenth century was Janus-faced. On the one hand, for doctors such as Hewitt, Letterman, Smith, and Holmes, as for many of their colleagues, the path to medical modernity lay through the battlefields of the Civil War. In the symbiotic relationship between the martial, the medical, and the modern that they established between 1861 and 1865 the groundwork for the professionalization of military and civilian medicine had been laid. By structuring their case for medical professionalism along military lines, aligning their expertise with the exigencies of the nation at war, Civil War doctors were, logically enough, seeking to extend the lessons of battlefield medicine into civilian life and thereby establish a platform for their professional advancement in the postwar world. And as far as battlefield medicine was concerned, they largely succeeded. By the time that Fielding Garrison came to compose his history of medicine at war in the early twentieth century, much of what Union surgeons had been arguing for during the Civil War had become a given. The “part played by medical personnel in the maintenance of military morale is of extraordinary moment,” Garrison argued. In “successful military operations of modern type, patriotism is the motor power, and military administration the mechanism by means of which great things are to be accomplished and victories won.” On the other hand, for the nation as a whole the link between the medical and the martial was a discomfiting one to contemplate. The collective space of the Civil War battlefield served as the training ground on which the citizen became the citizen-soldier of the American state, but the surgeon’s role within that space was always a more ambiguous one. The Union soldier’s sacrifice could be accom-

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modated by the new nationalist narrative of redemption and reconstruction that emerged from the Civil War—indeed, so encompassing was this narrative that, in time, it would incorporate the Confederate soldier, too—but the surgical story of the Union war challenged the sometimes rather smug certainties surrounding the idea of sacrifice in the name of the nation espoused by the USSC. Although Meier has shown how the northern public “lavished the [Sanitary] Commission with praise,” to the extent that “the organization became an important fount of nationalism in the war effort,” the same could not be said of the official Union medical effort. USSC doctors may have achieved a shift in public consciousness such that the “democratic masses” began to “view medical science as something familiar enough to be comfortable with,” but in fact there was little comfort to be had from the official surgical story of the Civil War; quite the opposite. In their letters from the front, through their postwar memoirs, and via publications such as the MSHWR, men such as Letterman, Trowbridge, Billings, and Brinton offered no contradiction to the general public perception of Civil War medicine, and specifically Civil War surgery as, at best, organized chaos, at worst, a system of callous disregard for the individual soldier’s body, broken on the battlefields of an internecine conflict. As such, the medical imperative as they conceived it was fundamentally out of line with the nationalist, rationalist ideology promulgated by the intellectual elite who dominated the USSC. Although equally exercised by the opportunity the Civil War provided to effect, as USSC propaganda had it, a “national education of ideas as well as of instincts,” Union surgeons were less absorbed by the “value of order” in the abstract than they were focused on the value placed on the individual soldier’s body through which they could establish—in the face of USSC competition and criticism, to some extent—both surgical and sanitary authority over the individual components of the Union war machine and thereby consolidate their professional position within the state. In the end, indeed, it may not be surprising that the surgical story of the war floundered in the face of a far more potent martial narrative that suffused the victorious Union. For those Civil War surgeons who did not share the moral and managerial certainties espoused by the USSC, the soldier’s suffering offered a means to their professional ends, certainly, but it was never an end in itself, far less a robust means of inculcating a new national discipline capable of imposing order on an “unruly society.” Their perspective, in the context of the suffering they had witnessed and had, too often, been unable to alleviate, was less accommodating of the Civil War as triumphalist national narrative, productive of a reformed and reconstructed nation; from their perspective, indeed, it was questionable whether the Civil War generation could ever truly be whole again.

To Save the Afflicted Union Race, Civic Health, and the Sanitary Front

Richard Newman

C

ivil War Americans were obsessed with notions of civic as well as bodily health. From the secession crisis to war and battlefronts to home fronts, medical officials, politicians, university presidents, reformers, and average citizens alike often framed the turbulent series of events facing the American nation through discourses of disease, health, and well-being. For instance, although proslavery forces had long since characterized abolitionists as deluded and even insane, members of the northern intelligentsia read disunion as a disease and began calling disunionist disciples a cancerous blot on the American body politic. By eradicating bondage via sectional war, Unionists would restore civic as well as political health. Similarly, an army of sanitary reformers that emerged in the 1860s steeled northerners’ battle wills by arguing that American civic health would be revived once home front citizens sacrificed money and time to improve soldiers’ physical health on the battlefront. As the Chicago reformer Jane Currie Hoge noted, the sanitary front became a “living embodiment” of the Union’s healthy condition. Race and emancipation became important, though contested, parts of Union health discourses too. Using notions of affliction, illness, and physical/mental well-being to frame their understanding of black freedom, northern reformers pushed politicians and military officials to see emancipation as a healthful and even healing measure for the war-torn nation. “The face of every loyal citizen is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought,” Frederick Douglass lectured a Philadelphia audience at a low point of Union morale in December 1862. But by embracing universal freedom as an ideological elixir, Unionists could turn the war around, reviving American hearts, minds, and bodies in equal measure. A host of other reformers agreed. Yet there was a wicked underside to Union discourses about race and civic health, for some white northerners also came to see liberated blacks as a disabled and potentially disabling segment of American democ-

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racy. By the war’s end, in fact, some white northerners worried that the remedy to American social ills (black liberty) was as problematic as the disease (slavery and secession) that had engendered the grisly civil war in the first place. Building on recent scholarly work in nineteenth-century health, this chapter examines northerners’ use of medical discourses to frame notions of civic wellbeing and race reform in the Civil War era. At a time when American medicine became simultaneously more authoritative and accessible, it is perhaps unsurprising that many northerners reverted to the language of health and healing to explain the Union war. Yet medicalized discourses were far from mere rhetorical ornaments. Rather, they reflected a universe of thought that helped clarify the meaning of northerners’ wartime commitments on a range of difficult issues and that framed Union policy and procedure on such critical matters as abolition, black military participation, and reconstruction of the American body politic. Looking at these through the prism of affliction, disease, and well-being, Unionists could argue that the Civil War was not simply a struggle to rein in disunionists but a desperate battle over the nation’s civic health. By creating a sanitary front that would wipe out the various social and political illnesses besetting the embattled nation, the Union would (like a good patient) be revived after nearly expiring. In this way, a broad array of Union men and women participated in the vast project of restoring Union health, shaping not so much an “inner” narrative of Civil War ideology among northern intellectuals (as famously described by George Fredrickson) but a societal discourse about the fate of American national health in a time of crisis. Still, perceptions about reviving the nation’s civic health kept shifting. By the postwar years, in fact, white and black Americans disagreed vociferously about the continuing nature of American illness and thus the project of Reconstruction. Although many whites believed that former slaves still exhibited the debilitating marks of bondage, African Americans argued that whites still suffered from the psychosis of mastery. Through to the end of the century, ideas about health haunted Americans’ understanding of both race and nation. Code Blue: Diagnosing Disunion Even before the war started, northerners began utilizing medical metaphors to frame intensifying sectional disputes. Indeed, some Unionists saw secession as a family dispute or a criminal conspiracy, whereas others offered a medical diagnosis of the crisis designed to capture northerners’ attention: Disunion was a sickness that had to be eliminated before it killed American democracy. In November

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1860, the Reverend George Duffield of Detroit called secession a plague, albeit one that forced northerners as well as southerners to get right with God. Vanity, luxury, and crime had defined pre-1860 American life, he explained, prompting an offended God to visit plague upon a sinning nation. By the following year, however, Duffield had sharpened his diagnosis: Confederate rebellion flowed entirely from southern slavery, which was a “cancer in the body politic.” Until that sickness could be slayed, Duffield concluded, the Union would be threatened. By referring to plagues, cancer, and illness, Duffield sought to clarify the lessons of the hour for his Detroit audience. Far from a garden-variety political dispute—one that northerners had grown used to during the 1850s—secession was evidence of something new and grave in the American condition. Duffield was not alone in resorting to medical analogies to frame disunion and then war. By using disease metaphors, a host of northern thinkers made abstract notions of sectional conflict more tangible. By comparing secession to bodily and mental dysfunction, doctors, ministers, educators, and reformers offered analyses of complex events that everyday Americans could understand. Far from an abstruse ideological problem, secession was, like bodily affliction, personal and palpable—an attack on the status quo that must be remedied. New Yorker George Templeton Strong’s famous quip that secession removed the “diseased members” from the American body politic showed that some northerners found illness metaphors both easy and appealing. As secessionist threats turned to disunion and war, more northerners argued that Confederates were afflicted, cancerous, ill, or insane. For the Philadelphian Charles Stille, Confederate rebellion was a form of madness that undercut the natural bonds of affection connecting southerners and northerners. Why else would secessionists break away from the hallowed founders’ Union? The New Yorker James McKaye, a Union official who would report on emancipation for Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, had a ready answer after visiting former plantations in the South: Masters had fallen prey to a slaveholding mania and were delusional. Dr. Charles Meigs told the Philadelphia Union League that Confederate rebellion flowed from severe bodily as well as mental afflictions. “Slavery is a small pox,” he explained, and slaveholders sufferers of “moral insanity.” Now they were trying to slay the American Union. Northerners’ striking use of medical and mental health metaphors flowed from several sources. For one thing, the mid-nineteenth century witnessed the first stirrings of professionalization within the American medical and mental health professions. The American Medical Association was founded in 1847, creating a series of guidelines about professional practice and obligations. More

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generally, American physicians tried to clothe the medical profession in the garb of institutional as well as moral authority. New generations of American physicians trained overseas, gaining insight into the intricacies of clinical practice, the use of professional instrumentation (such as the stethoscope), and the spread and treatment of disease. For instance, in 1860 British physicians diagnosed leukemia for the first time as a blood disorder; several years later, cities such as Philadelphia created the first American cancer institutes. The antebellum era also witnessed the rise of professionalized asylum culture: a web of institutions and practices that sought to formalize the treatment of people with mental illness. From Iowa to Indiana and Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, doctors and asylum superintendents circulated a bevy of essays, papers, and official reports about the proper housing, care, and treatment of those tormented by psychological afflictions. Yet another potent force affected mid-nineteenth-century American health discourses: a popular medical revolution. As Charles Rosenberg has shown, the antebellum era was a heyday for medical popularizers, whose elixirs and mantras (allegedly) destroyed bodily imbalances causing illnesses of one kind or another. The rise of popular medicine allowed Americans not only to diagnose and treat their own diseases but also, as Kathryn Shively Meier wonderfully illustrates, participate in broader discourses about health, medicine, and well-being. Catering to an expanding middle-class readership interested in remaking bodies and minds, popular health literature exploded between the 1830s and the 1870s. As Rosenberg has written, with this literature serving as a popular medical foundation, “every man was his own doctor.” The same might be said of antebellum women, who became more medically knowledgeable and sophisticated. Though popular and professionalized discourses were often at odds, they nevertheless combined to make more Americans than ever conversant in the language of medicine, health, and civic well-being. By the Civil War era, many American cities had created boards of health and rudimentary sanitation systems that sought to contain, if not eliminate, a variety of ailments and diseases. Though the post–Civil War era would usher in truly modern public health infrastructures (based on shifts in science and engineering), the antebellum period saw reformers in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York and other urban locales debating the creation of what Martin Melosi, an environmental historian, refers to as “protosystems” of public sanitation: water filtration technology, newer methods of trash disposal, and the treatment of fouled environments, all with an eye toward improving public health. Though often steeped in environmental and class-based understandings of disease—which linked illness to unclean

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places and uncultivated people—these public health “protosystems” nevertheless publicized new ideas about battling disease. For instance, as Michael Rawson has shown, antebellum Bostonians considered the creation of water filtration systems as a way to “transform the health and morality of the city’s working classes.” By delivering clean water from the countryside to the city’s burgeoning working populations, Boston reformers believed that they could form a healthier city, thereby overcoming many of the social divisions besetting urbanizing America. Taken together, these medical, mental, and public health shifts produced a new sensibility about disease, health, and American well-being. As John Harley Warner has observed, by the Civil War era many of the traditional remedies that once defined American medical treatment (such as bloodletting) had vanished; in their place came novel perspectives about the observation and treatment of physical and psychological disorders. Chief among these new ideas was the notion that disease necessitated “intervention.” Whether through folk remedies or potions and pills or visits by a trained physician, many Americans now saw disease and public health as products of individual or institutional agency. Indeed, the very concept of medicine shifted from conservative methods (with treatments aimed at sustaining the body) to progressive ones (with treatments aimed at improving health via interventions of one kind or another). The point remains that midcentury American medical science had its feet in multiple worlds. Even elevated medical discourses found their way into vernacular culture via expanding print cultures of medicine. Yet this is exactly what allowed Americans to participate in discussions about bodily, civic, and national health as never before. Here, it is well to remember that antebellum American scientists often remained somewhere between popularization and professionalization. As Christopher Irmscher has recently illustrated, the “creator of American science” himself, Harvard’s Louis Agassiz, built his reputation in the 1840s and 1850s on the notion that science was participatory and public. To understand the glory of Godly creation, he “constantly surrounded himself with other people” (including illustrators, students, and members of the public) and encouraged everyday Americans to send him specimens for Agassiz’s zoological museum. Of course, Agassiz was also one of the era’s most notable scientific racists, adding his academic and popular reputation to studies depicting people of African descent as lesser members of the human family. But Agassiz had a range of colleagues who believed that science, like medicine, offered broad social lessons to Americans. When the war came, then, it was not hard for northerners to view the Union cause itself through the lens of medicine and health. Soon after the First Battle

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of Bull Run, for example, the president of Yale College, Julian M. Sturtevant, told a group of alumni that “much of our philanthropy is sickly” and that national regeneration would come only through battle, blood, and conquest. In this way, Americans would fight off the various diseases afflicting the nation. Like Alfred Stille, a Philadelphia physician, Sturtevant believed that war offered a way to cleanse society of “the unfit.” Just as death came in life, so too would sickness bring health. That lesson, he and others believed, extended to people, cities, and now nations. Civic Health in Wartime: Building the Sanitary Front Civil War Americans did not have to wait long to test Sturtevant’s theory. No sooner had Northern armies mobilized for battle in the spring of 1861 than sanitary reformers saw trouble on the horizon. Stressed and clustered in barracks far from home, soldiers quickly fell prey to disease and ill health. Thinking of the British experience in the Crimean War, where casualties borne of disease proved as costly as military fatalities, Union reformers mobilized a sanitary front that made soldiers’ health a key concern on the home front. In June of 1861, benevolent men and women convinced the Lincoln Administration to create the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC), a civilian group with no funding from the federal government that might nevertheless raise money, medical supplies, and consciousness about the importance of improving soldiers’ health. “For every soldier,” one USSC branch office argued in 1861, “there should be a dozen volunteers, male and female, at home ready for any work or service . . . to maintain our armies.” Over the next several years, the sanitary front expanded in all directions. Thanks largely to women’s exertions, sanitary reformers became a bastion of Union support. Staffing auxiliary societies, mobilizing fund-raisers, mastering the logistics of getting sanitary supplies to the battlefront (and wounded soldiers home), serving as nurses in hospitals and soldiers’ homes, women made sanitary reform successful. No better example exists than the nearly three-dozen sanitary fairs held in Union cities and towns between 1863 and 1865. Hailing the sacrifices of the boys in blue, women in city after city organized sanitary bazaars that sought to flood hospitals with money and resources. Raising roughly $5 million—the equivalent of over $1.5 billion today—sanitary fairs illustrated the power of northern women to fuel a long war. More than mere fund-raisers, sanitary fairs cemented the link between healthy home fronts and efficient war fronts. As northern sanitary reformers argued, the

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vigor, vitality, and healthiness of one sphere automatically influenced the other. According to Jane Currie Hoge, one of the leading architects of the sanitary fair movement, Civil War bazaars touched almost every sector of northern society, thereby improving Union patriotism as well as soldiers’ health. Recalling the successes of the second Chicago sanitary fair at the close of the war, she noted that it “was founded on the rock of humanity and patriotism.” With tens of thousands of people attending Union fairs and donating time, goods, and money, the Union seemed vigorous, alive, and well in ways unseen since the Revolutionary era. In Philadelphia alone, the Great Central Fair attracted about 29,000 people per day for over three weeks. In New York City, a similar throng at the Metropolitan Fair raised nearly $2 million. As Charles Stille observed, there was a fair “mania” spreading throughout the Union—an intriguing choice of words considering that one definition of mania was frenzied activity and thoughts (like secession). But if these thoughts could be marshaled for Union health, Stille observed, then it was a good condition to have. No less a figure than Abraham Lincoln touted the healthy civic qualities of sanitary fairs. Indeed, for Lincoln, sanitary fairs offered convincing proof that American democracy would not only survive but thrive in war. Visiting three fairs during his presidency, Lincoln highlighted the many connections between sanitary and military fronts. By supporting not only the Union cause but sanitary reform so “freely,” as he put it at the Philadelphia fair in June of 1864, northern citizens upheld that pillar of democratic Union: voluntarism. Indeed, while the war had “deranged” economic and social affairs, Lincoln exclaimed, sanitary fairs had convincingly proven that “the national spirit of patriotism is even . . . stronger [now] than at the commencement of the rebellion.” For Lincoln, as for Stille and others, the sanitary front proved that the Union cause was anything but sickly at home. Emancipation and the Sanitary Front With the sanitary front looming so large in the Union war, African Americans wondered if they had a role to play in improving the nation’s civic well-being. Yet although African Americans rendered key aid on the sanitary front—serving as nurses, medical attendants, and even hospital builders—they were not initially appreciated as healthful members of the Union body politic. If many white Unionists viewed slavery, secession, and sectional war through the lens of illness—with slaveholders embodying the poisonous possibility of national death—it did not necessarily follow that they saw southern emancipation as the cure. In fact, some

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northerners viewed emancipation as a disease that might wreak havoc above the Mason-Dixon Line. Debates over contraband policies and confiscation acts between 1861 and 1862 illuminated early wartime concerns about what they imagined would be a virtual contagion of black liberty. For some Unionists, contraband policies—in which Union forces could claim Confederate slaves as illegal property—set southern blacks dangerously “adrift,” as Pennsylvania newspapers claimed. Rather than let liberated blacks wander behind Union lines, and perhaps stream North, some commentators urged northern policymakers to send them overseas or into Indian country. For these critics, isolation was the cure to what (in white minds) was a looming problem: black freedom. Using well-known stereotypes still circulating from early northern emancipation, opponents of southern abolition also worried that mass black freedom would create a permanent underclass of African Americans—something that would sap Union strength. By 1862, images of black contrabands desperately in need of food, shelter, and medical care were widespread throughout the North. Some critics of Union contraband policy argued that white health and well-being would be directly affected by black liberation, for freed slaves took resources (sanitary and otherwise) away from deserving white citizens. More broadly, some Unionists worried that emancipation would make reunion impossible by driving Confederates to deeper—and perhaps more insane—defenses of bondage. Massachusetts congressman B. F. Thomas argued in April of 1862 that any emancipation measures would harm the Union cause by making Confederates desperate. Though an abolitionist, Charles Stille thought emancipation would turn Confederate madness into justified rebellion and permanent separation: a delusional worldview of black freedom made real. Anti-abolitionists used these arguments to hold off an emancipation war in 1861 and 1862. Alluding to themes of madness and delusion, they argued that abolitionists wanted to reverse the racial order by embracing emancipation. And that would hurt folks above as well as below the secession line. Such reasoning infuriated African Americans. Creating a healthy Union required abolitionism, they argued. For Henry McNeil Turner, bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, mass suffering and death in the early war years had actually resulted from Unionist afflictions, especially white northerners’ willful disregard of emancipationist remedies to the disease of slavery. As in the days of old, Bishop Turner proclaimed, “the plagues of this country”— slavery and wartime death—proved that a “providential interposition” was at hand. Unless the Union embraced the healing cure of abolition, it would face more destruction and even death. The Christian Recorder agreed, pointing out

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that the Union’s fate flowed from its treatment of African Americans. Alluding to the miasma theory of disease, which posited that deadly air and fouled water caused illness, the paper asserted that the American republic needed to flush its polluted streams by embracing the cleansing principles of liberty and justice for all. Without emancipation, the paper concluded, Civil War America might “totter and fall, like the ancient Republics, or dilapidated empires.” Frederick Douglass argued that the “bloody spirit of slavery” had long since sapped “the moral stamina” of the country. The Civil War would at last bring the disease and its remedy face-to-face: either the government would “destroy the slaveholding contagion, by destroying the field which produced it,” he predicted in September 1862, or it will let the disease itself conquer the American body. “There is no other way,” Douglass concluded. “Slavery must die if the nation lives, and the nation must die if slavery lives.” For African Americans no less than whites, bodily and mental health discourses served as key categories of wartime thought. Here too one could see the impact of expanding nineteenth-century medical, mental, and public health discourses. By the Civil War, a generation of formally trained black physicians (who often studied in Europe) had established themselves in the North. In addition, communal medical practices in slavery and freedom had already shaped black worldviews about healthy bodies and minds—though often with an interesting twist: whites, enslaved people and free blacks believed, suffered from the disturbing illness of race-hatred. Unlike many white preachers, who thought that the godly plagues of Exodus extended to all Americans deficient in moral qualities (humility, piety, and so forth), African Americans believed firmly that disease was a heavenly design pointed straight at anti-abolition whites. From the American Revolution onward, African Americans had used Exodus, in which unrepentant Egyptian slaveholders perished for refusing to let enslaved Israelites go, to warn Americans about the evils of slavery. The story of Jeremiah further showed that God used disease and injury to afflict unrepentant slaveholders. In Jeremiah 33–34, even God’s chosen people faced harsh judgment for retaining bondage. In ancient times, Jeremiah had warned his fellow Israelites about the perils of slavery, to no avail. Judaea’s bloody war was the result. Now in Civil War times, sectional battle offered blacks a chance to redeploy Exodus and Jeremiah, albeit through the lens of civic health. When white missionaries arrived at federally controlled Fort Monroe in Virginia, they found former slaves speaking of Jeremiah. Alluding to wartime events as evidence that the plague of slavery would either kill American society or be killed by the Union war machine, socalled contrabands depicted themselves as part of a revived nation.

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Nevertheless, during the first half of the war, racial friction from Philadelphia (where streetcar segregation prompted a variety of confrontations between white and black residents) to Detroit (where whites terrorized blacks in 1862) made African Americans wonder about the healing potential of war. Indeed, African Americans realized that they had medical as well as political hurdles to overcome in the 1860s. Notions of black inferiority that had been written into American scientific and medical practice since the late eighteenth century did not disappear easily. Early white medical authorities had often studied disease through the lens of racial difference. For instance, the celebrated physician Benjamin Rush believed that black pigmentation was the result of leprosy. By the 1840s and 1850s, a new racial science had appeared, with physicians, scientists, and medical officials arguing that alleged black conditions—laziness, impiety, and a tendency to flee plantation life—actually resulted from endemic racial traits. Thus did Dr. Samuel Cartwright’s diagnosis of “Drapetomania”—a categorized illness, in his eyes, defined by African Americans’ propensity for fleeing bondage—flow from years of medical debate about black “rascality” and insanity. Though he practiced in Louisiana, Cartwright had been trained at the University of Pennsylvania. A medical capital, Philadelphia was home to some of the earliest American asylums, hospitals, and medical schools. The city’s medical students and professionals were well versed in debates over potential black afflictions. During the 1830s and 1840s, as asylum literature proliferated and physicians began collating information on patient trends—who suffered from what illnesses and where—some doctors diagnosed an epidemic of black mania. With seemingly more black patients entering asylums and hospitals throughout the North, medical professionals began to wonder if freedom itself was driving African Americans insane. A sober review in one medical journal showed that statistical error had caused an erroneous diagnosis, for insane blacks were not streaming to northern hospitals. No matter; by then, the idea that black freedom and insanity were linked had gained wide currency. By the Civil War, these medicalized views of blackness influenced antiabolitionists North as well as South. In fact, Dr. John Van Evrie of New York, Cartwright’s successor and perhaps the most notorious advocate of black mental inferiority in the 1860s, established his own printing house to further popularize notions of black affliction. From his New York City base, Van Evrie circulated a bevy of “Anti-Abolition” pamphlets depicting all variants of black freedom (whether in the American North or the British Caribbean) as failed social experiments. In his medical opinion, blacks were simply unfit for freedom. No less a figure than Jefferson Davis hailed Van Evrie’s work as “an able and manly expo-

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sure of a fallacy [abolitionism] which more than all other causes has disturbed the tranquility of our people.” Offering a range of titles for purchase—from scientific ones (“An American Ethnological View of the Negro Question”) to racebaiting ones (“Free Niggerism”)—Van Evrie sought to meld racial science and social policy to prevent an abolitionist ascendancy in the Civil War. Medical perspectives abetted Van Evrie’s claims. For instance, his policy of “subgeneation” flowed from medical and health studies defining blacks downward on the evolutionary scale. Arguing that racial science had proven black physical and mental inferiority, Van Evrie proposed that slavery was a natural condition for African-descended people. Without bondage, he claimed, they became disoriented and dysfunctional—problems to themselves and society at large. It is not hard to find traces of asylum literature in Van Evrie’s medicalized view of African Americans. Like doctors writing about the insane at asylums around the country in the 1840s and 1850s, Van Evrie depicted blacks as suffering from a natural disorder that made them dangerous unless contained and controlled. Unlike many asylum superintendents, he located the cause of such disorders in blackness itself. Significantly, Van Evrie’s work appealed to white workingmen in urban areas who saw free black populations as an economic and social threat. Worried about the “sudden” emancipations resulting from Civil War policy, they imagined black Republican hordes streaming north. But Van Evrie’s work also penetrated the countryside, particularly in New York and Pennsylvania. “The public have long needed a concise history of the results of emancipation,” a Pennsylvania newspaper noted, and it was fitting that a medical man and physician had provided it. Moreover, Van Evrie proved that abolition—and not slavery or secession—was a contagion that would “ruin the country.” Far from a marginalized figure of race hatred, Van Evrie’s work influenced many others in the years ahead. Indeed, his pamphlet “White Supremacy and Negro Subordination”—which though published in 1868 was actually completed “in the year of Mr. Lincoln’s election”—solidified anti-abolitionist thinking in the Reconstruction era by picturing the mere concept of black freedom as unnatural, unhealthy, and simply insane. As Van Evrie put it, the “natural order of things” dictated “white supremacy and negro subordination,” no matter how “blind, perverse or mad the present generation may be.” Black Suffering and Union Redemption For African Americans, Van Evrie’s brand of thinking offered a painful reminder that a solid contingent of wartime northern whites viewed black freedom as the

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nation’s enduring illness. As Frederick Douglass told a Philadelphia audience in 1862, more than a few Unionists still blamed black and white abolitionists for leading the nation to war. How to overcome that entrenched notion? One answer came in the language of bodily sacrifice. By fighting for their own freedom as well as the nation’s survival, Douglass asserted, African Americans would slay prejudice and slavery in one fell swoop. Building on romantic notions of heroic self-sacrifice, Douglass told whites that the struggle for black freedom would be an elixir for the wounded nation. “Freedom,” Douglass explained, is not only “the centre of our Northern social system” but the very lifeblood of a healthy country. Freedom “warms into life every other interest,” making it indispensable to the republic. By making the war a grand struggle for freedom, and allowing blacks to participate and even suffer in it, Unionists would cure themselves of a national malady. And when many white Unionists formally embraced emancipation after 1863, African Americans hailed the policy’s healing benefits. Though stooped and injured in bondage, black writers argued, emancipation now allowed African Americans to walk “upright,” as the Christian Recorder put it. As important, emancipation would curtail providential pestilence by showing that the Union had at last understood God’s “righteous intentions.” Yet African Americans did not simply celebrate the coming of an emancipation war; like Douglass, they emphasized shared physical sacrifice as a foundation for a revitalized Union. Not only did blacks respond to the call for arms (slowly at first but still in solid numbers) but African American newspapers publicized black casualties as a way to highlight the redemptive qualities of black pain and suffering. Indeed, African American correspondents went to great lengths to show the grim toll of Civil War battles on people of color. The Christian Recorder believed that publishing even a partial list of “killed and wounded” black soldiers would impress white citizens. By seeing the rising numbers of black sufferers, whites would realize that African Americans had lost much too. Far from passive recipients of philanthropic aid, blacks were manly exponents of dignity and uplift—and well worthy of equal treatment when wounded and sent home. In fact, raw numbers of black casualties, even more than polished tales of African American heroism, would show that “both white and colored [troops should garner] the highest admiration” for their sacrifices. Americans should not just remember the boys in blue but the black men in Union colors too. By the second half of the war, pictures of embattled and endangered black Union troops were quite familiar to white readers. As Carol Emberton has shown, blacks troops’ ability to endure pain bolstered African Americans’ postwar suffrage campaigns.

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Black military service and sacrifice compelled many white northerners to reexamine their attitudes about slavery and freedom. As Chandra Manning has reminded us, many Union troops along the thousand-mile front embraced emancipation and even black military service after witnessing the horrors of bondage firsthand and then seeing the way that black troops were treated in the war. Pairing the cruelty of war and slavery, they found a higher purpose in sectional battle. Abolitionists highlighted these changes of heart at every opportunity. On the Massachusetts home front, for instance, Lydia Maria Child wrote glowingly to friends about shifts in Union troops’ attitudes toward black soldiers. As she noted, many young Unionists were outraged at the sight of southern slavery. Just as important, they now saw black soldiers as valiant defenders of freedom. On one occasion, she recalled, a white soldier had rushed to the aid of a black soldier who was being moved to a segregated section of a train heading out of Boston. Yelling that he had watched black troops in action, the white soldier refused to countenance segregation at home. For the normally pacifist Child, that incident proved the worthiness of blacks fighting in the Civil War. The mere prospect of African American military service provided a new picture of black vigor for some whites. “The raising of colored troops,” as one Philadelphia newspaper put it in December of 1863, challenged white Americans to cleanse their minds of poisonous images from the past. Indeed, with so many black troops already having been recruited by the Union, whites would have to see African Americans as an asset, not “a burden.” With Camp William Penn rising outside of Philadelphia—one of the largest training grounds for African American soldiers in the North—Pennsylvania became an entrepôt for black troops. Referring to the afflictions of mind that had formerly dominated white northerners’ thinking, the Philadelphia Inquirer stated that “many persons [once] believed . . . that freed slaves would not make good soldiers, that they would lack courage and could not be subjected to military discipline.” With black military service a reality, “facts have shown how groundless were these apprehensions.” According to the Philadelphia Press, published by John Forney, a Democrat turned Republican, secession remained a lethal virus while emancipation looked increasingly like a moral cure for the Civil War. Throughout the Union, an increasing number of white commentators celebrated black military service and even heroism. Summing up an eventful year of social change and military success, Lincoln’s 1863 message to Congress highlighted the nation’s newfound “health” on military, social, and political fronts—a fact owing very much to emancipation. Indeed, the “improved condition of our national affairs,” Lincoln told Congress in December 1863, was heartening and

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should convince Unionists everywhere that the “effects of the [Emancipation] Proclamation” were glorious and uplifting in equal measure. As he learned from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s report, roughly 100,000 former slaves now fought in Union blue, about half “bearing arms.” Though Lincoln stressed that only freed blacks in “suitable condition” (i.e., healthy) would be utilized in the military, Stanton had stated that even freed people deemed a “burden” (whom he defined as women, children, and “the infirm”) would still be used by Union forces to undercut Confederate power. Whatever the details of black military participation, Lincoln assured Congress that he would not retract or alter the Emancipation Proclamation itself. Inflicting pain on the Confederacy via emancipation was now a Union war aim. “Thus we have the new reckoning,” Lincoln concluded at the close of 1863. With black freedom now officially part of Northern wartime strategy, the “crisis which threatened to divide . . . the Union is past.” Many sanitarians celebrated emancipation’s newfound importance at bazaars and fairs. At the Philadelphia sanitary fair, the children’s department touted emancipation as a war aim by writing the phrase “all for freedom and freedom for all” in bold letters behind its tables of donated goods. In Philadelphia and other sanitary fairs, visitors could also purchase small replicas of the Emancipation Proclamation, funds from which defrayed the cost of supporting injured Union troops. In Chicago and Albany, sanitary fair organizers even auctioned off signed copies of Lincoln’s emancipation edicts, raising more substantial sums of money for the sanitary cause. In Chicago, the emancipation auction brought the largest single donation of the entire fair, the mighty sum of $3,000. Soon after, the document became the centerpiece of a memorial at the Illinois Soldiers’ Home. Looking at this shrine, injured Union soldiers would constantly recall that their pain had not been in vain. But the transformation of the Union war into a heroic and healthy struggle for black freedom was not without complications. Although African Americans emphasized their own industriousness in and out of bondage, white Unionists often saw the scars of slavery as a potentially enduring mark of black disability. White philanthropy thus became a means of ensuring black wellness beyond the battlefront. Perhaps the single most famous image of an enslaved person in nineteenth-century America, that of a Mississippi fugitive who bore the horrendous marks of bondage on his back, illustrated the way many Unionists used medical discourses to frame black wartime well-being itself as a product of white philanthropy. As Harper’s Weekly explained in July 1863, the former slave known simply as “Gordon” had arrived in the Union lines as a mere specter of a human being. With his tattered and torn clothing, Gordon was anything but the picture

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of health, even if he had an impressive life force that compelled him to flee bondage. Once he came under the Union’s care, though, Gordon became something of a medical specimen. The iconic image of Gordon baring his back so that the world might see what slavery had done to him appeared with a caption noting that he was “under medical inspection.” Treated by friendly Union doctors and nurses, Gordon was soon turned into a vigorous soldier. Readers thus saw Gordon not only as a former slave willing to fight in Union blue but as a gravely ill patient whose bodily afflictions had required white treatment to survive. The message was obvious: White doctoring had made former slaves strong. In this and other ways, the sanitary front was righteous. Blacks asserted that lessons about wartime healing went in the other direction, for the once feeble Union had been revived by blacks’ contributions. Indeed, from the moment fighting broke out and fugitive slaves fled to Union lines, African Americans shaped a discourse about black health amid Civil War turmoil that sought to undercut any and all notions of black debility. Douglass constantly emphasized African Americans’ industriousness beyond bondage and behind Union lines. At Fort Monroe, for instance, he showed that fugitive slaves had aided the Union war effort before emancipation was ever an official policy. With emancipation now a formal policy, Douglass continued to challenge white concerns about black inferiority and difference. “What shall be done with the slaves?” Douglass asked on one occasion. To that perennial question, he replied: Nothing. Liberate them and watch them rise as vibrant members of the body politic. Despite Douglass’s call, debates about the meaning of black wartime freedom persisted on both sanitary and social fronts. Not only did African Americans languish in many Union military camps, with a shocking death rate even in Civil War times, but wounded black soldiers were often treated in segregated facilities. In the Mississippi basin near Memphis, the Sanitary Reporter (the publishing arm of the USSC) noted that Union officials had established “Negro hospitals.” Yet these were segregated facilities—and blacks there were often called “inmates” (à la asylum literature) rather than “patients” (as white soldiers had often if not always been labeled). In Philadelphia, the establishment of Summit House Hospital for wounded African American soldiers required the complete evacuation of white soldiers. Similarly, African Americans had to establish their own sanitary fairs in Philadelphia. On the home front as well as the battlefront, fears of blood mixture folded neatly into concerns about postwar race mixing. Thus, although post-1863 Unionists deemed African Americans indispensable to the war effort,

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they did not move heaven and earth to treat them equally. The affliction of slavery may have been eradicated, but racial disease still haunted the Union. Reconstruction Is Made with Blood In April 1864, Abraham Lincoln traveled to the Baltimore Sanitary Fair, where he spoke about soldiers’ health. Remembering an earlier visit to the city, when threats on the newly elected president’s life convinced him to dress in disguise and move stealthily through the night, Lincoln joked that a much safer Baltimore illuminated improvements in the nation’s civic well-being since 1863. “The change within Baltimore is part only of a far wider change,” he observed. “When the war began, three years ago, neither party, nor any man, expected it would last till now. . . . Neither did any anticipate that domestic slavery would be much affected by the war. But here we are; the war has not ended, and slavery has been much affected.” Though emancipation had made the Union stronger and more vigorous, he claimed, there was still much to do. Echoing black thinkers, Lincoln pointed toward the stories of Exodus and Jeremiah as his new guiding light. Both slavery and the war must end together, lest a righteous God eternally punish unrepentant Americans. As he put it, “So true is it that man proposes, and God disposes.” Indeed, following the dictates of Providence, Lincoln asserted that further white affliction, suffering, and sacrifice would be warranted if the nation did not end bondage and institute racial justice as a national standard. To show that the body politic was still poisoned—this time by racism—Lincoln pointed out that many Americans refused to accept abolition and potential black equality as a consequence of bloody war. As reports of a massacre of black troops in Tennessee indicated, black soldiers’ health and heroism could be all too easily wiped out by race hatred. But Lincoln did not stop there. If the reports of the massacre were true, he noted, then Fort Pillow demanded retaliation: blood for blood. Previewing concepts imbedded in the Second Inaugural, Lincoln observed coolly that if retribution against Confederate whites was the price to be paid for salving black pain—past and present—then “it must come.” Lincoln was far from alone in thinking that a better Union would result from national blood sacrifice. The concept of bloodletting to atone for national sins and sickness appealed to a wide variety of Civil War thinkers. From intellectuals such as Horace Bushnell to Union officers such as Benjamin Butler, many felt that the new union had been sanctified by blood. Though the idea that blood

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represented the remission of either individual or collective human sin had been around for centuries, the apotheosis of national blood sacrifice came into vogue during the nineteenth century with the creation of modern nation-states. Moreover, in Civil War America, people high and low channeled recent popular and medical work on blood to rationalize the tragedy of sectional war. Blood became the subject of new transatlantic research by the mid-1800s, not to mention new elixirs. Americans could buy “blood healers” and “blood purifiers” to gain better health. Similarly, military and civilian officials now saw blood as a vital part of bodily regeneration, for when blood was purified, true healing began. In short, blood in wartime might not only be a sign of trouble but of health. Near the end of the war, Horace Bushnell told a New Haven audience that “noble blood, spilled blood, blood of unity and sacrifice” had made the nation better, freer, healthier. Robert Beecham, a Wisconsin soldier who had led a black regiment in Virginia and subsequently authored an autobiography, wrote that only the shedding of black blood in battle had convinced many white troops and officers of the Union’s righteous nature. Yet this bloody birth of freedom did not automatically erase the marks of slavery and racism. Indeed, for a wide variety of people, black freedom was often conceived as a challenging postwar condition. The problem of black freedom was again located on African Americans’ bodies and minds. Put another way, freedom’s success would be defined by blacks’ physical and mental ability beyond slavery. Out of the House of Bondage, former slaves now entered a Lab of Freedom: a suspect societal space where liberated blacks were consistently examined and watched for signs of debility and illness. Just as they had done with the enslaved man Gordon, white medical officials, reformers, statesmen, and others would monitor emancipated slaves to see whether or not the scars of bondage could be overcome. Even northern reformers believed that black freedom required deep study and consistent monitoring. As one of its first priorities, the newly established American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (AFIC), set out to study African Americans’ physical and mental constitution. Were people of color physically and mentally prepared for the rigors of freedom? the AFIC asked in a flood of questionnaires to military officials, doctors, and reformers. Headed by Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the AFIC hoped to show that blacks could become productive postwar citizens. But AFIC commissioners also wanted to be sure that their brief for emancipation rested on medical as well as political/moral judgments. Indeed, doctors and asylum superintendents were a particularly important source of information, in the AFIC’s eyes, for they could help white Americans determine

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whether or not blacks suffered disproportionately from diseases of the mind like insanity. And so, the AFIC asked dozens of doctors, were there many African Americans in asylums before 1860? Thirty asylum superintendents reported back to AFIC commissioners by the end of 1863. From Massachusetts to Iowa, they found that blacks made up a minuscule number of “insane” patients in their midst. Yet in debunking blacks’ innate mental inferiority, the AFIC enhanced concerns about other black bodily conditions. One Hartford physician argued that blacks had a “constitutional cheerfulness” that mitigated against insanity—a propensity to happiness that would overcome even great suffering. Responding to AFIC prompts—“Do mulattoes seem to you to have as much vital force to resist disease and destructive agencies as pure blacks and whites; and do they usually live as long?”—other physicians noted seeming health differences between “pure blacks” and “mulattoes,” with some arguing that the former had better health than the latter because their bloodlines had not been diluted. Still others worried about blacks’ ability to become not just healthy people but healthy citizens. As a physician in Kansas told the AFIC, a “healthy” black race would be a boon to American society, though it “still remains to be demonstrated” that African Americans could achieve equality with whites. J. H. Worthington observed that the famous Friends Asylum for the Insane in Philadelphia “never have rec’d colored [people],” though the low incidence of black insanity may have resulted from “less education.” Thus, while the AFIC found northern doctors and mental health officials to be supportive of black freedom, they also discovered that African American liberty was akin to a guarded condition. As Thomas Kirkbride, the dean of American asylum superintendents put it, the AFIC’s “inquiry ought to be conducted with great care,” because the “statistics” of black insanity and health could be gauged only by scouring “almshouses, jails, etc,” where most afflicted African Americans were thought to be. And until that was done, firm medical claims to blacks’ mental and physical equality must be put on hold. The rise of aid societies for those newly freed raised similar questions about black health in peacetime. Like sanitary reform groups, relief agencies cultivated consciousness about the physical needs of those formerly enslaved. At the top of the list for freedmen and women were the necessities of day-to-day life, including clothing, food, and housing. But even appeals for these items came in a dire language of affliction and destitution that suggested endemic black illness and pain beyond bondage. “There are large multitudes of destitute negroes at the South,” the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society (NEFAS) wrote before the end of the sectional conflict, “who (like large numbers of destitute white people) will

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need, while the war lasts, the supply from time to time of pressing bodily wants.” Beyond the war, however, freed blacks would need for a longer period, instruction in the elements of knowledge and in the “arts of civilized life.” That last phrase—“arts of civilized life”—was critical, referring not only to the “lessons of industry” (i.e., free labor economies) but “domestic management and thrift . . . truth and honesty” (i.e., healthy and clean living). From hygiene to work habits, then, freed blacks had to show whites that they had, as the NEFAS put it, “unlearned” the degraded lessons of bondage and set themselves on the path to better bodies and minds. Other Union reformers followed suit, picturing black freedom as a worthy but long-range project aimed at curing African Americans’ compromised state of health. In fact, that idea became a staple of aid work for the newly freed in the 1860s and 1870s. One such relief society in St. Louis argued that “the recent glorious decree of emancipation in Missouri [in 1865 has had] the immediate effect of increasing the number of free people who are unhoused and destitute.” Although there were many urgent calls for medical and sanitary relief, the American Presbyterian asked, was there “any other more urgent” cause than improving the physical health of endangered blacks? Was there “any class of sufferers more needy or more helpless? Shall we give them liberty and let liberty mean to them homelessness and starvation?” Knowing that the newly freed would require “continuing” care, from the daily necessities of life (shelter, food, and clothing) to up-to-date medical treatment, the newspaper called for a national upsurge of benevolent action toward blacks. Such benevolent calls again conjured into being links between medical and racial reform. Sanitary reformers were among the first to cite former slaves’ medical needs, and by extension, their critical condition beyond bondage. Both Henry Bellows and Frederick Law Olmsted, key members of the United States Sanitary Commission, became early advocates of relief societies for the newly freed. As the NEFAS observed in 1865, sanitary reform was a perfect model for postwar abolitionists, for the “Freedmen’s Aid Societies, like the Christian and Sanitary Commissions, are important auxiliary forces” to government agencies. Through civic volunteerism, they bolstered federal aims, in and beyond war. Like sanitary reformers, in fact, aid groups for the formerly enslaved would learn the valuable lesson of keeping the federal imprint small. Black relief, like white soldiers’ aid, had to flow upward from the people themselves. If citizens’ themselves were energetic and vigorous, as sanitary reformers had been saying for years, then racial reform would be well supported and successful too. If not, black freedom would fail.

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Moreover, sanitary inspectors became a model for relief society inspectors— commissioners whose job entailed examining the health and bodily conditions of liberated blacks. Cleaning up dirty barracks or mustering out sick soldiers was one thing for sanitary officers (who might criticize individuals or policies); but the inspectors’ value-laden examinations of contraband camps and free black towns brought something more: race-based moral censure. In the Nashville area soon after the war, a well-meaning inspector offered praise to communities of newly freed people struggling to survive amid racial terrorism, but he also commented on the “moral and educational results” of black liberty exhibited in the settlements. Until free blacks learned a “sense of their individual responsibility, duty and intelligence,” he noted, emancipation seemed to be “but one degree above the old” system of bondage. In this sense, white medical and philanthropic aid often came with a bill of lading. Throughout the postwar South, federal officials sought to discipline former slaves to the rigors of a free market economy. Blacks’ health became part and parcel of this grand cause. Indeed, Freedmen’s Bureau officials, like sanitary commissioners before them, conveyed the innate moral lessons of their cause to African Americans. For one thing, they decried the prospect of black dependence on government—a bad thing, Freedmen’s Bureau officers noted, for former slaves trying to illustrate their vigor and health beyond bondage. According to the harsh logic of Freedmen’s Bureau representatives, too much philanthropy and government—in the form of hospitals, almshouses, or even food rations in contraband camps—might cause black dependence. For another thing, black calls for aid in the face of continuing postwar hardship often brought censure from federal officials, who viewed even medical dependence as unmanly and unhealthy. Tragically, this federal strategy of disciplining black bodies and minds to self-sufficiency and market life produced medical fallout in the form of the perpetual underfunding of hospitals dedicated to African Americans’ health. The result, often buried in government medical reports, was a black health epidemic that needlessly killed thousands of former slaves who were denied proper care in the name of self-help and uplift. But white doctors did not need economic rationales to discipline African Americans. Medical, health, and sanitary discourses before as well as during the war had already provided them with a language of black affliction and debility. For many whites, African Americans were injured figures whose lack of sanitary consciousness exposed their morally inferior nature. In South Carolina, a Union military official reported that the “health of the country” had been poor in the last year because freed blacks refused to dig a sanitary ditch that would have

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drained disease from the environment (disease still being associated with foul air and water). Yet even while he read this incident as a commentary on black medical knowledge, or lack thereof, he also explained that African Americans had been in a dispute with white authorities over work conditions. Rather than link these two issues, the white official focused instead on the readily available discourse of black moral and psychological inferiority—the idea that blacks were unruly, indolent, and mindless and would not lift a shovel to better their health. That was not a momentary concern, for him or other northern whites; rather, it raised alarm bells about the black condition after 1865. Critical Conditions in Black and White White and black Americans continued to disagree about the nation’s postwar civic well-being. For African Americans, a healthful future meant many things, including bodily health, suitable housing, income, and sustenance, and strong communal ties. For many whites, however, black freedom claims (equal medical care, equality of movement, equal voting rights) created a palpable sense of unease. Mobility became a flashpoint for these diverging views, as African Americans saw physical movement as a way to regain their health (by connecting with long lost loved ones) while whites worried that migration proved blacks’ mental instability and propensity for wandering. In one revealing but not isolated case just two months after Lee’s surrender, the assistant superintendent of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Louisiana wrote that free black communities contained a significant number of “helpless” and “suffering” people, particularly children of parents who wandered off and showed “no interest” in them (the official actually heard that parents expressed fears about being re-enslaved and were out looking for better economic arrangements, to little avail). “Roving about the country doing nothing,” according to the official, adult freedmen exhibited few healthy mental traits. In this vein, planters coming back into the Union argued that, though slavery might have ended, blacks’ natural (inferior) condition remained unchanged. Resorting to old stereotypes, they claimed that free blacks were lazy, shiftless, and dishonest. In Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana, former slaveholders spoke forthrightly of their concerns about enduring black character traits, especially African Americans’ propensity to feign sickness to get out of work. One South Carolinian even gave Freedmen’s Bureau officials a detailed list of the “bad characters” among his plantation workforce. Although some Union officials went to great lengths to refute critiques of black character—one white

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figure hailed the pledge of the newly freed in Tennessee to “take care of their own sick & poor” even though they were “penniless” and could not find work—they often relied on southern whites and former slaveholders for medical support. As Jim Downs points out, understaffed Union officials wanted to devolve many Reconstruction policies downward to localities, in essence removing federal protection for liberated blacks. And that meant using white doctors from southern communities where slavery had been so recently the order of the day. By the 1880s, political redemption in the South was followed by a psychological and medical redemption—a reexamination of black health. Studying the Reconstruction era, Dr. A. H. Witmer of Washington, D.C., claimed that the incidence of “insanity in the Colored race” had increased markedly between 1860 (when there were under 1,000 reported cases) and 1880 (when over 6,500 cases had been reported). “What has caused this great increase of mental disease in the Colored Race,” Dr. Witmer wondered. Though he cited a “combination of causes,” Witmer concluded that “the new and exciting requirements incident to their emancipation, life of freedom, and advancing civilization” were “at the root of the problem.” According to Witmer, blacks were naturally timid and sickly, prone to alcoholism, excitable but not rational and thus could not handle the health and moral requirements of freedom. Put into asylums, prisons, and group homes, they were cleared from the countryside as a disturbing element. How did blacks respond to this round of racial diagnoses? The unhealthy depiction of black postwar freedom spurred some African American writers to revisit slavery’s painful nature in American history and memory. Although postbellum slave narratives often emphasized black uplift, they also highlighted the enduring pain of bondage as a window unto Reconstruction-era race relations. For many second-generation slave narrators, particularly women, there was a disturbing link between antebellum and postbellum white pathology. Octavia V. Rogers Albert’s underappreciated 1890 book of slave reminiscences, The House of Bondage, pictured white mastery itself as a near-permanent psychological condition. “Much has been written concerning the negro,” she began, “but who is responsible for the immoral condition of this illiterate race in the South [now]? I answer unhesitatingly, their masters.” Replete with stories of cruel slaveholders from antebellum days, The House of Bondage was a WPA-style survey of slavery that also warned of white pathology in the days ahead. Indeed, slavery’s physical and psychic toll was so great that only constant retellings of its reality would remind white Americans of what they had to overcome: the psychological affliction of mastery. Whites’ propensity for inflicting pain on blacks would die a slow death, she argued. Though thankful for Civil War emancipation, she ended her

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book by commenting that only in the next world, perhaps, would the “inhuman system of slavery” and its tragic consequences truly disappear. Like Albert, Frederick Douglass highlighted white psychosis as an enduring problem in postwar America. As Douglass wrote in an 1881 essay for the North American Review, a closer examination of race relations globally illustrated that white Americans were exceptional practitioners of racial prejudice. “In the abstract,” he observed, “there is no prejudice against color.” Indeed, if color were so horrible, uncolored Americans would refuse to embrace anything but whiteness—they would demand white flowers, white clothes, white soil, an all-consuming “snowy whiteness.” That was not the case, of course. In fact, whites exhibited “wild inconsistencies” on color prejudice, working with and around blacks on some things, refusing to be with and around them in other cases. But there was also a sense of paranoia or delusion undergirding white racial views, especially the idea that a minority of blacks could and would overtake the majority-white republic and drive it into the ground. Where else in the world, asked Douglass, did race loom as large as in the United States? For him, this raised a key question: Were whites, in some essential sense, mentally disturbed? Though he wrote not as a physician, Douglass showed a familiarity with concepts of mental disturbance. So, he all but asked, were whites inherently psychotic? Douglass doubted that, for many whites had treated him as an equal. But there was still a cultural habit of mind among white folks that Douglass could not decipher. Looking at the nation’s civic health from antebellum times to Reconstruction, he found it curious that a once-proud slaveholding nation that had nearly committed suicide in a deathly Civil War over slavery’s sanctity could so thoroughly convince itself that blacks (and not whites) suffered from an enduring condition of moral, mental, and physical deformity. Well before W. E. B. Du Bois, Douglass realized that color lines framed the way that whites saw the world. American civic health would thus not improve until and unless whites sought treatment and healed themselves.

John Codman Ropes A Lawyer’s Historian

Richard F. Miller

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ocating John Codman Ropes, the founder of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts (MHSM), in the intellectual currents of his time only looks easy. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1836 to the “Russia trader” William Ropes and descended from two distinguished Salem and Boston families, John Codman Ropes belonged to the social class at the center of George M. Fredrickson’s The Inner Civil War: the “group of old-stock New Englanders” who “combined high social status with intellectual interests and accomplishments.” Indeed, by class credentials and education, Ropes, educated at Harvard College (1857) and Harvard Law School (1861), was an obvious candidate to qualify as one of Fredrickson’s antebellum “demoralized gentry without a clearly defined social role,” destined to be transformed by the Civil War into “a self-confident modernizing elite.” Many of the young men who illustrate Fredrickson’s thesis of the transformative effects of war on this social class had attended Harvard with Ropes. But as Ropes’s biography suggests, theory clashes with cases. Ropes did undergo a long period of prewar demoralization, the product not of class anxieties but a physical transformation from a healthy adolescent to a differently abled young man, as a result of what was probably severe spinal scoliosis. And before the war began, Ropes had already recovered his balance by renewing his religious faith and mastering the social skills required to make him among the most popular boys in his college class. When the death of his beloved brother Henry at Gettysburg unsettled Ropes again, he again recovered, not by discovering some new class mission, but through sacralizing his loss by imagining his role in creating, in his words, a “true History” of the war: “the present view and the future view.” Ropes was transformed by the war but in highly personal ways better described by Drew Gilpin Faust in This Republic of Suffering. Faust notes, “Civil War Americans lived the rest of their lives with grief and loss”; later, meditating on survivors’ and the nation’s sacralization of the war dead, she observes, “Without agendas, without politics, the Dead became what the survivors chose to make them.” The nation’s dead were collectively mourned while individual survivors

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struggled to interpret meaning from the loss of a son, a husband, and, for Ropes, a brother and many friends. As millions of human beings worked through these issues in ordinary ways, writers, poets, politicians and judges—here, Faust mentions Ambrose Bierce, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.—worked through them in prose, verse, and legal theory. Ropes the historian would honor his dead and the Dead by founding the MHSM; and here, as Fredrickson might have predicted, Ropes became a “modernizer,” but in his efforts he applied his antebellum legal training, which was already modernizing before the war, to his postbellum pursuit of a “true History.” Innate to Ropes and the MHSM’s early membership were class attitudes that assumed an authority, conferred by education and social access, to produce histories that mattered. Since most classmates and social networks involved elite peers, the histories would also—the stories that mattered involved senior politicians who controlled ministries and officers who commanded armies. Yet for Ropes and the MHSM, preserving narratives was not hagiography. The altar of “true History” that Ropes dedicated to Henry’s memory would be purified by the forensic procedures of Ropes’s other passion: the law. “Juries” deciding between competing narratives and through an institutional structure that resembled the appellate process would shape MHSM’s knowledge production. The high-minded Ropes believed that the best way to honor Henry and the others was by finding the “true History” and not by refighting the war through biased narrative that filled books after Appomattox. It was an early effort to professionalize historical writing, and it applied the tools familiar to Ropes and many MHSM members for sorting through conflicting narratives: the adversary process. I On the clear, cold evening of January 20, 1876, however, it was too soon for such perspectives. The forty-year-old John Codman Ropes, now senior partner of the law firm of Ropes & Gray, gathered ten ex-federal officers at Boston’s Union Club to discuss forming a new organization. They dined, and afterward, “Mr. Ropes called the meeting to order, and then stated that his object in inviting these gentlemen to meet him had been to ask them to consider the desirability of forming a society for the consideration of history, principally of our late war, but also of other wars, both of this and other nations.” Ropes had never worn a uniform, but his ten guests were all Civil War veterans. The highest ranking was West Point graduate and Mexican War veteran Brevet Major General George H. Gordon, at the time of the meeting a Boston lawyer.

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Next ranked was Brevet Brigadier General Francis Winthrop Palfrey, Harvard College, 1851, Harvard Law School, 1853, a Boston bankruptcy judge and the son of John Gorham Palfrey, renowned historian of colonial New England. The others by rank were Ropes’s 1857 college classmate Lieutenant Colonel Franklin S. Haven, in 1876 a Boston banker; Ohio-born Charles Fairchild, Harvard College, 1858, a Boston paper merchant; Twentieth Massachusetts veteran Brevet Major Herbert C. Mason, a textile mill executive and Harvard classmate of Ropes’s brother Henry; Major John Chipman Gray Jr., Ropes’s law partner, Harvard College, 1859, Harvard Law School, 1861, a cavalryman, aide-de-camp to General Gordon, who later served as a judge advocate; Captain William E. Perkins, Harvard College, 1860, Harvard Law School, 1862, former Massachusetts legislator and at the time of the meeting a Boston lawyer; Pennsylvania-born Brevet Captain Howard Stockton, who had served as a topographical engineer and a cavalryman, a Boston lawyer. Brevet Captain Edward Blake Robins, Harvard College, 1864, another Twentieth Massachusetts alumnus, was a Boston dry goods commission merchant. Finally, there was Edmund L. Zalinski, a Polish-born Jew who had served on the staff of Nelson Miles in 1864, and at the time of the meeting taught military science at MIT. Tilted toward Brahmins and lawyers, they numbered eight graduates of the college, five of whom attended the law school, if one includes Stockton, who did not graduate, six practicing lawyers, five businessmen, and one professor. Ropes proposed that a committee of five be appointed to consider how best to organize this yet unnamed society; Palfrey suggested that the committee be of three; a vote was taken and Palfrey prevailed. This foreshadowed another of MHSM’s traits: Ropes might inspire, but he would never dominate—it was in neither his nature nor his vision for the MHSM. Rather, after proposing he would always join the discussion as an equal; he would offer guidance, maintain correspondence, and furnish meeting venues, at first, at his law offices and eventually at his home at 99 Mount Vernon Street. And the committee formed this evening would be the forerunner of other committees that would determine the historical questions to be investigated, select the investigators, set the schedule for presentation and discussion, and, for perplexing issues, decide whether questions should be “recommitted” to yet another committee for further study. Votes, committees, and the group’s elite makeup would determine how MHSM worked, but not its goals. These were the product of another vision, best summarized by Ropes years later in the preface to his never-completed summa: “The best service that the historian can render is to set forth, as nearly as he can, the exact facts, taking account of all matters that justice requires should be weighed, and that a regard for truth demands should be clearly set forth.”

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For tonight, General Gordon, as “the senior officer present” was chosen to chair the committee of three, whose other members were Ropes and Palfrey. When everyone next convened at the Club on February 7 to hear Gordon’s report, the group had a name: the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts. And at this meeting, another two ex-generals were present, as was Colonel Thomas L. Livermore, whose future writings, like those of other MHSM members, would influence how later generations understood the war. For Livermore, a gifted statistician, the war was about numbers: how many served, deserted, were wounded, or had died. For other members, it was about the battles, with narratives vetted for fairness by lawyers’ devotion to process: who won, who lost, why, and what might have been done differently. These would be written by gentlemen elites, mostly ex-soldiers, who instinctively recoiled from the war’s larger but grubbier political and social questions that had been relentlessly pressed since Appomattox: freedmen enfranchisement, the struggle between Congress and a president over Reconstruction, and the war’s other social and economic disruptions. Squaring MHSM’s work product with the historian David Blight’s differentiation between history as “a reasoned reconstruction of the past rooted in research” and memory as “a sacred set of potentially absolute meanings and stories, possessed as the heritage or identity of a community,” the MHSM produced history and not memory, although it was a narrow history, ostensibly limited to military affairs. Ropes usually disdained politics; but significantly, four months after founding the MHSM, he made a rare venture into public life, becoming president of the equally high-minded Boston Bristow Club, which backed the quixotic presidential candidacy of the radical reformer Benjamin H. Bristow; its declared purpose was to promote “the nomination of the best men to office, purity in elections and a return to honest government of the early days of the Republic.” At least six other early MHSM members followed Ropes into the Bristow Club, all presumably disgusted by the low ethics of the Grant years. Politics, like the history of the “late war,” could be something better than it was. And Ropes had many precedents to believe that that history might be purified. It was still the age of the gentleman-historian. Harvard College and Boston had produced many of that era’s outstanding historians, men who held an Artium Baccalaureus or a Harvard divinity degree, maybe some legal training, but little else, with other credentials conferred by self-appointment, independent income, exhaustive research, and peerless storytelling: Francis Parkman, William Hickling Prescott, Jared Sparks, John Lothrop Motley (whom Ropes feared as competition for a Civil War history), and John Gorham Palfrey were several prominent examples. Ropes fit this world as did his eventual home: 99 Mount Vernon Street, perhaps the most “po-

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lite” address on Beacon Hill, would become one of the country’s leading salons for military history. II Who was John Codman Ropes to draw ex-generals into what for years amounted to little more than a Boston discussion group? The answer resides in Ropes’s biography. Most of what today’s historians understand about Ropes is based on texts that were written or became available years after the MHSM was formed. Based on several of these, scholars can claim some intimacy with the twenty-six-year-old Ropes, at least for the period between October 15, 1862, and June 27, 1865, the dates that bracket his correspondence with John Chipman Gray Jr., a soldier who was to become his law partner. Published in 1927 as War Letters, 1862–1865, this correspondence offers facing windows on two privileged young men and remains one of the war’s most enduring collections of letters. Here Ropes appears as a struggling Boston lawyer, unable to afford dues for the newly opened Union Club; he is a young man deeply interested in the war, with a passionate conviction in the North’s cause but with a healthy skepticism of Lincoln, his ministers, and generals; his imagination is stirred by the constant flow of newspaper stories and soldier anecdotes, and a need to untangle the threads of tactics, strategy, and politics that unspooled from Washington, the Massachusetts Statehouse, and a dozen battlefields. He is deeply religious and ponders his faith through books and reflection. Above all, Ropes is an intensely social and likable creature, a man who shared with his correspondent Gray, serving at Hilton Head, his thoughts on strategy, gossip, politics, religion, and personal tragedies and exaltations. Ropes knew everyone, and after six visits to the Army of the Potomac between February 1862 and February 1865, eventually met most everyone of whom he had heard. As Gray recalled years later, Ropes had “a genius for friendship.” Ropes appears on today’s bookshelves at least twice more. In Army under Pope, published in 1881, Ropes created a still read account of John Pope’s debacle in August 1862. And in 1894, G. P. Putnam published part 1 of his intended summa, The Story of the Civil War: A Concise Account of the War in the United States of America between 1861 and 1865. Ropes died after finishing part 2; others would complete The Story. Between founding the society and part 2 of The Story Ropes penned numerous monographs on campaigns, battles, lives (memoirs of Francis W. Palfrey and Charles Devens, among others), and magazine articles, gave lectures, and wrote Napoleon I’s biography and a study of the Battle

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of Waterloo. But in January 1876, when the generals and the colonels gathered at Ropes’s request, these works lay years ahead, and his correspondence with Gray remained in private files. And yet the War Letters teem with insights as to why, over a decade later, the generals came when Ropes asked. III On September 18, 1863, Ropes wrote excitedly to Gray. It was a striking change in mood, for just two days earlier, Ropes had written a passage far more characteristic of this period, the gloomy months after the death of brother Henry. “Here, in a little over a year I have lost my brother Henry and three of my best friends, Stephen [George Perkins], Major [Sidney] Willard and Jim [James Amory] Perkins,” Ropes had lamented. “I can’t bear to think of it.” And it is here that Faust’s This Republic of Suffering begins to explain more about Ropes than Fredrickson’s abstract notions of class destinies. “So much suffering had to have a transcendent purpose,” Faust writes and quotes Frederick Douglass—“ ‘a sacred significance.’ ” For Ropes the event that, in the words of the Psalmist, “turned for me my mourning into dancing” probably occurred the day he wrote Gray and described a development that came as unexpected to him as it does to the reader: [Robert McNeill] Morse and [Arthur John Clark] Sowdon and [Francis Ormond] French have suggested to me—for the idea never occurred to me—the idea of writing a History of this War. . . . My notion would be, not to write a complete and exhaustive treatise or history of the War, for that would be impossible at the present stage of affairs. It is not possible to find out the truth about some very important matters—the public documents cannot I presume be examined, and if they could, I have not the time to examine them. Ropes gave three reasons why he was the one to write this history. And these partially explain why the 1876 Ropes could summon hardened veterans; they also foreshadow his vision that would be realized thirteen years later in the MHSM. Ropes conceded that future historians might have “superior advantages in the way of documents brought to light, and the attained results of measures now being carried out,” thus allowing a better judgment of “the character of prominent men now in dispute”; however, Ropes’s generation offered something indispensable to this future: the judgment of both the contemporary general public and elites “on the men, measures, and events of the times, [that] should be stated and

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preserved.” This was necessary, Ropes high-mindedly insisted, “to true History— the present view and the future view.” Ropes’s second reason for undertaking a “true History” also involved the “present view” available only to those who had experienced the war and its times that later might be lost: the “fleeting impressions on the public mind, of despondency and of exultation, or of hope, or dissatisfaction, etc., with impressions, though at the time very influential in shaping the course of the government, and of individuals in high places, [that] are forgotten with marvellous rapidity.” This was connected with another duty that was owed to the future, that in Ropes’s view, only his generation could discharge: factual accuracy. “It is well to have a history written now,” Ropes declared, “in order to preserve as many of those facts of battles and other operations of the war, which are misstated by correspondents and such people, and are likely therefore, many of them, to be misstated in history.” The first two reasons qualified Ropes in only a general way—he belonged to the generation that now passed through these events and thus could create contemporaneous records to ensure that neither contemporary moods nor facts would be effaced by time. But the third reason (and here, Ropes apologized for his “egotism”) dealt with “my qualifications for such a task.” In a long but essential paragraph, Ropes unrolled his special qualifications to undertake this task; it was a self-assessment that few who knew him would ever doubt, and it is a declaration that in shortened form, might have served as a mission statement for the future MHSM: I am one of that class from whom must come such a book, if it comes at all and is worth anything—education, sympathy with the war and with government, long attention to American Politics, and familiarity with them greater, I may say, than most young men in my position possess, a pretty fair acquaintance with general history, especially with military history, some smattering in military matters, art of war, etc., careful study of this war from the first, and very considerable familiarity with the details of some parts of it . . . the fact of having had a brother and many good friends in the war enabling me to realize the scenes in which they were engaged as well as anyone perhaps could, not a participant therein, sufficient legal knowledge to understand the legal and constitutional questions of the war, and of the policy of the government, able from several sources to get at all that need be said about the financial questions of the rebellion, and to all these I will add a pretty fair and impartial mind, and entire freedom from any bias that would disqualify me from being an impartial judge in any of these matters.

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To this, Ropes added one more qualification, perhaps the only one he understated: “From my friends in the army and elsewhere I can easily put myself in possession of important facts which my legal training would enable me to use . . . in as fair a manner as most historians.” In September 1863, Ropes only fantasized about writing this history and dreamed of the “filthy lucre” that he would earn from publishing it; but as Ropes acknowledged, the law was a jealous mistress, and the time was not yet right. In listing his qualifications Ropes also foretold other important goals that the MHSM would embrace. First, to record the immediate experience of those who had participated in the action; unless preserved, mortality would eventually deprive the future of this “present view” so essential to “true History.” But for Ropes only elites were equipped to write history, done preferably by educated generalists. This followed from Ropes’s conception of history: Statesmen, financiers, and generals drove the historical processes; thus, for military history the army hierarchy loosely reflected the historical importance of one’s experience. (Despite mentioning politics, constitutional law, and economics, Ropes would eventually narrow his interest to military history, although in History of the Civil War he returned to politics.) The final theme was Ropes’s embrace of a Platonic ideal of historical truth—to achieve it required only fairness, impartiality, and a historian who knew enough people to collect the sources. Ropes’s self-assessment was likely shared by many of the elites who followed him into the MHSM. The period covered in War Letters reveals that Ropes was in constant contact with numerous serving officers. Ropes made many visits to the army, and when men were on leave in Boston, Ropes always lunched, dined, or shared drinks at the Apollo; after men returned to the front, he maintained a steady correspondence. In his letters, the names mentioned by Ropes to Gray were often accompanied by summaries of his conversations; the more these letters dealt with military affairs, the lengthier they became. IV Why would three good friends counsel a still-grieving John C. Ropes to write history and not theology, another of his great interests? After all, War Letters abounds with Ropes’s talk of recent sermons and his extensive religious readings. Indeed, Ropes had received the prestigious Bowdoin Prize in 1861, not for history or law, but for theology; his thesis was titled The Limits of Religious Thought. Although law and history would define the outward Ropes, it was religion, a legacy from his pious mother, that shaped the inner man and about which he

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was public—in 1862 or 1863, he became a lifelong vestryman of Boston’s Trinity Church. Ropes’s friends saw in him what would become obvious to future historians. On Ropes’s twenty-first birthday, he composed a lengthy entry for the Harvard Class Book of 1857. This autobiography is lucidly written and chronologically arranged and includes his treatment of another matter that surprises even readers somewhat familiar with Ropes’s life: his candid and accepting account of the illness that deformed him at age fourteen and forever altered his world. And when John was born, that world offered considerable promise. At John’s birth his father William Ropes already had six surviving children by a first marriage. After the death of his first wife, William married Mary Anne Codman in 1832 and also switched from the East India trade to Russia. That same year he left for St. Petersburg accompanied by Mary Anne and his eldest sons. John was born there in 1836. His brothers Francis Codman Ropes born in 1837 and Henry Ropes in 1839 were born during sojourns in England. This blended family seemed to have lived in peace although emotionally apart, understandable if for no other reason than having different mothers and half-siblings very different ages. John C. Ropes early evinced a historian’s interest in events. Having left Russia at the age of one, he recalled nothing about it, but in England, and older now, stories about wars and violence figure prominently. His “imagination was excited” by tales of the 1841 burning of the Tower of London; his horror at the atrocity stories emerging from the First Opium War and the 1842 massacre of the British army as it retreated from Kabul. Ropes was six years old before he had his first glimpse of the United States; he also believed that his childhood abroad made him somehow different from his later classmates. He sarcastically compared his terrors at learning about wartime atrocities to the “memories which must have been impressed upon the minds of most of my Classmates by the contemporaneous though bloodless campaign in the United States, when [William Henry Harrison’s 1840 campaign song] Tippecanoe and Tyler too was triumphantly successful.” But not all childhood memories involved fire and bloodshed. Ropes also recalled hearing the cannon celebrating Victoria’s marriage to Albert. Ropes entered Chauncey Hall School in 1843. Here he met many of his future Harvard classmates and recalled the experience as “very pleasant.” Meanwhile, his father built a home at 92 Beacon Street; summers were spent at fashionable spots on the Massachusetts coast, although eventually, the family made Swampscott its permanent summer home. Then, at the age of fourteen, Ropes was slowly enfolded by changes whose implications were not immediately apparent:

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In June, 1850, my friends perceived that my right shoulder was higher and more prominent on the back than my left. I consulted a family physician, and by his advice devoted [during my] summer vacations more time to swinging with my arms & similar exercises. But the difficulty seemed rather on the increase, and it was thought best in the fall term of the school for me to give my self up wholly to getting well. I therefore entered on October 14 1850 the Boston Orthopedic Institution . . . with a decided lateral curvature of the spine. Despite daily visits for a year, treatment produced no results, and Ropes was left, in his word, “deformed.” This disease would have important consequences for Ropes’s life in general and Civil War historiography in particular. First, it was the most influential factor in disposing Ropes toward a life of the mind. Other than prescribed exercises, he would never share his brother Henry’s world of football and rowing. Next, it prevented him from entering military service. He would fight the war using the means available to him: supporting from home his friends in uniform, visiting them at the front, and also writing “leaders” (editorials) for the mainstream Republican and influential Boston Daily Advertiser. Finally, the disease strengthened Ropes’s remarkable resiliency (in his eulogy, A. J. C. Sowdon said of Ropes, “He knew no fear”); it was a trait that served him well in coping with permanent spinal malformation that began at an age when many Harvard-bound boys had athletics as much as academics in mind. Ropes recalled: At first I confess I found it rather hard to get reconciled to my new situation, which was rather a dismal one—obliged as I was to have to leave school, & deformed into the bargain. But although I soon gave up the hope which I had at first cherished of becoming in time straight again, I found comfort in considering that my health, a blessing so often denied to persons in that condition, was yet unimpaired, or rather I should say improved by the rest from study, & the unusual bodily exercise, and gave up desponding as useless & uncalled for. V Ropes’s experience at Harvard College began poorly but ended well. His first year was spent in rooms far from the Yard, and deprived of peer contact, John

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found his freshman year “a very stupid one indeed to me.” That changed during his sophomore year, with rooms much closer to the College. “Cambridge life, hereto insufferably dull,” he wrote, had now become “very cheerful and pleasant.” He was elected to the Institute of 1770, Harvard’s oldest social club, and the personal relationships it provided changed everything. Classmate A. J. C. Sowdon remembered of Ropes that “at graduation [he was] probably the most popular man in the class of 1857.” His popularity and a high class rank (as a freshman, Ropes finished seventh in a class of sixty-six; as a sophomore, tenth in a class of sixty-seven) led to his election in May 1855 as an editor of Harvard Magazine, to which he was reelected the next year. For Ropes, this editorship became everything. It may have “required of me a great expenditure of time and labor,” but he was “amply repaid [by] all the benefits, both as regards mental cultivation and the formation of business habits . . . not to speak of the honor of the post.” Indeed, he said, “I think that there will be little more in my College course upon which I shall look back in future years with more pleasure [than] upon my connexion with Harvard Magazine.” He contributed three articles and an unknown number of book reviews. However, those seeking the first buds of a military historian will be disappointed. Although his articles are analytical, two topics were literary and one was about college societies (which Ropes favored). But to look only at topics is to miss the larger point. Like the future MHSM, Harvard Magazine was a collaborative enterprise, and Ropes shared the editorship with two other classmates; moreover, most submissions came from other peers. Ropes liked that, and those who read his articles, the War Letters, The Army under Pope, and accounts of his conversations at 99 Mount Vernon Street will recognize that what he really liked to do was to analyze and explain things, and the more moving parts in a problem, the better. Years later, partner Gray recalled what made Ropes a perfect intellectual collaborator, a trait as helpful to Ropes & Gray as it was to Harvard Magazine and to the MHSM: “He welcomed the expression of adverse views, not that he might confute them, but that he might seriously, without pride of opinion, consider what there was in them of truth.” Ropes’s eulogists all noted his fine qualities of mind, but Gray was probably in the best position to appreciate them: He was not a rapid reader, but he never had to read anything twice. His memory, to the minutest circumstances of date and place was remarkable. Then he had the unusual power of mastering the details of a complicated transaction and of setting forth the result in a lucid and orderly, and attractive manner, so

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as to be alike instructive to specialists and intelligible to the ordinary reader. And, finally, he had an intense desire to find out and tell the truth. In sum, Ropes’s mind was unsuited to partisanship but highly amenable to the practice of a certain style of law and the writing of honest history. VI There remains to be examined a critical period in Ropes’s life which permanently altered his understanding of the war and its study: the years between Ropes’s 1857 graduation from college and Sunday afternoon, July 5, 1863—when he learned that his brother Henry had been killed at Gettysburg. Until then, Ropes’s greatest tragedy had been spinal disease. But Ropes’s moving account of how he confronted his brother’s death and its aftermath makes clear that Henry’s death was a far blacker moment than when he realized that his spine would never again be straight. Although Ropes’s intense interest in Civil War affairs predated the awful telegram’s arrival, Henry’s death transformed his interest in the war from a current events topic into an effort to preserve that “present view” that Ropes soon came to regard as essential to “true History.” Beyond Ropes’s 1860 statement (“I have always intended to become a lawyer”) it is unclear what else (if anything) prompted him to enter Harvard Law School in March 1858. For eight months after Ropes’s college graduation he had lived at home, “occupying or trying to occupy myself with general reading, &c.” During this time his brother Francis entered medical school while Henry prepared for college. Ropes enjoyed a good relationship with Francis, but his relationship with Henry was special, marked by closeness, confidence, and mutual affection, whose warmth runs throughout the volumes of the Henry Ropes Letters, which preserves Henry’s side of his wartime correspondence with John. It was this relationship that partly explained John’s ambivalence toward the law before Henry’s death, and afterward, his acceptance of his profession and new goal of becoming a historian of the Civil War. John C. Ropes began pursuing his studies in earnest on November 15, 1859, when he started reading law in the 4 Court Street offices of Peleg W. Chandler and George O. Shattuck. How Ropes connected with Chandler, one of the most prominent lawyers of his day, is unclear but might be surmised: Chandler was an 1837 graduate of Harvard Law School and cousin of the Law School’s Dane Professor of Law Theophilus Parsons, a man Ropes surely knew; but however Ropes arrived, the man under whom he read was well suited to be his mentor. Like

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Ropes, Chandler was deeply religious; he was a legal scholar; and while still a law student, he had created a new genre of journalism by submitting digests of recent cases to the Boston Daily Advertiser. After graduating from law school Chandler co-founded, in 1838, The Law Reporter, a nationally circulated, monthly case digest; he wrote a well-received history of famous trials, compiled, and modernized Boston’s city ordinances, and authored a treatise on bankruptcy. Chandler was also a public servant. In the 1840s and ’50s, he had sat on Boston’s Common Council; he also served as city solicitor and as a state representative. But during Ropes’s nine months with the firm Chandler offered another connection that proved vital to Ropes, and indirectly, to the MHSM’s future. Since 1838, Chandler’s relationship with the Boston Daily Advertiser had grown: When Ropes entered his office, Chandler represented the sheet, and in the words of its then-owner, the editors “relied upon his opinion” in all matters. Chandler wrote and influenced many Advertiser editorials—but Ropes also “ghosted” his share. In War Letters Ropes was candid: An unknown number of editorials were actually written by him and not Chandler. This must have been heady stuff for the twenty-something Ropes. It extended his beloved editorial duties from Harvard Magazine to a vastly more consequential stage at a time when such words mattered, and it also started him penning instant analyses of the war. Further, it allowed him to vicariously participate in a war in which service was denied him. It is no wonder that in a wartime letter to Gray, in the sentence following his complaint about how Advertiser editor Charles F. Dunbar had “emasculated” one of his recent submissions, Ropes declared, “It does one much good to write out one’s ideas. I sometimes think of an old literary project of ours to have a sort of literary Club, where each one should write an Essay once or twice a year. I think it would be a useful thing for us.” During these years Ropes, experiencing a lack of success as a sole practitioner, yearned for something else. After his November 1861 admission to the bar he could not make office expenses and was embarrassed to take money from his father; he dreamed of entering business with his brother Henry. Ropes now became preoccupied with the road not taken. “The conviction has been growing upon me for some time in a more or less indefinite manner that I made a mistake in not going into [W. Ropes & Co.],” he wrote Gray in February 1863. Ropes had just returned from visiting his brother-in-law in New York City, who represented W. Ropes there and had encouraged John to move to Manhattan and join the company with a promised salary of $2,000. Ropes confided to Gray, “I might do at any rate enough to pay my own way and this would be an immense thing for my own comfort.”

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The previous June, Henry had written John from the Peninsula, and discussed his own yearnings. “If I should return, I expect to enter the Counting room, and I suppose my business life would then be begun,” Henry wrote. “I do not expect ever again to be a non-producer, or rather [a] non-laborer.” Henry and John shared a belief in self-reliance. Did they also share a plan to enter the family business together? The evidence suggests that they did, or at least, John did. The day Henry was buried, a broken John C. Ropes wrote to Gray that “my future plans were to a great extent connected with his.” After returning from his tour of the Gettysburg battlefield three months after Henry’s death, Ropes wrote Gray, I have come to the conclusion in my own case, that for the present, at any rate, I shall stick to law. . . . The loss of my brother Henry takes away one of the main inducements to me in a business life. . . . I need not say to you, that nothing would gratify me so much as carrying out, when you return of our projected partnership [i.e., Ropes & Gray]. And in the next paragraph, Ropes turns to the prospects of writing a two-volume history of the Civil War, current through 1864. “Again, and this I regard as of considerable importance—what I, J. C. Ropes, need, is to do something, and that soon. I am physically, mentally and morally injured by lack of full employment, and lack of anything like success.” John, having “realized” Henry’s death, was now ready to live life on his own terms. Ropes would find that success as a lawyer and historian. In April 1864, finally able to afford the dues, he was elected to Boston’s Union Club. On October 1, 1865, he joined Gray to form the law firm of Ropes & Gray; in January 1866 the partnership took respectable State Street offices. That October Ropes and Gray became co-editors of a new quarterly, the American Law Review, and in 1867, in a rare honor for a civilian, Ropes was elected to the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, Companion of the Third Class. On Ropes’s birthday in 1869, President U. S. Grant appointed him assistant United States district attorney for civil business. By then Ropes had developed a niche as a trust and estate asset manager, a business model he pioneered for his firm; by 1870, he was comfortable enough to travel to Europe, researching Napoleon through France, Switzerland, Italy, Russia, Prussia, and Austria. In 1876, forty-year-old John C. Ropes, with his bulging files of Civil War correspondence, capacious library, and intimate con-

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nections with veterans from both sides of the conflict, finally had the time and the means to resume old notions. VII It was at the second MHSM meeting of February 7, 1876, that the society sprang, like Athena from Zeus, full-grown from the forehead of Ropes, to reflect his conviction that a “true History” was possible. At this gathering, General Gordon’s committee report included a list of proposed members, which included Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (who joined) and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (who did not) as well as Harvard Law School graduates Henry Cabot Lodge and Charles Devens, the financier Henry Lee Higginson, the scientist Theodore Lyman, the textile manufacturer General John C. Palfrey, and the scientist General Alfred P. Rockwell, all of whom did join. But it was Ropes who proposed the MHSM’s unique committee structure as well as the first two topics for investigation. During the decades that the MHSM was in the business of publishing original papers written by its members, this process—committees—and the “type” of topics deemed worth investigating, would more than anything define the society’s contribution to Civil War historiography. How topics were generated, considered, and in some cases, reconsidered, reflected Ropes’s legal training and unquestionably appealed to the many MHSM members who were lawyers. Both law and the study of history deal with evidence: its type, source, and evaluation, with the ultimate aim of constructing a narrative. But there are differences, one of the most important of which is that legal narratives are built in the immediate anticipation of a skilled challenge; thus, legal narratives interpret very narrow fact patterns, and the inferences drawn tend to be tight; moreover, rules restrict permissible evidence. And another important difference between narratives is that unlike those of historians, lawyers’ “histories” are subject to appellate review and final verdicts. In Ropes’s case, the MHSM moved easily into constructing narrative histories, albeit through a process influenced by legal procedures. These differences between narrative constructions were illustrated in the MHSM’s procedures for determining, presenting, and evaluating historical questions. First, a president and a three-member executive committee, elected annually, governed the society. At the beginning and for years afterward it consisted of Gordon as president, Ropes, Theodore Lyman, and Francis Palfrey with Robins as the Executive Committee’s secretary. Next, Ropes suggested forming a three-

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person Committee on Subjects, “whose duty it shall be to suggest [it was then voted to replace “suggest” with “determine”] at each meeting topics for investigation, and to appoint the members of the committee to which such investigation shall be entrusted.” “Subjects” was a permanent committee whose members were elected annually. The Committee of Investigation was ad hoc, with a new committee created for each question to be researched and presented. Perhaps to keep the Committee of Investigation focused, or to maintain some quality control, it was then voted that “one or more” members of the Executive Committee would sit on each Committee of Investigation. Those topics pursued by the MHSM were consensus productions and not the result of a single member’s whim. Ropes wasted no time getting under way. At the February 7 meeting, since subjects had been established only moments before, the Executive Committee, on Ropes’s motion, suggested the first two topics for exploration: “The relative numbers of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia at the Battle of Gettysburg.” Mason and General Greeley S. Stevenson were appointed as the Committee of Investigation, joined by Gordon. The second topic proposed was “The alleged delay in the concentration of the Army of the Potomac under Gen. McClellan at Antietam, and the cause of the delay of the 2d. A[rmy] C[orps] in entering into the battle at Antietam.” Gray and Gordon were appointed as the Investigating Committee for this question. It is tempting to analogize this to a law firm’s parceling out case matters on the basis of partners’ expertise, but the record is too bare to support this conclusion. Thus were the investigators separated from the parties who proposed questions. No reasons were given for this structure, but several are easily inferred. First, it resembles a similar division of responsibilities between legislatures and the courts, which rule on their statutes, or between a judge’s charge to a jury and the jury itself. This and the MHSM’s adversarial process (about to be described) constitute the bedrock of Anglo-Saxon legal procedure, with the outcome said to favor truth-finding more often than not, and if not, then at minimum, fairness, or its appearance. Second, separating topic generation from investigation meant reducing the chances that members might ride the MHSM like a hobbyhorse, using it to defend their own wartime actions, justify a controversial superior, or support or attack a particular strategy in which they once had a stake. Ropes was aware of the risks to historical “truth” posed by members who had witnessed or participated in events: Although they might have evidence to preserve, some procedural means were necessary to screen for prejudice, thereby embracing a basic rule of law that bars a party-in-interest from judging a matter or sitting on a jury.

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There was one more committee, not mentioned on February 7, which first appeared at the October 9, 1876, meeting: a recommitment committee (unlike the other committees, this may not have had a formal name; reconsidered matters were described as being “recommitted to a committee” that consisted of different members from those on the Committee(s) of Investigation whose work it was to review). The circumstances under which the committee appeared are telling as they highlight one means by which Ropes and the MHSM intended to arrive at “true History” for especially contentious questions. At the April 10 meeting of the society, the Committee on Subjects assigned to Haven and Stockton one of the war’s most controversial topics: “The conduct of General McClellan during his stay at Alexandria in August 1862; the nature and extent of his command; and his alleged neglect to support the army of General Pope.” Haven and Stockton were to report at the June 1 meeting. At that meeting, this report was delayed, although there was another development: The same topic was now assigned to another Committee of Investigation consisting of former Generals Stephen M. Weld and Charles A. Whittier. Both committees were to report at the October 9, 1876, meeting. Dueling presentations were thus initiated. At the October 9 meeting, Haven presented his and Stockton’s detailed report first. It was sharply critical of McClellan, and concluded, “That the conduct of McClellan was an immediate cause of the escape of [Stonewall] Jackson when the latter was cut off from the rest of Lee’s army, and a chief cause of the failures of our army on the 29th and 30th [of August, 1862].” Immediately afterward, Weld presented for his committee, which after a lengthy review of the history (including recent letters from McClellan defending his conduct) concluded that, “It seems to us that McClellan did all that a man could do to aid Pope and to give him a full, hearty support.” The members present did not vote or otherwise judge between the two presentations; neither Ropes nor others present believed that historical truths were established by majority votes; instead, the two reports were “recommitted to a committee” consisting of Rockwell, Lyman, and Ropes, who were tasked with researching “the conduct of General Halleck at that time.” This process was not analogous to any single legal procedure; rather, it represented an expression of the legal mind and a blend of legal processes, each of which would have been well known to the lawyers and business executives among MHSM’s members: first, an adversarial presentation, then a form of nonbinding arbitration, followed by an appellate procedure in which the judge (i.e., the Executive Committee) might “remand” the matter to a court-appointed Master (i.e., the recommitment committee) for further consideration. In the above case, the recommitment committee sought to introduce a new element that it believed was

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relevant in weighing McClellan’s responsibility—the actions of general-in-chief General Henry W. Halleck. A “recommitted” report might not always be given to a committee formed for that purpose. On March 13, 1876, a presentation that had been prepared by Theodore Lyman on the question of “the numbers of Gen. Lee’s army at the opening of the last campaign, March 26 and 27, 1865” was read in absentia, Lyman being unable to attend. In the discussion afterward, Ropes related a conversation he once had with George Gordon Meade, who said that in conversing with Lee at Appomattox, he thought the Southern commander had intentionally understated his troop strength. Ropes then proposed the following for a vote: “The report be recommitted to Col. Lyman with the thanks of the Society, and that he be requested to communicate with . . . other officers, to obtain, if possible, greater accuracy in regard to the numbers. Confederate Generals [James] Longstreet and [William] Mahone were suggested as able and willing to give information.” The motion carried, and Lyman was asked to expand his sources. No consideration of MHSM’s internal procedures is complete without discussing the conversations, often debates, that followed each report. Ropes understood that, unlike him, most members had not been vicarious observers. These men were combat veterans, most of whom had participated in the battles being described, and almost all of whom were, by education, social class, or wartime commands, connected to the most senior ranks of federal, and ex-Confederate decision makers. Thus, presenters alone could not monopolize the available information or existing anecdotes that might illuminate a given question. On April 10, 1876, Gray presented his and Gordon’s report on the question of McClellan’s timeliness at Antietam; Gray had not been present at that battle, but co-committeeman Gordon was there. Afterward, “The Chair then asked if any officer present could speak certainly about the position of the troops in which he served, on the evening of the 15th of September.” A remarkable discussion followed. The Twentieth Regiment’s quartermaster, Charles W. Folsom (who had reason to know) declared that, “the 2d Corps was up.” General Weld then stated that, “the 5th Corps was up.” Colonel Livermore of the Fifth New Hampshire was absent from the meeting, but anticipating the discussion, had sent a letter: “not later” than 2:00 pm, the Fifth, skirmishers deployed, had reached Antietam Creek. Ropes then offered an opinion—Sumner’s Corps should have crossed the creek earlier in the morning or even the night before; it would have enhanced coordination on battle day. Gray offered several reasons why Sumner could not have crossed earlier, but conceded that Hooker’s attack was “most injudicious.” Ropes repeated a conversation he once had with

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General Charles Russell Lowell (killed later in the war), who conveyed McClellan’s statement that he had sent five officers to “move” Burnside but without success. Weld then repeated a conversation he had had with McClellan that “he had sent all the officers he had to start Burnside.” The meeting then adjourned. This discussion mattered. When Gray’s report was published in the Papers of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts in 1918, it incorporated the comments of Weld, Livermore, Folsom, and Ropes. Thus did Ropes realize his objective of preserving the “present view.” But what should the “present view” embrace? Consider the topics that were presented to the society in its first year: McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign and alleged government interference; Halleck’s responsibility for Pope’s debacle; and Pope’s debacle itself. Clearly, Ropes had narrowed his 1863 view that a “true History” would include “the legal and constitutional questions of the war” as well as “the financial questions of the rebellion.” But despite Ropes’s aversion to public politics these topics about troop movements and commanders only looked anodyne; closer scrutiny reveals that the questions embedded some of the most contentious issues of the war itself. Did Lincoln handicap McClellan on the Peninsula? Should Halleck have withdrawn the army from the Peninsula or renew the campaign against Richmond from Harrison’s Landing? Even the topics about numbers—those of Gettysburg’s contending armies or of Lee’s forces in the Appomattox Campaign—also implied larger political and historical arguments about the war: Did Confederates lose Gettysburg (or the war) because they were steamrolled by larger federal armies, or were the armies relatively matched at points of contact and thus do explanations for loss lie elsewhere? These questions may “look” exclusively “military,” but the questions they presented had deep political and historical import, and thus required the MHSM’s procedural safeguards to ensure that they were studied in an appropriate way. And these studies might influence current events—historical monograph met the law when Ropes’s two-part paper on Pope’s campaign, read on February 12 and March 12, 1877, and the book that followed, The Army under Pope, convinced Ropes that General Fitz-John Porter’s 1862 dismissal for failing to aid Pope, was unjust; Ropes allowed his work to be used to aid Porter’s official exoneration. VIII Ropes’s resort to procedural methodology for determining facts and making judgments was more than just a product of his legal background: It was also a re-

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sponse to the deeply partisan postbellum Civil War histories that continued the conflict with ink and not powder. Much was at stake: Writers sought to redeem reputations, claim victories, enhance sectional virtue, wave bloody shirts, and argue over the war’s meaning, that is, Reconstruction policies. In this world, Ropes’s gentleman-historian predecessors could offer little guidance. Their beautifully crafted narratives dealt with topics that were in faraway places, such as Hickling on Peru and Mexico and Motley on the Dutch Republic, or happened long ago, such as Parkman on the French and Indian War or Palfrey on colonial New England. None of their works had to confront the existential questions that remained the stuff of current headlines: disputed elections, constitutional amendments, impeachment, and the legal status of African Americans and Southern whites. It is useful to recall that the year MHSM was founded, Rutherford B. Hayes “won” the presidency, ratified the next year by a compromise that ended Reconstruction, a consequence of which would be to ease the insertion of the Lost Cause into mainline Civil War historiography. Compared with all of this, untangling battlefield maneuvers on the Peninsula, at Second Manassas or Gettysburg was simple: Somebody won, and somebody lost. A conscientious truth seeker such as Ropes reacted against this contentious environment in part by retreating into certainties. The MHSM’s work product fit well into the late nineteenth-century emergence of modern schools of historical methodology: By Ropes’s death in 1899, the membership of the MHSM had grown to include prominent academic historians, nationally recognized cartographers, and college presidents. For modern Civil War historians, the fourteen volumes of MHSM papers published between 1881 and 1918 remain a useful and mostly primary resource that requires little qualification for “school factors” such as Lost (or Won) Causes and Blue-Gray Reunions. It is also noteworthy that the MHSM’s topics did not “disappear” the contributions of African Americans. It is also useful to note what MHSM eschewed: Although located in Boston, it rejected sectional or partisan outlooks and never sought a victors’ history. But it also rejected another form of history, what might be termed the protosocial histories represented by many regimental histories written by enlisted veterans and enormously popular books such as John D. Billings’s Hardtack and Coffee. The MHSM’s mind-set likely regarded these works as vulgarizations of a war whose higher truths were best seen through the lens of grand strategy and from the headquarters’ telescope. Ropes opposed mythologizing war (he would became a devoted anti-imperialist) and especially the Civil War; mythologizing was popularizing war, and Ropes disdained the latter. Consider his comments

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as he concluded his March 12, 1877, presentation on Pope’s campaign. He quotes a passage taken from William Swinton, the former New York Times reporter and popular postwar historian: But when a man like Swinton . . . says that, “the structure of the army was completely dislocated [after Second Manassas]; half the men had abandoned their colors . . . and only these broken battalions lay between Lee and Washington” it is obvious that he is writing for the general public and not for the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts. It is our duty to reprove severely all attempts to add to the interest of history by such unconscientious coloring of the facts as this is. Another MHSM bias also stemmed from its members but in a different way: The founding group comprised, with a few exceptions, New England men, who had served chiefly in the eastern armies. Thus the topics preserved in the “present view” were, for some years, an Army of the Potomac view. Most members had belonged to infantry or cavalry regiments; thus, those arms were studied at the expense of artillery, naval, and medical units. However, as MHSM’s membership expanded, this theater-army-branch bias gave way to other experiences, albeit from the perspective of the naval officer, the battery commander, or chief surgeon. The papers produced by the MHSM and the books written by its members established its influence, which continues through this day. A number of important works, still consulted, originated as presentations to the MHSM. Besides Ropes’s The Army under Pope, the list includes Francis Winthrop Palfrey’s The Antietam and Fredericksburg (1881); Theodore A. Dodge, The Campaign of Chancellorsville (1881); portions of Francis A. Walker’s The History of the Second Army Corps (1891); Thomas L. Livermore’s Numbers and Losses in the Civil War, (1900); and ex-Confederate William Allan’s The Army of Northern Virginia in 1862 (1892), for which Ropes wrote the introduction. Using a more inferential definition of influence, it is worth noting that between 1876 and 1895, as the MHSM’s members aged and grew in influence, members included serving governors, generals, admirals, and cabinet secretaries. Finally, the MHSM should not be mislocated: It was not a northern response or even analogue to the very different, better known (and more interesting to historians) Southern Historical Society (SHS), founded 1868–69. The SHS was originally organized as a regional association, with one vice president from every former slave state, including non-Confederate members such as Maryland,

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the District of Columbia, and Kentucky. In contrast, the MHSM embraced exConfederates as members almost immediately, starting with the SHS’s prolific secretary J. William Jones and Colonel Archer Anderson, both approved on January 8, 1877. By the end of that year, ex-Confederates included Generals James Longstreet and William Mahone and ex-officers Jedediah Hotchkiss, George Gaither, Skipwith Wilmer, and McHenry Howard. By 1895, the list included another eight ex-Confederates, including Henry Heth, Henry Kyd Douglas, Charles Marshall, and Robert E. Lee Jr. The MHSM’s welcoming of Confederate veterans was not a product of what David Blight has identified as the fraternal Blue-Gray reconciliation movement, driven by willful forgetting and the smothering of a nascent movement for racial equality following the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877. For Ropes, ex-Confederate MHSM members were valuable as witnesses rather than symbols of white solidarity or a reunified country prompted by nostalgia, emotions Ropes despised. Indeed, Ropes declared that the task attempted in volume 1 of his erstwhile summa was “a novel one,” because it intended “to write of the subjects treated from the stand-point of each of the contending parties.” Published in 1895, he added that that The Story would make “no attempt to minimize the differences of opinion which separated the people of that time into two hostile camps.” Ropes never married. He practiced law, attended MHSM meetings, occasionally opposed Gilded Age corruption. and lent his prestige to the anti-imperialism movement. With his writings, lectures, and connections, Ropes’s stature as a Civil War historian grew: In 1878, President Hayes appointed him as a visitor to West Point, and several years later, he was named an honorary member of the United States Cavalry Association. And Ropes did not neglect professional writing. He published technical papers and delivered formal testimony on matters of state taxation and mortgages, areas of concern to Ropes & Gray clients. Ropes’s commitment to the Episcopalian Church deepened as he aged. He was a delegate to diocesan conventions and wrote on religious subjects. John Codman Ropes died on October 28, 1899, from an apparent stroke. Ropes is easily “located” in one respect: He was born and bred into Boston’s upper class, and to understand him, this counts for something; imbued with class confidence, Ropes believed that he was destined by birth to assume such roles as Harvard Overseer (1868–76), legal scholar, trust manager, military historian, and biographer. The same confidence allowed him to network among his peers,

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whether Bostonians or not: generals and colonels that mattered, prominent politicians, college presidents, lawyers, and newspaper publishers. Once Ropes psychologically surmounted his scoliosis, his confidence took hold and, except for the brief period after Henry’s death, remained with him for life. But like the characters in George Fredrickson’s Inner Civil War, Ropes also experienced “the collective trauma” of war; in Fredrickson’s word, Ropes was indeed “reshaped” by it. However, in Ropes’s case, it was not to “prepare [him] for a modernizing role” in the postwar world as much as it was to transform him, by the death of Henry and many friends, into a citizen of Drew Faust’s Republic of Suffering. Like all people, Ropes was deeply influenced by the death of others— the Civil War only ensured that a brutal confrontation with mortality and the perpetual mourning in its wake came fast and early in life’s cycle. Although the Ropes family was spared an unknown grave for Henry, John was forced to confront one consequence of the known grave, the sight of his brother’s remains. This was its own trauma. “I have seen his body. It is alas! far gone in decomposition,” he wrote Gray on July 8, 1863. “We had great difficulty recognizing it.” His mother, brother, and sister would not be permitted to view Henry’s remains because the desired view of the corpse—in Faust’s summary, “in a state of seemingly sleeplike repose”—and the reassurance this gave to the mourners—was not possible. Instead, John confronted his deep mourning and the need to “realize” Henry’s death by a trip to Gettysburg, lingering at the spot where he was killed and interviewing survivors to determine last words or final discomfort, if any. Ultimately, he found release in the sacralization of “true History.” After the war, Ropes began his formal memorialization of the dead with his contribution to the Harvard Memorial Biographies of the life of classmate James Amory Perkins. It was a factual treatment expressing restrained sentiment as might befit any eulogy Ropes would write. Years later Ropes, already a polished biographer of Napoleon I, similarly memorialized with straightforward prose and muted sentiments the deaths of Francis W. Palfrey, Charles Devens, and William Raymond Lee. The memory of Henry remained with him; The Army under Pope, published in 1881, was dedicated to Henry, although his involvement in that campaign had been negligible. But Ropes’s peers certainly understood Henry’s importance to John and the MHSM. Indeed, after Ropes’s death one obituary summarized it all. “His interest in the Civil War was intensified by the loss of his brother, who was an officer in the Twentieth Massachusetts Infantry, and was killed at Gettysburg,” the writer declared, adding, “and his natural love of study and investigation led his mind, trained by his legal education and practice, in the direction of military science.”

Save a School to Save a Nation Faculty Responses to the Civil War at Midwestern Universities

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dward G. Miller returned to the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1861, following three months’ service in the Union Army. The underclassman had left the university in haste after the attack on Fort Sumter the previous April, abandoned his freshman year, and headed to the front. “At 11 a.m. the book was opened at the armory, and my name was the 13th enrolled,” he recalled later. After experiencing military life, Miller struggled to adjust to being back on campus. As the leaves changed color in Madison and war news dominated the headlines, he recognized that “the war spirit within him would not be repressed.” By the spring of 1862, the young man walked away from his studies once more and began recruiting his own company for the war. He told fellow student James High before he left, “When they ask me fifty years hence where I was during the war of the rebellion, it won’t sound just right to say, ‘grinding Latin and Greek at No. 11, North College.’ ” When Miller was discharged at the end of the war, he did not return to the university. Budding scholars who left college classrooms for the battlefield often did so at the ultimate expense of obtaining their degrees. Consequently, faculty at colleges and universities around the country feared how the national call to arms might affect their institutions. Some schools, especially in the South, shut their doors during the war as their classrooms stood empty. Northern universities suffered as well; issues with enrollment consumed the attention of faculty, boards of regents, and surrounding communities. In his analysis of northern intellectuals during the American Civil War, the historian George Fredrickson argued that some young men saw the war as a way to find their place in the world. Those who flocked into the ranks believed the war to be “a hope for personal salvation.” For students such as Edward G. Miller, the promise of military glory and the chance to save the republic outweighed the benefits of a college education. But intellectuals of a different sort than those that Fredrickson highlighted, professors in

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the Midwest who toiled to train and groom the next generation of the country’s thinkers and leaders, watched with grave concern as their protégés struggled with the decision before them. This essay analyzes how faculty members at the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, and Indiana University, the only viable state universities in the Midwest during the conflict, responded to the challenges to their institutions that the American Civil War caused. Specifically, faculty adopted two strategies as they faced depleted enrollment and the quickly shifting nature of higher education in the North. First, professors elevated the importance of education in comparison with military service in their attempts to dissuade students from leaving school. Second, they sought to obtain Morrill Act grant money in order to protect the future of their institutions. These two examples reveal how professors at Midwestern state universities intellectually engaged with the war. The strategies that professors and administrators adopted shifted over time as the war progressed. Initially, faculty members were reactive when they attempted to shape how the students understood and related to the war; they crafted arguments to discourage their young charges from leaving school and enlisting in the Union Army. In this way, the war did not force them to adopt new patterns of thinking, as Fredrickson argues, and instead led them to define service to country based on the antebellum notions of individualism and personal achievement. To that end, leaders at these three universities—in their speeches and baccalaureate addresses as well as by their actions—asserted that citizens not pursuing higher education should first fill the ranks. By the second year of the war, faculty members acted proactively as the war altered their understanding of the nation and its role in higher education. In 1862, the United States Congress passed the Morrill Land-Grant Act, which gave states federal land grants that they could then sell and use the proceeds toward higher education. States could either assign the funds raised to existing schools or create new universities. The main stipulation was that the money needed to be used to support programs in agriculture, mechanical arts, and military training. Faculty at the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, and Indiana University began to immediately strategize about how to get their state legislatures to award them these funds. In doing so, they had to accept and grapple with the changes thrust onto higher education by this federal government foray into a historically private, local, or, at most, state-influenced arena. As the nation-state expanded during the war, faculty members had to adjust their understanding of service to the state and the role their universities would play in that new conception of citizenship. Throughout this process, they continued to espouse the

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importance of education and attempted to intertwine that with an emphasis on how their school would benefit the young men of the state. Although seeking these funds signaled a willingness to work within a newly emerging system, it was perceived by these professors as a way to attract students and thus continue to postpone military service in the name of education. This essay is part of the ongoing discussion among historians who study the wartime experiences of college-age students and higher education institutions. My work continues to intersect in a complementary way with that of Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai. In larger projects, he studies the students who went off to war, whereas I study those who remained in school. In this particular volume, his essay focuses on educated elite war veterans who became college presidents, which again complements my work here on professors. We both find that our subjects believed that education contributed to nation-building. Like the intellectuals who encouraged education as a nation-building process, discussed in Wongsrichanalai’s essay, faculty members at the universities in this study during the Civil War believed that the nation would be stronger with an educated populace. Both in peacetime, as Wongsrichanalai points out, and in wartime, intellectuals contended that education fostered unity and would contribute strong leaders to the national fabric. This essay also contributes to the conversation in historical literature regarding how northerners understood loyalty. Faculty in the Midwest did not dissent from the war itself, disagree with the Lincoln Administration, or oppose war goals such as preservation of the Union or emancipation. Overall, university professors agreed with the priorities of the war and supported Lincoln’s prosecution of the conflict. Mostly Republicans, they considered themselves faithful and devoted Americans. However, they questioned whether the war effort was primary and educating young men secondary. Historians have been piecing together how individuals and communities in the North experienced the war and in what ways their local affiliations and loyalties conflicted with and complemented what occurred in the war to save the Union. In most of these studies, dissent is the lens through which to examine conflicting viewpoints about national issues and the execution of the war. Professors in the Midwest did not consider themselves dissenters; they were Unionists. They struggled to submit unquestioningly to the call to arms and, throughout the war, actually competed with the national government for men. Midwestern professors believed that they could still be loyal while serving the needs of those immediately around them. Fredrickson explains how intellectuals such as Walt Whitman believed that the war would allow individuals to be “saved from an excessive attachment to

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institutions.” Whitman specifically identified “the school where the scholar was studying” as one place that “the war spirit would go” and cause a “disruption of ordinary institutional life.” The University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, and Indiana University could not afford to allow the course of their “institutional life” to be altered negatively by a civil war. Prioritizing Education: Reactive Responses In his book Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War, Michael David Cohen contends that “between 1861 and 1865 colleges across America refashioned themselves as vehicles of war. . . . They harnessed the strengths of a college campus and adapted these to serve wartime needs.” This was not the case in the Midwest at these public universities where financial difficulties were continuous and pervasive. The professors remained so ambivalent about students and military service that survival was truly the refrain of these years. Ultimately, these three schools adapted themselves to “serve wartime needs” only when the growing federal government provided financial incentives for the alteration of their curriculum and mission. Regardless of this philosophical shift, faculty did not initially embrace the notion that young men should eschew their education to serve in the military. With fewer than 200 students registered at Indiana and Wisconsin when the war broke out, each student’s decision regarding whether to leave school and enlist held dramatic consequences for those universities. The numerical strength of 670 students enrolled at the University of Michigan did not offer President Henry Tappan any more comfort. Circumstances had changed radically in a short period of time. Students demonstrated an engagement with national events during the antebellum era, but it was not until war erupted that they asked themselves whether an education and service to country were mutually exclusive. Harvey Reid, a University of Wisconsin student, wrote home on April 20, 1861, “Madison is in a great state of military excitement. . . . The fever has penetrated the University walls.” Faculty, worrying about the financial future of their institutions, viewed the martial excitement of young men around them and collectively held their breath. The response to the start of the war on these campuses was swift. Isaac H. Elliott, a senior at the University of Michigan, remembered how “the whole body of students seemed inclined to break away and rush blindly to the defense of the government at the first call for troops.” The day after the firing on Fort Sumter, forty-three members of the class of 1861, just months from their graduation, at-

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tempted to enroll in the military companies that were forming in the area. The state turned them away because it had already fulfilled its quota. Discouraged, the young men returned to campus. President Tappan and history professor Andrew D. White discussed the conflict with the students during chapel that day. White implored the students, “Wait; this is not to be a war of months, but years. You will have your chance.” Tappan called for the young men to organize themselves into military companies, hired someone to drill them, set aside university property for practice, and made it clear that he expected them to train daily. The university president attempted to mold their response to the war and hoped that by encouraging and controlling their desire to fight, he could hold them off until after commencement. The students quickly formed the University Battalion and nicknamed their companies with titles relevant to their university life, such as the University Guards, the Tappan Guards, and the Chancellor Greys. President Tappan’s efforts to restrain the seniors at the University of Michigan from enlisting before graduation largely worked. Only three seniors left school before commencement and headed straight to the army in April 1861. The rest heeded Tappan’s advice; fully half the class entered the army after accepting their diplomas. As in Ann Arbor, faculty at the University of Wisconsin rushed to control the emotional responses of their students. In the wake of Fort Sumter, Professor James D. Butler implored the students to wait before enlisting, advising them not to rush to “give up the still air of delightful studies for the sterner duties of the tented field.” Butler was explicit in his belief that the national situation did not “warrant depopulating the colleges.” Professor John W. Sterling strongly suggested that the students get permission from their parents before enlisting. He argued that the country had plenty of willing men who could fight, and “there was no need of taking students.” Sterling evidently invested much hope in the idea that parents would provide sufficient obstacles to impulsive departures. Graduation activities offered faculty a prime opportunity to influence the choices of their students. Commencement represented the high point of the emotional connection between students and their university. Continuing students felt pride in their accomplishments and excitement about their matriculation into the next year of their program. In prior years, faculty speakers aimed the final address at the graduating class, to wish them well and offer some final thoughts on the ways to lead a distinguished life. Graduation addresses in the antebellum era assumed that the completion of the education was a given, so the focus was on the other traits necessary to complement the education in order to succeed and lead. Speakers extolled graduates to avoid “loose morals,” to seek

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“thorough culture,” and to exemplify “veracity, justice, honesty, candor, temperance, chastity, meekness, courage, generosity, patriotism.” Antebellum graduates heard repeated lessons about developing their character, usefulness, and morals in order to contribute to society. During the war, the faculty altered their purpose, and spoke only vaguely to the departing graduates, while reinforcing their beliefs about the value of education specifically to those students who had not yet enlisted in the military. The emphasis on independent decision making and self-confidence was continuous from the antebellum period because it still benefited the faculty to encourage students to make their own choices, rather than be swept away by the crowd. In 1856, University of Wisconsin professor Daniel Read spoke at the Indiana University commencement, arguing, “College life is the very forming period of character.” Faculty at all three universities would have agreed with him in the Civil War years too. However, they feared that students might see war as more directly testing and molding character than would achievements in the classroom. In 1854, University of Michigan professor Erastus O. Haven called for a “generation of heroes” who would be humble and educated “defenders of truth.” This desire did not change during the Civil War, but faculty on all three campuses attempted to slow the flood of students into the military by insisting that the best version of glory could be obtained through the combination of a degree and then military service if desired. The first commencements on these three campuses occurred within months of the opening of the war, and faculty formulated their messages based on the reactive response they adopted as they tried to clutch at the students eager to throw themselves into the fight. Dr. Cyrus Nutt, president of Indiana University, gave the baccalaureate address in 1861. Some of the graduating class had already left for the war before completing their degree requirements. Nutt faced the few who remained and the rest of the student body with a large burden on his shoulders. He somehow had to convince the young, virile men of the undergraduate classes to stay in school. “Greatness is the aim of all generous minded youth,” Nutt conceded. He understood their need to serve and acknowledged that “thousands of young hearts are burning with a laudable ambition to become distinguished as laborers for the advancement of our race; and to leave a bright record on the page of history.” However, Nutt contended that serving in the military would not automatically ensure a man’s greatness. His argument was that “great men are born, not made,” and education was the only activity that could shape and mold that natural potential. “Education is to nature what sculpture is to the marble,” Nutt asserted. He described a great man as one who, among other things, had faith, self-reliance,

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and a strong will. Essentially, Nutt encouraged each student not to follow the path into the army for the sake of camaraderie. Nutt challenged the budding scholars to be confident in their own plans for the future and in their beliefs as to the best ways to achieve those goals. He maintained that if students followed his suggestions and became strong, independent, Christian, and, above all, educated men, “success will ever attend you throughout the subsequent battle of life.” Professor Butler invoked a similar theme in his parting words to Wisconsin students in the summer of 1862. Even after the first full year of the war, Butler was adamant that the country had enough men willing to enlist without draining the nation’s universities. He insisted that education remained a crucial endeavor during the country’s crisis. Butler used his baccalaureate sermon in 1862 as an opportunity to persuade students to remain in school until after their graduation rather than enlisting in the Union army before obtaining a degree. “I honor the patriotic fervor which, in the first week of the rebellion, hurried so many of our students into our first regiment,” Butler declared. “Yet, as I judge, these volunteers were not demanded.” He maintained instead, “Their places should have been filled by others, not inferior . . . [but] who had no plan of study . . . to interrupt.” Butler argued that education “adds a precious seeing to the eye” and that students who completed their degrees “would themselves have rendered more efficient service in the field had they pushed on to the end of their educational curriculum.” He believed that students could remain on campus and still fulfill their “duties as patriots.” “I am far from supposing,” Butler argued, “that all true patriots must go down to the battle in their own persons—if the whole body were the hand, where were the eye, the ear, the foot?” The Wisconsin professor did not ask the students to forgo serving their country entirely; he ended his lengthy speech by sympathizing with their passions. Ultimately, Butler acknowledged that “when an American has completed an education, which gives to every power a double power, he can sacrifice himself on no grander altar than that of his fatherland.” He wisely knew that if he tried to discourage the young men from fighting altogether they might not listen, so instead he focused on emphasizing the greater value of their contribution on the battlefield with a degree in hand. The professor directed his remarks at both the graduating class who had remained away from the war long enough to complete their degrees and at the other students who held doubts about their decision to continue at the university. Butler claimed that the former group should take comfort in the knowledge that their achievement represented something that those who made the opposite choice could not accomplish. He referred to the eleven young men who left to

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enlist before graduation, contending, “They must mourn today that they stand not with you . . . and their most bitter tears over high aims abandoned, are yet to be shed.” Only three young graduates heard these moving, passionate words. The rest who had begun four years earlier were off on distant battlefields. Yet Butler hoped that his stirring message sank deep into the hearts and minds of other young students listening, who daily faced similarly significant decisions. Another way that professors reacted to the outbreak of war was to make their teaching more relevant to the conflict. Professor White at Michigan believed that “the only way in which I could contribute anything to [the country] was in aiding to train up a new race of young men who should understand our own time and its problems in the light of history.” He described his teaching during the war as “more direct.” His students read histories of other nations who had suffered through similar conflicts “in order to show what the maintenance of a republic was worth.” The fact that professors spent time in the first years of the war trying to explain the value of education naturally led to these types of pedagogical techniques. It became necessary in the eyes of faculty to prove to students that remaining in school would provide them an advantage in learning the intellectual aspects of the conflict that others would miss by serving before obtaining their education. These efforts proved initially unsuccessful as all three schools suffered from decreases in enrollment. The University of Wisconsin experienced the sharpest decrease in enrollment during the war. Less than half of Indiana University’s freshmen returned for their sophomore year in the fall of 1861. The University of Michigan also suffered, and professors there expressed concern not only over the number of returning students but about their educational prospects. In the fall of 1862, Henry S. Frieze, professor of Latin and literature, wrote to Professor White that “students are coming in almost every day.” He continued, “A few have presented themselves from Kentucky. Many from Indiana, Illinois and elsewhere have just left the ‘three months’ service in the army.” Frieze found these new students to be quite “rusty” in their Greek and Latin. After describing a conversation with a war veteran who “very graphically” depicted a battle in which he participated, Frieze despondently wondered, “Is war destined to be the normal condition of the country?” Faculty despaired about both the number of students arriving and at their level of preparation, evidently declining due to the distraction of the conflict. To stem the rapidly decreasing numbers, all three universities rushed to provide military instruction after the start of the war. They viewed military curriculum as a way to convince current students of the value of remaining in school and

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believed that it would also attract new students. Faculty members supported the students in their determination to learn how to drill and tried various methods of applying pressure to the states to make the programs more official. Because they were state universities, funding for a venture such as military training could not be obtained from a national religious organization, whereas denominational colleges could receive such funding. Therefore, all three schools had to appeal to their state legislatures for appropriations. In May 1861, Indiana’s faculty passed a resolution authorizing President Nutt to “announce in the forthcoming Catalogue that instruction in Military Tactics will hereafter be given to such students as may desire it.” However, no financial support for a military professorship was forthcoming from the Indiana legislature during the war period, despite repeated attempts to obtain it. Any drill that the students pursued in Bloomington was of their own accord. In Madison, faculty prompted the Board of Regents to request funding for a military department in their annual report to the state in 1861. The faculty plea published in the annual report was quite lengthy when compared with other individual sections, and its argument spanned the history of military education in Europe, current practices in other advanced countries, and the existing military education opportunities in the United States. They argued that the state’s population had a need for military training, and therefore the state’s university should fulfill that demand. The faculty’s push for a formal military department met with failure. The state did not grant funding for the program. Consequently, the faculty continued to vocally encourage the students to drill in their own companies, but the university did not offer official training during the war. University of Wisconsin faculty did, however, boast in 1862 of the positive impact of informal military exercises to the Board of Regents, claiming that the program “enabl[ed] most who have left us for the army, to start as officers.” In addition, the program “has heightened the physical vigor of all who have shared in it, and thus given a sympathetic aid to their mental efforts.” The first of those achievements became the crux of the faculty argument during the war as they linked military drill with graduation to persuade students that the degree would propel them into leadership positions in the service. Additionally, faculty believed that the students’ viewing of actual soldiers preparing for battle at the nearby Camp Randall “seemed to stimulate all to a corresponding self-denial and energy in their own field of duty.” Within two years of the war’s beginning, faculty began to paint their students as absorbing the martial ethics of the battlefield and compared the classroom to a place of patriotic importance.

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The University of Michigan faculty received immense support from the Ann Arbor community in trying to obtain funds from the state legislature for its proposed military professorship. Their intention for the new program was to train students to enter the military as officers. Ann Arbor residents formed a committee of nine prominent men, including a former mayor of the city, and sent a delegation to lobby the state legislature. While the town and faculty waited to hear the results of their request, lectures began regarding military engineering and tactics. Professor White explained, “Promoting the military drill of those who had determined to become soldiers” was “one way in which those of us who remained at the university helped the good cause.” Since the university had not yet received funding to hire a new professor specifically for military courses, the professor of civil engineering expanded his responsibilities to include this additional topic. Despite the cohesive front presented by the university and the community in their requests for funding, the University of Michigan received a negative reply from its state legislature. No funds for military education were forthcoming. The passage of the Morrill Act in 1862, which specifically called for additional instruction in military tactics, further encouraged these universities to campaign for funds to establish such a program. Students anxious to join the fray but not willing to “carry a musket” wished for a way to qualify themselves for officer positions. Faculty members heard their calls and tried to shape the universities into institutions that could provide the type of training necessary for students to achieve that goal. In doing so, they continued to insist to the students that an education was a more direct path to leadership in the country than was glory in military service. Their inability to cement funding for military training aside, their efforts demonstrated the lengths that faculty were willing to go during the war to convince students that the classroom afforded them the best preparation for the future. Professors at these three universities felt that the path of college students was too important to be drastically altered by military service. Doubtlessly, the academics were sincere in their support of student drilling companies during the war and in their best wishes to those heading to the front. Nevertheless, faculty never truly reconciled themselves to the decisions made by these young men. They wished college students were exempt from the war; they hoped that dedication to intellectual development trumped devotion to country, at least until after graduation. Faculty believed that because war was a temporary circumstance, young men should obtain an education so that they could prepare themselves for

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leadership roles in the postwar era. They took the Union victory for granted and wished to continue to train men to lead the country for peacetime. Time did not temper these feelings. After the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, Michigan professor Thomas Cooley wrote forlornly to a colleague, “We lost two noble boys from the Law School in [the battle]. One [was] the Colonel of the Michigan 4th—a Dexter boy, & very young, to whom we were much attached.” “Such men,” insisted Cooley, “I am sure, cannot die in vain.” Granted, faculty attempts to encourage further attendance at the schools in these first years of the war were purely reactive. They fought against the tide rather than find ways to renovate their programs to complement the current national situation. Even the pursuit of military training curriculum represented the faculty’s efforts to keep students in school. When considering this example in the context of Fredrickson’s arguments, we can see that this population of Americans, professors at Midwestern universities, did not interpret the Civil War as a watershed event in their antebellum beliefs regarding the importance of higher education. They did not reinterpret service to country in a military uniform as being the highest demonstration of patriotism. Professors in the Midwest continued to prioritize education and insist that through it, they could provide young men with the foundation for myriad ways to serve their countries. Competing for the Morrill Act Grant: Proactive Reforms Despite their insistence that students remain in college, professors in the Midwest were not blind to the sea change around them regarding the relationship between the federal government and higher education. Fredrickson argued that the Union created by the Civil War included a more active federal government that sought to involve itself in previously untouched local and state issues. Higher education was one of these, and faculty understood the potential impact of the Morrill Act immediately. This second example of how faculty pursued Morrill Grant funds illustrates the proactive ways that they responded to the war. They clearly saw the Morrill Act as an opportunity and moved quickly to embrace it. This was unlike their response to the war itself; they interpreted the Morrill Act as a way to strengthen their institutions while they did not view the call to arms in the same manner. Although initial efforts of restraint focused on the current student body, enrollment figures quickly signaled a need to attract new students. Between 1862 and 1865, faculty members of these three schools strove to position their institutions for the postwar world. Assuredly, not all constituents agreed on the direc-

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tion the universities should take to respond to the exigencies of the times. Regardless, the response of the universities and their communities in the later years of the war was calculated, strategic, and went well beyond survival. As students at these three universities put down their books and enlisted, their professors took preemptive steps to ensure the existence of their institutions. A commencement address from 1863 can highlight this shift in response. Unlike the speeches examined from 1861 and 1862 that maintained the emphasis on character while stressing the need for education, it was clear by 1863 that times had changed. In March, James V. Campbell, a law professor at the University of Michigan, gave an address to the graduating members of the law department in which he adopted martial language and illustrated how the discourse of usefulness had changed from the early war period. Campbell told the prospective lawyers that they must serve society as “interpreters of the law,” and to do so they must internalize and radiate a “pure and earnest patriotism.” In Campbell’s view, patriotism was the defining characteristic that secured integrity. This was necessary in order to “preserve society from [the] terrible evils,” because, Campbell inquired, “if the sentinels fails, what will become of the army?” By 1863, Campbell saw students as part of the military effort. His address demonstrates how faculty began to argue for the significance of education by comparing it favorably with the glory obtainable on the battlefield. As these institutions stood poised to enter the third year of the war, they assessed their situations candidly and adopted rhetoric and actions to move themselves forward. While still attempting to hone their message regarding military service, faculty at the University of Michigan began to shift their attention to obtaining Morrill Grant funds. They faced an obstacle because the institution endured a turbulent transition in 1863. The Michigan Board of Regents had struggled for a few years for control of the institution, as the vibrant and forceful President Tappan aimed for complete authority. At wit’s end, the board fired Tappan following the June 1863 commencement ceremony. Tappan’s removal subjected the university and the community to a storm of protests that some believed might weaken the school. His successor, Erastus O. Haven, a Methodist minister and former professor at Michigan, acknowledged that when he arrived in Ann Arbor to accept his position, “Many of the citizens would not even greet me personally. It was soon rumored that I was intemperate, and all kinds of slanders were hinted at. The newspapers opposed had much more to say than those favorable.” Community leaders worked with faculty members and the Board of Regents throughout the dramatic weeks and months following Tappan’s removal because all parties appreciated the significance of obtaining the Morrill Act funds for the

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university. They could not afford to lose sight of that goal and potentially fail to capture the financial windfall. In Michigan, the faculty and Board of Regents faced a unique set of circumstances following the announcement of the Morrill Act as compared with the other two universities in this study. Specifically, the State of Michigan had already opened an agricultural college in Lansing in 1855 (it would eventually become Michigan State University), and therefore leaders of the University of Michigan had to compete for the Morrill Act funds against an existing institution. This reality helped force the paradigm shift that occurred in the response of faculty to the war. Originally, Tappan approved of the state’s decision to house its agricultural program away from Ann Arbor, as the goals associated with teaching future farmers did not appeal to his sense of a classical liberal arts education. Once the Morrill Act money became available in 1862, Tappan changed his tune. He then not only fought strenuously to obtain the new funds but also campaigned to move the struggling agricultural school from Lansing and attach it to the university in Ann Arbor. “I have strong hopes of success,” Tappan wrote to Professor White in February 1863. If he could facilitate the “strong movement to bring the Agricultural College from Lansing to Ann Arbor . . . 240,000 acres of land granted by Congress will then be ours.” White called the Morrill Act a “glorious law,” for it would allow universities to address the educational needs of more of the population. In his eyes, this would make society and, by extension, the nation stronger. It was also a potential attraction for students during the war. Following Tappan’s firing, Haven resumed the call for the legislature to appropriate the Morrill funds for the university. Friends of the agricultural school in Lansing held enough sway in the state government that they were able to postpone that decision for many years. In the meantime, a new president took over at the Lansing institution and began to make changes in order to prove to the legislature that his school was poised to make the most of the Morrill funds. The two schools continued to compete well past the end of the war, when the university in Ann Arbor finally acquiesced. They came to understand that accepting the Morrill money and creating an agricultural school would force them to cater to the farming industry, which the University of Michigan Board of Regents ultimately did not feel was something reconcilable with the goals of the university. In 1869, Lansing gained the Morrill Act designation as the state’s mechanical arts and agricultural institution. Wisconsin also considered many options in dispersing their Morrill Act funds. In his January 1864 address to the state legislature, Governor James T.

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Lewis spoke of the significance of the measure to Wisconsin residents. “Fivesixths of our population are engaged in agricultural pursuits,” he began, which constituted the majority of the state’s income. Lewis argued that it made sense that the people should desire additional education in that field, not only to continue the state’s success in that endeavor but also to encourage the state’s youth to choose agriculture as their future profession. Military instruction was also crucial for the state’s young men, as “the events of the last two years” proved to Lewis. He suggested including a mandatory level of military skills and knowledge in every student’s requirements for graduation. In his speech, Lewis focused on the usefulness of the university to the state and its residents. Lewis’s words echoed the sentiment expressed by Professor Butler in a commencement address when he emphasized the symbiotic relationship between the university and the state; Butler contended the university was “an institution living as long as the State, indeed helping the State to live longer.” Ultimately, Wisconsin political leaders decided to funnel all Morrill Act funds into the University of Wisconsin. Whereas the state of Michigan created a separate agricultural institution apart from the classically focused University of Michigan, Wisconsin poured its financial resources into strengthening the school in Madison. Surely the university’s location in the state’s capital helped with this determination. Unlike in Ann Arbor, where the university constantly fought for the attention of its state legislature and competed with other communities around the state who felt threatened by its potential power, Wisconsin leaders witnessed the positive impact of the university in the state while attending to business in Madison. The Morrill Act served to bring the university and the state closer together. Of the three schools, faculty at the University of Wisconsin had the easiest time obtaining the grant money. Indiana University faculty created a two-person committee in 1864 to campaign for available funds. The newly hired Richard Owen, a Civil War veteran, joined President Nutt in appealing to the state government, both legislative and executive, to secure the Morrill funds for the Bloomington institution. That summer, the two men made several rounds throughout the state to garner support for the university. Bloomington residents encouraged Indiana University’s push for the new land-grant school by promising to support an experimental farm, “equal in value to any that may be tendered by any other locality.” As the faculty of Indiana University had long been aware that many state residents failed to understand the relevance or value of their state university, Owen and Nutt initiated their campaign by attempting to persuade listeners of its significance.

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“Every citizen of Indiana has a life interest, for himself and his descendants, in the State University. It belongs to the whole people,” Nutt began. He outlined five “advantages of education”: 1. It promotes individual happiness, affording intellectual and moral pleasures of the purest and highest order alloted [sic] to humanity. 2. It imparts power over matter and the elements. It gives power to its possessor in society—in the [State]. 3. Its value and blessings are imperishable, lasting as the mind itself. 4. It promotes national greatness and happiness. 5. It is the safeguard of civil liberty. Although Nutt may have garnered support for his arguments for education, he revealed the narrow perspective through which he understood the larger situation when he stated, “No more important subject can claim the attention of the citizens of Indiana, than the disposal of the munificent grant made by Congress, for the endowment of Agricultural Colleges in each of the States.” Three years into a civil war that affected their households, their businesses, and their sense of security, the people of Indiana assuredly had concerns greater than the Morrill Act. He may well have achieved more had he been able to explain to his listeners how and why his priorities related to those of their own homes. Nutt addressed three proposals for the funds within Indiana. The first, that they be distributed among five institutions equally with a central research facility in Indianapolis, Nutt criticized as too costly. He felt that spreading the money among the many denominational colleges was “impracticable” and argued that the state should not dole out money to institutions that were not truly under the control of the state. He feared that if the religious colleges later chose to discontinue instruction in their agricultural schools, the state would have no way to protest because the denominations controlled those institutions. “The fund,” claimed Nutt, “should by all means, be kept together. To distribute it would be to throw it away.” Nutt specifically attacked the rumor that the new university might be located in Indianapolis. “Great cities are no place for institutions of higher learning,” he said, “and least of all, for an agricultural one.” Nutt called Bloomington “one of the most healthy points in Indiana” and continued to praise the merits of the locale. He used both qualitative and quantitative points to insist that Indiana University receive the state’s Morrill funds. Nutt outlined the financial situation of the university, stating that it already offered a significant portion of the assets necessary for an agricultural college, which would save both

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the state and the taxpaying population money. He also pointed out that Indiana University offered free tuition, essentially allowing all students to attend on scholarship, while a newly formed institution would most likely have to charge enrollment fees. According to Nutt’s vision, Richard Owen, who was recently established in a professorship at Indiana University, could step easily into the role of professor of military tactics, thus relieving the state of having to furnish someone for such a position. “None better qualified can be found in the country,” Nutt contended; Owen “is a regular graduate of a military college in Europe, was a Captain in the Mexican war, Colonel of the Sixtieth Indiana Volunteers, and commanded a brigade for more than a year” in the Civil War. The crux of Nutt’s argument, the point that surely he and the other faculty at Indiana University would cherish the most, came just before he concluded his speech. “An Agricultural and Industrial College cannot succeed by itself,” Nutt asserted. “Agricultural science and mechanics cannot be pursued, except by those who have a high degree of scientific and literary culture.” Essentially, Nutt insisted that the agricultural college must be joined with an institution that taught the foundations of science and literature in order to foster a well-rounded student. He did not believe that students could truly comprehend their mechanical or agricultural studies if they did not have a solid preparation in such elemental subjects as chemistry and philosophy. He referred to Michigan’s struggles in sustaining the agricultural college in Lansing, which on the eve of the war had reduced its curriculum to two years and enrolled fewer than seventy students. At Indiana University, where the faculty had been fighting against requests to alter their classical curriculum for years, Nutt maintained that traditional education was a requisite complement to the new pursuits funded by the Morrill Act. He was also aware that adding the agricultural and military curriculum to the classical offerings in Bloomington was an opportunity to increase enrollment at the school at a time of great uncertainty. Professor Owen also gave remarks in several places regarding Indiana University’s quest to obtain the Morrill Act monies. He contended that the secular state university allowed young men to receive an education steeped in “the highest grade of morality and religion,” without giving preference to any one denomination, “until the mind is capable of judging from dispassionate examination.” This allowed the students to learn and mature in an environment shaped by religious principles yet independent of any one particular doctrine. Owen believed that Indiana University offered the same type of experience with regard to politics. Students were not inundated with the political positions of a certain religious denomination when they attended the secular state university but instead were in-

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stilled with “the highest tone of patriotism, with a spirit of toleration, and a sense of justice.” These values, claimed to be infused into the young men enrolled at Indiana University, then combined, according to Owen, to “insure acquiescence in the fully ascertained will of the majority of the qualified voters.” Where Nutt emphasized the need to supplement agricultural and industrial courses with the classical curriculum, Professor Owen, new to the faculty, promoted the agricultural college as “the most favorable form of college for the education of the masses . . . because it develops equally the physical, mental, and moral faculties.” Owen focused less on what Indiana University could contribute to an agricultural college and more on what the latter could offer the young men of the state. He argued that “the professions [were] overfilled” and that students must become experts in “the cultivation of the soil, in practical science, and in mechanic arts . . . so as to keep pace with other nations.” However, in a state that did not yet claim a significant number of teachers, lawyers, or an educated elite, Indiana residents failed to support the faculty’s calls to enhance the state university for the purposes of competing globally. The perspective of Hoosiers in 1864 was only then growing to encompass the priorities of the nation, very different from the antebellum localism and regionalism prevalent in this young state. In the years following the war, Indiana faculty members continued their passionate attempts to obtain the Morrill funds from the legislature. The state considered a number of different plans and could not seem to make a decision. Party politics and personal relationships caused the entire affair to be mired in confusion, and those involved lost sight at times of the impact on the state’s educational prospects. Finally, a generous offer from a businessman named John Purdue enticed state leaders to split their state university system, thereby creating the agricultural and mechanical arts school in Lafayette, Indiana, located just over one hundred miles north of Bloomington. The second university opened its doors in 1874. Although Indiana University failed to garner the land-grant for the establishment of an agricultural school, its efforts demonstrated how the leaders of the university worked tirelessly to expand the institution despite the national crisis. Professors in the Midwest felt no conflict or concern about their loyalty even though they essentially aimed to compete directly with the military for men. Their actions during the war were designed to recruit students; obviously any student who enrolled in their schools was not simultaneously fighting for the Union. Yet these professors considered themselves Union men; they supported Lincoln, mourned his death, and celebrated Union victory. They never felt the

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need to reconcile their beliefs in the necessity of sustaining and growing the universities with the Union’s desperate pleas for more soldiers. This second example demonstrates how professors in the Midwest preferred to acknowledge the growth and strength of the federal government when it came to something like the Morrill Act that could help their institutions, yet ignored the calls of the country when those calls might empty their classrooms of students. Through this illustration, it is possible to confirm Fredrickson’s assertions that the Civil War had an impact on the relationship between the changing nation-state and northerners who moved to capitalize on it. None of these institutions remained static during the conflict. Leaders of these three universities responded ambitiously to the obstacles they faced and pushed their students to toil toward intellectual goals unobtainable on the battlefield. Some students did not return for their next semester, and potential students never arrived. This reality prompted faculty at Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana to seek concrete solutions to their problems. They all pursued innovations in their curricula and improvements in their reputations in order to emerge from the war period with momentum. Through a variety of methods, they implemented agendas that succeeded in keeping their doors open during the Civil War. Professors of the antebellum and Civil War eras would agree with Hayden Kellogg Smith at the University of Wisconsin commencement in 1854 when he said, “Great men are pictures of the age in which they live.” However, the difference between the two periods was how they defined what would be judged as great in their respective eras. Perhaps Fredrickson’s intellectuals would not have found these Midwestern professors loyal enough to the Union cause because they were unwilling to push their students off to war. The priorities of these professors did not always seem to align with those of the nation. But, this cadre of intellectuals developed an ideology that valued education over military service for a nation in crisis and understood the country’s universities as key components in shaping its future leaders. The University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, and Indiana University had faculty made up of men dedicated to the cause of higher education unwilling to sacrifice the institutions to heed the nation’s call. Their efforts during the Civil War to maintain and increase opportunities for young men to obtain degrees surely had selfish motives: They wanted to keep their jobs. Yet they also struggled to advance their institutions during the war because they believed passionately in the benefits of higher education to their local, state, and national governments

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and communities. These professors never rested on their laurels; instead, they encouraged young men to seek, and insisted that a university education provided, their own clear path to the glory that others sought on the battlefield. In 1865, following Lincoln’s assassination, Henry Tappan gave a sermon in Berlin, Germany, at a memorial service for the late president. Tappan had been living there since his unceremonious dismissal from the University of Michigan in 1863. In speaking of the war, Tappan said, “The true soldiers of a free people are the people themselves, who go from the plough to the battle field, and return from the battle field to the plough.” He did not say, nor did professors at these three Midwestern universities believe, that “true soldiers of a free people” should have gone to the battlefield from the classroom, although they surely wished that soldiers would return to the classroom from the battlefield. There was a disconnect between the goals and expectations of the populace when it came to who should fight in the war with what those intellectuals who ran these institutions of higher education in the Midwest believed. The progress of the universities can in many ways be attributed to their efforts, but not all students came to view education as the paramount task of the era. Their professors, however, held fast to their antebellum beliefs and took reactive and proactive steps to ensure that young American men could find opportunities for intellectual growth on their campuses. Edward G. Miller, whose struggle to decide between school and service opened this essay, was a man of the classroom at the start of the war and at the end of the war personified Tappan’s description of the “true soldiers.” The young man, who left his studies at the University of Wisconsin twice to enlist in the Union army, returned to Madison on July 31, 1865, with his military company. He confided in his diary that evening that his company “signed the pay rolls and went home—never to be drummed together again as Company ‘G.’ ” Two days later, Miller left Camp Randall “for good,” returned home the next day, “went to work in the harvest field, [and] took Jennie’s place on the reaper.” The girl, most likely his sister, was relieved of her farming duties when Edward arrived to reclaim his responsibilities. He did not enroll again at the University of Wisconsin to finish his degree. His association with the school had already experienced its final chapter. Luckily, many other young men decided to pursue their education after the war; the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Michigan, and Indiana University stood ready to greet them.

Lessons of War Three Civil War Veterans and the Goals of Postwar Education

Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai

I

n 1874, less than a decade after Union armies had suppressed the Confederate rebellion, one of the heroes of the American Civil War found himself faced with another uprising amid the usually placid pines of Bowdoin College’s campus in Brunswick, Maine. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had returned home from war after having suffered terrible wounds, defending the Union army’s left flank at the Battle of Gettysburg, and receiving the surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse. The residents of Maine thought he would make a good governor and sent him to Augusta four times. Chamberlain then accepted the presidency of his alma mater and proposed to modernize Bowdoin. One of his initiatives included the introduction of mandatory military drill on campus. The students of Bowdoin, however, did not see the point of the drill, protested, and refused to participate. Determined not to yield, the war hero stood his ground and threatened to expel all those who disobeyed his authority. The Civil War, it seemed, had followed Chamberlain home. In Washington, D.C., General Oliver Otis Howard, another Bowdoin graduate, Civil War veteran, and head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, faced a different kind of opposition. Attempting to navigate the tricky political headwinds of the Reconstruction era, he also contended with a rising tide of violent resistance in the former Confederate states. In trying to defend his vision of a comprehensive postwar education structure for the newly freed, he likened the cause of education to the cause of liberty. Howard argued that the prosperity of the nation required an educated black citizenry. In one address, he explained, “In freedom men and women learn what they could not know in slavery.” The commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau also acknowledged that both bureaucratic opposition in the capital and physical resistance in the defeated South opposed his efforts. He pointed out that the “enemies of education, the enemies of freedom,” liked to complain of the “ignorance of the masses of the colored people,” all the while perpetuating that ignorance by “burning school-houses, by

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ostracizing teachers, by a perpetual effort to establish their theory of the absolute inferiority of the negro; by the very tones of voice they address to him which deny him the right of manhood, by every species of intimidation and opposition, from malicious lying to open blows, often culminating in riot and murder.” Acknowledging that African Americans would have to fend for themselves in the postwar South, he made the case for education on the basis that only a knowledgeable population could understand the laws and ensure an independent and incorruptible system of government. Only men who understood what was at stake could defend against tyranny. All people, Howard declared, needed “a fair knowledge of our constitution and laws. Nothing but education can accomplish this.” “If the colored men can read,” he explained, “they soon learn what their true friends demand of them, and are soon able to determine what to do. If they cannot read, they can easily be deceived by false doctrines and be influenced by bad men.” One of Commissioner Howard’s agents, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, expressed similar sentiments. Stationed on the Virginia coast and interacting daily with freed people, Armstrong declared, “The education of the freedmen is the great work of the day, it is their only hope, the only power that can lift them up as a people, and I think every encouragement should be given to schools established for their benefit.” As a result of the Bureau’s general functions—ensuring a just and peaceful coexistence between white landowners and black workers, for instance—as well as its work in promoting education, Armstrong hoped that the federal government would renew its charter. Referring to the agency as “a moral power that is greatly felt,” he made a case for its usefulness: “The freedmen stretch out their arms to the government . . . for help and justice; without the Bureau they will receive neither. . . . The Bureau is their last hope.” Armstrong argued that teaching freed people about how to behave in a world without slavery was necessary for their survival. In a letter to his mother, Armstrong expressed his fear that black and white southerners could not live peacefully together. The men who had been “closest into Southern affairs,” he wrote, “believe that there is another conflict coming—a war of races and extermination.” Perhaps education and the actions of northerners such as himself could prevent this. “I wish to be on hand,” he told his mother, committing himself to the cause of black education. The three Civil War veterans examined here drew on their own antebellum lessons and wartime experiences to shape postwar education. These men’s antebellum schooling taught them the importance of upholding discipline and de-

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veloping good character traits. During the war, they believed that these traits made them uniquely suited to lead others into combat. At the end of the conflict these men emerged with similar ideas about what education needed to do in the postwar world: develop the character of both black and white students. Joshua Chamberlain believed that the nation had been ill-prepared for the conflict and wanted to ensure that succeeding generations were both morally and physically prepared for service, in the event of another crisis. Oliver Howard believed that education for southerners, black and white, was necessary to strengthen attachment to the Union, rekindle friendship among Americans, and prevent another conflict between the sections. Samuel Armstrong drew on his prior view of race relations and promoted industrial education for freed people at the expense of their civil rights. All three men fit some aspects of George M. Fredrickson’s model that describes how the North’s intellectuals rededicated themselves to service after the Civil War. Fredrickson observed that the war brought “significant adjustments in ideology and social thought” and “promoted a sudden and dramatic change in the intellectual landscape.” For the men in Fredrickson’s sample, the war rekindled their faith in democracy (as long as the elites led the masses and the larger population felt content to obey), shaped their beliefs in pragmatic goals rather than the “broad enthusiasms of their elders,” and prompted a desire to work “in useful ways in a dynamic activist society with little place for the purely intellectual or artistic existence.” Additionally, Fredrickson’s intellectuals thought that the war had established a strong nationalism, upheld the rule of law, rendered anti-institutionalism passé, and embraced practical and scientific methods. Although Chamberlain’s, Howard’s, and Armstrong’s postwar careers fit with Fredrickson’s observations, they also complicate some of his conclusions. All would have agreed that law and order had triumphed over secession and anarchy, and they would also have embraced the elitist vision that democracy worked only if the masses accepted the leadership of the educated classes. This may help explain Chamberlain’s unsympathetic and unyielding stance against the Bowdoin students resisting drill and Armstrong’s insistence that whites knew what was best for freed people. These men did attempt to foster a robust nationalism through educating blacks and whites alike. The educators also accepted scientific rationale and adopted pragmatic solutions to the problems they faced. Chamberlain updated Bowdoin’s curriculum to include more science classes, and Armstrong emphasized mechanical and industrial skills. But these men did not leave all their idealistic tendencies in the wreckage of the war. Rather, their idealized

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vision of gentlemanly conduct and the code of behavior that they lived up to, summarized in the word character, persisted and infused the lessons they tried to impart to the next generation. These individuals, once they entered into positions of influence, attempted to implement their educational plans. The prominence of “character” in these men’s educational ideas echoes their own schooling from the early nineteenth century. The war, therefore, reaffirmed rather than challenged these men’s prior beliefs that character and education were essential for the preservation of American society. After all, they believed that their character had helped them triumph in the war. Racial ideas prevalent at the time also influenced these men’s approaches. Chamberlain’s all-white, all-male student body was being trained as citizen-soldiers whereas Howard’s and Armstrong’s African American students were being taught to assimilate into a white-dominated world. All these institutions cultivated self-discipline in their pupils but for different purposes: to make white students fighters and black students working citizens. Additionally, in all three cases, the goal of education also involved the fostering of national cohesion: White northerners were supposed to be prepared to defend the nation with their military skills; black men in the South were being trained to become productive members of society; and education, as a whole, was supposed to advance national harmony. Chamberlain, Howard, and Armstrong knew full well the value of education. Because they had been fortunate enough to receive a college degree in their lives, these men had, as far as they were concerned, succeeded in nineteenth-century life. Faced with the enormous postwar problems that plagued Reconstruction, these men returned to education as the tried and true panacea that could not only heal the ruptured nation and prevent its future sundering but also lay the foundation for a peaceful biracial society. A History of Education Before exploring these college-educated veterans’ postwar educational reforms, it is necessary to review how these men were, themselves, influenced by education during their formative years. In the early nineteenth century, colleges taught privileged young men how to become leaders in society. Although colleges offered a classical education, the emphasis was on how to conduct oneself. Colleges developed “character” rather than teaching vocation. During their senior year, students were required to take a course on “moral philosophy,” which incorporated various topics ranging from political science and history to legal philoso-

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phy and economics. Moral philosophers, “society’s moral navigators,” sought to “bring all knowledge into a proper moral focus, instilling in the nation’s educated class an enlightened respect for basic Christian beliefs and virtues and shaping the character of her future leaders.” Young men were supposed to learn how to police their behavior and uphold the highest standards of personal character. After they had mastered themselves, moral men could lead others in society by example. Colleges reinforced the importance of education and emphasized that graduates had the responsibility of leading less fortunate members in society. A noble need to serve others underpinned this idea despite its elitist and classist overtones. By teaching their undergraduates that only the best-educated and morally righteous citizens had a duty and right to lead, antebellum colleges imparted a conservative lesson. One scholar of nineteenth-century colleges observed that graduates who entered authoritative positions in the professions of law, politics, and the ministry were taught to speak on “behalf of the status quo.” College graduates were supposed to defend “truth,” which was “fixed and certain in the nature of things” and “accessible only to those who had learned to use the faculties correctly.” This educational philosophy taught the most educated men in society to have confidence in their knowledge and opinions but also gave rise to a sense of arrogance in the professional classes. Colleges were supposed to provide the men with a broad and varied education and set them on the “right” path in life. Joshua Chamberlain, while teaching at Bowdoin before the war, described his “ideal” curriculum for undergraduates. “My idea of a College course,” he explained in 1859, “is that it should afford a liberal education—not a special or professional one, not in any way one-sided.” Chamberlain’s ideal curriculum would provide “a general outline of a symmetrical development, involving such acquaintance with all the departments of knowledge and culture . . . as shall give some insight into the principles and powers by which thought passes into life—together with such practice and exercise in each of the great fields of study that the student may experience himself a little in all.” This broad education would teach men to meet with any situation in their adult lives. Another important trait that colleges cultivated involved the development of discipline. Many young men eagerly took the opportunity of college life to better themselves. “I think I have accomplished a reformation in myself,” college student Oliver Howard proudly wrote his mother in 1848. He explained, “I have not only left off using tobaco [sic], but over come the desire for it,” observing that his ability to quit was the result of both his own resolution and college influence.

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“I happened to be thinking one day that smoking was doing me no good,” he later elaborated, “and also thought that I would put my self-denial to the test.” Although he did have an urge to smoke particularly when he had free time, he had “mostly overcome the desire of it. If at any time I feel any inclination ‘there to’ I immediately resort to reading or studying. It is very easy to keep from forming a bad habit but exceedingly difficult breaking it up.” Chamberlain wrote that, in his first days in college, it was “necessary for me to take a decided stand at the very commencement and resist the first temptation” to break college rules. This self-conditioning had not come without “many trials,” but the young student noted that such challenges “brighten the Christian’s hope, and temptations resisted strengthen his faith.” College-educated young men in general and these three in particular fully believed that character was the essential part of their identity as gentlemen. The first test of a gentleman in a time of crisis revolved around his actions. In the case of the war, these young men pondered their roles and resolved to volunteer despite the fact that their professional class position shielded them from service if they chose not to risk life and limb for their nation. Proper character, however, dictated otherwise. When the war began, these men would call on the good traits of discipline and character that they had developed in college to motivate them. In a sense, the war tested not just the young men who volunteered but also the value of the lessons that they had internalized. In the military, these men discovered that their adherence to discipline came in handy and their success in the war would confirm their belief that good character was all one needed to succeed. Three Experiences of War The lessons that Chamberlain, Howard, and Armstrong hoped to impart on the postwar world can be traced to the circumstances that each man faced in the army. All three had different experiences as a result of their ranks, the types of units that they commanded, and the assignments that they were responsible for completing. The war confirmed the importance of character and discipline for them, but these other factors influenced how they sought to implement educational reforms after the Union had been saved. Chamberlain’s experience in the Civil War taught him that the Union states had been unprepared for the conflict. Some of the first missives he received from the front lines informed him of that fact. In October 1861, Chamberlain was teaching rhetoric and modern languages at Bowdoin and watched as dozens of his students enlisted in the war effort. That month, a former student, Walter S.

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Poor, reported his experiences in the Union army. “If you could see the soldiers drill, hear the confused murmur of voices in the ranks drowning the commands of the officers and destracting [sic] the attention of the men, could see the beardless boys, and see the lifeless, and characterless men who command them,” Poor began, “you would not be surprised at the panic at Bull Run or other reverses elsewhere.” In his mind, the war effort needed “cool, self reliant, self controling [sic] officers, and disciplined silent obedient men.” He observed that the Confederate army had better military leaders because “nearly all the Southern officers are gentlemen, accustomed to command, and enforce obedience, and the men accustomed to obey, or at least to respect their superiors.” “This,” Poor explained, “is the reason why, in spite of our superiority they have checkmated us in every instance, for that they have done so there can be no doubt.” The Union, he implied, needed gentlemen to lead its armies as well. One year later, Chamberlain heeded his student’s call for “cool, self reliant, self controlling officers.” Despite opposition from Bowdoin’s faculty and administration, Chamberlain volunteered, citing his “duty” to serve his country. The Bowdoin administration’s reluctance to support the military service of one of its faculty members echoes the less-than-enthusiastic sentiments that Julie Mujic described in her study of Midwestern colleges in this volume. In presenting himself to Governor Israel Washburn, Chamberlain declared that he had “always been interested in military matters, and what I do not know in that line I know how to learn.” The governor commissioned him the lieutenant colonel of the 20th Maine Volunteer Regiment. Despite the fact that he had been trained to be an exemplar of good character and duty, Chamberlain was ill-prepared to serve as an officer. He learned quickly, however, from his regiment’s colonel, West Point– trained Adelbert Ames. Chamberlain related his activities in camp to his wife, writing, “I study, I tell you every military work I can find. And it is no small labor to master the evolutions of a Battalion & Brigade. I am bound to understand every thing . . . . The Col. [Ames] & I are going to read it. He to instruct me, as he is kindly doing in every thing now.” Over the course of the war, Chamberlain proved himself to be an exceptional soldier. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions at the Battle of Gettysburg and won praise for his honorable acceptance of the Confederate army’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. Wounded six times, he refused to leave the service until the war ended. When his alma mater offered him an opportunity to shape its future, he knew exactly how to prepare his students for the next conflict. When the Civil War began, Howard was serving as an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point, having graduated from that institution

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as well as from Bowdoin. Badly wounded during the Peninsula Campaign at the Battle of Fair Oaks, he refused to leave the service even after the loss of his right arm. Howard received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism and rose to corps command in the Army of the Potomac. The war’s end found him at the head of the Union Army of the Tennessee. For Howard, the war increased his awareness that blacks needed more than just freedom. During a sad encounter in January 1862, Howard’s brother Charles (who served with him for part of the war) reported that Union troops confronted “two of our negro boys [sic]” and ordered them to dismount. One of them responded that they were “carrying clothes to Gen. Howard and could not dismount.” The soldier responded, “I’ll fix you” and discharged his firearm. “The ball & buck shot,” Charles recounted, “had entered just below the shoulder from behind shattering the shoulder blade breaking through the joint and coming out in front, at least a portin [sic] of the charge, making a terrible ragged wound. The poor boy [sic] suffered most intensely & soon began to fail in strength. He rallied a little this forenoon and was operated upon by the surgeons.” The Howards visited their servant, and Charles praised the wounded man for being “a most exemplary boy [sic], remarkable for his good manner and strict integrity of character.” Incidents like this may have prompted Howard, who already sympathized with the abolitionist stance, to recognize that although African Americans might be freed by the conflict, they still faced enormous obstacles in a world dominated by racial hostility. Howard’s experience in the states of the Confederacy also taught him that white southerners craved education. One year, Howard’s troops passed the winter months in Lookout Valley, near Chattanooga, Tennessee. While there, some of his soldiers established schools, and to these classrooms the “young folks of the mountains came gladly from the slopes and valleys for miles around. Simple hearted, honest, quick to see and to understand, they felt that hitherto they had been destitute of the privilege which our Northern country people everywhere possessed, and were eager to embrace those we offered.” Amazed by the eagerness with which southerners jumped at the opportunity to learn, Howard returned to the mountains of Tennessee three decades later to see what he could do about making education more widely available to those whose isolation denied them schooling. Armstrong, who also witnessed the plight of freed people, viewed the start of the war from the campus of Williams College, where he was still a student. Graduating in the midst of a raging conflict, he decided to volunteer for the Union cause. His service brought him in touch with African American soldiers and

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civilians, kindling the passion he had (as the son of missionary parents in the Sandwich Islands) for aiding people from different racial groups. Although he identified himself as an abolitionist, Armstrong took a conservative view toward African Americans. He assured one of his college friends that he was fighting to free the enslaved “more on account of their souls than for their bodies,” explaining, “I am a sort of abolitionist, but haven’t learned to love the negro. I believe in universal freedom; I believe the whole world cannot buy a single soul. The Almighty has set, or rather limited, the price of one man, and until worlds can be paid for a single negro I don’t believe in selling or buying them.” Nor did encountering blacks alter his views. On one occasion, he expressed his frustration at a black servant’s actions. He complained that the servant would sleep on a pile of chopped wood, preventing anyone from using the fuel. “These negroes—as far as I’ve seen yet—are worse than the Kanakas, and are hardly worth fighting for,” he reported, comparing blacks to native Hawaiians. Despite his beliefs about African Americans, Armstrong, after serving in a white regiment for more than a year, volunteered for service in the United States Colored Troops. Armstrong believed that African Americans had to prove themselves as men if they were to be treated as such in the postwar world. Whatever his view of them, he thought that blacks deserved a chance to demonstrate their abilities in the armed forces. He consciously chose to lead black troops, he explained, because he wanted to “use my talents to the most advantage and for the cause of humanity.” Armstrong’s views of the African American soldiers under his command involved a mix of admiration and criticism. He observed, “These darkeys’ [sic] meetings are very loud but really full of feeling and religion; we have many good men with us.” Despite the fact that his troops were “good” and “full of feeling and religion,” his emphasis of the word “loud,” suggests his disapproval of chaotic and disorganized ceremonies. Regardless of his prejudices, Armstrong remained a dedicated champion for social advancement and seriously pondered how he might help African Americans achieve success in the postwar world. With their battle scars and memories of service, Chamberlain, Howard, and Armstrong emerged from the war having witnessed both the victory of the Union and the triumph of their own qualities of strong character and discipline. They could claim, therefore, that the lessons that had been imparted to them by antebellum college education had proven useful in times of crisis. As they set out on their different paths to influence postwar education, they took this lesson with them. The situations in which they found themselves differed, but their common response was to hold high the values that they believed had been tried

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and tested in the fires of war. The importance of character and discipline had emerged stronger than ever in their minds. Conflicting Visions: Chamberlain at Bowdoin After the Civil War, Chamberlain returned to Maine. Reentering the classroom after three years of war seemed less appealing than capitalizing on his war hero status to run for public office. He served four terms as governor during Reconstruction. Chamberlain then accepted the presidency of Bowdoin College during a transitional time. He entered office with a mandate to reform the curriculum, which he did by emphasizing science and modern languages. The new president got the college’s boards to approve of a new scientific department and a bachelor of science degree. Students also had new courses to choose from, including civil and mechanical engineering. Additionally, Chamberlain pressed for replacing Greek and Latin in the classic curriculum with French and German. Chamberlain laid out several of his reform programs in his inaugural address titled “The New Education.” Employing military terminology and imagery, he argued that the college needed to “advance boldly to the key point of the position, and begin in right earnest to entrench, before we had force enough to hold it at all hazards, and even before our supplies had come up.” For Chamberlain, the old Bowdoin had a proud tradition of giving to its graduates “a stamp of rare manliness.” The representatives of Bowdoin then “bore out into the world more good to it than it ever gave back or even confessed to the college.” He defined education as “that training of the man by which he will be enabled to summon and concentrate all his energies upon a purposed end. Let us say that discipline is the chief thing in education.” With the ultimate goal of education, a reverence for the past, and a commitment to modernization in mind, he pushed for a greater commitment to science and attempted to head off criticisms by those opposed to changing the curriculum. “I do not fear these men of science,” he declared, “for after all they are following in God’s ways, and whether they see him now or not, these lines will surely lead to him at the end.” “I would say,” he continued, “that Laws are God’s ways seen by men, while Principles are God’s thoughts to himself, when he projected the universe and appointed the bounds and consummations towards which all things tend.” In urging the adoption of French and German in place of Greek and Latin, he asked, “May not discipline now be acquired and possibly as good results attained in the modern as in the ancient tongues?” With much of his agenda laid out, Chamberlain declared near his conclusion, “I fear not the age, with all its hot haste. Let it come and stir all minds and all hands.”

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Chamberlain’s inaugural speech as well as his reforms to Bowdoin’s curriculum signaled his embrace of a pragmatic approach to educational affairs. By radically altering the college that had provided him with an education, Chamberlain discarded an antebellum course of study for a postbellum one. But the new president also held firm to some old principles. He did away with the harsh discipline of the past and treated the students as budding gentlemen of character. In this effort, he straddled both the old and new approaches, for while he signaled a greater respect for the students, he maintained an authoritarian approach, demanding their compliance with college regulations. And, of course, he hoped to build a strong bond between the next generation and the nation that he had shed blood to defend. In 1872, as part of his reforms, Chamberlain instituted military drill on campus. He hoped to prepare graduates for military service (if a national crisis demanded it). As the United States had “new interests to guard and keep,” the college president hoped to train potential gentleman officers for America’s armies. But with the military drill, he was also harkening back to his own undergraduate training, attempting to instill discipline and develop good character traits. The guide for the “Bowdoin Cadets” listed forty regulations, which included an organizational structure for the four student companies, a timetable for drills (every weekday) and inspections (every Sunday), and the admonition that “all cadets are presumed to be strictly on honor in the performance of military duty.” The regulations also prescribed a standard for interaction: 22. Courtesy among military men is indispensable to discipline. Respect to superiors should not be confined to obedience on duty, but will be extended on all occasions. It is always the duty of the subordinate to accost, or to offer the first the [sic] customary salutation, and of the senior to return such complimentary notice. Cadets when off duty, or when engaged in their ordinary College pursuits, will recognize the President and Faculty of the College by touching or raising the hat. The United States War Department, in support of the program, sent twelve artillery pieces and a major to assist the college in its training. “At first the new exercises were very popular,” reported the New York Times, “but after awhile more or less hostility was manifested in the older classes, members of which regarded the drill and discipline as rather irksome and obnoxious to collegiate dignity.” Some students complained about the cost of the uniforms. In one instance, when student William G. Waitt did not abide by the regulations with regard to

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proper dress, Chamberlain personally wrote to the young man. “I am directed by the Faculty of this College to inform you that unless you immediately after this notice procure the Blouse & other articles of dress prescribed for use in the Drill you are dismissed, and will leave town by the first train,” his concise note proclaimed. Others took issue with the tiresome and lengthy list of regulations that they needed to observe. In November 1873, students sent a petition to the Board of Trustees and the Board of Overseers in an attempt to end the military drill. The student petition listed nine reasons why the drill ought to be “totally discontinued or at least suspended” until the meeting of the college boards. In their introduction, the students declared their conviction that the military drill was “altogether detrimental to the best interests of the College and to its students.” According to the students, the drill “draws heavily upon our time and detracts attention from study, requiring attendance upon drill at the best hour of the day for study,” “fills up that time with an irksome and in some cases positively injurious exercise,” and “involves a large expenditure of money on the part of students for every new class from $360 to $1800. And this expenditure is required solely that the cadets may make a showy display on the Parade ground.” The students also made an argument about manhood, implying that the drill had a negative effect on the development of gentlemanly traits. In their words, the drill “lowers the manly independence and dignity of the student by imposing upon them a code of severe regulations which if disobeyed cannot fail to have a bad effect and if obeyed can have no good effect.” Students rejected the idea that the drill would acquaint them “with military tactics and regulations which may be invaluable in years to come.” They questioned how much they were actually going to learn from “the sprinkling of tactics.” All their knowledge, after all, “hardly lasts over a vacation.” Perhaps as a dig at Chamberlain’s own record, the students asked rhetorically, “Does Bowdoin expect her sons to be the heroes of our future battles?” In their final point, the students argued that potential undergraduates were turning to Harvard and Yale because they did not like Bowdoin’s drill requirement. The Board of Trustees and Overseers informed Chamberlain that the petition had been signed by 126 of the 133 students, and this included “the three upper classes, with the exception of one senior, five juniors, and one sophomore.” Resistance to the drill came in many forms. Some students vandalized the artillery pieces that had been loaned to the college. In another instance, “blasphemous inscriptions were painted over the door of the chapel.” Later some juniors used “profane language concerning the drill” and received a suspension. The crisis came to a head on Friday, May 22, 1874, when a majority of the sophomore

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and freshman classes failed to report for drill. As the day progressed, college officials became aware of the fact that “a majority of the Junior, Sophomore, and Freshman classes had bound themselves by a written agreement to resist the drill at all hazards.” That evening, the faculty met to decide on an appropriate course of action. They decided to send home “every man who persisted in his refusal to comply with all the requirements of the College.” Responding to the students’ allegations, Chamberlain claimed, “The outbreak was wholly unexpected by me, and I believe that, with half a dozen exceptions, it was entirely unpremeditated by the students.” Students, he continued, “had never shown more interest in the drill and never given so little trouble.” Attempting to defuse the notion of widespread student dissatisfaction, he declared, “I . . . know many who took part in the demonstration had no sympathy with its objects, in fact, who violated their sense of right and manliness in thus opposing the drill.” He denied “that the class feeling which forced so many of the students into an attitude of hostility to the military department was an aggregate of the opinions of the individuals concerned, or was even an exponent of the honest sentiments of the majority.” Refuting the criticisms point by point, he laid out the facts of the matter: During the past 2½ years, but 8 students have been disciplined on account of trouble growing out of the military department and that neither of these was denied a full hearing: that during the past year not a student has attended more than 44 drills (the whole number)[,] that not one of those drills has been over one hour and ten minutes in duration, and that the exercises were suited to the most effeminate and delicate of those taking part: that no student has been required to pay more than $6.00 for military equipment; that more time is devoted to study in Bowdoin College now than before the establishment of the military department. Believing himself and the college victims of misinformation, Chamberlain attempted to set the record straight and focus on the students’ most egregious act: disobeying regulations. In a form letter notifying parents of why their sons had been suspended from Bowdoin, Chamberlain explained the college’s position. The parents of Horace R. Patten of the class of 1875, for example, read that Horace and his fellow students had “positively refused to obey rules and regulations of the College, in so far as they related to the ‘drill.’ Thereupon he was directed to leave at once for home, there to await the action of the Faculty in his case.” After sending the students home, Chamberlain dispatched a letter and pledge renewal form to parents informing them that their sons had an opportunity to

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return to college. The students who wished to return to Bowdoin had to sign “renewing in good faith and without reservation his matriculation pledge of obedience to the Laws and Regulations of the college.” Students had a ten-day window with which to respond to this offer (by 7 p.m. on June 8). Failure to meet the deadline meant automatic expulsion. In his letter, Chamberlain dismissed the claim that the drill was a hardship. Even if it had been so, the students could have withdrawn rather than defy the authority of the college, which they had pledged to respect. As Chamberlain explained, “The Faculty consider the matriculation pledge as one which of right takes precedence of all others in whatever concerns the relations of the students to the government of the College, so that in requiring your son to recede from his subsequent conflicting agreement with his classmates, the Faculty believe that they are not only requiring nothing dishonorable, but are pointing out the only course which is consistent with true and highest sense of honor.” Rather than admitting that the students’ stand against what they considered an injustice was consistent with honor, Chamberlain declared that obedience to duty was the only course open to them. College students, after all, did not become gentlemen of character until they had completed their course of study. The trouble at Bowdoin made national headlines, and Chamberlain received both criticism and support. One newspaper, which had been critical of his governorship, declared, “The same sickly longing for the exercise of autocratic power . . . has made the halls of Bowdoin tenantless.” Henry W. Benham, a West Point graduate, engineer, and Civil War general, felt compelled to write in support of the college president’s actions. As he understood it, the fight was over giving “to the educated intellect of the country the precedence in war, that it holds by universally acknowledged right in peace.” Benham continued: “And more than this it is to give to our young men, our children even in their early ‘teens,’ and when, it is in almost all cases, a pleasure, and a pride to them, the drill and discipline indispensable to the strength, or freedom of any nation, when, in emergencies, its manhood could, as it should, rise up in its armed and disciplined strength.” Benham hoped to avoid the “anomaly” of “the lawyer and the clergyman in the ranks as enlisted soldiers, commanded by the drayman or the butcher, or worse, as is so often the case the popular grog shop keeper as the Captains, Majors and Colonels of these educated but ignorant men.” As an educated man himself, Benham attempted to ensure that society’s elites continued to hold leadership positions in the military. The rebellion became part of a conversation about the influence of the military in American life. Several newspapers viewed the events at Bowdoin as part of a

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disturbing trend in which the military—a topic few Americans cared about in the postwar world despite ongoing wars with Native Americans—was becoming too prominent in postwar society. “There can be no question,” the Memphis Daily Appeal noted, “of the incongruity of so much of the military idea among our republican institutions.” Although acknowledging that the “Bowdoin students may be wrong in revolting against the college government,” the paper concluded, “their action expresses the sound principle that military forms have no place in the collegiate education of citizens of a civil republic.” Another paper declared that the “tendency of this military spirit is to encroach upon, and finally overawe, the civil power.” It warned that “if things go on as they are drifting now we shall not be surprised to see cordons of Federal bayonets bristling about the polls in the most peaceful communities.” There was, therefore, a need for “perpetual vigilance, and occasionally emphatic protest.” It praised the “Bowdoin College boys” who were “refusing to be turned from students into soldiers” because they were only demonstrating “that antagonism which persons of studious and thoughtful minds must feel to the domination of the military idea in civil life.” Ultimately, all but three students returned to Bowdoin. Although he appeared to have won, Chamberlain confessed that “the toil and trial to me has been far beyond anything I ever experienced in the field.” Later reflecting on the incident, he admitted, “Some difficulties I have met with were unexpected and, I think, unnecessary, and some doubtless the result of my own too sanguine and selfreliant spirit.” The military drill was made an elective that fall, and in 1879 the faculty voted to end the program altogether. In 1882, the boards finally put an end to military drill. One year later Chamberlain stepped down as president. His attempts to reform his college had not been as successful as he had planned. The lessons he took from the war and the solutions he proposed were ultimately rejected by the very students he hoped would be better prepared for the nation’s next crisis. The Promise of Education: Oliver O. Howard Oliver O. Howard, as the head of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, also attempted to impart his lessons from the war to future generations. Like Chamberlain, he faced opposition, not from the students themselves but rather from those who rejected the idea of educating the newly freed people. Additionally, Howard faced time constraints, as the very agency that he headed became the topic of many political debates about the role of the federal government during Reconstruction.

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After the war ended, Howard immediately realized that he needed to plan for the long-term development of the freed people. In May 1865, he told Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, that education was the “true relief” for the freed people and their children. When Stanton asked “Relief from what?” Howard responded, “Relief from beggary and dependence.” The commissioner set out to train black teachers who would, in turn, educate other freed people. As the Freedmen’s Bureau started its work, Howard remembered, “in the outset there were few negroes in the United States who were properly fitted to teach. The most who had a smattering of learning could not speak the English language with a reasonable correctness. It was then a plain necessity to have schools which could prepare teachers.” With regards to the freed people, he declared, “A brief experience showed us that the negro people were capable of education, with no limit that men could set to their capacity. What white men could learn or had learned, they, or some of them, could learn.” Knowing the temporary nature of the bureau’s charter, Howard attempted to erect an educational system that might survive the Reconstruction era. In this effort, he worked with private organizations to provide both the infrastructure for educational facilities and salaries for teachers. Whites, he hoped, would realize that educating the freed people benefited all southerners. He did not object to segregated schools, preferring, as one of his biographers noted, to go along with it “on the practical assumption that this was all that could be had at the time.” The most important goal was to provide education to as many freed people as possible. In the end, between 1865 and 1871, the Freedmen’s Bureau spent more than five million dollars to educate the freed people. Unlike other supporters of blacks’ postwar prospects, Howard favored education at all levels. He envisioned a system of common schools—“as many as possible”—along with normal schools and universities. Howard made the case that blacks should have the opportunity to receive a college education. Despite critics who thought that using government money to help black colleges in the Reconstruction era was wasteful and unnecessary, Howard pushed ahead. The bureau helped purchase land, construct facilities, and endowed several schools, among them Atlanta University, Fisk University, and Howard University. Howard’s greatest achievement with regard to education for freed people in this period was to help found the university that would bear his name. In 1866, members of the First Congregational Church of Washington, D.C., proposed the building of an institution of higher learning for blacks. Initially, the plan was to establish the Howard Theological Seminary, which would also have the ability to train teachers. On March 2, 1867, the United States Senate approved of the

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charter. Howard had, by then, pushed to include other departments in this institution so that it would be able to serve the function of a college, a law school, an agricultural school, and a medical school. Of the fact that the founders named the university after him, Howard wrote, “I had, during the discussion, continued to oppose that name, not only from modesty, but from my feeling that I could do more privately and officially for an enterprise that did not bear my own name; I did not wish to be suspected and accused of raising a monument to myself. But the universal voice was against me.” Despite his objections, the founders went ahead with their plans. Although colleges for freed people were small in number, they served their purpose and, by the turn of the twentieth century, the cadre of educated African Americans who had been trained were following the pattern seen in other college graduates of the nineteenth century: They graduated into the professional class. For example, W. E. B. Du Bois noted that in a survey of African American college graduates in the second half of the nineteenth century, 53 percent worked in education as either teachers or school administrators, 17 percent were clergymen, and 17 percent served in other professional roles. Howard’s support for these blacks’ educational institutions included attempts to protect them from the very real danger of southern vigilantes. Those opposed to African American education made different arguments: that education for blacks was useless, that an educated black person would be more difficult to control, that black education was being influenced by northern teachers and was, therefore, an attempt to influence local politics by building up a base for the Republican Party. Howard knew that black schools needed protection, explaining to Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts in the fall of 1865, “The minds of white men have been so long enslaved by prejudice and habit, that it will require time and education to bring them to a respectable degree of enlightenment.” The general had great sympathy for white northern teachers who suffered through abuse and criticism in the South, writing: “Despised, misrepresented, called mercenary, ostracised by persons of less culture than themselves, these teachers have suffered no obstacle to thwart, no hatred to make them hesitate, but have energetically and earnestly demonstrated by their success, the true nature of their mission.” There was some speculation that, if the teachers had been southern whites, there would not be as much opposition to the enterprise. But, of course, most southern whites did not want to participate in any operation aimed at elevating blacks. As a champion of southern education, Howard did not limit his support to black schools. Howard viewed education for both races as keys to national

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harmony and prosperity. With these goals and his desire to honor the departed Lincoln in mind, Howard helped found Lincoln Memorial University in eastern Tennessee at the end of the nineteenth century. Education in rural locations like this, he hoped, would minimize the influence of those who had led eleven states down the road of secession and those who stirred up animosity between poor and uneducated southerners and Union men. As he explained, “Almost the last words that President Lincoln” spoke to him were about the “Cumberland Gap and the people of East Tennessee.” According to Howard, the president “manifested a peculiar tenderness towards the people of that mountain region. His largeness of heart took in all. He wanted me to understand them and to appreciate their worth.” In the postwar era, Howard declared that he wanted to “present the case of these mountain people—people who have our best blood in their veins, and yet who have been overlooked and left behind in all our educational privileges.” Howard campaigned aggressively for funds in the late 1890s. As he did so, he continued to make the case that the poor whites of Appalachia needed an education. In a letter to the New York Tribune in 1899 in which he asked for contributions for the new university, he reminded his readers of that “warm-hearted, loyal race” of mountain dwellers who deserved aid. “Among their youth,” he wrote, “must be more Lincolns, more great minds for crises, more great hearts for humanity.” Explaining his motives, Howard recounted how, in aiding black education, he noticed that the educational facilities “for ‘loyal refugees,’ for the mountain whites, are behindhand.” One newspaper expressed support for Howard’s fund-raising efforts, believing that “such an institution appeals with special force” for those who believed “in the potent force of a wise education as the only leverage to uplift the Negro and poor white.” Helping to secure a financial basis for this memorial to the departed Lincoln would be one of the general’s last and most lasting achievements. An Industrial Education: Samuel C. Armstrong As he prepared for the postwar world, Howard recruited Samuel C. Armstrong to become a Freedmen’s Bureau agent, with charge over ten counties in Virginia. The twenty-eight-year-old Armstrong arrived in Hampton, a city filled with thousands of freed people at the mouth of the James River in Virginia. On assuming his post, Armstrong reported in April 1866 that there were “about 1,700 infirm or helpless men, women and children drawing rations from government.” If this aid were to be withdrawn, he warned, the freed people “would suffer ex-

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tremely.” However, as he explained, “nearly one half of these are in this dependent condition solely because there is nothing for them to do and they cannot go where there is work. Most are women who have from one to five children apiece.” But these individuals, he observed, “are generally able-bodied, apt to learn and anxious to get employment.” Armstrong was more than happy to help the freed people, but he considered his support conditional. His goal was to make sure that the freed people could help themselves so that they did not become destitute and dependent on the government for aid. He explained that “the ration is given to those from whom it would be absolute cruelty to withhold it; this because it is always and everywhere a curse to men and women, to help them more than enough to supplement their own best endeavors to help themselves.” To combat the perceived problem of blacks’ laziness, he proposed to bring “moral influence . . . to bear.” Payment for rent would be “vigorously enforced and all duties as citizens [would] be required, [and] idleness prevented.” From the very start of his involvement with aiding blacks, Armstrong was convinced that teaching them the traits of responsibility and free labor was more important than prolonged aid. While at Hampton, Armstrong succeeded in increasing educational access, reporting: “The freedmen’s schools already established are in good condition and this county is well supplied. Three years ago but seven or eight persons in the negro village of Slabtown, of some 2,000 inhabitants, could read or write; now over 800 can both read and write.” He pronounced the location “a grand educational centre for a radius of 200 miles.” Since there was “no opportunity of education in the country,” however, those who left suffered a “serious” loss. “Freedmen,” he observed, “as a class are destitute of ambition; their complacency in poverty and filth is a curse; discontent would lead to determined effort and a better life.” Armstrong realized that the necessity for education was even more pressing when he saw southern whites taking advantage of the freed people. He noticed that blacks were being made suspicious of Union men’s activities “by certain persons who lose no opportunity to throw discredit on the Bureau.” “Honest efforts on their behalf,” he complained, were being misinterpreted as “designs to reenslave them. No slave catcher was ever looked upon with more horror than the clerk who recently sought orphans for the farm-school at Washington.” “These wild notions,” he concluded, “are the result of ignorance, to which is mainly due the troubles of the race.” Armstrong committed himself to the cause of education, hoping to train African American teachers: “A large number of colored teachers should quickly be prepared and sent into the remoter districts where Northern lady teachers cannot safely go. From much inquiry, I am satisfied that colored

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teachers would not meet serious opposition.” Since the South would “do nothing for the education of the Negroes” and “the North cannot very long conduct it,” freed people “must do it for themselves.” Education, he explained, was the key to their uplift, for “the pillar of aristocracy is the ignorance of the masses.” In time, Armstrong also dedicated his life to southern education. He remained at Hampton, committed to finishing the work that he started. With the goal of establishing a permanent educational facility for the newly freed, he sought out potential sponsors. In 1867, Armstrong wrote to the American Missionary Association (AMA) expressing his plans to build a “permanent and great educational work” at Hampton. Ultimately, several organizations supported his endeavor, including the Freedmen’s Bureau, which provided $7,500. Armstrong’s Hampton Institute was geared toward teaching freed people industrial skills. It became, in the words of one prominent historian, “a citadel of industrial education.” One of the institution’s primary goals was to train blacks to have the character—the same lesson hammered into Armstrong and his cohort in college—necessary for survival. Northern educators, in the words of one AMA official, sought to teach “obedience to law and respect for the rights and property of others, and reverence for those in authority.” Two early twentieth-century biographers considered Hampton Armstrong’s “greatest work” and praised the general because he “realized that the negro’s best chance lay in his ability to use his hands skillfully.” Acknowledging Howard’s aid in setting up Hampton, which opened its doors in April 1868, Armstrong thanked the commissioner in June of the following year, writing, “You have always stood most kindly and heartily by us and shall always have the right to feel that you have a ‘large part’ in whatever success may be achieved here.” Armstrong’s successes at Hampton did not go unnoticed. In fact, the managers at Howard University attempted to lure him to helm their institution. The Williams-educated soldier, however, had other plans and rejected any overtures to take him away from his own school for freedmen. As Armstrong explained to his mother, his “own enterprise” was “the soundest thing” that had “better possibilities, is more central with reference to freedmen, and has important advantages over Howard.” Armstrong boasted that he would introduce “manual labor, self-help, into my institution; will make my students feel that they are paying their own way.” He had “a magnificent farm of 125 acres” while “Howard can’t do much with his 60 acres of poor land.” Unlike Howard University in Washington, D.C., Hampton could expand “indefinitely.” Armstrong admitted that Howard had access to “money—all he wants—but only for building purposes—the Bureau can only build, not endow.” “I am not afraid of him in the endowment race,” Armstrong maintained. “My normal school, which does not pretend to be anything

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else[,] is to-day six months ahead of him, yet his has been opened since last May and mine will open next month.” In a blunt assessment, the head of Hampton concluded, “The truth is, bad management, a stupid, divided, foolishly ambitious corps of trustees has made the Howard University so far a sham—what little there is of mine is reality.” He was thankful that he had not accepted the task of running Howard University, fearing that he would have to “fight those trustees whom Congress has appointed and who can’t be got rid of.” Although he considered Howard “one of the noblest, bravest, kindest, gentlest of men” and “a true hearted Christian, wholly unselfish,” the general had “foolishly allowed the control of it [the university] to slip from his hands.” Both Howard and Armstrong agreed on the need for well-trained African American teachers who could, in turn, educate their fellow freed people after the work of missionary societies and the Freedmen’s Bureau was done. On one occasion, Howard declared, “There is no institution that seems to be more useful in aiding the colored people in the transition state, than the industrial school.” The bureau supported several industrial schools such as Tougaloo University and Hampton, and established schools and colleges with normal departments because of the need for black teachers. Although northern teachers, supported by missionary aid societies, did come south immediately after the war ended, Howard recognized the need for black teachers if the education in the South was to continue long term. Furthermore, all other black colleges and normal schools that received aid from the bureau offered vocational subjects as well. Although he had admirable goals, Armstrong’s system was limited to training blacks to teach elementary-level classes and perform manual labor. As one historian put it, the graduates of Hampton were “trained to prepare their students to accept a subordinate role in the emergent New South.” Believing that he needed to instill discipline into his students, Armstrong, the former Union officer, added elements of military training to Hampton’s curriculum, fully regulating almost every hour of the day. During the day, boys worked on the farm and girls did housework. The pupils were formed into squads with rotating schedules. While one squad worked two days a week, the other studied. Armstrong taught the free labor ideal by also paying the students with credit so that they could purchase books for class. A Hampton education combined both study and labor. Although he was also involved in educating African Americans, Armstrong did not face the same opposition that Howard encountered. This may have been a result of his paternalistic approach, which played down the importance of immediate civil rights goals for his pupils. As far as Armstrong was concerned, it

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did not matter what blacks themselves wanted as long as the white commanders of the bureau deemed it necessary for their future. Even though he committed himself to the cause of black education, he continued to believe that blacks had a long way to go before they attained the level of white civilization. He claimed that they were incompetent and unfit to get involved in politics, arguing that they should limit themselves to the pursuit of education and the learning of agricultural techniques. Armstrong maintained that African Americans’ problems revolved around their social rather than political needs. Hampton’s students, one prominent historian of Reconstruction observed, “were advised to eschew political involvement and concentrate on character development and economic selfhelp.” Armstrong seemed unable to grasp the fact that freed people needed more than a good work ethic and stated his belief that only lazy individuals failed to earn enough for a living wage. “God,” he maintained, “didn’t make the world for lazy people.” One of Armstrong’s students, indeed, his protégé, was Booker T. Washington, who helped spread his former teacher’s philosophy into the twentieth century. As a product of his own education and experiences, Armstrong continued to believe that he needed to build character in his pupils so that they could then survive on their own. He thought the negative traits that he ascribed to freed people, ignorance and laziness, for example, were bred by a deficiency in character. As such, he made sure to emphasize the positive traits of hard work and good morals at Hampton. Only through such actions could blacks hope to elevate their level of civilization and become productive and industrious members of white society. Others shared Armstrong’s ideas as well. President James Garfield, another Williams graduate and supporter of freedmen’s education, told a gathering of black and Native American students at Hampton that without labor “there can be no civilization.” “The white race,” he explained, “has learned that truth. They came here as pioneers, felled the forests and swept away all obstacles before them by labor.” His audience members, however, had “come from a people who have been taught to destroy;—to fight but not to labor.” He urged that the students at Hampton, in order to become civilized, must realize the simple truth that “labor must be free!” Armstrong’s ideas about the capacity of nonwhite peoples went back to his childhood days on the Hawaiian Islands. The son of missionaries, he took the lesson that nonwhite races could be elevated to the level of white civilization given proper schooling. Such a paternalistic view guided his beliefs about education. Armstrong certainly made the connection between Hawaiian natives and African Americans, writing:

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The negro and the Polynesian have many striking similarities. Of both it is true that not mere ignorance, but deficiency of character is the chief difficulty, and that to build up character is the true objective point of education. It is also true that in all men education is conditioned not alone by an enlightened head and a changed heart, but very largely on a routine of industrious habit, which is to character what the foundation is to the pyramid. . . . Morality and industry generally go together. Especially in weak tropical races, idleness, like ignorance, breeds vice. Armstrong’s emphasis on cultivating good character traits in his men could be an unending process. As his most recent biographer has observed, whites rather than blacks decided “when the latter had acquired enough of the requisite character.” Armstrong himself joked that completion of African Americans’ training might not take place until the twenty-fifth century. For the freed people, that would be a long time to wait for white approval. The three college-educated veterans discussed here all attempted to make their visions of education a reality in the postwar world. Influenced by their own educational and wartime experiences, these three men attempted to impart these lessons to the following generation of Americans. However, they all faced unique challenges. Chamberlain did not expect Bowdoin students to question his vision or his authority. Howard navigated a difficult path on the issue of black education between a hostile president, violent southerners, and a skeptical northern public. Armstrong’s challenge, which he never overcame, was a result of his own limitation of vision. He failed to see freed people as equals in a changing biracial world. Perhaps as a result of his own belief, Armstrong faced the least resistance to his plan. This also may have been in part because he was presenting an acceptable vision—of white superiority over blacks—for worried whites everywhere. In many ways Armstrong’s approach to education was similar to Chamberlain’s because it was patronizing in nature and assumed that the war veterans knew better than the innocent white youths of Maine and the uneducated black pupils of Virginia. Race, however, determined the response. Whereas the white New England youths could fight back, what was the recourse for black youths who wanted an education? The men who had grown up in the antebellum period, watched the country slide into a devastating sectional conflict, and saved the Union, brought their unique experiences to the problems of the postwar world. On the educational

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front, they had mixed results. Chamberlain’s confrontation at Bowdoin suggests that people from different age groups contested the war’s meaning. Whereas Chamberlain’s generation had been defined by the war, a younger cohort of Americans, who grew up in a world where the threat of secession had been dramatically crushed, viewed military preparations as a waste of time and effort. To the younger generation, the war had ended the greatest threat to the Union. Although Chamberlain made a concerted effort to modernize Bowdoin College’s curriculum, his attempts to install compulsory military drill marred his presidency. His experience illustrates the generational disagreement over the meaning of the war. Where Chamberlain saw a need for preparations, his students rejected the martial displays and, with it, the authoritarian leadership of their war hero president. Although Howard helped set up schools and colleges for southerners, he faced numerous challenges that thwarted his intentions and limited his plans. Southern secession had been defeated but not southern racism. Although Samuel Armstrong established and ran the Hampton Institute, his own racial ideas and paternalistic stance prevented him from expanding the school’s purpose and supporting equality for African Americans. Over time, Howard seems to have been the most successful of the three. The system of higher education for blacks that he promoted, however, would not become as popular as Armstrong’s model until the early twentieth century when new leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who earned his degree from Fisk University, a Freedmen’s Bureau–funded school, emerged to challenge the philosophy of Armstrong’s protégé, Booker T. Washington. Howard did set up the infrastructure that trained the professional classes of the early twentieth century’s African American community, and his support for education in the Cumberland Gap also advanced the education of many poor white southerners. The three models of postwar education exemplified by these men’s approaches highlight how the Civil War affected educational leaders’ ideas about postwar schooling. The men at the heart of this study hoped to instill lessons they had learned from the war. That, in turn, meant following a similar educational model that the men had been taught in the antebellum period (with an emphasis on the development of character). Since this model had served them well during the war, there was no reason to think that a character-based education might not also serve the purposes of late nineteenth-century America. These three men’s ideas represented, therefore, a continuation of antebellum education patterns. Regardless of their diverse approaches, emphases, and results, all hoped that the lessons they imparted would prevent another war and do honor to the legacy of the one that had restored their beloved Union.

“The Rebels’ Last Device” Theodore R. Davis and Faithful Representations of Black Soldiers during the Civil War

Niki Lefebvre

D

uring the hot summer months of 1863, Harper’s Weekly sketch artist Theodore R. Davis embedded himself with a regiment of Union soldiers digging trenches around Fort Wagner near Charleston, South Carolina. One evening, as Davis observed the soldiers carefully removing a series of explosive devices planted underground, an “accidental explosion” startled him. A “torpedo” had “blown out of the [trenches]” a black corporal from the Third United States Colored Regiment. The next morning Davis awoke to find that nearby Confederate soldiers had captured the dead corporal, stripped him of his uniform, and attached his nude body to a fresh explosive device. “Evidently,” Davis wrote, the “rebels” placed the corporal as “bait . . . undoubtedly thinking that [Union soldiers] would attempt his removal for burial . . . and explode the trap.” But the Union soldiers didn’t take the bait. According to Davis, the regiment continued to dig until they could safely reach the corporal’s body, slowly dismantle the torpedo, and finally remove the corporal for burial. The scene of the corporal’s devaluation from a Union soldier to Confederate “bait” so impressed Davis that he sketched it as part of a series of four images depicting the Siege of Charleston for Harper’s Weekly. Titled “The Rebels’ Last Device in the Torpedo Line,” Davis’s image and corresponding written account were published on September 19, 1863 (Figure 1). To a greater extent than any other wartime newspaper sketch, Davis’s rendering of the corporal faithfully captured the vulnerability and bravery of black Union soldiers as they risked their lives and freedom in order to secure them. “The Rebels’ Last Device” was one of an increasing number of respectful representations of African American soldiers or, as contemporaries sometimes called them, “faithful representations,” that appeared in northern illustrated newspapers following the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Although many scholars have rigorously analyzed the content and form of these

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Figure 1. Theodore R. Davis, “The Siege of Charleston—The Rebels’ Last Device in the Torpedo Line,” Harper’s Weekly, September 19, 1863.

postemancipation representations of black soldiers, none has closely considered the complex reasons why such images emerged when they did or how they affected the history of racial stereotyping in American visual culture. To assume that respectful imagery was an inevitable outcome of emancipation is misguided given the well-documented debates that enveloped President Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation; at no point in the 1860s was respect for African Americans considered a precondition for support of the Emancipation Proclamation. As much as any other factor, an ethos of authenticity, which was commercially and politically advantageous for northern illustrated newspaper editors such as Fletcher Harper of Harper’s Weekly, induced the emergence of postemancipation respectful representations. Moreover, because it lacks most acknowledged conventions of standard respectful representations of black soldiers, “The Rebels’ Last Device” defied stereotypes of African Americans rooted in antebellum abolitionist and racialized imagery. In his visual depiction of a dead and manipulated black corporal from the Third United States Colored Regiment, Theodore Davis elevated the ethos of authenticity to offer a new vision of African American humanity, a vision that imagined black soldiers as potential social and political equals. When Confederate batteries bombarded Fort Sumter in the spring of 1861, Theodore Davis was only twenty-one years old and barely an established news artist. Born in Boston and educated at Rittenhouse Academy in Washington, D.C., he

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had spent four years in Brooklyn studying drawing with the then well-known wood engraver and designer Henry E. Herrick. During the early months of the war, Davis traveled through the newly formed Confederacy alongside the famed London Times correspondent William H. Russell, while submitting his first sketches to Harper’s Weekly. Russell described Davis as a “pert, young fellow,” though after the war Union officers would remember him as “a regular Bohemian” and a man with a “spirit that was proof against all the fatigues and disappointments” of battle. Unlike many special artists who covered a single region or the movements of a single army, Davis logged thousands of miles traveling back and forth between western, southern, and eastern campaigns; a Union army general and friend remarked that Davis had probably seen more of the war than any other man. On his retirement from Harper’s Weekly, Davis was known to recount his memories of the war with anyone who visited him at his converted bathhouse studio in Asbury Park, New Jersey. “Many persons have said,” Davis wrote in 1899, “that since my duty was only to see, and not to fight, they should think that I would not be shot at. . . . [However,] to really see a battle one must accept the most dangerous situations.” The real dangers and privations that sketch artists faced while traveling alongside Union troops challenged the romantic and dramatized scenes (usually infused with moral fervor) that depicted previous wars, such as Emanuel Leutze’s iconic 1851 Washington Crossing the Delaware. As the first generation of American artists embedded with troops, Civil War–era “special artists,” as they were often called, captured the realities of war with a degree of truthfulness that studio painters could never have achieved. Under the private employ of weekly newspaper editors, special artists presented visuals of nearly every aspect of the war, from important battle scenes and long marches to the monotony of camp life and even moments of disgrace. Their emphasis on accuracy in image-making was also shaped by photography, an artistic medium that many Americans celebrated as uniquely democratic for its purported ability to capture authentic images. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once claimed, the daguerreotype was “the true Republican style of painting” because “the artist stands aside and lets you paint yourself.” The authentic qualities of wartime newspaper sketches aspired to mimic photography to a much greater extent than the grandiose war paintings of generations past. Despite photography’s popularity at midcentury, however, scholars have shown that special artists were better equipped to capture the narrative of the war as it unfolded in the field partly because the wet-collodion photographic process in use at the time was so laborious and time intensive. Special artists de-

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veloped a shorthand technique that enabled them to compose as many sketches as possible while a battle raged and then fill in the details when they returned to the safety of camp. Theodore Davis kept a memorandum sketchbook in which he made highly detailed sketches of anything that might enter into one of his sketches—distinctions in soldiers’ uniforms by rank, numerous varieties of saddles, tents, wagons, swords, and so on. Davis used the memoranda as references to help him fill out the details of as many shorthand sketches as possible. Thus whereas special artists could sling portfolios over their shoulders and shimmy up trees or climb rooftops to draw one expansive view after another, photographers’ heavy equipment anchored them to the ground, composing (at best) one image every half hour. Although all of the two thousand sketches that special artists produced for major northern illustrated newspapers such as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, New York Illustrated News, and Harper’s Weekly shaped how readers imagined the war, postemancipation sketches of black soldiers bore perhaps the greatest social and political import. In an 1849 issue of The North Star, Frederick Douglass condemned white artists whose eyes and hands, he argued, could not render the likenesses of African Americans without exaggeration and distortion. Similar to Emerson, Douglass celebrated photography because it promised freedom from white artists’ frequent base racialization of black Americans in popular visual culture. Special artists who undertook the rendering of newly enlisted black Union soldiers in 1863 worked within a culture of newspaper readers more accustomed to seeing caricatures and stereotypes of African Americans than sincere depictions of their humanity. As northerners debated the possible effects of emancipation, considered the realities of a mixed-race society and electorate, and closely examined the many possible meanings of freedom, depictions of black soldiers in the field held considerable sway over public opinion. After all, the swift strokes of an artist’s charcoal pen could mean the difference between white readers’ recognition of African Americans as fellow humans, or not. Scholars who have studied postemancipation respectful representations of black soldiers in illustrated newspapers have collectively identified a number of common “positive” artistic conventions. Prerequisites for respectful sketches include a high degree of physiognomic and anatomic accuracy, a well-appointed uniform, and an upright or otherwise dignified posture. Beyond that, the sketches generally pictured soldiers handling or using a rifle effectively and perhaps engaging in battle or some other task essential to military operations. Among these “positive” conventions, the social and political importance of physiognomic and anatomic accuracy cannot be overstated. Several years after the war in 1870,

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Frederick Douglass praised a mass-produced chromolithograph based on a photograph of Hiram R. Revels, the first elected African American United States senator. “It strikes me as a faithful representation of the man,” Douglass wrote. “Whatever may be the prejudices of those who look upon it, they will be compelled to admit that the Mississippi Senator is a man, and one who will easily pass for a man among men.” Revels’s portrait appeared “faithful” or truthful because it captured his facial features and expression precisely as they appeared in the original photographic portrait, and also in reality. For Douglass, a faithful representation signaled the public recognition of Revels’s status as a free man and co-equal American citizen. In the years following the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation, physiognomic and anatomic accuracy in sketches of black soldiers satisfied the same social and political goals that Douglass referenced when he used the term “faithful representation” in 1870; the only significant difference was that postemancipation respectful representations circulated well before the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments ensured freedom, citizenship, and suffrage for African-American men. Still, the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation alone did not stir special artists and newspapers to faithfully sketch black soldiers. As a military document applicable only to slaves living behind Confederate lines and enforceable only by a Union military presence, the proclamation had severe limitations. Moreover, as the historian Eric Foner has argued, few of the proclamation’s provisions were more contested than the decision to enroll free blacks in military service; no wartime development did more to bring African American men into the political sphere—after the war, at least 130 veterans served in political office. According to Foner, for northerners, the proclamation portended a “redefinition of the place of blacks in American society and of the very meaning of freedom in the American republic,” but it hardly forced the disappearance of racism. As black soldiers such as the corporal depicted in “The Rebels’ Last Device” stormed Fort Wagner during the summer of 1863, a mob of mostly Irish immigrants lynched black men, women, and children on the streets of New York during the city’s infamous draft riots. Black soldiers themselves spent over a year writing petitions and staging protests in order to convince Congress that they deserved compensation equal to white soldiers. Indeed, visual representations that forced illustrated newspaper readers to imagine black soldiers as fellow humans and potential social and political equals did not rise from the political portent of a redefined American society alone; other factors were at work. As the historian Andrea Pearson has shown, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated pioneered the use of images as trustworthy reporting tools in 1858 with an investiga-

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tion into New York City’s swill milk trade. Although several written reports had previously exposed the industry’s poorly kept inner-city cow pens and contaminated feeding supply, Frank Leslie’s was the first newspaper to publish sketches of the filthy pens and malnourished cows. According to Pearson, Frank Leslie’s pictorial reporting campaign led to the closing or regulation of swill milk producers and to increased newspaper sales, but not without a concerted effort from sketch artists and writers to convince the reading public that their images could be trusted. Words such as “authentic,” “truthful,” “correct,” and “accurate” were repeated over and over again to describe the sketches. In many cases, illustrations depicted the artists themselves in the middle of a scene with sketch pad and pen in hand recording every detail, as if to further convince readers that the artist was indeed an eyewitness. Though Frank Leslie’s laid the groundwork, so to speak, for readers’ expectations of authenticity in pictorial reporting, by the opening months of the Civil War Harper’s Weekly—Frank Leslie’s chief competitor—had begun to incorporate many of the same devices to establish its own reputation for truthfulness in pictorial reporting. For example, in Theodore Davis’s Harper’s Weekly sketch “The Siege of Charleston—Scene of the Desperate Assault upon Wagner, July 18, 1863—A Shell from Fort Johnson,” the artist himself is included in the foreground, narrowly escaping the explosion (Figure 2). The newspaper even printed a letter from Davis describing his harrowing experiences at Fort Wagner to reinforce the validity of the image. When Harper’s Weekly printed Davis’s first postemancipation sketch of black soldiers, however, the newspaper went to even greater lengths to convince readers the image was authentic. “Rebel Negro Pickets as Seen through a Field-Glass” appeared on the cover of Harper’s Weekly just one week after the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 (Figure 3). Two black Confederate soldiers stand guard for their regiment, most likely just before the Battle of Fredericksburg. While one soldier sits and the other stands, both appear dignified, with steady, firm grips on their bayoneted rifles. Davis granted both soldiers remarkable physiognomic and anatomic accuracy, as well as perfectly appointed uniforms with all the standard accoutrements—brass buttons, cap, and cartridge boxes, and so on. “Rebel Negro Pickets” exemplifies the “positive” artistic conventions of postemancipation respectful representations, yet the circular frame sets the image apart from the vast majority of newspaper illustrations, which tended to follow the rectangular contours of the page or text columns. In an accompanying cover-page editorial, Fletcher Harper informed readers that the sketch was sent

Figure 2. Theodore R. Davis, “The Siege of Charleston—Scene of the Desperate Assault upon Wagner, July 18, 1863—A Shell from Fort Johnson,” Harper’s Weekly, September 26, 1863.

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Figure 3. Theodore R. Davis, “Rebel Negro Pickets as Seen through a Field-Glass,” Harper’s Weekly, January 10, 1863.

by Davis as a “faithful representation of what was seen by one of our officers through his field-glass, while on outpost duty.” The unusual frame was a visual reference to the circular lens of a field glass; it dramatized the accuracy of the sketch by showing readers the visual limitations of what the officer and artists experienced in the field. Given the political leanings of Fletcher Harper, editor of Harper’s Weekly, it is not surprising that the newspaper went to such lengths to convince readers that Davis’s “Rebel Negro Pickets” was a “faithful representation” of the two soldiers. Harper cheered President Abraham Lincoln’s politics, including the Emancipa-

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tion Proclamation and the controversial provision to enroll free black men in military service. In an editorial that accompanied “Rebel Negro Pickets” Harper admonished northerners “who affect to be horrified at the enrollment of negroes into regiments. Let us hope,” he continued, “that the President will not be deterred by any squeamish scruples of the kind from garrisoning the Southern forts with fighting men of any color that can be obtained.” Two weeks later Harper printed Thomas Nast’s now-famous propagandistic illustration titled “The Emancipation of the Negroes, January 1863—the Past and the Future,” which drew a stark contrast between the horrors of slavery and the “domestic peace and comfort” of freedom (Figure 4). Both Nast’s sketch and the accompanying written description make crystal clear the newspaper’s support for Lincoln: “On the wall hangs a portrait of President Lincoln, whom the family can not sufficiently admire and revere. They regard him with feelings akin to veneration, and in each heart there is honest love and gratitude for him.” As the historian William Fletcher Thompson has argued, once Harper decided to throw his political support behind the Emancipation Proclamation, he mobilized the full resources of his paper toward the cause: writers, reporters, engravers, sketch artists, and cartoonists. Harper

Figure 4. Thomas Nast, “The Emancipation of the Negroes, January 1863—the Past and the Future,” Harper’s Weekly, January 24, 1863.

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continued to support black soldiers throughout the war; he even provided sympathetic coverage of the protests of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment against unequal pay for their military service. Though not every northern illustrated newspaper expressed the same level of support for President Lincoln or the Emancipation Proclamation, authentic pictorial reports of black soldiers made commercial and political sense. Authentic and thus respectful representations of black soldiers enabled newspaper editors and special artists to maintain their standards of truthfulness in wartime sketches and thus maintain the trust of their readers. By 1863 the illustrated newspaper business was swathed in an ethos of authenticity that made caricaturing and stereotyping black soldiers a bad business policy because it undermined the integrity of special artists’ work. Furthermore, especially in Fletcher Harper’s case, respectful representations such as “Rebel Negro Pickets” served a larger political purpose. In the most basic sense, such images aimed to present African American men as capable soldiers, worthy of President Lincoln’s decision to enroll them in the armed forces. It might also be said that respectful representations hinted at a possible higher calling for black men who served dutifully: perhaps citizenship or voting rights. Nonetheless, conflating the ethos of authenticity that informed specials artists’ work on the battlefront with such radical humanitarian principles seems impossible given the negative impact contemporaneous editorial decisions at Harper’s Weekly had on African Americans who did not or could not serve in the military. Throughout the war, northern illustrated newspapers juxtaposed racialized imagery alongside respectful representations of black soldiers, a phenomenon that the historian Alice Fahs has labeled “doubling,” in reference to W. E. B. Du Bois’s discussion of double-consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk. For example, when Harper’s Weekly reported on the heroism of Robert Smalls, a former slave who commandeered a Confederate steamship and steered it into Union territory in 1862, his portrait appeared across the page from a racialized sketch of African American refugees in South Carolina (Figure 5). Imbued with all the social and political import that Frederick Douglass intended, Smalls’s portrait warranted the label “faithful representation.” Indeed, Smalls looks forthrightly into the eyes of readers, a sign of power rarely granted to young, strong black men; his suit, tie, and coiffure signify his new social status. At the same time, however, little distinction is drawn between the children and animals depicted in “Feeding the Negro Children.” The accompanying description further dehumanizes the children by referring to them as “poor little creatures realizing for

Figure 5. “Robert Smalls, Captain of the Gunboat Planter,” and “Feeding the Negro Children under Charge of Military Authorities at Hilton Head, South Carolina,” Harper’s Weekly, June 14, 1862.

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Figure 6. “Pompey,” Harper’s Weekly, June 10, 1863.

the first time that they are human beings.” For another example, consider that the very same issue of Harper’s Weekly that featured “Rebel Negro Pickets” on the cover also included a racialized cartoon of a newly freed slave named Pompey (Figure 6). In the character of Pompey, contemporary readers would have recognized an amalgamation of antebellum African American stereotypes, which, as the historian Joshua Brown explains, were based on a limited range of sentimental and buffoonish black types derived from such figures of antebellum blackface minstrelsy as the “comic darkey” Jim Crow and the “darkey shyster” Zip Coon, as well as the caricatures of pompous and degraded free blacks found in anti-abolitionist prints.

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The omnipresence of “doubling” in the pages of northern illustrated newspapers only underscores the importance of elucidating the impact that respectful representations had on the history of racial stereotyping in American visual culture. In sketching “The Rebels’ Last Device,” Theodore Davis followed few of the positive artistic conventions that characterize nearly all the respectful representations of black soldiers that populate contemporary scholarship. In fact, the image has not been analyzed in any work to date that discusses the topic. I contend, however, that only by forgoing the otherwise necessary convention of a well-appointed uniform and thus exposing the corporal’s bare head and body, could Davis have so forcefully overturned two popular and destructive stereotypes of African Americans: first, the nude, scourged, and dependent slave popularized by abolitionists, and second, the racist-scientific “Negro-type,” which so distorted African Americans’ physiognomy and anatomy. Indeed, unlike more conventional respectful representations, Davis’s sketch does seem to employ the ethos of authenticity for larger humanitarian purpose. In “The Rebels’ Last Device,” Harper’s Weekly readers confronted an image of African American humanity that dared to imagine a black soldier as a potential social and political equal. The popular stereotype of the nude, scourged slave emerged with force during the 1830s in the pages of influential antislavery tracts. In her 1833 An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, Lydia Maria Child promised readers to “follow the poor slave through his wretched wanderings, in order to give some idea of his physical suffering, his mental and moral degradation.” Several years later in 1839 Theodore Weld collaborated with Sarah and Angelina Grimké to compile Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, a virtual catalogue of physical abuses. In Slavery As It Is whites and newly freed blacks offered their gruesome recollections of corporal punishments. William T. Allen of Alabama, for example, recounted witnessing a slaveholder strip and lacerate a slave’s back with a handcard (the sort usually reserved for carding wool) and then wash the open wounds in water, salt, and pepper. In the 1840s, popular slave narratives continued to pair images of slaves’ physical suffering with exposed skin. Frederick Douglass’s 1845 escape narrative, for example, described in detail the whipping of his half-naked Aunt Hester. In the 1849 edition of the popular Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, six of twenty illustrations depicted nude or semi-nude slaves suffering physically as well as emotionally. As the late historian Elizabeth B. Clark has pointed out, these “atrocity narratives” were hardly the “moral high ground,” but their very offensiveness and sensationalism proved effective in gathering support for the abolitionist movement right up to the start of the Civil War.

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Figure 7. McPherson and Oliver, “A Typical Negro,” Harper’s Weekly, July 4, 1863.

By the 1860s, written and visual atrocity narratives had so linked scarred and tortured black skin with slavery in the white imagination that even some respectful representations of black soldiers could not escape their association with the trope. Consider a well-known series of three portraits printed in Harper’s Weekly, featuring a former slave named Gordon who enlisted in the Union Army in 1863 (Figure 7). Whereas the first and third portraits construct a narrative of Gordon’s transformation from a worn and ragged freedman to a capable and confident Union soldier, the middle and largest portrait exposes his bare, scourged back, as if to offer indelible proof of Gordon’s former status as a slave. The title of the accompanying article, “A Typical Negro,” encouraged the perception that such scarring might be found under the uniform or clothing of many African Americans. Although the corporal’s prone position, nudity, and the gruesome circumstances of his death may seem to align “The Rebels’ Last Device” with the tradition of atrocity narratives, Davis’s rendering of the corporal’s skin resists such categorization. As the art historian Michael Hatt has observed, the skin is a site of subjectivity: “Who we are, what our lives are like, what our experiences have

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been: all these frequently seem to be visible on the surface of our body.” In other words, the wrinkles, stretch marks, and scars that imprint human skin reveal certain details of personal histories. However, in “The Rebels’ Last Device,” the corporal’s skin appears flawless; it bears no evidence of the scarring that might have marked him as a former slave. A close study of the corporal’s torso reveals that the shadows on his back and ribcage emphasize the contours of an impressive musculature rather than the lasting effects of a whip. Moreover, Davis’s sketch makes no reference to the torpedo explosion that “blew” the corporal out of the trenches and took his life—an explosion that certainly would have disfigured, burned, or otherwise blemished his impeccable body. Having witnessed the death and manipulation of the corporal by Confederate soldiers, Davis elected not to sketch the corporal as he must have appeared in reality. Instead, he honored the corporal’s great sacrifice by drawing a representative black soldier with an idealized, flawless body that emphasized, even dramatized, his humanity. In Davis’s idealized representation, the corporal bore no physical association with slavery; instead he appeared as, to use Frederick Douglass’s words, “a man among men.” If the corporal’s skin dramatized his humanity, then so, too, did Davis’s rendering of the corporal’s head and neck. Antebellum racialized imagery had deep roots in racist-scientific physiognomy studies, or the visual practice of “reading moral qualities from the head.” In the late eighteenth century, the Dutch artist Petrus Camper popularized a foundational concept in physiognomy studies called the facial line, which associated beauty with a perfectly vertical profile inspired by Greek sculpture. American pseudoscientists quickly adopted the facial line as a standard method for measuring the relative intelligence of the different races. By the mid-nineteenth century, the phrenologists Samuel Morton and Louis Agassiz had expanded Camper’s facial-line theory by experimenting with the purportedly empirical scientific methods of cranial measurement. They aimed to gather evidence to support a theory of polygenesis, or the idea that each human race represented a separate and unequal species. Their pseudoscientific research spawned a generalized image of a “Negro Type,” which featured protruding lips and teeth, an abnormally pronounced brow, and a drastic backsloping forehead to emphasize limited intelligence. According to the art historian Brian Wallis, popular visual culture built on the “Negro type” by even further distorting visual representations of African Americans. A Harper’s Weekly sketch titled “A Rebel Captain Forcing Negroes” is an especially troubling example of how extreme such distortions had become by the early 1860s (Figure 8). Close examination of the image reveals that the digits

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Figure 8. Mead, “A Rebel Captain Forcing Negroes to Load Cannon under Fire,” Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1862.

on each enslaved man’s hands are misrepresented. While the man depicted on the left exhibits a hand with six fingers, the man depicted on the right exhibits a hand with only four. In addition, the forehead of the man on the right slopes so far backward (nearly a 45-degree angle!) that the nape of his neck has disappeared entirely. His lips are tacked on as an appendage and his only visible eye is too deeply set. Such extreme distortions of African Americans’ physiognomy and anatomy denied them recognizably human bodies and faces and thus, in the minds and eyes of white newspaper readers, cast doubt on their relative humanity. In contrast, the corporal’s physiognomy and anatomy in “The Rebels’ Last Device” exhibit a level of accuracy and detail that imbues him with not only humanity but also with a discernible sentience. Although his eyes, nose, and lips are buried in his arms, the relationship of the corporal’s head and neck is propor-

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tionate. The slope of his forehead appears natural, not backward, and the location of his ear, brow, and jaw line also appear undistorted and in proper relation to each other. Davis’s positioning of the corporal’s body forces viewers to contemplate his humanity in more than just the physical sense; for, in spite of the facts of his death, the corporal appears filled with perceptible signs of life. The dark shadows between his shoulders indicate their engagement, and a deep line separating his shoulder and bicep reveals a concentrated grip. He embraces an oblong plank, which ostensibly ties his body to the torpedo buried beneath the sand. The corporal’s only visible hand hardly appears to have been hastily positioned by Confederate soldiers under the cover of night; it is clenched into a hard fist. Appropriately, the corporal’s physical engagement emotes a kind of sadness, as if his face is buried in his arms to hide tears rather than death. Remarkably, the sentient presence of Davis’s idealized corporal is so palpable it is as if blood runs through his veins, breath heaves from his chest, and tears roll down his buried face. By denying the stereotypes of the scourged, nude slave and the racist-scientific “Negro type,” Davis offered a new vision of a black soldier as a fully realized human, but the overall composition of the sketch hinted at an even greater possibility for enlisted black men: independence. When American abolitionists adopted the seal of the London Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the mid-nineteenth century, it quickly became the most commonly seen representation of African Americans (Figure 9). From the slave’s abject position to his clasped hands, upward gaze, and shackles, nearly everything about the image symbolized slaves’ dependence on whites for salvation. The seal and its many variants were so widely reproduced that Americans found them not only in the pages of abolitionist literature, but also on women’s jewelry, pincushions, and other household items, thus upholding a widely held assumption among whites that blacks could not function as independent members of American society. But “The Rebels’ Last Device” makes no such reference to the corporal’s dependence. Although his prone position might indicate prostration or subjugation in another environment, the corporal is visually removed from the familiar context of the dominant white society. He bears no scars, no distortions, and no shackles to remind viewers that he was once a slave. A pair of indefinite birds, the only vague reference to the corporal’s tragic death, appears weak and trifling in contrast with his substantial presence and powerful physique. Isolated on the shores at Fort Wagner, between sand and waves, sky and beach, at the very edge of American soil and society, the corporal is freed from the symbolic constraints of white hegemony; he appears ready to assume independence.

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Figure 9. Seal of the London Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, adopted in the United States. This copy from New York City, 1837, Library of Congress.

Six pages following “The Rebels’ Last Device,” Harper’s Weekly readers encountered Davis’s eyewitness written account of the corporal’s death, which complicates the vision of the fully realized and independent corporal Davis captured in his sketch. For the significance it bears to this study, Davis’s eyewitness written account is presented here in full: Since the assault upon Fort Wagner the rebels have planted quantities of torpedoes in front of their works. As we come to these with our saps they are removed with care and safety. A few nights since, by the accidental explosion of one of these machines, a negro corporal of the Third United States (colored) Regiment was blown out of the saps, and the next morning was seen, dead and entirely nude, evidently placed as bait by the rebels for one of their torpedoes, they undoubtedly thinking that we would attempt his removal for

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burial on the coming night, and explode the trap. Not so: the saps went quietly on; and when at last the body was reached the whole affair was dug out—the negro buried, and the torpedo reserved for use if need be. The Confederate soldiers’ manipulation of the corporal’s body after his death carried significant symbolic meaning. In stripping the corporal of his uniform, the soldiers stripped him of his respectability, and by attaching him to a torpedo as bait, they returned his body to a state of property and object-hood. The Confederate soldiers’ actions reversed the basic freedoms and sense of dignity that black soldiers had earned during the summer of 1863. Moreover, Davis’s written composition destabilizes the strong visual language he employed to honor the corporal in his sketch. In the written account, the corporal’s death, denuding, and reduction to bait merited only one disjointed sentence sandwiched between a discussion of white soldiers’ deployment and handling of torpedoes. In fact, the corporal’s tragic circumstances read as an insignificant aside within a story much more concerned with the effects of torpedoes. The title of the account, “The Rebel Torpedoes,” makes clear the centrality of torpedoes to Davis’s written text. Worse, a brief mention that “the negro [was] buried” overlooked the corporal’s rank and individuality—readers never learned his name. Whereas the corporal is the only subject in “The Rebels’ Last Device,” Davis’s written account obfuscates, even discounts, the tragic circumstances of the corporal’s death. In a sense, “The Rebel Torpedoes” encapsulated the worst imaginable outcome for freedmen enlisting in the Union Armed Forces: Not only did the corporal suffer death and the symbolic loss of freedom and dignity, his sacrifice was not granted the tribute and respect it deserved in the predominantly white public sphere as represented by Harper’s Weekly. The only words that appeared on the same page as Davis’s image, however, were in the title, and they complicate the meaning of Davis’s reporting further still. The most basic interpretation of the sketch’s full title, “The Rebels’ Last Device in the Torpedo Line,” is merely descriptive. Although the first section, “rebels’ last device” refers to the corporal’s dead body affixed to a torpedo as bait, the second section, “in the torpedo line,” reminds readers that the scene occurred in the midst of many torpedo traps. However, the force of the first section demands further interpretation. Although the term “rebel” is easily explainable given the politics of Harper’s Weekly and the frequency with which the term was used in the North during the war, the phrase “last device” is not. In his written account Davis used the term “bait,” which is far less nuanced and suggestive than “device.” Whereas “bait” refers to a simple trap or enticement, “device” implies an element

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of stratagem, contrivance, and trickery. With the addition of the word “last” the title frames the “device” as a desperate, final contrivance. Indeed, the phrase “last device” derides the Confederate soldiers who desecrated the corporal’s memory and sacrifice. Still, in an even larger sense the phrase assumes political import. As the key phrase in the title of an image that celebrated the humanity of black soldiers, “last device” mocked the Confederate soldiers’ pitiable attempt to undermine the progress of enlisted freedmen as they fought to preserve the Union during the summer of 1863. In the liminal space between the title and content of Davis’s pictorial reporting and the given title and content of his written reporting, Harper’s Weekly offered its most faithful representation of a black soldier. If Davis’s written account encapsulated the worst imaginable fate for an enlistee, then his sketch encapsulated just the opposite. Freed from the stereotypes that cast him as less than human, in “The Rebels’ Last Device” the corporal appeared to Harper’s Weekly readers as a sentient man poised to assume independence in American society. The sketch embodied “freedom” as many African Americans conceived it, according to the historian Eric Foner—that is, “freedom” not only as an escape from the myriad injustices of slavery but also as a share in the privileges of American citizenship. Alongside Davis’s written text, however, the future of free black soldiers appears less certain. Taken together, image and prose faithfully represent both the great vulnerabilities and highest hopes of black soldiers as they risked their lives and freedom in order to secure them. In her 1998 study “Painting Race,” the art historian Patricia Hills appealed to scholars to “not just identify the overt stereotypes that history has passed down to us, but also to recognize where the stereotypes dissolved and what kinds of images superseded them.” Theodore Davis’s “The Rebels’ Last Device” threatened to dissolve two deeply engrained stereotypes of African Americans that dominated antebellum popular culture: the scourged, nude slave, and the racistscientific “Negro Type.” As the late historian Elizabeth B. Clark has suggested, although these images succeeded in eliciting many whites’ sympathy for slaves, they may also have delimited the political rights of freedmen after 1863. According to Clark, repetitious images of subhuman, degraded, and dependent slaves “set them apart as a class in the viewer’s mind.” By transforming a black corporal from the Third United States Colored Regiment into an idealized and fully realized man, “The Rebels’ Last Device” challenged whites to recognize the humanity that blacks and whites shared. Rather than delimit the political future of African

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Americans, Davis’s sketch imagined the possibility of social and political equality for black soldiers even as his written account emphasized their vulnerability. From the vantage point of the present, we know that the vision that portended to supersede antebellum racial stereotypes in “The Rebels’ Last Device” was fleeting; antebellum racial stereotypes endured through the twentieth century. Furthermore, the ethos of authenticity that guided special artists and northern illustrated newspapers throughout the war years makes clear that postemancipation respectful representations of black soldiers were not generated solely from humanitarian concerns or from respect for black soldiers. Still, the emergence of these representations in northern illustrated newspapers did much to humanize and honor black soldiers in the minds of northern whites who had been so accustomed to seeing base racializations, stereotypes, and distortions of African Americans—even when such images acknowledged black soldiers’ vulnerabilities. Theodore Davis’s reporting on the corporal’s death, both visual and written, offered the most faithful of all such representations. In the liminal space between “The Rebels’ Last Device” and “The Rebel Torpedoes,” idealism converged with tragedy to encapsulate the highest human potential of black soldiers in the context of their greatest sacrifice.

For Their Adopted Home Native Northerners in the South during the Secession Crisis

David Zimring

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n 1838, John C. Pemberton, a Pennsylvania native, told his father, “I should like to become a Virginian by adoption.” Pemberton, who had married the daughter of a prominent Norfolk family in 1845, straddled two sections and kept close ties with the rest of his family back in Pennsylvania. The secession crisis in 1860 forced the U.S. Army officer to make a gut-wrenching decision. He thought long and hard about his choices and his ultimate loyalty. After Fort Sumter, Pemberton weighed pleas from both his family in Pennsylvania and his wife in Virginia. Although he left no contemporary record of his thoughts at this time, his mother understood the decision he faced and predicted he would ultimately side with Virginia. In a letter she wrote to her daughter-in-law in April 1861, Rebecca Pemberton confessed that although he loved his family in Pennsylvania, Pemberton felt duty- and honor-bound to the Confederacy. “As long as he remains,” she wrote, “he will do, he says, anything he is ordered to, excepting going to attack & fire upon Norfolk—if he is ordered to do that, he would resign at once . . . for his heart and views are that the South is right and we are wrong.” Like Robert E. Lee, Pemberton would not raise his sword against his own state; except he meant his adopted state of Virginia rather than his native state of Pennsylvania. Fulfilling his mother’s predictions, ten days after Fort Sumter, Pemberton resigned his commission in the U.S. Army and traveled to Richmond to offer his services to the Confederate government. Although he still loved his family, his ideological convictions and residence in the South dispelled any doubts about his chosen path. And Pemberton was not alone. Across the Union native northerners and southerners alike faced the same critical choice about where their ultimate loyalties led them as the secession crisis unfolded in 1860 and 1861. The vast majority of native white northerners supported the Union, and the vast majority of native white southerners supported the Confederacy. State, sectional, and national loyalties all coincided, providing a relatively simple decision regarding secession. At

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the same time, however, thousands upon thousands of Americans faced a much more difficult dilemma. Native southerners who continued to support the Union were forced to choose between their native section and their love of the Union. Conversely, native southerners who lived in the North and native northerners who lived in the South, by participating in the secession crisis at all, would inevitably declare war against either their native section or their adopted section. In light of these circumstances, how did the individuals who fought against native home and hearth justify their decision? What did these justifications reveal about the nature of sectional and national identity in the United States? Simply by making their decisions about secession, both southern-born Unionists and northern-born Confederates symbolized the fluidity of antebellum sectional and national identity. Rather than have their sectional and national identities fixed from birth, these individuals, along with all other Americans, had the option to shed their loyalties and attachments to their native section and base their decision about secession on criteria other than their birthplace. Throughout the secession crisis and beyond, native southerners who lived in the North expressed their loyalties to the Union with the same enthusiasm as native northerners. Although they still largely considered themselves southerners, their love of the Union and its government overshadowed their connections to the South. At the same time, many native northerners who lived in the South, like Pemberton, oftentimes expressed their connection with the South and the Confederacy and defended both with the same ideological fervor as native southerners. They based their justifications for secession mainly on loyalty to the section that provided them the opportunities and stability to succeed in adulthood. Regardless of how long these native northerners had actually lived in the South, they felt compelled by the power of residence, community, family, property, and ideology to join the Confederacy. Sectional and national identity thus remained highly flexible in the midst of the secession crisis and gave antebellum Americans plenty of choices in determining their loyalties to state, section, and nation. This essay examines the myriad ways in which Americans identified their loyalties during the secession crisis and focuses on the choices made by “adoptive southerners,” native northerners who ultimately sided with the Confederacy. The first section highlights several native southerners who supported the Union and their arguments for doing so. The primary focus of the paper, however, is on northerners whose political leanings and personal interests linked them to their adoptive section, the South. The accounts used in this chapter are drawn from a variety of sources and individuals’ experiences. The individuals in this study were mainly native northerners who grew up in the North and moved to the

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South as adults. This criterion allowed the qualified individuals to experience both sections during their maturity. They did not suffer the bias of being born in the North but living their entire lives in the South. Most individuals included in this study were highly educated elites mainly from New England and the MidAtlantic, making them largely unrepresentative of average white northerners or southerners. Nevertheless, they still provide valuable insight thanks to their motives, trials, and experiences in the secession crisis. They represented those who succeeded in creating a new life in a new section, became respected members of their adoptive communities, and left behind available records. The individuals discussed in this essay help complicate the model of intellectual development that George M. Fredrickson outlined in The Inner Civil War. Fredrickson describes a fractured northern intellectual society attempting to deal with the rejection of its leadership position in society. Some members of his sample rejected political parties and what appeared to the elites to be democratic anarchy. Young members of northern society sought out new ways of becoming useful citizens. Fredrickson hoped to discover “to what extent the war itself acted as a catalyst for intellectual change.” This essay suggests that the very act of secession and the fracturing of American national identity prompted an intellectual change in adoptive southerners, as it did in other Americans, before the war continued the process. Where the secession crisis solidified certain individuals’ connection to the Union, adoptive southerners saw the conflict as a chance to affirm their loyalties to the new Confederacy. This process of identification started, of course, before the conflict. In an age when many Americans sought out new opportunities in different regions of the country, some northerners found better prospects for their personal advancement in the South. Rather than remaining in a region whose political power was waning, these individuals settled in a powerful and growing part of the country. The South represented opportunity and success, exactly what ambitious young men sought. Perhaps those adoptive southerners took comfort in a society that had not, as Fredrickson’s northern intellectuals believed, rejected the leadership of the elite. Whether they arrived in the South for economic or familial reasons, their interests in the region grew, and their identity began to shift toward their adoptive homes. In addition, the experiences of cross-sectional emigrants challenge the supposed power of nativity and upbringing in the formulation of sectional identity and national loyalty. Ancestry, culture, and values taught through family, school, and community supposedly solidified an individual’s consciousness and personality, regardless of where they ended up in life. The “born and bred” argument,

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though certainly not universal, implied that protecting native states overpowered any other considerations. Much of the historiography on the formulation of identity and nationalism among nineteenth-century Americans echoes this thinking. Northerners remained northerners, and southerners remained southerners regardless of where they ended up. Within these historiographical debates lies the question of the meaning of nationalism and sectionalism, including the emotional, ideological, and political ties that Americans used to construct a national identity. On the one hand, these ties served to forge a common national identity; preserving the heritage of the American Revolution proved a particularly strong common bond. On the other hand, sectional differences in interpreting that heritage eroded a shared sense of nationalism, as Americans who lived in different sections tended to believe that sectional beliefs represented the “true” American nation as handed down from past generations. Building a national identity was a constantly evolving process, and Americans struggled to incorporate local and sectional identity into their construction of nationalism throughout the antebellum period. Within the discussion of identity, historians tend to overlook the fact that by 1860 over five and a half million Americans, close to 20 percent of the free population, lived outside of their native state. Sectional as well as national identity encompassed a complex matrix of characteristics and situations that often varied between different groups and individuals who did not feel constrained by their pasts. Americans possessed options and flexibility in the antebellum era when it came to sectional and national loyalty, and historians must not lose sight of the power of timing in shaping Americans’ decisions. For some Americans, the Constitution and the historical nation it created, as well as the tangible opportunities it provided its citizens, transcended sectional factors when they constructed identity and chose loyalties. For native-born Southern Unionists, sectional and state loyalty did not match the importance of the preservation of the Union. The Union represented more than simply an idea; it was the foundation of freedom, opportunity, and stability in their lives. The Constitution especially, in their view, symbolized the greatest defense against chaos for all Americans regardless of state or section. When secessionists attempted to destroy the Constitution through secession, Southern Unionists believed the very bedrock of liberty was threatened. James William Denver, a native Virginian who grew up in Ohio and lived much of his life in California, advocated moderation in the secession crisis, urging his fellow Democrats to search for compromise and ignore fanatics in both the North and the South. Although he considered himself southern-born and sympathized with the threats

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to southern whites by northerners, he did not consider his native state the ultimate source of his loyalty. As he told one of his friends, “We are both Southern born men, and would go every length that American citizens ought to go to protect the Southern people in their just rights; but they have no right to ask us to become traitors to the Constitution and flag of our country. While in Virginia I acknowledged my obligation to the laws of that State . . . but above all else I acknowledged fealty to the Constitution and flag of the United States, and on all occasions I have considered their enemies my enemies.” With connections in both the North and the South, Denver believed neither section held as much promise for him as the Union. Denver sided with the Union because of his belief in the sanctity of the Constitution and the Union, placing national ideology over sectional identity. Two of the most prominent Southern Unionist politicians in the secession crisis, U.S. Senators Andrew Johnson of Tennessee and John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, also referred to the Constitution and their love of the Union as their reason for defying their states’ calls for secession. Johnson, the only senator to remain in the Union after his state seceded, gave several speeches in the Senate urging compromise but also fidelity to the Union and the Constitution. In one such speech, Johnson proclaimed, “I am unwilling, of my own volition, to walk outside of the Union which has been the result of a Constitution made by the patriots of the Revolution.” In a speech he gave to the Senate in December 1860, Crittenden reminded his colleagues that any matter related to the Union and the Constitution “is a question beyond all party politics; that is a question of life and death. The Constitution and the Union are the life of this great people,—yes, sir, the life of life.” In Crittenden’s view, preserving the Constitution and the government based on it was worth any sacrifice. Linking his love of Kentucky with his love of the Union, Crittenden proclaimed, “I love her with all my heart. I am one of the oldest of her children. . . . Kentucky herself came into existence under the Constitution, and under the Union that she still clings to. Under its protection she has grown from a handful of pioneers and a few hunters to the noble State that she now is.” He also elaborated on the burdens Kentucky would suffer in the Confederacy versus the stability and certainty within the Union, especially with the Constitution, which he said was the best government in the world. “In the Union we know that we have found safety,” he argued. “There our fathers found safety, and these fathers constructed it for our safety.” Southern Unionists who served in the prewar army likewise emphasized themes of liberty, opportunity, and the ideology of democratic governance and constitutional security. For these men, resigning to join the Confederacy meant

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betraying the institution and nation that provided them with opportunity. Such an action would be dishonorable. As Philip St. George Cooke, a native Virginian and Union general, explained, “The national government adopted me as its pupil and future defender; it gave me an education and profession; and I then made a solemn oath to bear true allegiance to the United States of America. . . . I owe Virginia little; my country much.” George H. Thomas, another native Virginian who served throughout the war as a general in the Union Army, wrote after the conflict that his antebellum oath as an officer was “a solemn pledge on my part to return the Government some little service for the great benefit I had received in obtaining my education at the Academy.” Through a combination of the opportunities the army provided him as well as the importance of maintaining the integrity of the government, Thomas went to war against his native state on behalf of the greater nation. Native southerners who supported the Union did not reject their identity as southerners, but proclaimed that secession violated the Revolutionary heritage that formed the foundation of their construction of nationalism. William R. Terrill, a West Point graduate who served in Florida at the time of secession, defied his entire family through his loyalty to the Union. Three months after Virginia seceded, Terrill wrote to Andrew Johnson, “I am a southerner, a Virginian—such in every sense of the word save the secession.” In his opinion, the Union and the Constitution together represented opportunity and stability for a free people in a world of potential tyranny. As he told one of his old professors, “The Constitution as written by our fathers is a very plain Chart to sail by and when we use any other we soon lose our reckoning and it will not be long before we are as now— ‘in the breakers.’ ” Two of the highest ranked commanders in the Union forces, General Winfield Scott of Virginia and Admiral David Farragut of Tennessee, likewise valued the Union and Constitution over their native states and felt honor-bound to the opportunities the Union provided them. Farragut’s son summed up his father’s position when he wrote years later, “But he felt that he owed his first allegiance to the United States Government, which had given him his professional education, employment and rank.” General Scott also felt he owed the army and nation, which he had served for over half a century, his full devotion regardless of the actions of his native state. When one of his friends urged him to join Virginia in whatever the state decided, Scott responded, “Friend Robertson, go no further. It is best that we part here before you compel me to resent a mortal insult!” Instead, Scott spent the rest of his career persuading fellow southern officers to remain in the army to avoid destroying the Union they had all sworn to uphold. In

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the cases of Scott and Farragut, national identity, built up through years of public service, overpowered any attachments to native states. They directly confronted the complex nature of their sectional and national identities, and they subsumed their sectional identity in favor of national identity. Native northerners who moved to the South, or “adoptive southerners,” in contrast, confronted conflicts between their native section, adoptive section, and commitments to the Union. What separated northern emigrants to the South from all other northerners were their loyalties to their adopted states. Whether they advocated immediate secession or conditional unionism, these individuals made clear they did not feel the same attachments to the North as they had in the past. By the time of secession, these individuals had developed ties to the region through their families, financial interests, ideological convictions, and residence in southern states. Even native northerners who lived in the South for only a short period of time, and therefore did not have any family or significant financial ties, still felt their state of residence counted for more than the state they had left behind. Their identity was fluid and showed how many Americans were flexible in how they blended sectional and national identity. Admittedly, a few northern emigrants never gave up their northern identities regardless of how long they resided in the South. In their minds, their northern heritage forever barred them from feeling at home in the South. For instance, Franklin and Phoebe Farmer, a couple from Massachusetts who resided in Louisiana, considered themselves outsiders because of their northern heritage as well as their staunch unionism. They even supported Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans in the 1860 election, although Lincoln did not even appear on the ballot in Louisiana. As a further indication of their alienation from their surroundings, a couple of months before the election Phoebe wrote to one of her friends about conditions in New Iberia. “Either the Southern mind has experienced a change, or had a preponderance of northern energy imparted to it,” she said. “[I] find them now generally at home, spending their money on improvements which were much needed.” The tone of her letter reflected the observations of someone distant from her community rather than a part of it. Despite having lived in Louisiana for several years, she did not feel much connection to the state. As a result, the Farmers experienced harassment for their unionist views and fled their home, eventually finding refuge in New Orleans. Franklin Farmer ended up separated from his wife and daughter, who served as nurses in the Union hospitals in the city. Calvin Robinson, a Vermont native living in Florida, went even further by describing the discrimination heaped on native northerners in the midst of se-

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cession. When Florida passed its secession ordinance, Robinson likened it to the dark times of the French Revolution. Robinson recalled that “the reign of terror gained full sway, and the time came when for a northern man to utter openly his love for the Union would be almost suicide. Men who were born and reared in the South could speak against secession long after it was unsafe for northern men to do it.” In response to such threats against life and property, Robinson and his fellow unionists needed to proclaim their secessionist sympathies simply to save their lives, but they continued to meet in secret to plot defenses. As he wrote about the formation of the unionist militia, “A number of these individuals were northern men and unionists, and some few were Germans who had no sympathy with secession. Believing the majority of this group to be loyal at heart, I joined the company.” At all times, Robinson never separated his unionism from his identification as a northerner living in the South. One of the most outspoken native northerners to reject a southern identity during the secession crisis was Sally Baxter Hampton, a native New Yorker who married into one of the premier families in the heart of South Carolina. Throughout the secession crisis, Sally wrote her opinions in the tone of an outsider giving a firsthand account of a national tragedy. Sally constantly referred to South Carolinians as “them” and “they” rather than “we.” As she wrote to her family back in the North, “I am no Southerner heaven knows & at heart if not abolition at least anti-slavery.” Since she continued to think of herself as a northerner, Sally lamented the inevitable breakup of the Union. She had no illusions about the secessionist fervor spreading across the South and felt the country she loved would not survive. And although she opted to remain in the South to stay with her husband, she never gave any indication that she adopted a southern identity. As she wrote to one of her friends, “And what does it do for me? Do you care to know? Apart from home and friends, alone among strangers, the husband for whom I left all, in arms against the country where are still all I love.” Only loyalty to her husband kept her from rejoining the family and Union she loved back in New York. At the same time, however, other northern emigrants expressed their unionism in the context of a southern identity rather than as northerners caught in an alien and hostile environment. The fact that those in the Border States tended to support the Union came as little surprise since their adopted states did not secede. Yet instead of taking their place among their northern families and communities, they joined the ranks of Marylanders, Kentuckians, and other native white southerners who retained their southern identities without giving up their love for the Union. For instance, John H. B. Latrobe, a native Pennsylvanian,

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lived in Maryland during the secession crisis and supported the Union. Latrobe argued that Maryland did not have any reason to secede and predicted that the Confederacy would collapse because of competing interests among the southern states. He also argued that leaving the Union made slaveholders vulnerable to the uncertainties of war. Farther west, Abiel Leonard, a Vermont native and adoptive Missourian, also made proslavery arguments in favor of the Union. Having organized a unionist meeting in St. Louis as early as December 1860, Leonard viewed himself as both an American and a southerner, never hinting at his northern past. Laying out his arguments in favor of Missouri staying in the Union, Leonard wrote, “A border state united with the seceding states we should of course be subject to constant incursions from the free states that surround us on three sides until after being impoverished & desolated for a few years our slaves would be gradually drawn off to the states affording greater security to such property, & in the end we should be where we had better remain, with the old confederacy, connected with the great states of the West.” Leonard understood, like any other Southern Unionist, that if the Border States allied with the Confederacy, they stood to lose far more than the Deep South. Adoptive southerners like Latrobe and Leonard revealed that their decisions regarding secession depended largely on the welfare of their adoptive section rather than their native section, regardless of their views on the Union. Sectional identity thus remained highly flexible in the midst of crisis. Several adoptive southerners in the rest of the South added their own unionist sentiments to the debate. Isaac Murphy, a native of Massachusetts, was one of the strongest unionists in Arkansas. “My principles are all Southern. . . . If necessary, I would lay down my life for the benefit of the Southern States, but I would rather lose a thousand lives than aid in bringing about the untold evils that would assuredly follow in the train of secession.” In Murphy’s view, preserving his adopted section from the follies of secession meant backing the Union above all else. Even in the Deep South, where unionists faced trouble regardless of their origins, adoptive southerners still found a niche. In Texas, Elisha Pease, a former governor and native of Connecticut, served as a rallying point for Texas unionists. He even helped organize a unionist militia regiment in Austin while pleading with his fellow Texans to not rush into secession. Throughout the entire ordeal, Pease maintained his adoptive southern identity along with his unionist sympathies. His friends and neighbors did not consider him a traitor so much as a lost son. On several occasions, they attempted without success to convert Pease to the Confederate cause because they respected him as an adoptive Texan. Their efforts indicated that only Pease’s unionism kept him isolated and not his

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background. A much more compelling reason to stay lay in his connection with Texas and support of southern institutions. As his biographer admitted, “Pease feared that civil war was sure to follow secession and believed that the conflict would endanger civil liberties and southern institutions, to which he was attached as sincerely as most native southerners, more than would continuation in the Union.” Pease, and others like him, chose to stay in their adoptive states rather than return to the North, where they would find a much warmer reception for their unionist views, thanks in large part to the strength of their adoptive southern identities. Taking Pease’s convictions to another level, many other adoptive southerners not only chose to remain in the South but also actively supported secession. In terms of ideology, adoptive southerners who supported secession truly believed in the righteousness of the Confederacy’s actions, and their beliefs cemented their loyalties to their adoptive section. They declared repeatedly that the South had to secede because they needed to preserve slavery, uphold states’ rights, protect their families and homes, and protect the South from domination by an increasingly powerful North. Upbringing in the North did not keep adoptive southerners from incorporating these arguments as their own. They arrived as strangers but emerged as full-fledged members of their communities, working hard to adjust and assimilate into their surroundings. The values and traditions held by all Americans could allow a relatively smooth transition to a Confederate allegiance under the right circumstances. The secession crisis provided just those circumstances. Northerners uprooted from their native states saw nothing wrong in calls to defend their adopted states in the name of liberty and preservation. Henry Watson, a Connecticut native who studied law at Harvard before becoming a plantation owner in Alabama, wrote to a friend in March 1861 that any hint of coercion by the North would end any hopes of a peaceful reconciliation. Although he considered himself a unionist and still held out hope for a peaceful solution, “Force would unite the whole southern states and make unanimous the people of each state & the feeling would be so bitter that a future reconstruction would be impossible.” A Maine native and adoptive Louisianan, Henry Richardson warned his parents about southerners’ eagerness to resist if the Federal government coerced seceded states. He suggested that the best solution to the crisis involved northern states repealing their “unconstitutional laws,” meaning the personal liberty laws preventing the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. John S. Ryan, a native New Yorker and an adoptive South Carolinian, followed this logic by saying that both sides were misrepresented, but he also believed that the South suffered more because

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the North “slandered” its institutions and because it faced possible invasion by northern armies. In each case, these men cited the need to protect their adopted section from the dangers of the North. Specifically, the rise of the Republican Party and the growing strength of abolitionists and antislavery men threatened the existence of the slaveholding South in which adoptive southerners had forged their adult lives. The Republican Party’s attempt to keep slavery out of the territories threatened to undermine the balance and harmony the Union had enjoyed throughout the nineteenth century. As the historian Drew Faust argues, “The South, Confederates insisted, was the legitimate heir of American revolutionary tradition. Betrayed by Yankees who had perverted the true meaning of the Constitution, the revolutionary heritage could be preserved only by secession.” Adoptive southerners could also agree with this perception. Many of these men felt no hypocrisy because in their minds their native section had betrayed everything they loved as Americans and threatened the success they had enjoyed in their adopted states. A young northern emigrant who spent very little time in the South represented a vivid demonstration of this phenomenon. Edmund DeWitt Patterson left his native state of Ohio in 1859 to try his luck in the Black Belt of the Deep South in Alabama as a bookseller, teacher, and clerk. When war erupted, he had little financial stake in the state and a family back in Ohio who eagerly supported the Union. Despite all this, Patterson wasted little time in joining the Confederate army because of his certainty of the righteousness of the Confederate cause. In his December 31, 1861, diary entry, Patterson wrote, “It will be remembered as the year in which the Southern people, unable longer to bear the tyranny of the North, or rather of Northern fanaticism, determined to exercise those rights guaranteed to them by the constitution and, following the example of the colonies, years ago, separated themselves from the old government and set up for themselves another in which there will not be so many conflicting interests.” Harkening back to the Founding Fathers, Patterson presented a justification for southern independence worthy of a native Alabamian. He used the same references to the Revolution, liberty, and justice as expressed by the Union to justify his stance for the Confederacy. Other adoptive southerners cited the wrongs done to the South. They especially voiced their opposition to the rise of a powerful and seemingly radical antislavery party. Amelia Lines, who grew up in New York before moving to Georgia in 1857, railed against abolitionists and predicted in November 1860 that by nominating Lincoln, “the abolitionists set up a candidate which no honest & honorable southern man can vote for or hold an office under. . . . The South

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will not submit to be ruled by the north, and a dissolution of the union will be inevitable.” A month later, Henry Watson wrote that people in Alabama did not hate Lincoln personally but abhorred the meddling by free states into the slavery affairs of the South. They generally blamed the North for the problems facing the Union while defending the South’s right to resist. As Ashbel Smith, an adoptive Texan, told his nephew in Connecticut in February 1861, “The madness of Black Republicanism has destroyed the best government ever devised by man. . . . God grant that the mortification may never fall on me of hearing that you have affiliated in the smallest iota with Black Republicanism.” Even though a majority of the North supported the Republicans by 1860, adoptive southerners like Smith viewed them and their platform as the greatest threat to sectional harmony and the preservation of the country’s ideals as they understood them. Rather than see themselves as northerners forced to choose between competing sections, these men made a conscious effort to place themselves in the secessionist mold. Arthur McArthur, a Maine native and Bowdoin College graduate, found himself in the heart of Louisiana working as a painter after Lincoln’s election and immediately got caught up in the excitement of potential secessionist movements. In a state that lagged behind in the order of secession, this product of New England sounded like a man coming out of Charleston. As early as December 1860, when only South Carolina had actually seceded, McArthur predicted that all the Gulf states would soon follow suit and he intended to serve in the forefront. Through it all, McArthur placed all the blame not on northerners in general but on “Black Republican Fanatics,” whom he hated for meddling with slavery. McArthur declared, “You may tell them all that I wear the blue cockade & am Captain of a Company of ‘minute men’—and that I go with the South.” A few months later McArthur, who supported John C. Breckenridge and the southern wing of the Democratic Party in the 1860 election, reiterated his political philosophies and stated proudly his views on secession. “I was a Breckenridge man, a secessionist, immediate, no compromise—never go back fire eater, as you at the North would call us & from principle I am this knowing as I do [the] political beliefs & policies of both sections and all parties.” Fire-eaters William Lowndes Yancey and Robert Barnwell Rhett, two of the most prominent proponents of secession, could not have stated the immediate secessionist views any clearer. A native son of New England managed to take on the mantle of a Deep South secessionist because he wanted to protect the rights and privileges of his adopted section. Edward Wells, a native of New York and graduate of Rutgers, echoed McArthur’s sentiments. Belonging to a family of states’-rights Democrats, Wells pos-

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sessed long-held political convictions respecting the rights of states to protect themselves against encroachment. By a quirk of timing, he managed to express those views on behalf of a state he resided in for less than a year. While a student at Columbia Law School, Wells fell ill and decided to take a leave from school to improve his health. Taking advantage of the warmer climate in the South, Wells moved to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1860, which enabled him to witness the firing on Fort Sumter the next year. Regardless of the fact that he lived in South Carolina for only a short period of time, Wells hailed the coming of secession and believed every “right thinking & honourable man” needed to back the South Carolina secessionists. His presence in South Carolina reinforced his states’-rights views and allowed him to feel as one with secessionist southerners. In fact, even before South Carolina officially seceded, Wells declared the Union already broken up “because of the Yankee States having vilified it” with acts like the personal liberty laws. Several months later, in one of the most revealing statements expressed by an adoptive southerner toward his former section, Wells told his unionist father, “I believe that with its present folly, fanaticism & wickedness it [the North] is a doomed Nation, & that the South is to become ‘America.’ I therefore think the sooner I get a toehold here, the better.” Similar to many native southerners, Wells defended secession as the only honorable way to save the Union from the perceived perversions of northern fanatics. At the end of April 1861, Wells reiterated his sentiments when he wrote to his family, “Their [the North’s] purpose, in that case, will be to enslave . . . a free & noble people so will oppose them, deo volente, in the bitter end. They will call me at the North a rebel, & traitor. If contending for the rights of free men is treason, than [sic] every honorable man is a traitor. I rejoice in the name.” Similar rhetoric prevailed in the declarations of adoptive southern secessionists all over the South. Joseph Garey, a native Pennsylvanian, enlisted in a Mississippi regiment early in the war, even though he had moved to Cockrum, Mississippi, only in 1860. In May 1862, while discussing the Confederate Conscription Act, Garey took offense at any attempts to curtail individual rights. He hoped his comrades would stay, “but we cannot blame them for resisting any encroachments on their rights. . . . We are fighting for our unalienable rights & for them we inaugurated the war.” Moses Curtis, a native of Massachusetts who graduated from Williams College and Auburn Seminary before becoming a churchman in North Carolina, excoriated northern radicals for their antisouthern rhetoric. He left no doubt of his stance when he wrote to his colleagues in the North, “Let me say to you, our Union is in serious danger, & unless the Northern states recede from their hostile position, & repeal their ‘personal liberty’ Laws, the Southern

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States will secede inevitably. . . . We believe we are, in the main, right; & we know that in some things the North is wrong, has insulted & injured us, & we shall of course, act upon our own sense of the matter, whatever be the consequences.” Down in Louisiana, John Slidell, a native New Yorker, a graduate of Columbia, and senator for his adopted state, felt nothing but relief after Lincoln’s election because it forced all southerners, including himself, to face the prospect of separation. He wrote to one of his business partners in November 1860, “The most skeptical will now be convinced that the South is in earnest and you may consider the Union as already dissolved for I have no hope of the North retracing its steps. We have many true friends there from whom it will be painful to separate but self preservation is the supreme law.” Another adoptive Louisianan, Thomas K. Wharton, wrote in his diary after hearing about the firing on Fort Sumter, “It is hoped that one or two other victories on our part will convince the madmen of the North that their system of aggression must be abandoned.” Felix de Fontaine, a native Frenchman who spent many years in the North before moving to South Carolina just before secession, wrote about the 1860 election, “For the first time in the history of our confederacy, we look upon the spectacle of a sectional party, defiant, unyielding and uncompromising, whose principles aim a blow direct at the annihilation of one of the institutions of the South.” Even adoptive southerners who initially opposed secession insisted their unionism depended on the North’s acting in good faith. If forced to choose, they warned, preserving southern rights meant more to them than preserving the Union, with little regard for their native section. For instance, Robert Hatton, an Ohio native who emigrated to Tennessee with his family and graduated from Cumberland University before working as a lawyer and congressman in his adoptive state, told his friend in January 1861, “If it cannot be preserved—if the North will not yield to us what are our rights—will not guarantee to us those rights—destroy the Union, by the destruction of what it was intended to secure and establish—then, we will have no alternative but to look to ourselves—rely upon our own strength for security.” Nathaniel Pratt, a New Hampshire native who founded a town in Alabama, supported John Bell and the Constitutional Union Party in the 1860 election and urged moderation, yet he still believed “that the South ought to maintain her rights at all hazards.” Another New Hampshire native, George Kendall, who worked on a variety of newspapers in the Southwest, put it more bluntly when he wrote to one of his northern friends in December 1860 about the dangers of secession. “I am still for attempting to hold our Union together,” he insisted. “But I am all the time doubtful whether there is good faith enough left in the North to do justice to the South. If you in the North openly

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nullify by setting aside a plain and palpable provision of the Constitution, any State in the South has an undoubted right to secede or nullify.” Akin to most Southern Unionists, each of these men placed the rights and safety of the South as more important than the preservation of the Union. Still, adherence to secessionist ideology often reflected a much more fundamental issue: residence in the South. The North may have contained the families they grew up with, but the South contained their spouses, children, professions, land, and property. Since the South represented the region where they had forged their own paths to success as adults, any perceived threats to the root of that success unleashed fierce defensive postures. Even without all of those inducements, their mere presence in the South had an enormous influence on their decision. Calls to defend home and country meant the same for them as for their native southern neighbors. Also, witnessing the excitement and earnestness of their neighbors and communities inspired them to join in the same cause and fight in the same armies. Having forged connections with these communities, these individuals felt they had a much greater duty to support those around them than respond to pleas from distant northern families. Professions of connections to a southern state, and the region as a whole, appear profusely in their writings. For example, a native New Yorker and adoptive Virginian, Jedediah Hotchkiss, who operated a school in the Shenandoah Valley, explained to his wife that he would have preferred to stay home, “but then I owe a duty to my country that I must discharge that she may be enabled to put the shield of her protection over my family.” In a similar manner, Edmund DeWitt Patterson recorded in his journal in 1863 his thoughts about his decision to join the Confederacy. “I intended to spend one year there,” he wrote. “I liked the South, I found nothing existing as I had heard it represented, and I concluded to make my home there. Soon the dark clouds of war arose. . . . I saw that there was no alternative but war or disgrace and everlasting dishonor for the South, and embraced the first opportunity of becoming a soldier in the confederate army.” If his adopted state left the Union, Patterson would not stay with the Union either. Just as significantly, after the war Patterson admitted that he thought about returning to Ohio but wanted to counter accusations that he was working as a northern spy. He also recalled how he achieved success in his first jobs as a teacher and clerk in Alabama, and how if he returned to Ohio his family might consider him a failure. Rather than risk the success he had already accrued, and wanting to prove himself to his community, Patterson eagerly cast his lot with the Confederacy over the Union.

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The desire to support neighbors and friends could sway even those who initially supported the Union, though the urge to serve an adopted state was rarely far below the surface. In the fall of 1860 a local Nashville militia company called the “Rock City Guard” elected Charles Quintard, a Connecticut native and adoptive Tennessean, its chaplain, even though he did not consider himself a military man and remained a steadfast unionist during the secession crisis. Once hostilities commenced, the company became part of the First Tennessee Regiment and was ordered to Virginia for active duty. At that point, Quintard recalled, “Being very urgently pressed by members of the Rock City Guard and their friends in Nashville to accompany the regiment as chaplain, I resolved to do so.” Not wanting to let his friends and neighbors down, Quintard threw aside his earlier hesitations and followed them into the defense of the Confederacy. At the same time, he admitted that he felt a duty to support his adopted state above all else. At the end of 1865, Quintard told a Memphis newspaper editor about his recollections of the secession crisis, “I never believed in secession; I never taught secession; I never voted secession. But the crisis came; my path of duty was plain before me. The State, in her sovereign capacity, had dissolved her connection with the Government. The Church . . . must of necessity recognize the de facto government elsewhere, and submit to it.” Therefore, even though it appeared as though Quintard might just as easily have tilted his allegiance back to the Union if he simply visited the North at the right moment, his sense of duty to Tennessee provided him that much more reason to abandon his unionist stance and side with the Confederacy. Even moderate adoptive southerners often spoke with northerners as though talking to strangers. For instance, in the winter of 1861 Robert Hatton, while attempting to salvage a compromise in Congress, consistently asked northern representatives, “I answer you, gentlemen of the North, we demand nothing that it is unfair to ask, that would be dishonorable to grant.” He did not appeal to northern patriotism or his own childhood in Ohio at any point. Hatton did not need to because the South formed the base for his love of the Union. At the same time, Albert Pike, a native of Massachusetts who lived in Arkansas, expressed such feelings by asking his northern colleagues to make more concessions while urging his southern colleagues to speak with one voice. Pike pointed out that the North had vast stretches of territory to choose from while “we had none,” and that the North had nineteen states while “we” in the South had only fifteen. At the same time, he warned his fellow southerners, “They outnumber us, in white population, nearly two to one. They increase principally by foreign emigration,

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in a much larger ratio than we do.” Throughout all his speeches, Pike never indicated that he acted as an ambassador for his former state of Massachusetts. Instead, Pike spoke for his adopted state of Arkansas. Other adoptive southerners espoused a more militant tone than the gentle reasoning of Hatton and Pike. John S. Ryan, an adoptive South Carolinian, wrote to a friend in New York about the excitement of secession in early December 1860. After mentioning that he had already joined a militia company, Ryan said, “I am rejoiced to employ a moment of leisure, to drop a line, to inform you how we are in So. Carolina. We are all for Secession, in fact we, as a State, are out of the Union. Tomorrow is the Election for Electors to declare the fact to the world.” A few weeks later, after South Carolina officially seceded, Ryan told his friend, “We feel, we have done right, and prepared to defend our rights.” Similarly, Moses Curtis, a fellow adoptive South Carolinian, informed his own friend back in the North, “We all, to a man, look upon the election of Lincoln . . . as an insult and an outrage. . . . This is an unusual sort of discourse from me, but it may serve a purpose in showing you that we are in dead earnest here now, even the most conservative of us.” Farther south in Georgia, William Tappan Thompson, a native Ohioan and a prominent newspaper editor, declared in his newspaper, “The Rubicon is passed—a new nation is born! The only question now is what line on the map will be the Northern boundary of our glorious Southern Confederacy.” As Ryan, Curtis, and Thompson demonstrated, adoptive southerners deliberately used “we” to refer to southerners and “they” or “you” to refer to northerners. Only the protection of the South and the success of the Confederacy mattered to them because in their minds the South represented everything they held dear. In addition, several other adoptive southerners went so far as to openly disown their former links to the North. Aaron Willington, a native of Massachusetts, wrote to his friend from South Carolina, “This is my last visit North, for I am thoroughly disgusted with abolitionism.” Though he died shortly thereafter, Willington made clear that his destiny now lay with his adopted state of South Carolina and the cause of the Confederacy. Even more explicitly, Edward Wells took offense at the assumption that just because he grew up in the North, he needed to return to defend its policies. Wells told his family in mid-April 1861, “People ignorantly think they are bound by patriotism to rally to the aid of Lincoln, whether right or wrong, merely because they are Northerner. They seem to imagine that the contest . . . is to be purely sectional. If it is to become purely sectional all my feelings are with the South.” Wells stressed that theme to make all of his family and acquaintances understand the fallacy of their assumptions of sectional loyalty. Although Wells wished he could return to stay with his fam-

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ily, he did not consider that reason good enough to abandon everything else he held dear. “If it were not for my family, I declare I would never desire to see the North again,” he wrote in the same letter. “I blush for such a country & I disown it as mine.” By the end of April, in a final break with his past, Wells declared, “The whole tone of feelings at the North is entirely repugnant to my sentiments & I can not desire to resume my citizenship there. . . . The invading army of the North is already on the march to Washington & must be opposed.” Forced to choose between his native and adopted section, Wells did not hesitate to abandon the former to pursue what he saw as the just cause of a nation he now considered part of himself. Despite their acknowledgment of a northern past, these men viewed the emerging Confederacy as the nation that required their services and symbolized their homeland. Wells himself declared triumphantly, “Calmly & dispassionately then, I would rather make any sacrifice & undergo any privation, rather than help to sustain the would-be tyrants. . . . I should think it our honor to be hung, as a traitor by the Northern Government.” John S. Ryan described South Carolina as the place “in which I live, and where I hope to die.” Ashbel Smith told his cousin a few years after moving to Texas, “The settlement which I am about to make will be my home. . . . Here I hope to see my friends, and here to live with Mrs. S. if I ever marry!” A comrade of George Junkin Jr., a native Pennsylvanian who lived in Virginia and ultimately joined a Virginia regiment, proclaimed, “He is fighting against the S[t]ate that gave him birth, Father, Mother, Bro. & Sister, and for what . . . because he thinks our cause is just. . . . He was not to be persuaded, he could not give up the loyal principles of his noble heart & made the sacrifice of all family connection.” As long as their adopted state stayed in the Union, they could defend it to the death. If the relationship ever changed, however, then their own feelings about the Union would change as well. No other person summed up the position of adoptive southerners more than Edmund DeWitt Patterson. After two years in the Confederate army, Patterson looked back on his decision not to return to Ohio without regret. After enlisting in an Alabama regiment, he wrote in his diary that he could “truly say that I have never for a moment regretted the course I have pursued, although had I returned North at the commencement of the hostilities, I would have had the benefit of a thorough education, which I fear that I now never will have . . . but then, I have the consciousness within my bosom of having done right which amply repays me for all I have lost.” As much as they loved their families in the North and the fond memories of their childhoods, the South still represented the land where men like Patterson made their fortunes, their homes, their families, and their

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lives. Whether they acknowledged it or not, they now vowed to destroy their northern families if necessary to ensure the success of their Confederacy. Instead of a kind of ambassador between sections, adoptive southerners now symbolized either the ultimate patriot or the ultimate traitor, depending on the observer. In their own minds, they served as the ultimate patriots because they vowed to preserve a nation they had adopted voluntarily through their own ideology and residence in their adopted communities. Ultimately, individuals on the eve of the Civil War possessed the power to decide for themselves where their loyalties belonged. Adoptive southerners saw themselves as belonging to the South above all else and made the Confederate nation their own from its inception. Americans had flexible identities and loyalties. The Revolutionary heritage and professional opportunity provided ideological and practical grounds for loyalty to the nation, but mobile individuals applied those loyalties in a variety of ways. Native southerners who chose to support the Union often grounded their loyalties in the historical United States, the Constitution, and the opportunities these had provided them. Some native northerners caught in the South during the secession crisis clung to their sectional identities as northerners. But other native northerners adopted southern identities and a sectional interpretation of American nationalism. They believed it was the South that represented the true heritage of the American Revolution and that provided them with opportunity. Nationalism was shifting and fluid, as was the American population. The secession crisis forced adoptive southerners to sever ties to their birthplaces, their native homes, even their families in pursuit of ideology and defense of home and hearth. Though northern by birth, these individuals, backed mainly by ideology and the desire to protect the source of their adult success, prepared to suffer, fight, and die for their new country’s survival. They actively chose to protect their adopted home over their native home, fortified by their beliefs in the righteousness of secession against invasion from an alienated native section. The Civil War thus became a truly intersectional war, with not only native southerners fighting on behalf of the Union but also native northerners fighting on behalf of the Confederacy.

Thomas F. Meagher, Patrick R. Guiney, and the Meaning of the Civil War for Irish America The Questions of Nationalism, Citizenship, and Human Rights

Christian G. Samito

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ate in the Battle of Gaines’s Mill outside Richmond on June 27, 1862, the Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry served as its Fifth Corps’s rear guard after repeated Confederate assaults caused the entire blue line to buckle. Illness caused Colonel Thomas Cass to relinquish command to the regiment’s young lieutenant colonel, Patrick R. Guiney, who ordered his flag-bearers forward in the face of a Confederate onslaught. At his call, “Follow your colors, men,” Guiney’s soldiers, Irish Americans recruited from the Boston area, lunged toward the Confederate line with their green regimental and Union banners waving, buying precious moments for the rest of their corps to continue its retreat. The Ninth Massachusetts made several more charges until the Irish Brigade, commanded by Brigadier General Thomas F. Meagher, arrived along with other federal reinforcements and deployed to shield their retreating comrades. Meagher misidentified Guiney in the darkness and called out, “Hello, Cass, is this you?” Guiney replied, “Hello, General Meagher, is this the Irish Brigade? Thank God we are saved.” The lives of Meagher and Guiney intersected in ways other than their twilight meeting during one of the Seven Days’ Battles. Both men hailed from Ireland, received a Jesuit education, and became lawyers, high-ranking Union officers, government officials, and leaders of the Irish American community (Guiney in Boston, Meagher on a national scale), who drew a crowd when they spoke and received coverage by the ethnic and nonethnic press. Moreover, speeches and public letters by Meagher and Guiney reveal parallels in how both men thought about the meaning of military service for the Union, reconciled a sense of identity that included allegiance to Ireland as well as the United States, and aided in a

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transformative moment in American nationalism. In the course of their military service and public discussion of wartime political developments, Meagher and Guiney engaged in similar ways with a number of interrelated, and often mutually reinforcing, progressions. The private letters of Guiney to his wife help us understand these developments on a personal level, as well. The Civil War forged, in the words of the historian Melinda Lawson, a stronger “national identity and patriotism” through which “a ‘Union’ of states had become a ‘nation’ of Americans,” and this process required Civil War experiences to be “interpreted” and “given public meaning.” Examining the thoughts and activities of Meagher and Guiney allows for a fine-grained analysis of how these interpretations developed on an individual level and then how these two intellectuals helped shape the public discussion. This examination also allows for refinement of Lawson’s argument that the evolution of Civil War–era nationalism in the North involved the cultivation of “a preeminent national loyalty rooted in existing religious, political, and cultural values and identities,” redefinition of “the relationship between the individual and the national state,” and envelopment of “the nation-state in a mystical aura.” Meagher and Guiney assisted with the last two points, and very early on accepted and asserted broader Northern concepts of the Union and American patriotism, but they—and many members of their ethnic community—defined a national loyalty that included Catholic and Irish American identities alongside other ones. Meagher and Guiney thus point to a more nuanced possibility than is offered by most historians who debate whether Irish American service to the Union helped accelerate assimilation of their ethnic community into American society: fuller integration alongside maintenance of an ethnic and religious identity. Both Meagher and Guiney promoted a broader concept of American nationalism that challenged nativism and incorporated immigrants and Catholics, based on devotion to the republic, into their definition of the American people. Although neither Meagher nor Guiney cited Abraham Lincoln on this point, their position evoked his pronouncement in Chicago on July 10, 1858, that immigrants became connected to the founding generation as well as other Americans by their fidelity to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, a civic religion that could form the bedrock of a unified nation-state regardless of sectional and ethnic differences. Furthermore, Meagher and Guiney called to mind Lincoln’s argument for devotion to the Union as expressed in his First Inaugural and his address of July 4, 1861. As a part of this broader concept of American nationalism, Meagher and Guiney engaged with the law and practice of citizenship at a time when it was

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undergoing redefinition. Citizenship, acting as both a political creation and a legal concept, determines legal membership in the country and helps define the duties that individuals owe to it as well as the rights they enjoy; acting on both a social and cultural level, it helps define inclusion and exclusion in the community, as well as personal identities and allegiance, and thus collective patriotism. As of the Civil War, national citizenship existed as a vague concept that allowed the states to govern most of the rights and privileges now associated with it—and the states did so by taking into account such factors as one’s race, slave status, gender, and whether one was a naturalized or native-born citizen. The meaning of naturalization abroad also remained murky. The United States embraced the concept of expatriation rights, that a person could choose a different allegiance without permission from his or her native government. European nations, however, followed the principle of perpetual allegiance: Without permission, a subject could not change allegiance by any act, not even naturalization abroad. This divergence meant that British authorities did not recognize the naturalization of Irish immigrants who became United States citizens. As Meagher and Guiney argued for a more robust defense of expatriation rights and a national definition of citizenship (even if they did not delve into legal theory or address fully what rights should be associated with that status), they promoted the modern American view that the federal government can define who is a citizen and protect these individuals at home and abroad—a position that supported a stronger unified nation-state and sense of United States nationalism. In arguing for Irish American inclusion in the American identity, both men addressed citizenship on the social and cultural level as well. Their wartime experiences and intellectual predispositions also caused Meagher and Guiney, who identified themselves as Democrats at the start of the Civil War, to evolve in their viewpoints and eventually support Lincoln and the Republican Party. In some ways, their change seems like a natural progression in terms of what was taking place in the North at the time: The historian SusanMary Grant identified the “development of a specifically northern nationalism that culminated, in 1856, with the emergence of a northern political party, the Republicans. The Republican Party was engaged in, and was itself partly the result of, a process whereby the American national idea became associated with the North in general and with the Republican Party in particular.” As northerners increasingly criticized slavery, they also, according to Grant, “came increasingly to interpret the Declaration of Independence as the nation’s ‘mission statement.’ ” Moreover, for Irish-born men like Meagher and Guiney, becoming antislavery fit intellectually with the transatlantic abolition and repeal movements in Ireland

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in the 1840s. Meagher and Guiney progressively embraced a concern for human rights as part of the broader changes taking place. Yet their political transformation earned Meagher and Guiney intense criticism from some members of their traditionally Democratic Irish American community, revealing at the same time that this ethnic community was not monolithic, nor was it unaffected by the overall party fluidity of the Civil War era. At a time when Lincoln probably hoped at best for Irish Americans to become War Democrats, at least some of them had the intellectual and political courage to become Republicans (and reject the conception that it was a Protestants-only party) and try to persuade members of their ethnic community to follow suit. As William Kurtz addresses in his essay in this book, many Irish Americans proved unreceptive. The backlash Meagher and Guiney faced for some of their views highlights the intensely partisan and contested nature of changes taking place during the Civil War. In embracing the Republicans, Meagher and Guiney went beyond the War Democrats, who supported controversial war measures for the sake of the Union, to accept broader egalitarian and transnational republican themes, foreshadowing an alliance during Reconstruction between some Republicans and Irish Americans. In this way, Meagher and Guiney helped men like Abraham Lincoln and Wendell Phillips root the American identity in the “idea” of the Declaration of Independence but at a cost to themselves, because some members of their ethnic community opposed parts of the Republican program—and public intellectuals who spoke in favor of it. Meagher, Guiney, and Their Civil War Service Born in Waterford, Ireland, in 1823, and educated by English Jesuits at Stonyhurst, Thomas F. Meagher early on established a reputation as an impassioned Irish nationalist. After Meagher helped lead a failed uprising in 1848, the British banished him to the penal colony of Tasmania, but he escaped and arrived in New York City in late May 1852, where thousands of cheering Irish Americans greeted their newest hero. Meagher became a prominent orator, speaking in a lecture tour that took him through New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the South, and he joined the New York bar in September 1855. The following spring Meagher founded a weekly newspaper, the Irish News, in which he actively campaigned for Democrat James Buchanan’s candidacy for president. By 1858, Meagher solidified his position as an apologist for the South, and he scorned abolitionism. Away in

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Central America during most of 1860, Meagher returned to New York City in January 1861 in the middle of the secession winter. Just prior to the barrage on Fort Sumter, Meagher declared his “sympathies” were “entirely with the South,” but his stance changed once hostilities erupted, and he joined the Irish American Sixty-Ninth New York State Militia (NYSM). The regiment fought at First Bull Run, suffering heavy casualties and losing its colonel, Michael Corcoran, to capture. The Sixty-Ninth NYSM arrived home in New York City on July 27, 1861, and within weeks began recruiting to fight again as the core of an entire Irish American brigade that Meagher organized. With the rank of brigadier general, Meagher commanded the Irish Brigade during the Peninsula Campaign and the Battles of Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, and he later served in the Western Theater. Meagher socialized with Guiney, who called him “my friend” in a letter to his wife, while they served in the Army of the Potomac. Patrick R. Guiney was born in County Tipperary, Ireland, in January 1835 and immigrated to Maine with his father as a boy (his mother and brother arrived a few months later). Guiney spent most of his youth laboring in factories and machine shops. In October 1854, he entered the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, but left after a year because of financial difficulties. Guiney studied law in Portland, Maine, under Charles Walton, who later served as a Republican in Congress from March 4, 1861, to May 26, 1862. Upon moving to Boston in 1858, Guiney practiced law and wrote for the Boston Times. In 1859, Guiney married Jeannette Doyle and moved with her to the pleasant Boston suburb of Roxbury, where he won a seat on its common council (in spite of the nativism prevalent in Massachusetts at the time). The couple’s firstborn son died in infancy, but Jennie, as Guiney liked to call her, gave birth in January 1861 to Louise Imogen Guiney, who grew up to become an eminent poet. Despite having a young wife and an infant daughter, the twenty-six-year-old Guiney joined a three-year regiment of Catholic Irish Americans that Thomas Cass raised in Boston, with Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew’s support, shortly after the firing on Fort Sumter. When the regiment mustered into service on June 11, 1861, Guiney accepted the captaincy of Company D. On June 24, the men of the Ninth Massachusetts paraded through crowded Boston streets, and the next day, they began their journey by steamer to Washington, D.C., taking inspiration on passing George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon on the way. The Ninth Massachusetts spent the next couple months defending the federal capital, during which time Guiney rose in rank to become its lieutenant colonel.

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The regiment earned its sobriquet, “Fighting Ninth,” during the Peninsula Campaign. In addition to its role at Gaines’s Mill, the Ninth Massachusetts helped defend Malvern Hill a few days later, where a bullet mortally wounded Cass, one of 421 casualties suffered by the regiment in the fighting before Richmond. Guiney became colonel and led the Ninth Massachusetts through its ensuing campaigns with the Army of the Potomac until a bullet hit above his left eye, destroying it and the surrounding bone, on the first day of the Wilderness in May 1864. Surgeons identified Guiney’s wound as mortal and did not want to put him through an agonizing operation to remove the slug but Guiney, on regaining consciousness, insisted that it be done. Afterward, Jennie located her wounded husband and nursed him to recovery at home in Roxbury. Still recuperating, Guiney rode at the head of his regiment when the Ninth Massachusetts returned home on June 15, 1864, and marched to Boston’s Faneuil Hall for a celebratory dinner. The Political Meaning of Irish American Service Almost immediately with the outbreak of war, Meagher and Guiney considered the meaning of Irish American service to the Union in terms of identity and allegiance as well as how wartime fluidity could provide an opportunity to challenge nativism. Highlighting its impact on Ireland, Meagher (and to a lesser extent, Guiney) placed the Civil War in a transnational context and echoed Lincoln’s assertion that supporting the Union helped the cause of republicanism worldwide. At the same time, Meagher argued, as did Guiney, that Irish American service helped integrate that ethnic community into the United States. Both men expressed a vision of American nationalism that incorporated immigrants who proved their devotion to the republic and its ideals rather than automatically excluded them based on their religion or birthplace. On August 29, 1861, thousands of people attended a fair at Jones’s Wood in New York to benefit the families of members of the Sixty-Ninth NYSM who had fallen at the Battle of First Bull Run. Various stands sold beer, watermelon, and ice cream amid music and dancing. In his keynote oration, Meagher negotiated dual allegiances in arguing why Irish Americans should fight, and in the process he began to affirm an identity for that ethnic community within a stronger American nationality. Meagher reminded his largely Irish American audience that while they enjoyed the festival, widows mourned, and “little hearts that have grown big and heavy in darkened rooms” waited in vain to hear the footsteps of their fathers. Meagher offered the sacrifice of these soldiers on behalf of the

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entire ethnic community. Those “slain in battle” sealed “their oath of American citizenship with their blood,” Meagher declared, and those assembled claimed “these soldiers as our brothers,” yet moments later he also maintained, “as the tide of life rushed out the last thought that left their hearts was for the liberty of Ireland.” Incorporating the entire Irish American community into this bequest of the dead, Meagher included all its members in a global defense of liberty as well as an affirmation of their citizenship bond in the United States, sustaining “a Government which, while it is the least exacting, is the most encouraging and beneficent, the world has ever known” and “in the perpetuation of which their interests, as emigrants driven by devastating laws and practices from their native soil, are vitally involved!” Meagher praised American republicanism, emphasizing to his audience, “Never . . . was there a cause more sacred, nor one more just, nor one more urgent” than that of the Union, and he argued that it was imperative to maintain it for the benefit of the entire world. After reminding the crowd that he had good credentials as a Democrat—he had not yet switched his political affiliation—Meagher argued that the president’s party or the platform on which he won election fell irrelevant in times of national crisis because the needs of the nation trumped partisanship. Building to his concluding crescendo, Meagher incorporated a subject sure to arouse the passions of any good Irish American: England. Meagher declared that the same English aristocracy that oppressed Ireland now opposed the United States government, and he vowed that the Confederacy, which enjoyed the “patronage” of such an aristocracy, can “never have the heart and arm of any Irishman who has learned the history of the Stars and Stripes . . . and who . . . foresees . . . the liberty of Ireland.” Meagher’s final argument, punctuated by frequent cheering, incorporated Irish Americans into the national polity while inextricably linking the fate of Ireland and the Union. “Every blow that, with the shout of ‘Feac an bealac’ . . . clears the way for the Stars and Stripes,” Meagher proclaimed to his audience, discouraged the “English aristocracy” and deprived it of allies, “and thus so far avenges and liberates the island of which it has been the persecution.” Meagher called to his listeners (and to people who read newspaper reprints of the speech), “let us, who hail from Ireland . . . we, who have taken an oath of loyalty . . . not to any one isolated State, but to all the States . . . that built up the powerful and resplendent Union . . . stand to the last by the Stars and Stripes . . . the illustrious insignia of the nation that, of all the world, has been the friendliest sanctuary of the Irish race.” Meagher eagerly took his oratory beyond New York. On September 14, 1861, thousands of people gathered in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to hear Meagher speak

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at a Union rally organized by P. T. Barnum. Placing the Civil War in an international context, Meagher described the United States as bestowing “a glorious future not only to my own native Ireland but to humanity at large,” and he referred to the “Stars and Stripes” as “my flag.” In unison with the general conception of the Union expressed by Lincoln and other northerners, Meagher emphasized that should the American flame be extinguished so also would that of republicanism worldwide. He also rejected the validity of secession by declaring that, in a republic, “the creed and obligation of every citizen is this—to obey the will, the registered and the legitimate and constitutionally expressed will of the majority.” Meagher vowed that he would have sustained even a Know Nothing if duly elected. Nonetheless, he took this opportunity to mark the Know Nothing Party’s demise, noting to the laughing crowd, “I don’t know whether it [the Know Nothing Party] is dead or alive, and I don’t care whether it is alive or dead.” Nine days later, speaking in Boston, he answered the question with a definite statement: “I proclaim it—know nothingism is dead!” Meagher explained that one became an American through the choice of embracing its republican ideals. Speaking to Irish Americans who refrained from enlisting because of nativist strictures against them, Meagher promised that “vengeance” came not in holding aloof but proving “you are not only worthy of your commissions and your arms as citizen-soldiers, but that you prove yourselves better than citizens native born.” Meagher urged Irish Americans that, regardless of state-imposed strictures, their oaths to the United States created a duty “to the Union,” and moreover, so many Irish lives had mixed into the United States since its founding, and ideological ties so deeply linked Americans and Irish in mutual devotion to the idea of liberty worldwide, that staying out of the war involved turning one’s back on both countries. Although it is unknown whether Frederick Douglass read Meagher’s published remarks (we do know Douglass was familiar with Meagher—he had, in 1855, identified Meagher by name in an essay in which he complained that Irish Americans could be admitted to the bar when native-born black men could not be), he later made similar arguments when he pronounced to African Americans in Philadelphia on July 6, 1863, “the speediest, and best possible way open to us to manhood, equal rights and elevation, is that we enter this service,” and that regardless of local prejudices, “The State is not more than the nation. The greater includes the lesser. Because the State refuses [to arm blacks], you should all the more readily turn to the United States. . . . Citizenship in the United States will, in the end, secure your citizenship in the State.” In an appearance in Brooklyn on October 24, 1861, Meagher repeated his argument that the outcome of the war affected American interests and perpetuated

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republicanism’s beacon in the world, but this time, he added the argument that war would strengthen the United States as a nation-state, citing English, German, and French history as examples. Meagher also announced that naturalization rendered Irish Americans full-fledged citizens of the United States, lacking any distinction from the native-born and standing on an equal footing as to obligations and privileges, with implications as to expatriation rights and European adherence to perpetual allegiance. Meagher called on his “countrymen” to protect the land and institutions that had provided a harbor to Irish immigrants. “I consider this quarrel as my quarrel,” explained Meagher, and “between citizens adopted and citizens born there should be no difference as to duties they are bound to discharge to their common country.” Despite his Irish nationalism, Meagher also announced the Union struggle took precedence over that for Ireland’s liberty. In a March 1862 letter declining an invitation to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago, Meagher addressed charges that Ireland remained the priority for him and other Irish Americans. “You perceive that . . . the perils of another land, and the means and certainty of dissipating them, have been uppermost in my mind,” Meagher wrote, before assuring, “We, adopted citizens, owe to her [the United States] our first duty. Upon her destiny depends the fate of Democracy, the world over.” Honored by New York City in June 1863 with a medal and a banquet at Astor House, Meagher placed the Irish Brigade’s service within the context of the larger New York community, native and immigrant, and he explained how immigrants could embrace an American identity based on choice. Meagher described the Excelsior and Irish Brigades as “one in heart, one in purpose, and they struck, as it were, with one arm” on the battlefield. He also complimented New York’s German American soldiers, denouncing the “ungenerous and cowardly aspersions” aimed at them after Chancellorsville. As Meagher explained: No wonder that the Germans and the French, and the Irish, and every other foreign nationality should take equal interest, and display equal gallantry in defence of the authority of this Republic, since with those whose homes had been established with the foundations of it, or whose families can point to an honored line of ancestors, of the oldest of these States, the emigrant who arrived here this morning is equally concerned. It was the golden hope of having here an assured home in which he could retrieve the fortunes of the past, and acquire here a country and a flag of which he might boast before all nations; that lured him across the seas, and brought him to take the toast of citizenship.

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Guiney’s letters to his wife show that he reflected on themes similar to the ones Meagher discussed publicly, but within the context of how his service affected his family. When he enlisted, Guiney suffered intensely at separation from his wife and young daughter. In his first letter home, written before his regiment left Boston, Guiney also expressed deep concern for his family’s financial security and several times he thought of resigning during the early months of the war so that he could ensure its needs were met. Hearing a band play “Home Sweet Home” one night in July 1861 caused Guiney to reflect that his six-month-old daughter did not yet know him, and later that year he admitted he missed this family so much that “thoughts of home unnerve me.” Personal honor, ambition, and loyalty to the Union cause—the same factors that led Guiney to join the army in the first place—precluded his resignation, however. Though conscious that soldiering might result in his death, Guiney in one letter reminded Jennie about a conversation they shared before he enlisted, summarizing for her: “The cause in which we are enlisted is truly a good and grand one—one that will entitle those who labor in the achievement of its success to the gratitude and remembrance of the present, as well as of unborn generations—one that of itself compensates by its sublimity and goodness for all which may be sacrificed in its defense.” Guiney noted that friendships within the regiment and the reality that military service would benefit his future career reinforced his decision to remain in the army. In a letter the next day, Guiney called the Union cause one as “bright and grand as the Sun.” Guiney also relished the soldier’s active life, one that stood in marked contrast from Boston’s world of writing and law, as a test of his manhood. George M. Fredrickson identified this impulse within the upper class of American society when he examined Boston’s Brahmins during the war, and it applies to Guiney as well: Although not a Brahmin, he was an intellectual with a rising legal career by 1861. He described for Jennie in July 1861 camping “under a most beautiful bed curtain all bespangled with the diamonds of heaven,” and assured her that he withstood well the intense Virginia heat. The following month Guiney reported to his wife that he endured the strenuous living of picket duty during a severe rainstorm “first rate,” adding that he preferred to be in the “fields and forests” during good weather where, in contrast to “monotonous camp,” he could enjoy “splendid air,” “plenty of exercise,” and the “romance” of duty in northern Virginia. During one fierce storm early in the Peninsula Campaign, Guiney joked that he expected to float away during the night but in a more serious vein said that he was “enjoying hardships of which we never, until now, even dreamed.”

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Guiney’s most troubling privation, at least in the early days of war, was an occasional want of mental challenge, and he shared with many soldiers a frustration with the monotony of camp life. To stimulate his mind, he read newspapers from Boston and New York, and books such as Les Misérables, David Copperfield, and works by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins. Like Meagher, Guiney revealed during the war a continuing Irish identity. Of First Bull Run, Guiney claimed that an Irish and a Scotch regiment (the SixtyNinth and Seventy-Ninth New York, respectively) fought best while the “Yankees feel sore” because “many of the natives ran.” In the same letter, Guiney related an incident shortly after the battle in which his regiment “was set to work doing a job which they did not well understand. An Army officer (native) rode up and addressing Captn. [Edward] Fitzgerald said—‘It is strange that when your countrymen undertake to do anything they do it wrong.’ ‘There is one thing about it,’ says the Capt. in reply, ‘They stand their ground in a fight—they don’t run.’ This hit a sore spot—and he immediately . . . spurred up his horse and left.” After he officially took command of the regiment in August 1862, Guiney vowed in remarks to one of his companies “to make [the regiment’s] future, as well as its past, a testimony of Irish devotion to the vindication and establishment of human liberty.” On receiving a new regimental flag after Antietam, Guiney sent the original green banner to Governor Andrew and assured him in an accompanying letter that “when all else looked vague and battle-fortune seemed to be against us, there was a certain magic in the light of this old symbol of our enslaved but hopeful Ireland, that made the Ninth fight superhumanly hard.” At the same time, Guiney evinced a strong allegiance to the United States alongside his Irish identity. When his command became the regiment’s color company, Guiney proudly reported to his wife, “The stars and stripes and the green flag of Ireland will fling their shadows over me in the Battle field,” and in letters to her he referred to “our country” to mean the United States while he also called Ireland the “country I loved from my inmost heart.” A few weeks after the Battle of Fredericksburg, Guiney’s morale hit a low point, and he wrote, “How the thought of our defeat pains me! . . . If we could only be successful how proudly I could live afterwards in the knowledge of my humble participation. If we fail I never can be half the man. The charm of life will be gone. Even now the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ sounds like a wail to me.” He followed this letter with one in which he lamented, “If the country is to be broken—then we will have no country to love or serve.” Acknowledging a deeply personal American allegiance despite his Irish birth, Guiney by 1864 could write a friend after his near-mortal

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wounding, “God gave me an opportunity . . . to shed my blood for our beloved Republic,” and conclude a campaign speech for Lincoln by saying he would pray and fight for the United States until the day of his death. Like Meagher, Guiney used Irish American military service to oppose nativism and stake a location for members of his ethnic community within the American nationality. This process started early on in the war. Before it left Boston, Governor Andrew told the Ninth Massachusetts during a flag presentation ceremony that the nation knew no distinction “between its native-born citizens and those born in other countries”—a comment that challenged recent discrimination against Irish Americans. Huge throngs cheered from the streets as the Irish American soldiers proceeded to Boston Common for a review. If one onlooker commented, “There goes a load of Irish rubbish out of the city,” support for the Union generally trumped ethnicity as the Ninth Massachusetts departed for war with an emerald green banner that conjoined Irish and American symbols. Shortly afterward, the city of Boston honored the Irish flag for the first time by having it raised, along with the flags of other nations, during July Fourth celebrations. Harvard in July 1861 paid its respects to a Catholic prelate for the first time by bestowing on Bishop John Fitzpatrick an honorary doctorate in divinity. The state legislature compromised on the issue of requiring Catholic children in the public schools to read from the Protestant Bible. New legislation required daily reading of the Bible but without written or oral discussion, and students would not be compelled to read from a version of the Bible that contravened the religious faith of their parents. For its part, Boston’s Irish Catholic newspaper, the Pilot, proclaimed that “the sons of St. Patrick” had “trampled” over the “worst insult ever offered to human freedom”: the principle “that political liberty should be confined entirely to those born” in the United States (the paper conveniently forgot about slavery here), and that by “the squelching out of ‘nativism’ ” they had “removed from republican freedom its most scandalous foe,” and thus redeemed the United States among other nations. Irish American service helped bring about the repeal of a nativist amendment to the Massachusetts state constitution which had curtailed the voting rights of Irish immigrants. Ratified on May 9, 1859, the amendment held that no foreign-born person could vote or hold office unless he resided within the United States for two years subsequent to naturalization (nativists had earlier proposed a twenty-one-year period before voting and complete prohibition from office for Catholics and immigrants). Noting Irish American service in the Bay State’s regiments, the Pilot viewed the November 1861 Massachusetts election as an opportunity “when the repeal of the ‘two years’ amendment’ may justly be urged. . . .

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The adopted citizens have shown their devotion to the stars and stripes, and now is the time to demand all the rights and privileges to be enjoyed under them.” Governor Andrew convinced the Massachusetts legislature to annul the law in 1862, and a slim margin of Massachusetts voters ratified repeal in a spring 1863 referendum. In his letter accompanying the original green banner of the Ninth Massachusetts, tattered after the Peninsula campaign, in exchange for a new one, Guiney used his tender of “these shreds” to emphasize the change in Irish American status that came as a result of their service. Guiney expressed to Andrew “the warmest thanks of myself and command for your generous efforts to expunge from the Constitution of Massachusetts that provision which would make political distinction between us and our brothers in hope, conviction, disaster, and victory.” Andrew responded by complimenting the Ninth Massachusetts’s bravery and recalling “the emotion which your regiment, with its symbols both of fatherland and adopted country, awakened in my heart when I bade farewell and God speed to Col. Cass and his command.” Andrew summed up the significance of that ceremony: “Affectionate memory of a paternal home far away—of dear ones left behind, seemed joined by that union of the banners, to manly faith and dutiful devotion to the home and hope and country which you intended your children should know as the land of their birth, as it was that of their father’s adoption.” Andrew ably capitalized on the moment Guiney provided to articulate his belief that Americans would honor all Massachusetts soldiers, placing Irish Americans within that fold and complimenting the services they had performed to “your country.” Accordingly, Guiney declared in a speech after the war, “Go up to the State House and you will find the torn and faded banners of the Ninth Regiment, and so long as they remain there no man will ever be heard to say that the Irish people living in Massachusetts are enemies of the republic.” Meagher and Guiney argued that Irish American military service challenged nativism by showing that Catholic Irish could be loyal to the United States, and in the process they embraced broader Northern views of the Union and American nationalism but with a twist: They asserted an inclusive vision of American nationalism based not on birthplace or religion but on a choice to adhere to American values. Meagher and other members of the Irish American community claimed that they actually helped restore American republican ideals by defeating nativism through that service. Moreover, while Meagher and Guiney each maintained a strong Irish identity, one sees in them the strengthening of an American allegiance during the Civil War. Finally, Meagher consistently placed the Civil War in a transnational context, arguing that by defending the Union,

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Irish Americans not only preserved the United States as a refuge for future Irish immigrants but also maintained the global beacon of republicanism that, if extinguished, also darkened the chance of creating a comparable republic in a liberated Ireland. In contrast to nativists who claimed Irish Catholics could not embrace republican ideals, Meagher and other Irish nationalists looked forward to the day when Ireland lived under them. Meagher, Guiney, and the Republican Party A striking political transformation took place in both Meagher and Guiney as part of the above process: Each one started the war as a Democrat but eventually supported Lincoln and the Republicans. In his Bridgeport, Connecticut, speech of September 14, 1861, Meagher emphatically declared, “I did not vote for [Lincoln]. I never would have voted for him. I am what they call a Jacksonian Democrat. There is not a single proposition of the Republican party to which I say ‘Yea.’ ” Yet by the fall of 1863, Meagher wrote a letter to the Union Committee of Ohio in support of the War Democrat gubernatorial candidate, John Brough, backed also by the Republicans, against the Peace Democrat Clement Vallandigham. Meagher equated supporting Brough with standing shoulder to shoulder with the soldiers who fought on the “rocks of Gettysburg” and “bluffs of Vicksburg,” whereas voting for Vallandigham undermined Lincoln and would “inflame” the Confederacy. Several newspapers printed the letter, including the Irish American, which interpreted it as a slight against New York’s Democratic Governor Horatio Seymour and distinguished between support for the Union and for the Lincoln Administration. Furthermore, many Irish Americans were suspicious of the Union League, believing (correctly) it wanted the reelection of Lincoln, and they resented Meagher’s association with it and his support of Lincoln’s reelection in 1864. Meagher also wrote letters to the Dublin Irishman on September 5, 1863, and the Dublin Citizen on September 26, 1863, letters which the Loyal Publication Society shortly afterward published as a pamphlet. In the letter to the Citizen, Meagher provided an intellectual response to the conflict between slavery and American republican values when he attacked slaveholders as the cause of the war and, in the language of an abolitionist, described slavery as a “cancerous disease, as it was the glaring disgrace, of this great nation, and a violent contradiction of the principles on which it was established.” Both Lincoln and the Irish political leader Daniel O’Connell had made similar arguments. Meagher claimed he had earlier accepted slavery because it was part of the Union to which

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he was devoted. Wartime developments, Meagher explained, allowed for freeing the slaves, so that “the rebellion of the South emancipated all true Republicans from their complicity with an ordained system of bondage, which . . . was not only in conflict with their humanity and conscience, but falsified the spirit, and neutralized the glory of a Republic, which otherwise was unexceptionable and incomparable.” In the letter to the Irishman, Meagher placed the survival of the Union in transnational terms by calling it “the sanctuary and renovation of the impoverished and oppressed of Europe.” The Irish-American criticized Meagher’s support for Republicans, declaring that he represented “neither the feelings nor the sentiments of his countrymen” in political matters, and lamenting, “It is not an enviable position for one for whom a better fate might have been hoped; but it is of his own choosing. . . . Between him and the people who loved and trusted him once he has opened a gulf he never can bridge over.” Another edition of the paper stated, “In General Meagher’s fall from the high position he once held in the esteem and affection of his countrymen, we see only a subject for regret; our indignation at his unprovoked attack upon our people has long since subsided into contempt, and we have no desire to add a deeper tint to an act that has gone so far to darken the record of a life, of which the promise was once so fair.” Meagher’s continued outspoken Republican support seriously crippled his position within the Irish American community, so much so that he sought a fresh start in the West after the war. In October 1863, Meagher wrote Guiney to thank him for his support. Meagher declared his “utter disregard, if not a thorough contempt,” of Irish American scorn for his outspoken political opinions, and he condemned the Democratic Party as well as Irish Americans who blindly followed it. “Now-a-days to be a Democrat,” Meagher wrote, “is to be the partisan of a selfish and conscienceless faction, which under the captivating pretexts of the State-Rights, Habeas Corpus, and the popular claims and rights of the kind, would cripple the national power,” and, he explained, “hence the energy . . . with which I have broken loose from [it].” Guiney could empathize with his friend: He experienced similar troubles because of his own earlier political conversion, highlighting the contested nature of both intellectuals’ outspoken stands. As early as September 1861, Guiney repudiated his support of the Democrats, writing to his wife, “The craven Democrats who rot in office and starve out of it, are trying all over the country to get up an opposition to the government.” In July 1863, Guiney called participants in the New York City Draft Riot “soulless ruffians” (on this point, other Irish Americans serving in the field offered similar criticism), and he wrote Jennie, “I hope the ar-

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tillery will exempt them from the Draft forever!” Guiney also condemned slavery and agreed in principle with the abolitionists, writing to his wife in July 1861 that “slavery curses the land in which it is” and describing (as Republicans often did) that slavery led to lower productivity in comparison to free soil areas. Near Big Bethel, Virginia, in late March 1862, Guiney received five black females into his lines and proclaimed: “In the name of old Ireland and Massachusetts, I set you free.” A few weeks later, he sent his wife some “fragrant” Virginia leaves, which were, as he noted, “given to me by the only Virginia lady I met on the march—she was black.” Guiney openly expressed his political beliefs even though, as he noted in an 1866 speech, “These opinions did me no good at the time. Indeed, they were not agreeable to my dearest friends, as I had occasion to know.” Guiney maintained in that speech that he “was the only member of that regiment who called himself a Republican,” likely an exaggeration but a revealing one.  Beneath a seemingly smooth rise to command, tensions with elements of Boston’s Irish American community plagued Guiney, revealing, in contrast to postwar regimental histories that usually silently omitted mention of any dissension in the ranks, the political squabbles that sometimes occurred within volunteer units and that often involved civilians from their home communities. At the end of July 1861, eleven officers sent a petition to Governor Andrew in an attempt to prevent Guiney, then the regiment’s lieutenant colonel, from replacing Cass after that officer fell in battle. Guiney was on leave in Massachusetts at the time, recuperating from illness and recruiting for the regiment. The petitioners did not use the word cowardice but claimed Guiney’s role at Gaines’s Mill had been overstated, criticized his absence during the Battle of Malvern Hill (they failed to mention that malaria confined Guiney to an ambulance), and deemed speeches he delivered in Boston as “vapid” and “filled with spurious patriotism,” while he accepted “the thanks of a generous people to which he was very little entitled.” From his deathbed, Cass scribbled Guiney a note deeming the petition “a lie whole and complete.” Meanwhile, Captain John C. Willey, also in Boston on recruiting duty and thus unable to sign the petition (Guiney mentioned Willey in an earlier letter to his wife and told her, “He doesn’t love me”), wrote General George McClellan in late July about a speech in which Guiney said the federals would go to Richmond under General John Pope. Willey reported to McClellan, who in 1864 would run against Lincoln as the Democratic presidential nominee, “the abuse this Guiney is heaping upon you,” and he accused Guiney of having “been drunk many times”—an ironic charge in that Guiney was not much of a drinker. Guiney privately wrote his wife that all he meant by the statement was to rally people

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to support the Union cause and the new commander of one of its armies, but because Pope was a Republican the statement also held a political subtext. The corps commander, Fitz John Porter, telegraphed Governor Andrew and, although admitting he had “much difficulty in extracting any evidence to confirm the accusation [of cowardice],” asked Andrew to hold off on commissioning Guiney. Andrew responded that it was too late—he had already done so. This opposition highlights tension with Guiney caused by mutually reinforcing socioeconomic and intellectual circumstances. Boston’s Irish American population—and the Ninth Massachusetts—was mostly Democratic. Guiney’s Republican allegiance thus rankled some of his officers as well as members of the Boston Irish American community, especially when he began giving speeches. Campaigning for Lincoln during the 1864 election, Guiney admitted, “The great bulk of my countrymen differ with me in politics, as they have a perfect right to do, and I differ with them, as I have an equally perfect right to do.” Additionally, many of Boston’s Irish Americans lived in slums and tenements in the North End or Fort Hill districts, but Guiney became an attorney, moved to a Boston suburb, and joined the Irish Charitable Society. Despite his underprivileged youth, Guiney achieved a measure of success that eluded many Irish American Bostonians at the time. In contrast, of the nine signers of the petition to Governor Andrew whose occupation is known at the time of mustering in, only one, a law student, was involved in professional work. Among the other jobs held by members of the clique were bootmaker, tanner, blindmaker, shoemaker, clerk, custom house worker, and gasfitter; its ringleader, Timothy O’Leary, was a tailor. Two other Guiney opponents were Captains Willey (turnkey) and James F. McGunnigle (bootmaker). Guiney’s intellectual formation and status probably made him more amenable to the Republican platform and encouraged his reformist position. Guiney’s views, the social standing that helped foster them, and probably his youth and rapid promotion, then antagonized some of his fellow officers. On his return from Boston on August 5, 1862, the enlisted men of the regiment met Guiney with cheers, whereas on August 9, 1862, O’Leary charged Guiney with having abandoned the Ninth Massachusetts in battle at Gaines’s Mill and pleading illness thirty-six hours before Malvern Hill. Guiney wrote his wife that he was ready for “a long and stirring row,” though within days he also admitted to her that he felt sadness at “having my own countrymen seek my life or at least my disgrace forever.” Guiney also wrote to Governor Andrew to “set defiantly” the “facts and the praise of my Generals” against the case of his rivals. On August 16, 1862, Capt. John Mahan, detailed in Boston on recruiting duty and thus unable to attend any court-martial, testified by sworn affidavit that Guiney

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led numerous charges at Gaines’s Mill and was sick at Malvern Hill. Guiney felt heartened when one of his companies surprised him with a “splendid” sword later that month. “How gratifying it is,” Guiney wrote, “to be so much thought of by my brave comrades who fought with me.” Guiney never faced trial and within days of the Battle of Antietam, nine of the eleven signers retracted their support for the original petition (one of the signers was absent from camp at the time; only O’Leary refused to sign the retraction). Tension continued as a result of the views Guiney held and expressed. In February 1863, some of his friends in the North End presented O’Leary with a sword and belt. In his presentation address, Eneas Smyth, who later called Guiney a “political and skedaddling Colonel,” said of O’Leary, “your independence of character . . . [has] brought down on you from officers, your superior only in title (otherwise your inferior), a mean, unmanly persecution.” Smyth also complained to Governor Andrew about Guiney’s punishment in early 1863 of two noncommissioned officers who had each been absent without leave for well over a month. To his wife, Guiney recognized that “the unarmed traitors of the North End encourage them [his opponents] in seeing hostility to me because I am for the government in all its measures,” and he reported a joke in camp that “O’Leary has been presented with a gold shears by his admirers in token of his skill—as a tailor.” In another letter, Guiney identified the North End as a stronghold of the Copperhead movement and Smith as one who “dipped his pen in a Confederate inkstand.” Guiney felt that the complaint about his punishing the noncommissioned officers was politically motivated, while his brigade and division commanders thought the punishment justified. Moreover, in April 1863, twenty-five of his regimental officers signed a circular that placed “unbounded confidence in [Guiney’s] high military qualification” and the regiment raised $500 for a presentation to its colonel. These tensions spilled into military discipline within the regiment. Guiney had O’Leary tried by a series of general courts-martial, the first of which came in the fall of 1862 after O’Leary drunkenly disturbed the regiment’s camp. Guiney testified that he did not see O’Leary drinking, but that he acted drunk, and other officers, including one who signed the petition against Guiney, also testified against O’Leary. The defense argued Guiney had targeted O’Leary, however, and when asked if he had heard Guiney say he “had waited & watched for an opportunity to fix these fellows,” Lt. John Doherty answered, “I have heard him use words to that effect, using no names.” The court-martial panel found O’Leary guilty except of being drunk and sentenced him to public reprimand and a week’s

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confinement in camp. Guiney reported to his wife, “I told you I’d handle those fellows at the proper time.” O’Leary’s second general court-martial, in April 1863, involved a technicality concerning his leave (the panel sentenced him to a public reprimand), and a third trial in March 1864 again addressed his “drinking and carousing.” O’Leary’s defense counsel (John Mahan, who in August 1862 signed an affidavit on Guiney’s behalf but now, Guiney reported to his wife, held a grudge because Guiney had not recommended his promotion) asked one witness if it was unusual for an officer to sing as he walked, prompting the reply that it was not, “But, it is an unusual thing for an officer to sing at that hour of the night. It is a very unusual thing for an officer to use the words, ‘I am as drunk as a Lord.’ ” Nonetheless, the judge advocate requested that, should the panel find O’Leary guilty, it consider during sentencing his bravery in battle and that the regiment was soon due to muster out of service. The panel sentenced O’Leary to a public reprimand. Similarly, Guiney had McGunnigle tried by general court-martial in April 1863 for a technicality involving his leave while he was with O’Leary. A month later, McGunnigle charged Guiney for punishing the two noncommissioned officers earlier that year, and Guiney countercharged the captain with conduct “animated by a malicious and personal spirit” and “writing deliberate falsehoods.” There does not seem to be a record of any trial on this matter, and McGunnigle retracted the charges against Guiney. While home recovering from the head wound he received at the Wilderness, Guiney maintained his Republican activism and campaigned for Lincoln’s reelection. Upon his introduction at one speech in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a few Democrats who attended began to hiss before the rest of the audience drowned them out with cheers for Guiney. In his remarks Guiney announced that he once felt proud to be a Democrat but that the party now was tainted with treason. Guiney also noted the contradiction wherein Irish Americans asked the world for sympathy for Ireland in its struggle for liberty while denying the same to Southern slaves, and he cited the transnational abolition movement when he referenced Irish leader Daniel O’Connell’s loathing of slavery (Guiney years later served as chair of the committee for arrangements for a banquet held in Boston in August 1875 to honor the centennial of O’Connell’s birth). In a similar oration at Dorchester, Massachusetts, on October 4, 1864, Guiney called slavery an evil that burned in the nation until it raised the armies presently fighting against the Union, again cited O’Connell’s opposition to it, and called slavery “the strength of the rebellion.” Guiney, as O’Connell had before him, placed slavery in global

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terms as an embarrassing contradiction to the United States’s self-identification as the worldwide beacon of republican values: Although “Russia had become ashamed of human slavery” and “emancipated her serfs” and Germany had abandoned feudalism, “all nations had advanced, had taken tremendous strides in the direction of freedom, but the American people, who should have been the first in the race for liberty, yet were the last.” After criticizing McClellan’s military record, Guiney reminded his audience that McClellan and the Democrats desired no more than the restoration of the Union whereas Republicans wanted to combat those who perpetrated “a great crime against the human race.” The political transformation of Meagher and Guiney foreshadowed party fluidity during Reconstruction wherein some Irish Americans, particularly Fenians, embraced the Republican cause, and Republicans reciprocated. A number of prominent Fenians, such as John O’Neill and Octave Fariola, even officered black regiments during the war and in the process blurred the boundaries of antagonism between both groups. After the war, Republican Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, could quote a definition of Fenianism as supporting “the cause of liberty everywhere,” and then declare, “If that be Fenianism, then I am a Fenian.” The postwar Fenian movement reveals the broader recognition, in at least some Irish Americans, of a more expansive understanding of liberty and human rights. When the delegates of one Fenian convention learned that several thousand black men of New Orleans offered to fight for Irish freedom, they, despite any antipathy between Irish Americans and African Americans, swiftly resolved to “accept the services of every man who truly loves liberty, and is willing to fight for Ireland, without distinction of race, color, or nationality.” Although these black men never did fight under the Fenian standard, the offer and its acceptance reveal the unexpected links and mutual goals affirmed by the outcome of the Civil War: multiracial and transnational promotion of liberty and republican values. In addressing the delegates, a Fenian leader, William R. Roberts, claimed that “in the ranks of the Fenian Brotherhood are men of various nationalities, many of whom, neither by the ties of blood nor education, have the slightest affinity with the Irish people. They may differ in matters of religion, politics, and even in social feelings; but there is one common bond of Union, broad, deep and strong. It is Liberty, priceless Liberty.” After the War After the war, Meagher went west to pursue his political ambitions. He served as acting governor of the Montana Territory, where he focused on local politics

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and affairs, and seems to have been involved in the Fenian movement in that part of the country. Meagher did not have much opportunity to engage with Reconstruction politics and questions of rights for freedpeople because he died on July 1, 1867, when he fell from the deck of a steamboat into the Missouri River and drowned, his body unrecovered. Guiney also participated in civic affairs, despite his fragile health. On April 4, 1865, Guiney joined a public meeting convened in Boston’s Faneuil Hall to celebrate the fall of Richmond that included African Americans and the Irish-born alongside native-born Bostonians. Two African American men sang a spiritual, followed by speeches from Guiney, Frederick Douglass, and Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson and ex-Senator Robert C. Winthrop. Guiney maintained his commission as colonel of the Ninth Regiment in the Massachusetts Militia, and on April 28, 1865, was appointed to head the state’s chapter of the United States Veteran Military League. When a position as assistant district attorney for Suffolk County became vacant, Governor Andrew nominated Guiney for it on May 17, 1865. On June 1, 1865, Guiney led through Boston one of the divisions that marched in a procession to commemorate President Lincoln (Guiney’s division included several hundred disabled soldiers in carriages, while Irish and Catholic organizations marched in other sections). President Andrew Johnson on May 26, 1866, signed a brevet promotion making Guiney a brigadier general “for gallant and meritorious service during the war” to date from March 13, 1865. Guiney ran for Congress a few months later, nominated by the Workingman Party to represent the Third Congressional District of Massachusetts. In a congressional campaign that foreshadowed the labor strife of the 1870s, Guiney frequently recalled his own youth as a factory worker, and he sought bipartisan support. In a speech in Faneuil Hall, Guiney expressed frustration that Republicans—especially local ones—claimed not to have any time to address labor issues until after they resolved Reconstruction questions, and he declared that the “secret” of that party’s success was “its friendship to the toiling millions of the land.” Guiney also mentioned that local Republicans considered nominating him for Congress until “one of the mercantile class suggested [during the convention] that I was not of sufficient callibre [sic]”—a reference to Guiney’s ethnicity. During the speech, Guiney urged as his primary legislative agenda the swift passage of an act enforcing an eight-hour workday as a way to reduce unemployment, improve the lives of laborers, and help bring the classes closer together. Guiney also expressed his impatience as to Reconstruction, and he anticipated the Fifteenth Amendment by calling for “instantaneous and impartial suffrage,” though, he complained, Congress remained “timid as a fawn” on that point. Guiney identi-

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fied the vote as “neither” a civil nor a political right but instead, “as much a natural right as the right to live.” After rejecting the association of any educational standard or literacy test to the practice of suffrage, Guiney announced, “I want all men to vote,” though he also appealed to the self-interest of his audience by advising, “the workingmen should insist that the negroes in the South should have a right to vote, for that will be an inducement for them to stay where they are.” Guiney revealed his populist streak during the campaign, urging in another speech, “The necessities of the masses must be attended to rather than the little luxuries of the few” and warning of “great corporate monopolies.” In that speech, Guiney called the Civil War a conflict, at its heart, between “capital over labor,” as some Southerners “enslaved their fellow-beings” and called “the workingmen of the North ‘Mudsils’ [sic].” In his Faneuil Hall speech, Guiney claimed that the Democratic Party had a “long predominance” because of an “underlying principle of friendship to the masses,” but when it “espoused the cause of Southern Aristocracy as against the enslaved laborers of the South, that moment it began to wane.” Ginery Twichell, a Republican, soundly defeated Guiney as well as the Democratic candidate in the three-way race. At the same time, it became increasingly apparent that Guiney’s battle wound had shattered his health permanently. As of October 1867, Guiney still suffered great pain that impaired his concentration, and the vision in his good eye had also deteriorated. The following spring, Guiney resigned his commission as colonel of the Ninth Massachusetts Militia though he continued his legal work, occasionally bathing his head during court recesses in an effort to relieve some of the dizziness and discomfort he suffered. In 1867, Guiney called for changes in U.S. citizenship doctrine when the actions of the Fenian Brotherhood brought to the forefront the conflict between the U.S. support for expatriation rights versus continued adherence by Britain and most of Europe to the principle of perpetual allegiance. The United States had long embraced the notion that citizenship originated through one’s choice of allegiance, and yet failed to articulate a coherent policy regarding the mechanics and boundaries of expatriation rights. When Irish Americans were arrested on British soil for suspected Fenian activities after the Civil War, Britain considered naturalized American citizens born in the United Kingdom as subjects of the Crown, eliciting a mass popular response by native-born and Irish Americans alike (in contrast to antebellum nativism). Guiney wrote Representative Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts a summation of the Irish American position, and in the process he supported the concept of a stronger American nation-state capable of defining and protecting its citizens:

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I have fought side by side with thousands of men born, as I was, in Ireland, for the flag, the integrity, and the perpetuity of this Republic. Are we British subjects or are we American citizens? We must be answered now, and we are ready to fight the matter out in the political field—or in any other. This country was built, has been made great and prosperous, and hopes to go on in the increase of its greatness and prosperity, upon the right of expatriation. England denies this right . . . in absolute defiance of our law. Will this nation— will Congress—will you—allow us to be seized, tried, condemned, and punished as British subjects[?] . . . We must assert the force of our laws, and that our Constitution is not a false light to the immigrant nor a sham to those who swear allegiance to it. In Boston, 6,000 citizens assembled at Faneuil Hall on December 7, 1867, and petitioned Congress on the issue. Guiney ascended the podium at the meeting, an especially moving figure in light of his grievous head wound, and declared to his audience that both native and naturalized citizens stood “on precisely the same footing as to their rights and duties” pursuant to the Constitution. Guiney argued that if the United States allowed Britain to distinguish between American citizens based on where they were born, it ceded to Parliament the power to “alter, amend, impair or destroy” the Constitution and rights vested in it. For Guiney, the issue could not be simpler: On naturalization, “the Constitution flings its sunshine and its promise around the new-born citizen.” In the end, mass meetings across the United States forced Congress and the State Department successfully to pressure Britain to abandon the doctrine of perpetual allegiance. In the United States, naturalized citizenship became equal to birthright citizenship pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment, with the exception that under the Constitution only a native-born citizen could serve as president or vice president. Guiney made speeches in 1868 supporting Ulysses S. Grant for president. Guiney’s poor health prompted him to resign as assistant district attorney in October 1869 and return to private practice. Guiney won election for the less demanding position of register of probate and insolvency for Suffolk County in November 1871. Shortly before the Civil War, nativists had tried to curtail officeholding and voting by Irish-born immigrants. Now a changed climate, coupled with Guiney’s credentials as a war hero, lawyer, and Republican activist, allowed him to run for Congress, serve as an assistant district attorney, and win election in his own right to a position concerned with administering property matters for the city of Boston.

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On Saint Patrick’s Day, 1877, Guiney wrote his daughter, “Glory to Old Ireland forever! The Saint himself doesn’t need it.” A few days later, on March 21, 1877, Guiney sat at his desk, with daffodils in a glass before him. At 5:30, he left his office and visited the barber’s room at the St. James Hotel. Afterward, Guiney crossed Franklin Square to go to his house when he coughed up blood, knelt by a tree, and died. A child recognized Guiney (he sometimes drilled local youths, including his daughter, as they played soldier) and ran to him as did two passersby who carried his lifeless body to his home. His daughter, Louise, later called him “the good knight of Boston.” Examining Meagher and Guiney shows how two Irish American intellectuals considered, and helped shape, several threads within the transformation of American nationalism that took place during the Civil War era. Both men went further than simply urging devotion to the Union; they interpreted military service to that cause as a way for Irish Americans to claim fuller inclusion in the American people. As a part of this impulse, Meagher and Guiney envisioned a more robust and better defined concept of American national citizenship in law and practice, one that incorporated greater protection for naturalized citizens abroad and a stronger emphasis on human rights overall. Moreover, in the context of war, both men underwent a political transformation to espouse the ideals of the Republican Party regardless of the criticism aimed at them by some of their fellow Irish Americans for doing so. While Meagher died early in Reconstruction, Guiney revealed the depth to which he embraced Republican egalitarianism by serving as a vocal proponent of its principles during his postwar political career in Boston. Meagher and Guiney not only contributed to the Union by serving in its army but also by helping interpret the ideological meaning of its victory.

“ This Most Unholy and Destructive War” Catholic Intellectuals and the Limits of Catholic Patriotism

William Kurtz

T

he outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861 tore apart not just the nation but the American Catholic Church as well. Shortly after the Battle of Bull Run, Patrick Lynch, Charleston’s Catholic archbishop, wrote his fellow clergyman, Archbishop John Hughes of New York, “The Separation of the southern States is un fait accompli. The Federal government has no power to reverse it.” Blaming “black republicans” for the conflict and boasting that the South could never be defeated, Lynch, appealing to their common ancestry and religion, told Hughes to keep Irish Catholics out of the conflict. Hughes, however, proved to be just as firm an advocate of the Union as his fellow prelate was for the Confederacy. In his widely published response, Hughes strongly denounced the legitimacy of secession while adding that “foreigners now naturalized, whether Catholics or not, ought to bear their relative burthen in defense of the . . . country.” This firm rejection of southern secession and argument that northern Catholics would do their part to save the nation solidified Hughes’s reputation as a northern patriot. In fact, a number of prominent Catholic intellectuals, most notably Orestes A. Brownson, a prominent convert and editor of the influential Brownson’s Quarterly Review, initially hoped that by supporting the war back home in the Catholic press and volunteering in the Union Army, Catholics would save the nation and prove themselves loyal citizens once and for all. This united outpouring of patriotism and pro-war sentiment by Catholic intellectuals in the North, however, did not last long. Indeed, it was Hughes himself who spelled out the limits of his community’s support for Republican war aims. Shortly after his public dispute with Lynch, Hughes warned Secretary of War Simon Cameron that Catholics would not continue to support the war if its goals expanded to include the destruction of slavery. Indeed, as casualties mounted and Abraham Lincoln’s administration promoted emancipation and conscription as means to defeat the Confederacy, many northern Catholic thinkers strongly

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denounced administration policies that they believed were ruining the nation’s well-being. Some Catholic critics of the war believed they were in fact the true patriots for resisting what they saw as Republican violations of the Constitution and a ruinous radical social agenda. Such logic sounded like treason to pro-war Republicans, however, who believed that strong measures were needed to save the Union. Because most Civil War studies that discuss Catholic Americans do so from a political or ethnic focus, this essay focuses more closely on their Catholic-based conservative worldview and its impact on their actions and attitudes during the conflict. Exploring as broadly as possible Catholic civilian intellectuals’ opinions on the war in the loyal states (the North and the slaveholding states that did not secede) reveals more than Walter G. Sharrow’s previous study of Catholic thinkers during the war’s early stages. Sharrow’s article focused almost exclusively on English-speaking men from New York (Hughes, James McMaster, and Brownson). Specifically, this study expands on Sharrow’s by covering the period from 1861 to 1865, by including intellectuals from the Border States, and by including a variety of Catholic thinkers of different ethnic backgrounds. Examining Catholic intellectuals allows for a comparative study of a group of men that included liberals and conservatives, German and Irish immigrants, Democrats and even a few Republicans. Still, for these intellectuals, their common religion tied them together across geographical, political, and ethnic divides, and their faith played the most important role in how they viewed the war. With a few prominent exceptions, their shared conservative Catholic worldview led most intellectuals to support a limited war for the Union while opposing the means proposed by the Republican Party. Thus, although George M. Fredrickson’s The Inner Civil War argues that emancipation “united” northern intellectuals, most Catholic thinkers were united in rejecting abolitionism. For some, such policies as emancipation and conscription would eventually drive them into outright opposition to the war. This essay argues that the war laid bare internal conflicts within the American Catholic Church and negatively shaped its postwar relationship to American society as a whole. It argues that divisions between civilian Catholic intellectuals over the war and slavery existed throughout most of the war. The essay further argues that Catholic thinkers differed over whether or not Union victory would have a positive effect on the future of the United States and American Catholicism. By 1863, Catholic intellectuals with the exception of only a few voices lost much of their early enthusiasm for the war and became pessimistic about the nation and their community’s future under Republican rule. This was in sharp con-

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trast to the two military men, Thomas Meagher and Patrick Guiney, highlighted in Christian Samito’s essay in this collection. Antiwar Catholics fervently believed that they were loyally upholding the Constitution by opposing Republican policies, a position they shared with many northern Democrats. Because civilian Catholic intellectuals, like their larger faith community, did not wholeheartedly support the Republican war effort and emancipation, they remained vulnerable to traditional attacks on their patriotism. In the end, with conservative critics of the war dominant among Catholic thinkers in positions of influence, the war accelerated the development of a separate and defensive Catholic subculture within the United States. Whereas George Fredrickson famously argued that the war swept away old ideas about democracy and religiously inspired humanitarianism in favor of bureaucracy, secularization, and modernization, Catholic intellectuals became even more starkly defined by their conservative, religious worldview. Even though most mid-nineteenth-century Catholics were admittedly lowerclass foreign-born laborers with little formal education, there were a number of important intellectuals in the American Catholic Church. Although none of them rivaled the influence of such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau, Catholic thinkers possessed a relatively high degree of education, published erudite commentary on religious and social topics, and had significant influence over the larger U.S. Catholic community. Generally these men were members of the priesthood or were newspaper editors; their positions made it possible for them to influence Catholic thought in the mid-nineteenth century. Although other intellectuals appear throughout, this study focuses primarily on a group of thirteen civilian men from a variety of ethnic backgrounds who were prominent leaders in the mid-nineteenth-century church. Orestes A. Brownson and James A. McMaster were both native-born converts to the faith who edited important Catholic newspapers in New York. Father Isaac Hecker, a New Yorker of German ancestry, founded the missionary society known as the “Paulists” that sought to convert America to the Catholic faith. Archbishop John Hughes of New York, Bishop Martin Spalding of Louisville, Father Edward Purcell (editor of the Catholic Telegraph), and his brother Archbishop John Purcell of Cincinnati were all Irishmen by birth. Irish Catholic lay editors Patrick Donahoe (Boston Pilot) and John Mullay (Metropolitan Record), were also part of the dominant ethnic group in the church in America. Maximilian Oertel published the largest German-Catholic newspaper in the country from New York City. Father Boniface Wimmer was an outspoken German-born Benedictine monk

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residing in his monastery in central Pennsylvania. Father Francis Weninger, a refugee of the European upheavals of 1848, served as a Jesuit missionary to German Catholics in the Midwest. The Belgian Jesuit, Father Pierre de Smet, was also a missionary in the West, respected by Catholic and non-Catholic Americans alike. Despite their divergent backgrounds and occasional prewar differences of opinion, their common faith tied them together and set them apart from the Protestant majority in American society. Not just religion but geography, party politics, and ethnicity also played significant roles in how Catholic intellectuals responded to changing events during the war. In fact, the war reinforced most conservative Catholic northerners’ strong antebellum allegiance to the Democratic Party and their dislike of evangelical-led reform efforts. What united Catholic intellectuals across ethnic lines even more so than party politics, however, were the twin influences of their own religious conservatism and their increasing fears of nativism. They were “conservative” in the sense that their religion emphasized authority, hierarchy, and social stability above theological innovation or social reform. These Catholic thinkers did not share in the millennial optimism of the perfectibility of humanity that was widely shared among Protestant leaders and social reformers, according to George Fredrickson. Many devout Catholic leaders feared that America’s predominantly Protestant and increasingly materialistic culture would erode their children’s faith and respect for traditional customs. Such a siege mentality, which led to Hughes himself leading the movement for the creation of Catholic schools in opposition to public schools that preached a nondenominational Christian faith, was only further exacerbated by other Americans’ increasing attacks on the church and its growing influence in American society. First the American Republican Party in the mid-1840s and then the much more powerful Know Nothing Party of the mid-1850s attacked immigrants and Catholics as a threat to the well-being of American society. In response, Catholic intellectuals sought to prove that their community was no threat to the nation by “becoming more ardent in their statements of loyalty to the United States.” In a speech in 1852, for example, Hughes pointed out the contributions of American and French Catholics to victory during the Revolution while he also argued that the Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom was “almost literally copied from the provision of the charter and statutes of the Catholic colony of Maryland.” “Let [Americans] without distinction of creed, unite, and be united, in preserving the common inheritance,” for the time might come “when our country shall have need of all her children.” Nonetheless, such (sometimes boastful) reassurances did little to assuage a fundamental and deeply

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held conviction of many that the growth of the Catholic Church posed a fundamental threat to the democratic and Protestant United States. The beginning of the Civil War in April 1861 had a unifying effect across the northern states. The attack on Fort Sumter brought Catholics together with other northerners to uphold the Union, to blame the South for the outbreak of hostilities, and to volunteer in large numbers for the growing federal army. Catholic intellectuals were swept up into what Fredrickson calls “the spirit of ’61” along with non-Catholic thinkers such as Emerson and Walt Whitman. Brownson, Hughes, and even McMaster, perhaps the most prominent voices, were not the only ones to speak out on behalf of the Union at the very beginning of the war. Father Edward Purcell, Donahoe, and Oertel called on all Catholics to do their “solemn duty” on behalf of the nation. Father Pierre de Smet, a Belgian missionary well known for his travels in the American West, denounced “detestable secession” and all of its destructive influences on his adopted state of Missouri. Identifying slavery’s role in bringing on the conflict and earnestly hoping for a return to law and order, de Smet prayed that the “same almighty arm that sustained the cause of Washington and his brave soldiers, to establish the glorious Constitution, will not be withdrawn from their children in a not less difficult war for its maintenance.” Irish nationalist leaders such as Thomas F. Meagher and Michael Corcoran supported enlistment on behalf of the Union cause, becoming prominent officers themselves in the federal army. Dissent in the North in 1861 was generally mild and confined to only a handful of Catholic intellectuals. The Reverend Isaac Hecker, a friend of Brownson’s and a fellow convert, privately deplored the violence of the “fratricidal war,” and he stubbornly refused to send any of his priests from his “small” community to serve as chaplains in the Union Army. Oertel, a scholar and the editor of New York City’s leading German-Catholic newspaper, moderated his pro-Union rhetoric less than a month into the war, stating: “We vote for peace, the Church votes for peace, calm citizens vote for peace, common sense votes for peace.” After the Union defeat at Bull Run in the summer of 1861, John Mullay’s Metropolitan Record more stridently criticized the Republicans for not adopting compromise measures, attacked any suggestion of targeting slavery as a war measure, and defended the freedom of speech of antiwar journals, including McMaster’s. As many Catholic thinkers would argue throughout the war, Republicans should not conflate loyalty to the nation with loyalty to the current administration. From the very beginning of the conflict, Border State Catholics were much more pessimistic about the war and its probable effects on their slaveholding

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states. Kentucky’s Bishop Spalding privately but strenuously voiced his discontent to his friend Archbishop Purcell a day before the conflict erupted. “God avert Civil War, & restrain such fanatical firebrands as your own Chase & Dennison, to say nothing of the preachers!” he wrote only a day before the attack on Fort Sumter. Spalding’s statement reflected a deeply held view of conservative Catholics across the United States that the extreme antislavery rhetoric of Republican politicians and Protestant preachers was responsible for sectional conflict. Francis Weninger, a German-speaking Jesuit missionary in the Midwest who opposed secession, echoed this view after the war, noting that southerners “were by no means as great fanatics as the Republicans.” Though only the most conservative Catholic thinkers expressed such views in the war’s first months, their fears of Republican extremism were also shared by many pro-war intellectuals of their faith. The issue of slavery further widened these early fissures between Catholic thinkers in the loyal states. Managing to alienate conservative Catholic editors by denouncing their papers as “secession sheets” for their insufficient pro-war enthusiasm, Orestes Brownson infamously suggested in October 1861, at a time in which little seemed to be going right for the North, that freeing the slaves might help Union war aims. Calling slavery a “great moral, social, and political wrong” and the “weak spot” of the South, he believed that the North should think about “the removal of the causes which have rendered [the war] necessary.” Brownson’s advocacy of emancipation, almost an entire year before Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, certainly appealed to New England intellectuals like his old friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, but it infuriated conservative Catholics across the North and Border States. Already suspicious of him because of his liberal theological views and his criticism of the Irish during the Know Nothing crisis, conservatives believed emancipation was a radical and unnecessary measure. As McMaster put it succinctly in July, this was not a “vindictive” war “intended to damage the South,” but a war simply to “protect the Union, and to carry out the provisions of the Constitution—nothing more.” Like their Democratic counterparts, most Catholic intellectuals refused to support a war that they believed was being waged not simply to save the Union but to radically remake American society according to the desires of Republicans or New England abolitionists. In this sense, McMaster and others saw themselves as the true patriots, loyal to the nation and its laws, not simply those in charge and their ill-advised ideas. Although most Catholic intellectuals blamed radicals on both sides for their inability to compromise, they largely believed that the abolitionists were most at

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fault for the war. Father Francis Weninger called southern secession “utterly unjustifiable,” but he more strongly denounced the influence of “bigoted Puritans,” “savage Know-Nothings,” and the “Germans of ’48” in the Republican Party. The Catholic Mirror spoke for Border-States Catholics by denouncing Brownson as an “ultra-abolitionist,” and Archbishop Hughes lashed out at Brownson’s proemancipation stance as “untimely and mischievous.” Arguing that slavery had helped Christianize millions of Africans, and that Catholics deserved “great credit” for staying out of the ruinous antebellum debate over slavery, he seemingly belittled the horrors of slavery by referencing the “degraded condition of thousands of females in our large cities in the free States.” Speaking for other intellectuals and Catholics at large, Hughes asserted “we despise in the name of all Catholics the ‘Idea’ of making this war subservient to the philanthropic nonsense of abolitionism.” Catholic editors praised the letter, and their support strongly suggested that most northern Catholics rejected Brownson’s abolitionist turn as one the larger community should adopt. Indeed, none of the other eleven Catholic thinkers highlighted in this study publicly supported Brownson’s arguments in favor of emancipation. The remarkable unanimity of their loud denunciation of Brownson showed that Catholic intellectuals held strongly to their conservative worldview and antebellum convictions. Even pro-war voices such as that of the cleric Hughes and the layman Donahoe shouted down Brownson and the idea of emancipation. Thus Hughes warned the then secretary of war Simon Cameron that the Irish would “turn away in disgust” against any war fought to free slaves, and Donahoe blasted “the negro worshippers of the North” for taking advantage of the war to advocate abolition. To Donahoe’s Pilot, abolitionism and secessionism were twin treasons between which “the fundamental law of the country has no refuge.” Both the Confederacy and northern abolitionists threatened the Constitution and were thus equally to be opposed. After the war, Weninger praised the “conservative” stance of the northern Democrats, who, he claimed, “disapprove[d] of slavery” while rightly holding themselves “aloof ” from abolition. Oertel, who spoke for conservative Germans, mocked the “logic” of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, claiming it had just as much “authority” to free slaves in Turkey as in the American South. The anti-abolition Catholic intellectuals’ argument was simple and echoed that of conservative and Democratic northerners: One did not have to support emancipation to support the war effort and the preservation of the Union. Thus Catholic intellectuals joined pro-war Democrats in affirming that the two issues of slavery and union were separate and that mixing the two would

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only hopelessly divide the Union against itself. Catholics were overwhelmingly anti-abolition with only a handful of pro-emancipation voices on the other side. In July 1863, Brownson, aware of his lack of support, nonetheless lashed out at the patriotism of other Catholic Americans for “identify[ing the Catholic] Church with slavery and rebellion.” “It is undeniable,” Brownson told them, “that no religious body in the country stands so generally committed to slavery and the Rebellion, or as a body have shown so little sympathy with the effort of the Government to save the unity and life of the nation as the Catholic.” One astonished pro-war Catholic editor from Pittsburgh responded later that month, “We scarcely know what to think of the writer, who at this crisis, comes forward unasked to furnish unfounded calumnies against Catholics to the enemies of our holy religion.” Despite such apparent outrage, several of the most conservative Catholic intellectuals in fact would soon make common cause with the extreme antiwar wing of the Democratic Party, a group that pro-war northerners derisively nicknamed the “Copperheads.” Like much of the rest of the nation, however, as the war dragged on, many northerners rethought their feelings about emancipation as they sought out new ways to defeat the Confederacy’s victorious armies in 1862 and early 1863. A handful of Catholic leaders and thinkers, although by no means less racially prejudiced than anti-abolition Catholics, began to agree with Brownson that the preservation of the Union was more important than respecting the property rights of southern traitors. They, like Brownson, never embraced the label of abolitionist, but neither did they sympathize with slavery. In the fall of 1861, Father Hecker became more stridently antislavery as he grew more and more opposed to southern secession. Like his friend Brownson, Hecker predicted that “the time will soon come to expel slavery from our entire country.” Bishop Josue Young of Erie, Pennsylvania, who was a protégé of Archbishop Purcell, was a well-known supporter of the war who privately hoped for the “entire riddance of the curse & incubus of slavery, so that a grander and more ample field for our Religion may be opened with our returning peace and consequent prosperity.” In April 1863, Father de Smet, who privately criticized the South for seceding when slavery was, in his view, in no real danger, argued that “either slavery or freedom will triumph in this gigantic contest.” Approving of the war’s likely eradication of slavery through such means as the Emancipation Proclamation while applauding ongoing efforts in St. Louis toward passing emancipation laws, de Smet declared that “the friends of the human race everywhere must feel a deep interest in the fate of the Great Republic.” As Christian Samito shows, prominent Catholics in

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the Union Army, such as Meagher and Guiney, ardently supported the cause of emancipation as a means to help win the war and preserve the Union. Clerics such as Young, Hecker, and de Smet voiced a private opposition to slavery, but only a handful of other prominent Catholic civilians besides Brownson publicly argued in favor of eradicating the institution. They were the archbishop of Cincinnati, John Purcell, and his brother, Rev. Edward, who were by far the most important and influential clerical figures in the church to advocate abolition as a means to end the war. In January 1862, however, the Reverend Purcell had initially denounced the idea of emancipation as a war measure, arguing that it was “incendiary and stupid” and fearing that it would unleash a ruinous slave rebellion. In August, however, his brother Archbishop Purcell returned from a trip to Europe during which he had a meeting with a leading antislavery French bishop, Felix Dupanloup. After arriving home in Cincinnati, Purcell argued that had the North enrolled slaves in the Union Army the war would have been over in three months. Only a short time later, his brother Edward began to use the editorial section of the Telegraph to support emancipation as a moral cause, eventually calling on Irish Catholics across the country to take pity on the slaves. In April 1863, arguing that the Catholic Church was “no lover of slavery,” Purcell cited early church theologians and gradual emancipation in Europe to point out that Catholics could support abolition. Similarly, in his postwar memoirs, Weninger too agreed that the church had “frequently raised her voice to say that, when [Catholics] can emancipate [their slaves] without detriment to the temporal and eternal weal of these servants, they can no longer delay.” Although he acknowledged that slavery and the church had existed side by side since the time of Christ, he saw this as no reason for slavery, arguing against southern racial justifications of the institution as having “been proved by experience to be false.” The two Purcell brothers soon became outspoken proponents of emancipation, much to the delight of Brownson and the handful of other antislavery Catholics. In July 1863, Brownson, who finally had a public Catholic ally in favor of emancipation, crowed that Purcell’s “voice can penetrate where ours cannot, and will be listened to with respect, where ours will be unheeded.” Earlier that year, Major General William S. Rosecrans, the highest-ranked Catholic officer in the Union Army, in command of the Army of the Cumberland in 1863, had likewise applauded the Purcells’ advocacy of abolition, arguing that slavery “with its horrors, barbarities, and base immoralities . . . is dead.” In fact, evidence from letters to the Telegraph and surviving correspondence from Catholic soldiers suggests

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that many of them, like Rosecrans, came to support emancipation in order to end the war as quickly as possible. Still, though the divisions among Catholic thinkers over slavery were very real, there is a danger in seeing the debate as one between sides of equal strength. Of the sixteen major Catholic newspapers published during the war, only three Catholic editors (Purcell, Brownson, and the German editor of Der Wahrheits Freund published in Cincinnati) ever supported emancipation during the war, with the rest outright opposing it or refusing to comment on the issue. In fact, a wave of anti-abolition articles appeared in some of the most influential Catholic papers throughout the spring and summer of 1863. McMaster chided Purcell, noting he had ten times as many readers as did his opponent, and John Mullay attacked the Telegraph for an “excess of . . . zeal in the cause of Abolitionism.” Even someone like Donahoe, who had no personal sympathy with slavery himself, came to side with McMaster against Father Purcell. “Slavery is an evil,” Donahoe admitted, “but the Greeleyizing of our priests would be a greater evil.” In other words, Donahoe’s Pilot did not want to see Catholic priests becoming radical abolitionists like Horace Greeley, the editor of the Republican New York Tribune. Similarly, Bishop Spalding wrote an anonymous essay that was published in October in the Roman newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which criticized Lincoln’s proclamation as “atrocious” and argued that the slaves could be freed only gradually, as was the Catholic “practice in times past.” Influenced primarily by their conservative religious views of society that distrusted radical abolitionism as inimical to social order, most civilian Catholic intellectuals, regardless of their position on the war, consistently refused to support emancipation. Despite such pessimism and dislike for abolition, however, most Catholic intellectuals were horrified by the violence of the Draft Riots in New York City in July 1863. Angry about emancipation, economic problems, and conscription, which was about to begin in the city, thousands of men and some women rioted for several days. Over a hundred people died during the violence, after rioters targeted Republicans’ and African Americans’ homes and businesses. Although the riot was not a “Catholic” one, as Brownson protested again and again in October, he and others freely admitted that many lower-class Irish Catholic workers were involved. A number of Catholic voices, such as those of Father Purcell and D. J. Sadlier of the New York Tablet, denounced the riots in July, the latter calling all Irish persons involved in the riots “a disgrace to the country from which they came.” Still, this was not enough to fend off a wave of criticism directed at the church. Thus Horace Greeley, whose own newspaper office had been attacked, chided Archbishop Hughes to “control ‘his people.’ ”

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Hughes’s personal intervention probably helped calm down the more Godfearing Catholics among the rioters. Still, a number of Republican and Protestant editors took the chance to criticize him and the church by extension. Though Catholic intellectuals were unwilling to admit it, anti-Catholic critics correctly saw that the New Yorkers who rioted against conscription and emancipation were largely following the antiwar lead of their Democratic and Catholic leaders. In the midst of the riots, McMaster could not restrain himself from attacking conscription, later defending the rioters, while the like-minded John Mullay also denounced the “Washington Despotism” only days after the violence ended. Certainly other Catholic intellectuals and newspaper editors including Brownson and Sadlier genuinely deplored the violence. Faced with non-Catholic intellectuals’ attacks on their community, the riots brought about a rare moment during the war when more liberal men like Brownson and conservatives like McMaster came together to defend the church against their traditional critics. Antiwar Catholics interpreted Lincoln’s attack on slavery as part of a larger attack of radicalism on established institutions that had plagued the Western world since the French Revolution. Northern Catholic intellectuals, including ardent Democrats such as Donahoe and McMaster, did not approve of slavery, but, with few exceptions, they also did not approve of radical reform movements such as abolitionism that might upset social order. Thus when the Purcells openly supported emancipation in the spring of 1863, McMaster accused them of “pandering to the infidel radicalism of the times.” Likewise, a few months later Bishop Spalding attacked the “program of modern progress” of the Radical Republicans for its depiction of (and attack on) both slavery and Catholicism as the “two relics of a barbarous age.” Such conservative intellectuals noted that American abolitionists often sympathized with European radicals, and that neither held the Catholic Church in high regard. Lincoln’s apparent refusal to exempt all Catholic clergymen further embittered Catholic thinkers toward the Republicans. Wimmer complained directly to Lincoln in June that he and his monks had given themselves and all of their treasure for the “benefit of this country,” and that refusing to make exemptions was a poor way to repay them. For conservative Catholics, attacks on slavery as well as military conscription without clerical exemptions were equally troubling parts of a radical Republican program that had to be resisted by true patriots in the press and at the polls. Ten of the Catholic intellectuals surveyed here at some point during the war sharply criticized its bloody cost or the Lincoln government for having wrongly changed its focus from simply restoring the Union to imposing radical ideals on both the South and the North. Draft riots in several northern states and the

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bulk of recent scholarship on ethnic Catholics also demonstrate that antiwar or anti-Republican sentiment predominated among nonelite ethnic Catholics. The pro-war editor of the Catholic, for example, spoke for many immigrants and conservative Catholics when he reproved abolitionists who questioned the loyalty of a Union man just “because his sober sense disapproves of your hobby on the right way of ending the war.” Oertel, for one, suggested that the Know Nothings of years past should properly be “renamed” the abolitionists of the present, reflecting a widely held belief that their anti-Catholic opponents would seek to do away with “popery” as soon as slavery was gone. Blaming the war on “Methodist preachers and the Reds of ’48,” Wimmer argued in February 1863 that the war was simply an excuse to destroy the Democratic Party. He was thankful that “public opinion” and recent Democratic victories stood in the way of an outright attack on American Catholics. Weninger echoed this view after the war, arguing that “it [was] plain that the interest of the faith will suffer to a great extent if the North be victorious.” This fear, as the historians Michael Hochgeschwender and John McGreevy have persuasively shown, led Catholics to make common cause with the increasingly antiwar Democratic Party. Some evangelical northerners as well as Republicans, in turn saw Catholics’ disaffection over the war as confirmation of their antebellum belief that Catholicism was dangerous to the nation’s future. Thus it was a vicious cycle that pushed the Catholics further apart from pro-war northerners during and long after the conflict and facilitated the rise of a separate Catholic subculture in the United States. In addition to debating the necessity of the war, emancipation, and other Republican policies, Catholic intellectuals often discussed the conflict in terms of how it would affect their faith community’s future in the United States. Would the blood shed by Catholic soldiers finally end nativism or would no amount of sacrifice be able to dampen Americans’ strong anti-Catholicism that dated back to the colonial era? The more optimistic Catholic thinkers believed and argued strenuously that Catholic support for the war at home and in the ranks should forever end questions about their loyalty. As Donahoe’s Pilot said in October 1861, “Let us hear no more ‘nativism,’ for it is now dead, disgraced, and offensive, while Irish Catholic patriotism and bravery are true to the nation and indispensable to it in every point of consideration.” This issue of loyalty, raised again and again by their nativist critics in the 1840s and 1850s, was one that particularly rankled Catholic thinkers given their (in their view) firm support of the nation’s institutions during times of peace and war. The Pilot’s belief, that the war would cement their claims to citizenship and help dispel traditional prejudices, was in

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fact quite similar to African American leaders’ hope that their service would end both slavery and racism. But just as they were divided over emancipation and the war itself, Catholic intellectuals proved to be divided over whether or not the war would benefit their religious community and the nation. The conservative majority proved unwilling to embrace what they saw as radical and harmful wartime measures, and thus a more pessimistic view predominated by the war’s end. Intellectuals from Brownson to Purcell to Donahoe quickly realized the war would be an opportunity for Catholics and Catholic immigrants to prove their loyalty to the nation despite the doubts of prewar nativists. Brownson claimed in October 1861 that Catholics, bound by their “Catholic duty” to faithfully support the Union, had turned out in disproportionate numbers to volunteer in the federal armies. “Catholics have, considering their numbers, more than their proportion in the regular army and volunteer forces of the Union,” he enthusiastically, if erroneously, stated. He predicted that after the war Catholics would finally be accepted as equals into American society, and this became one of his prominent themes of the war. In his own words, after the war “both Catholics and nonCatholics will mutually feel that they are citizens of a common country, and form but one political people.” At the end of the war, Brownson argued that Catholics had “poured out too freely and too much of their richest and noblest blood in defence of the unity of the nation” during the Civil War to be treated as anything less than equals by their Protestant countrymen. For Patrick Donahoe, the bravery of the Sixty-Ninth New York Regiment in the first major battle was yet another proof of “Irish valor” against their enemies at home and abroad. The Sixty-Ninth soon became the unit that, more than any other, was the cause célèbre of the English-language (largely Irish) Catholic Press. Other Catholic newspapers echoed the Pilot in praising Irish Catholic soldiers for proving that their bigoted critics were wrong. In August, Father Purcell remarked on the irony of so many newspapers praising the Irishmen of the Sixty-Ninth New York Regiment when they had in years past repeatedly printed the “most atrocious calumnies on the Irish . . . on account of their religion.” There were many other early examples of Catholics asserting their patriotism across the North. In April 1861, a Pittsburgh editor called the “Catholic sentiment” “unmistakably true” in the present crisis and that the choice for Catholics “cannot be for a moment doubtful.” When forced to choose between “the duty we owe to the United States” and “sympathy for a Confederacy which as its Vice President declares, has African Slavery for its corner stone,” Catholics would naturally choose the former. Similarly after the war, Weninger denounced the

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South for acting “ignobly and rashly” by seceding, stating the cause of the North was “just” during the war. Likewise Archbishop Hughes argued in February 1862 that part of the reason he served in Europe as an unofficial agent of the Lincoln Administration was to confirm Catholic loyalty. Although this appointment made at the end of 1861 did not sit well with some Catholics at home or abroad, Hughes believed his mission would promote peace as well as the best interests of both North and South. As he later told a prominent figure at the Vatican, Cardinal Alessandro Barnabo, the government intended the appointment both as a “great compliment” to Catholic Americans and as a firm repudiation of the Know Nothings and nativist politics. Even in the wake of the draft riots in New York and his own city in 1863, Donahoe proudly proclaimed that the devotion of the “gallant Catholic chiefs” was something “the Nation is never likely to forget.” In all, seven of the intellectuals surveyed here at least initially believed that Union victory would not only benefit the United States but also help the cause of American Catholicism. Optimistic Catholic thinkers joined their fellow northerners in seeing the war as a trial from God that would purify the nation and ultimately allow the reunited country to become even stronger economically, globally, and religiously. Bishop Young told his French correspondents in 1864 that “Almighty God is chastising us [the United States] now in love for our ultimate temporal as well as spiritual good.” Father Hecker privately assured his European correspondents that the war was a “bloody passage” that would help to mature the young United States into “manhood,” all the while preparing it for a greater and Catholic future. Noting a year later that “certainly, the war has not been in its effects on the minds of our people unfavorable to our holy Faith,” Hecker clearly saw the fate of his plans to convert America to the Catholic faith as advanced by the conflict. “Indeed the war has accelerated the downfall of Protestantism and made the wiser portion of the community feel the necessity of a religion like the Catholic,” he wrote in 1864. Such a sentiment was common among Catholic intellectuals, convinced that their faith was the only true one. For example, Bishop Young argued in June 1864 that the war would make the nation “the grand theatre of our Holy Church to execute its glorious mission” of conversion. In his private “chronicle” of the Congregation of the Holy Cross in North America, Father Edward Sorin, president of the University of Notre Dame near South Bend, Indiana, reported in 1861 and again in 1862 that his order’s priests serving as chaplains and nuns serving as nurses had helped dispel prejudices against Catholicism among Union soldiers. Such reports seemingly confirm the optimism of thinkers like Young, Hecker,

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and Brownson that the war would help advance the cause of Catholicism in the postbellum nation. Still, just as over the issue of slavery, some Catholic thinkers, especially committed Democrats, were not optimistic that the war could prove Catholic loyalty and thus eradicate anti-Catholicism once and for all in American society. Many anti-abolitionist and antiwar thinkers tended to focus on the present, eschewing discussions of a possible better future while so much suffering and unrest wracked the nation. The Union, “as it was,” they believed was under threat not just from Confederates but from an administration that for its own political agenda “ruthlessly and needlessly trampled under foot” the Constitution. McMaster, for one, always focused on the conflict’s negative aspects and never spoke about the war benefiting Catholics or the nation. Shortly before Bull Run, he smugly noted that the newly expanded Paulist chapel in New York City proved that the church “though her members suffer their full share[,] goes ahead whether the country does or not.” His arrest by the Lincoln Administration for printing antiwar editorials in the fall of 1861 made him only more outspoken in defense of constitutional liberties, in attacking abolitionists, and in criticizing the human cost of “this most unholy and destructive war” for the remainder of the conflict. In 1863, John Mullay mused that the reaction to the draft riots was not surprising, for only a “simpleton” could ever have believed that the sacrifices of the Irish on behalf of the Union would have had any effect on public prejudices against them. Even Hecker initially declared it “strange” in June 1861 that “a very large number of the volunteers [from the] north, are Catholics.” From their conservative viewpoint, most Catholic thinkers saw the troubling developments taking place in the war as the triumph of what their radical enemies had wanted in the antebellum era. McMaster opined as early as 1861 that the war simply proved the necessity of the church for the preservation of the nation. If Lincoln and other northern leaders saw the preservation of the United States as the last great hope for global democracy, then many Catholics saw their faith as the last great hope for salvaging what was left of their once proud nation. Advising Americans to turn their back on radical, pro-war preachers like Henry Ward Beecher, McMaster saw the war as further proof of the destructive nature of Protestantism and that the “grand salvation for the country” could only “be found in the Catholic Church.” By 1863 or 1864 the majority of Catholic civilian thinkers, joined together by their conservative approach to the issues surrounding the war, believed that the

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conflict had become a national calamity. Even some of the most optimistic gave up their initial hopes of a positive benefit to come for Catholics. If the Union won or lost, triumphant or angry Republicans would further seek to radicalize American society and to attack the church. After all, were they not simply the Know Nothings under another name who would attack the church as soon as the war was finished? Thus in the fall of 1863 Bishop Spalding cited the burning and desecration of Catholic churches by northern soldiers in the South and Border States as proof that “all, or nearly all, the leaders . . . of the North, hate the Catholic religion with an almost satanic hate.” To justify its open support of the Democrats in 1864, the Pilot accused the Republicans of “narrow bigotry” against both the Irish and Catholics, portraying the party as the “legitimate successors” of the Know Nothings. Such a stance was part of the antiwar turn Donahoe’s paper took after the Overland Campaign of 1864, a development all the more startling considering the Pilot’s early patriotism and firm belief that Irish Catholics would prove their loyalty once and for all during the conflict. In fact, by the midpoint of the conflict, it seemed that the bulk of Catholic opinion was moving away from supporting the war and into apathy or occasionally outright opposition. Bishop Spalding spoke for antiwar Catholics across the United States when he argued in October 1863 that the institutional church should stay out of both politics and the “detestable war.” Earlier that year in February, Father Wimmer, angered by the conscription of several of his clergy, wrote that if Lincoln was not “more reasonable, a revolution will break out in the North, the consequences of which no one can foresee.” Fears of a radical remaking of society by the Republicans, which seemed likely given allegedly anti-Catholic events during the war, made even pro-Union intellectuals such as Weninger wary. “Their war cry is ‘No slaves and priests,’ ” he later wrote of the extreme element of the Radical Republicans, “hence the danger which hung over the church.” In the end, the participation of large numbers of Catholics in the draft riots, the growing reluctance of Irish Catholics (the most prominent and visible ethnic subgroup in American Catholicism) to serve in the Union Army because of emancipation, and the arrival of papal peace letters in 1863, seemed to show that the antiwar, anti-abolition intellectuals represented their church and community’s views more faithfully than did men like the Purcell brothers, Hecker, and Brownson. Negative assessments of Catholic patriotism in the second half of the war by some northerners, particularly Republicans, only strengthened the pessimism of conservative Catholic thinkers. For example, in December 1864, Horace Gree-

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ley’s New York Tribune openly attacked Catholic loyalty, suggesting that the clergy had actually undermined the Union War effort. “Whereas all the Catholic clergy within the rebel lines are active rebels,” Greely stated, “we know of scarcely one under the Union flag who is any more loyal than the law requires him to be.” He continued: “As a body, their influence discourages enlistments in our armies, and tends to enfeeble and paralyze the prosecution of the war.” Such attacks on antiwar Democrats were common enough in Republican newspapers across the United States. But such an open attack on the Catholic clergy’s loyalty (and the community as a whole), however, had never before been so prominently expressed in the public sphere during the conflict. Given Catholic participation in the draft riots and their almost unanimous support for the Democrats both before and during the war, it is understandable why Greeley and many of his readers must have held such a view. Such criticism of Catholics’ loyalty during the war produced a good amount of anger among Catholics of all viewpoints across the North. Just ten days before Greeley’s article was published, Donahoe denounced such anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment in a Pilot editorial titled “Kill Off This Foreign Vote.” He spoke for many Catholics when he lamented the fact that after all Catholics had “sacrificed and suffered for the country” they still were the targets of such “slander and unmerited reproach.” Just as many of Fredrickson’s northern intellectuals were dismayed at how “remote” the postwar period was from their wartime hopes of a purified, “ideal America,” Donahoe clearly lamented the similar failure of the war to bring about greater tolerance for Catholics. McMaster half seriously suggested at the end of the month that Catholics emigrate to Mexico to avoid the persecution that was sure to come now that slavery was gone. Greeley’s article also inspired some in the Catholic press to posit the possibility of a “religious war” or “anti-Popery crusade” on Catholics in the conflict’s waning months. Evidence of such a possible conflict was not hard to find. Father de Smet, who happily believed that “Union sentiment” had been restored throughout much of the South in late 1865, nonetheless lamented the rise of Radical Republicans in Missouri politics. In particular, he targeted the loyalty oath imposed on Catholic and Protestant clergy, denouncing it as an “iniquitous law” that had already worked its mischief in the arrest of several priests and nuns in St. Louis. Despite religious tensions in Missouri and anger over Greeley’s article, most Catholic thinkers realized by the second half of 1865 that no real religious war would actually take place. One Catholic editor from Pittsburgh opined in January of that

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year that the “common sense” of the northern people mitigated religious conflict, and even the antiwar Oertel stated in November that only a “minority” of “twisted heads” wished to wage an actual war on Catholicism. Still, for many northern Catholics, the war proved an alienating experience that did little to reverse the trend of further Catholic segregation from the rest of U.S. society. American bishops, including the liberal Purcell and the more typical Spalding, gathered in Baltimore in 1866 to take part in the U.S. church’s second plenary council. The assembled bishops issued a statement on the “evils” of immediate emancipation, condemning the haste with which their “sudden liberation” was achieved, and noting that the Catholic countries of Europe emancipated their slaves more humanely through a “gradual” process. With this statement, the American church’s highest leaders officially endorsed and declared the outright triumph of the Catholic thinkers’ conservative critique of the Civil War. In his The American Republic, published shortly after the end of the war, Brownson too adopted his co-religionists attack on the social reform agenda of abolitionists and other humanitarians in the North. The ultimate effect of the war was to drive civilian Catholic intellectuals closer together in support of a more separate identity from that of the rest of American society. Catholics certainly did join other Americans in the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.), the North’s most important veterans’ association, and in building monuments and writing histories after the war to celebrate what they had done on behalf of the Union. Thus, through the lived experience of Civil War commemoration, many Catholics, particularly war veterans, joined hand in hand with other northerners in celebrating their role in preserving the nation. Prominent among them, was Bishop John Ireland, a former Civil War chaplain who was a well-known proponent of reconciling American democracy with the Catholic Church. In addition, the postwar federal government significantly strengthened laws protecting naturalized citizens, a policy that helped strengthen immigrants’ claims to equal citizenship in the United States. Still, from their conservative religious worldview, the most influential Catholic intellectuals within the church saw continuing anti-Catholicism as well as radical changes to the nation during the war as threats to the church. While Catholic thinkers, bishops, and newspapers celebrated devout Catholic men who had saved the Union, they also continued to create Catholic institutions to parallel those of Protestant Americans. They resisted the new bureaucratic, scientific, and highly organized versions of social and civil reform that, according to George Fredrickson, swept across the North in the postwar period in favor

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of a religiously conservative worldview that valued authority, unity, and stability. They feared Republican efforts to strengthen national power, in part because they were Democrats, but also because of their fears that state power might be directed against the American church as it had been in Europe, most notably in Otto von Bismarck’s newly unified Germany. That Republicans often spoke highly of Bismarck and wanted to use the federal government to promote public schools at the expense of parochial ones confirmed Catholic thinkers’ belief in the continuing hostility of their wartime political enemies. In the last half of the nineteenth century, bishops and prominent laymen faced with such a perceived threat took concrete steps to safeguard their community from Republican, Protestant, and nativist interference. Catholic leaders enlarged the parochial school system and founded more colleges and universities, such as the Catholic University of America, founded in 1887. They established more of their own religious newspapers and encouraged Catholic men to join their own fraternal organizations such as the Knights of Columbus or Ancient Order of Hibernians, and women could join auxiliary groups to those organizations. They built up a substantial Catholic subculture all the while refuting nativist attacks leveled now by the American Protective Association (A.P.A.) on their Americanness. Though some Catholic veterans did join the G.A.R., others stayed away because of its alliance with the Republican Party and church leaders’ initial concerns that it was a secret society and a danger to Catholic veterans’ faith. Subsequent waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who like the Germans and Irish, settled into their own ethnic neighborhoods and founded their own ethnic churches, furthered the isolation of the church from mainstream America. The victory of conservative bishops over more liberal Catholic leaders in the so-called Americanist crisis of the 1890s, which was an internal debate over the extent to which the church should modernize itself, had already been foretold by the victory of antiwar conservatives over pro-emancipation voices during the Civil War. Thus, in addition to nineteenth-century nativism, the war accelerated and strengthened Catholic thinkers’ apologetic and separatist tone. It had reinforced their identity as Catholic Americans. Unable to embrace the war and its radical changes to American society wholeheartedly, the religious, social, and political conservatism of Catholic thinkers of the Civil War era proved to have a lasting impact on the church’s leadership and Catholic life for years to come.

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Notes

Historians and Intellectual Life in the Civil War Era Lorien Foote 1. William E. Gienapp, ed., This Fiery Trial: The Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 184. 2. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006). 3. Several important studies take seriously the ideas of popular writers and their influence over American intellectual life. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), studies commercial works and the influence of their style and themes over the major writers. Alice A. Fahs, in The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), examines the broadly shared literary sensibilities of northerners and southerners. Michael J. Bernath, Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), considers writers, publishers, educators, ministers, artists, doctors, scientists, and so on, who were committed to southern intellectual independence. Although Bernath pulls back from labeling his subjects “intellectuals,” he calls them “facilitators of culture,” who took ideas seriously and expressed them in print (4). 4. John Higham and Paul Conkin, New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). 5. George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (1965; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), viii–xiii, 1–50, 99–108, 199–209. 6. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). 7. Randall Fuller, From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 9. 8. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 5. 9. Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 3–4, 53, 88, 99. 10. Anne C. Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–13, 58–59, 235–52. 11. Fahs, Imagined Civil War, 10–16, 94–95, 311. 12. George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 9.

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13. Rose, Victorian America, 1–2. 14. Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008). 15. Frances M. Clarke, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 2–7, 40, 140–42. 16. John G. Sproat, “The Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 17. Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 5, 11–59, 97–142, 165–81, 207–11. 18. Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 98–128. 19. Joan Waugh, Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 2–9, 96. 20. Lorien Foote, Seeking the One Great Remedy: Francis George Shaw and Nineteenth-Century Reform (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 164. 21. Butler, Critical Americans, 11–12, 192–93, 212–13. 22. Jeanie Attie, Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 5, 57–81, 125–90, 248–54. 23. Judith Ann Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 5–12. 24. Clarke, War Stories, 87–95. 25. Paul Quigley, Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5–6. 26. Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 26–28; Quigley, Shifting Grounds, 9; Bernath, Confederate Minds, 2–3. 27. Grant, North over South, 4–13, 26–36, 72; Lawson, Patriot Fires, 1–13. 28. Clarke, War Stories, 22, 53, 85. 29. Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 135–45, 184–94. 30. Fahs, Imagined Civil War, 1–2, 11; Lawson Patriot Fires, 14–39; Attie, Patriotic Toil, 3–4, 30; Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). 31. Fahs, Imagined Civil War, 14; Lawson, Patriot Fires, 14–39. 32. Waugh, Unsentimental Reformer, 101; Butler, Critical Americans, 88, 253. 33. Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 1–6. 34. Andre M. Fleche, The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 3, 6, 60–78, 108–31. 35. Ibid., 121–23; Clarke, War Stories, 115–29.

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U.S. Sanitary Commission Physicians and the Transformation of American Health Care Kathryn Shively Meier 1. Medical sectarianism is addressed in this chapter only insofar as it affected the decline of the profession. The best scholarship on the professional medical debates over the course of the nineteenth century tend to be older but remain relevant: Joseph F. Kett, The Formation of the American Medical Profession: The Role of Institutions (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1968); John S. Haller, American Medicine in Transition, 1840–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820–1885 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); Naomi Rogers, An Alternative Path: The Making and Remaking of Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital of Philadelphia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Charles E. Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System (New York: Basic Books, 1987); Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961); William G. Rothstein, American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century: From Sects to Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and more recently, James C. Whorton, Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Medical histories that give some mention to sectarianism during the Civil War years include Margaret Humphreys, Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); George Worthington Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (1952; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Alfred J. Bollet, Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (Tucson, Ariz.: Galen Press, 2002); Frank R. Freemon, Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care during the American Civil War (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998); Ira Rutkow, Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine (New York: Random House, 2005). 2. George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 111. 3. See in this volume Richard Newman, “To Save the Afflicted Union: Race, Civic Health, and the Sanitary Front,” and Susan-Mary Grant, “Civil War Cybernetics: Medicine, Modernity, and the Intellectual Mechanics of Union.” 4. For connections between environment and physical illness, see Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 24. For connections between environment and mental health, see Daniel Drake, “Selected Papers: Medical Topography: From the Natural and Statistical View, or Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Country,” Eclectic Repertory and Analytical Review, Medical and Philosophical 6 (April 1816): 137. 5. Rosenberg, Care of Strangers, 4. 6. Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 213–14.

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7. Rogers, Alternative Path, 9. 8. As the historian Stephen Halliday has termed it, virtually no universal understanding of disease causation, save in the case of small pox, existed in the early to mid1800s. Stephen Halliday, The Great Filth: The War against Disease in Victorian England (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2007), 59. 9. John Harley Warner, “Orthodoxy and Otherness: Homeopathy and Regular Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Culture, Knowledge, and Healing: Historical Perspectives of Homeopathic Medicine in Europe and North America, ed. Robert Jütte, Guether B. Risse, and John Woodward (Sheffield, UK: European Association for the History of Health and Medicine, 1998), 6. 10. Joseph Kett discusses the relationship between Thomsonianism and Jacksonian democracy in Formation of the American Medical Profession, 110. A similar but less coherent challenge to medical orthodoxy came from hydropathy—the use of water in the treatment of disease. Kett, Formation of the American Medical Profession, 161. 11. Warner, “Orthodoxy and Otherness,” 6–7. 12. Rutkow, Bleeding Blue and Gray, 59. 13. Kett, Formation of the American Medical Profession, 165. 14. Warner, Therapeutic Perspective, 13–15, 37. 15. Kett, Formation of the American Medical Profession, 165. 16. Code of Medical Ethics of the American Medical Association: Originally Adopted at the Meeting of the National Medical Convention in Philadelphia, May 1847 (Chicago: American Medical Association Press, 1861), 95–97, 105–6. 17. John S. Haller, The History of American Homeopathy: The Academic Years, 1820–1935 (Binghamton, N.Y.: Hawthorne Press, 2005), 272–73. 18. Warner, Therapeutic Perspective, 24. 19. The Sanitary Commission doctors examined in this study tend to fall into two groups: first, those who were founding members of the commission and/or served on the governing board of the organization, including Cornelius Agnew, William H. Van Buren, John F. Jenkins, and John S. Newberry. The other group, which also included the aforementioned physicians, were the principal authors of Sanitary Commission pamphlets, directing information in the field; these included William A. Hammond, John T. Metcalfe, Valentine Mott, and Elisha Harris. See Charles Janeway Stillé, History of the United States Sanitary Commission: Being the General Report of Its Work Done during the War of the Rebellion (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1866), 519, 553. 20. For Agnew’s professional history, see Theodore Gaillard Thomas, A Eulogy upon Cornelius Rea Agnew Read before the New York Academy of Medicine (New York, 1888), 6–7; for his influence on the Commission, see Stillé, History of the United States Sanitary Commission, 73. 21. Biographies for these doctors can be found in Charles A. White, Biographical Memoir of John Strong Newberry Read Before the National Academy of Sciences 1902 (Washington, D.C.: Judd and Detweiler, 1906) and The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, ed. Charles E. Beveridge and Carolyn R. Hoffman, 7 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977–), 4:99–100, 103–7, and 96–99. Other physicians , such as Elisha

Notes to pages 25–27

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Harris and Samuel Gridley Howe, were more advanced in their careers and had served in public health capacities; see Stillé, History of the United States Sanitary Commission. 22. For more on the hijacking of the women’s benevolence movement by prominent male intellectuals, see Judith A. Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 31–50. 23. Stillé, History of the United States Sanitary Commission, 63. 24. William Quentin Maxwell, Lincoln’s Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the U.S. Sanitary Commission (New York: Longmans, Green, 1956), 6–8. 25. United States Sanitary Commission, Documents of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, 3 vols. (New York: s.n., 1856–1866), 1:4, 1. 26. Surgery was far from perfect, and Medical Department officials such as Army of the Potomac Medical Director Jonathan Letterman would provide important advancements in ambulance evacuation as the war went on. Yet with the introduction of anesthesia in the 1840s, surgery was, in many ways, more advanced than disease treatment. Rutkow, Bleeding Blue and Gray, 61. 27. Howard Atwood Kelly, A Cyclopedia of American Medical Biography (Baltimore: Norman, Remington, 1920), 496. 28. See, for instance, Henry Whitney Bellows to Russell Nevins Bellows, June 9, 1862, Henry W. Bellows correspondence, 1830–1880, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts (hereafter cited as MHS). 29. G. T. Strong, Origin, Struggles, and Principles of the U.S. Sanitary Commission (Boston: s.n., 1864), 27–28. 30. Fredrickson wrote, “Men like Bellows, Strong, and Stillé welcomed the sufferings and sacrifices of the hour because they served the cause of discipline in a broader sense than demanded by purely military requirements. An unruly society, devoted to individual freedom, might be in the process of learning that discipline and subordination were good in themselves, and the commissioners wanted to play their role in teaching this lesson.” Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War, 105. 31. Jeanie Attie, Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 59. 32. John Brooke explains, “After 1800, men and women of Federalist leanings turned to culture, religion, and benevolence, hoping to establish bonds of a common nationality out of the vestiges of the early modern confessional state, now reforged as a broad and implicit establishment of Protestant denominationalism in the Second Great Awakening.” Brooke, “Cultures of Nationalism, Movements of Reform, and the CompositeFederal Polity: From Revolutionary Settlement to Antebellum Crisis,” Journal of the Early Republic 29 (Spring 2009): 11. 33. United States Sanitary Commission, Documents of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, 1:9–11, 15, 18. 34. Adams, Doctors in Blue, 10–11. 35. “Army Surgeons,” Valley Spirit, July 9, 1862. 36. Rutkow, Bleeding Blue and Gray, 59.

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37. Ibid., 99. 38. Warner, Therapeutic Perspective, 98–99. 39. Pvt. Aaron E. Bachman, 1st Pennsylvania Cavalry, memoir, 10, Bachman, Aaron E.—HCWRTColl (Enlisted man and prisoner of war’s memoirs, July 1861–July 1865), U.S. Army Military Institute at Carlisle, Penn. (hereafter cited as USAMHI). 40. Sgt. Henry Keiser, “Diary of Henry Keiser of Lykens, Pennsylvania: Company G, 95th and 96th Pennsylvania Volunteers, War of the Rebellion, 1891 to 1865,” typescript, 29, USAMHI. 41. Rev. A. M. Stewart, Camp, March and Battle-field; on Three Years and a Half with the Army of the Potomac (Philadelphia: Jas. B. Rodgers, 1865), 74. 42. For more information on soldier self-care and the informal network of health care, see Kathryn Shively Meier, Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 43. Alfred Lewis Castleman, Diary of Alfred Lewis Castleman, May, 1862, in The Army of the Potomac, Behind the Scenes (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Strickland, 1863), 162. 44. Thomas P. Lowry and Jack D. Welsh, Tarnished Scalpels: The Court-Martials of Fifty Union Surgeons (Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole Books, 2000), 106. 45. Olmsted, Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, 4:354. 46. J. Franklin Dyer, The Journal of a Civil War Surgeon, ed. Michael B. Chesson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 20. 47. William Mervale Smith, Swamp Doctor: A Union Physician’s Civil War Story, ed. Tomas P. Lowry (Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole Books, 2001), 15. For an additional example, see John Gardner Perry, Letters from a Surgeon of the Civil War, ed. Martha Derby (Boston: Little, Brown, 1906), 18–19. Perry wrote “My cottage is full, in fact the whole hospital is crowded, and I am tired out, having no relief whatever from steady, close confinement.” Immediately thereafter, he was gripped by crippling illness and had to return home. He did not rejoin the army until April 11, 1863, after taking a hiatus to pass his medical board exams and marry his sweetheart. 48. Dyer, Journal of a Civil War Surgeon, 25–26. 49. Camp Inspection Return, 106th Pennsylvania Infantry, December 21, 1861, United States Sanitary Commission Records Series 1 Medical Committee Archives, 1861–5 and Series 7 Statistical Bureau Archives, Camp Inspection Reports 1861–4, Stephen A. Schwartzman Special Collections, New York Public Library, New York, NY (hereafter cited as NYPL). 50. Stillé, History of the Sanitary Commission, 111. 51. The message read: “The attention of the Sanitary Commission has been called to the fact that most of our Army Surgeons now in the field are unavoidably deprived of many facilities they have heretofore enjoyed for the consultation of standard medical authorities.” See, for example, United States Sanitary Commission, “Report of a Committee on Dysentery,” 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: McGill and Witherow, 1863), U.S. Sanitary Commission Treatment of Diseases, bound volume, MHS. 52. United States Sanitary Commission, “Report on Military Hygiene and Therapeutics,” 4th ed. (Printed for Circulation by the U.S. Sanitary Commission, 1863), 5, 10–13, U.S. Sanitary Commission Treatment of Diseases, bound volume, MHS.

Notes to pages 31–34

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53. Kett, Formation of the American Medical Profession, 155. 54. United States Sanitary Commission, “Report of a Committee Appointed by Resolution of the U.S. Sanitary Commission to Prepare a Paper on the Use of Quinine as a Prophylactic Against Malarious Disease,” 2nd ed. (Printed for Circulation by the U.S. Sanitary Commission 1863), 5–7; U.S. Sanitary Commission Treatment of Diseases, bound volume, MHS. 55. United States Sanitary Commission, The Sanitary Commission Bulletin, 40 vols. (New York: Sanitary Commission, 1863–65), 1:215. 56. See the following pamphlets as examples: United States Sanitary Commission, “Report of a Committee of the Associate Medical Members of the Sanitary Commission on the Subject of Continued Fevers” (Boston: J. E. Farwell, 1862); “Report of a Committee of the Associate Medical Members of the Sanitary Commission on Dysentery,” 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: McGill and Witherow, 1863); and “Report of a Committee of the Associate Medical Members of the Sanitary Commission on the Subject and Nature of Miasmatic Fevers” (New York: Ballier Brothers, 1862), all contained in U.S. Sanitary Commission Treatment of Diseases, bound volume, MHS. 57. Kathryn Shively Meier, “ ‘This Is No Place for the Sick’: Nature’s War on Civil War Soldier Mental and Physical Health in the 1862 Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley Campaigns,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1 (June 2011): 191–97. 58. United States Sanitary Commission, “Report of a Committee on Dysentery,” 22, 25, 31. 59. United States Sanitary Commission, Hints for the Control and Prevention of Infectious Diseases: In Camps, Transports, and Hospitals (New York: William C. Bryant, 1863), 16–18; U.S. Sanitary Commission Treatment of Diseases, bound volume, MHS. 60. United States Sanitary Commission, Report of a Committee of the Associate Medical Members of the Sanitary Commission on the Subject of Scurvy with Special Reference to the Army and Navy, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Witherow, 1863); U.S. Sanitary Commission Treatment of Diseases, bound volume, MHS. 61. United States Sanitary Commission, Bulletin, 1:30–31. 62. William H. Van Buren, Rules for Preserving the Health of the Soldier (Washington, D.C.: United States Sanitary Commission, 1861), 1–9, Library of Virginia, Archives and Manuscripts, Richmond, Virginia. 63. For examples of surgeons who appeared open to the Sanitary Commission requests for information, see “Medical History of the 20th Indiana Volunteers,” July 1861–August 1862, Microfilm, Frame 0450, Reel 1, United States Sanitary Commission: Medical Committee Archives Series 1, 1861–66, NYPL, and Dr. Alfred Castleman, “Copy of Regimental Notes on Water,” May 19, 1863, Microfilm, Frame 0516, Reel 1, United States Sanitary Commission: Medical Committee Archives Series 1, 1861–66, NYPL. 64. In The Civil War Letters of Joseph Hopkins Twichell: A Chaplain’s Story, ed. Peter Messent and Steve Courtney (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 130. 65. United States Sanitary Commission, Camp Inspection Report, 87th New York Infantry, January 1862, Series 1 Medical Committee Archives, 1861–65, and Series 7 Statistical Bureau Archives, Camp Inspection Reports, 1861–64, United States Sanitary Commission Records, NYPL.

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Notes to pages 34–37

66. Rev. Dr. Henry Bellows, “Speech at the Philadelphia Academy of Music,” February 24, 1863, U.S. Sanitary Commission Records, Box No. 989, NYPL. 67. United States Sanitary Commission, “Reports Circulating Appeals: An Appeal to the People of Pennsylvania for the Sick and Wounded Soldiers, United States Sanitary Commission Records,” 3, U.S. Sanitary Commission Records, Box No. 989, NYPL. 68. United States Sanitary Commission, Form Letter Addressed to Colonel, Commanding Regiment (Washington, D.C., Treasury Building, 1861), Frederick Newman Knapp Papers, 1860–1889, MHS. 69. J. Foster Jenkins, Typed Letter Form, May 12, 1864, Office of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, New York, Frederick Newman Knapp Papers, 1860–89, MHS. 70. Frederick Newman Knapp, diary [June 14, 1862 entry], Frederick Newman Knapp Papers, MHS. 71. Pvt. Ephraim A. Wood, 13th Massachusetts Infantry, July 3, 1862 diary entry, Journal of Private Ephraim A. Wood, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. 72. Jane E. Schultz, Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 20. 73. The historian Frances Clarke explains that from 1863 on, the commission became more sentimentalized and religious in its message as an attempt to commune with the soldier and combat a reputation as a soulless bureaucracy. Frances M. Clarke, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 93. 74. Frederick K. Knapp, “Report Concerning the Aid and Comfort given by the Sanitary Commission to Sick and Invalid Soldiers, for the Quarter ending June 30, 1865,” Documents of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, Issues 61–95 (New York: United States Sanitary Commission, 1866), 2. 75. United States Sanitary Commission, The Soldier’s Friend (Philadelphia: Perkinpine & Higgins, 1865), 17. 76. Indeed, after looking at the following sample of newspapers for the year 1862, it was apparent that Confederate papers rarely reported on soldier health, whereas Union papers tended to transmit information provided mainly by the Sanitary Commission: Staunton Spectator, Richmond Daily Dispatch, Alexandria Gazette, Christian Banner, Day Book, Richmond Enquirer, Cavalier, Maryland News Sheet, Richmond Whig, Harper’s Weekly, New York Herald, New York Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Christian Recorder, Semi-Weekly Dispatch, Valley Spirit, 5th Pennsylvania, and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. 77. See, for examples, “Sanitary Statistics of the Army,” Chicago Tribune, April 16, 1862; “Soldier’s Health,” Christian Recorder, November 1, 1862; New York Post, January 10, 1862, NYPL. 78. “For the Soldiers,” Harper’s Weekly, April 19, 1862. 79. United States Sanitary Commission, Bulletin, 1:293–94. 80. Ibid., 152. 81. United States Sanitary Commission, To the Loyal Women of America (Washington, D.C., October 1, 1861), Frederick Newman Knapp Papers, MHS.

Notes to pages 38–42

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82. United States Sanitary Commission, “Hospital Directory Paper Pertaining to the Final Report,” 1866, U.S. Sanitary Commission Washington Hospital Directory Archives, Box 192.3, NYPL. 83. United States Sanitary Commission, “Character of Inquiries,” U.S. Sanitary Commission Washington Hospital Directory Archives, Box 192.3, NYPL. 84. United States Sanitary Commission, “Dear Sir from Edward Abbott,” December 3, 1862, Washington Hospital Directory Letter Book, November 29, 1862–September 5, 1863, U.S. Sanitary Commission Washington Hospital Directory Archives, Box 192.3, NYPL. 85. United States Sanitary Commission, Plot of Soldiers’ Cemetery at Bell Plain, Virginia, May 23, 1864, Washington Hospital Directory Archives, Box. 192.3, Folder 1, NYPL. 86. Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 14–39. 87. United States Sanitary Commission, “Hospital Directory Paper pertaining to the Final Report, 1866,” U.S. Sanitary Commission Washington Hospital Directory Archives, Box 192.3, NYPL. 88. Charles Abiathar White, Biographical Memoir of John Strong Newberry, 1822–1892 (Washington, D.C.: Judd and Detweiler, 1906), 9–10. 89. American Historical Company, American Biography: A New Cyclopedia (New York, 1918), 4:344–51. 90. To Cornelius R. Agnew from Samuel L. Clemens, June 7, 1875, in Mark Twain’s Letters, ed. Michael B. Frank and Harriet Eleanor Smith, 6 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988–2002), 6:490. 91. Haller, History of American Homeopathy, 272–73. 92. Thomas, Eulogy upon Cornelius Rea Agnew. 93. Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 131. 94. Strong, Origin, Struggles, and Principles, 31.

Civil War Cybernetics: Medicine, Modernity, and the Intellectual Mechanics of Union Susan-Mary Grant The author thanks the editors of this volume and especially the anonymous readers for their careful, encouraging, and considered comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 1. Anon. [Rebecca Harding Davis], “Life in the Iron Mills,” Atlantic Monthly 7, no. 42 (1861): 430–51, quotations 430, 433, 439. 2. Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans (1989; New York: Hill and Wang, 1999), 109; Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union (1947–71; New York: Collier Books, 1992), vol. 4, The War for the Union, 271–73; George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); Leonard P. Curry, Blueprint for Modern America: Nonmilitary Legislation of the First Civil War Congress (Nashville, Tenn.:

246

Notes to pages 42–44

Vanderbilt University Press, 1968); Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); George M. Fredrickson, “Blue Over Gray: Sources of Success and failure in the Civil War,” in A Nation Divided: Problems and Issues of the Civil War and Reconstruction, ed. George M. Fredrickson (Minneapolis: Burgess, 1975), 57–80, quotation 70. Fredrickson’s seminal and still hugely significant study of northern intellectuals at war had nothing to say about the medical profession. 3. John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820–1885 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); Bonnie Ellen Blustein, “ ‘To Increase the Efficiency of the Medical Department’: A New Approach to Civil War Medicine,” Civil War History 33, no. 1 (1987): 22–41; see Kathryn Shively Meier in this volume; on this subject see also Bobby A. Wintermute, Public Health and the U.S. Military: A History of the Army Medical Department, 1818–1917 (New York: Routledge, 2011), 45–46. The literature on public health in the later nineteenthcentury United States is vast, but an important and suggestive link between the national and medical perspective of the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) and that of medicine is established and explored in Bonj Szczygiel and Robert Hewitt, “NineteenthCentury Medical Landscapes: John H. Rauch, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Search for Salubrity,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74, no. 4 (2000), 708–34; Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (London: Longman, 1980), 151. 4. Craig A. Warren, Scars to Prove It: The Civil War Soldier and American Fiction (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2009), 2. 5. Ibid., 5; Kathryn Montgomery Hunter, Doctors’ Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 8–9. 6. Anon., “A Remedy for an Evil,” American Medical Times, June 14, 1862, 335. 7. “Quackery and Brutality on the Battlefield,” New York Times, October 19, 1862; Report of Surgeon Jonathan Letterman, U.S.A., Medical Director of the Army of the Potomac, of the Operations of the Medical Department, from September 2 to November 7, 1862, in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901) (hereafter ORA), series 1, vol. 19 (XXXI), 113; J. N. Reach, “Army Surgeons: Their Character and Duties,” Cincinnati Lancet and Observer, June 1863, 339–44, quotation, 339. See also Cincinnati Lancet and Observer, April 1863, 230; “Complaint of the Volunteer Surgeon,” New York Times, September 25, 1862, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 20, 1862; American Medical Times, May 31, 1862, 312. 8. D. L. Griffiths, “Medicine and Surgery in the American Civil War,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 59, no. 3 (1966): 204–8, quotation, 208; earlier medical histories tended to present a more positive perspective on Civil War procedures and their lasting impact. See Courtney R. Hall, “The Rise of Professional Surgery in the United States: 1800–1865,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 26 (1952); 231–62; Frances M. Clarke, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 66; Francis M. Wafer, A Surgeon in the Army of the Potomac, ed. Cheryl A. Wells (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), xxix.

Notes to pages 45–50

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9. Alfred Jay Bollet, “Amputations in the Civil War,” in Years of Change and Suffering: Modern Perspectives on Civil War Medicine, ed. James M. Schmidt and Guy R. Hasegawa (Roseville, Minn.: Edinborough Press, 2009), 57–58; Griffiths, “Medicine and Surgery,” 207. 10. Charles E. Rosenberg, “The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine, Meaning, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 20, 4 (1977): 485–506, reprinted in The Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of American Medicine, ed. Morris J. Vogel and Rosenberg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 3–25, quotation 4–5; and see also Warner, Therapeutic Perspective, vii, ix. On science and postwar scientific rationalization, see S. E. D. Shortt, “Physicians, Science, and Status: Issues in the Professionalization of Anglo-American Medicine in the Nineteenth Century,” Medical History 27, 1 (1983): 51–68, esp. 64–65. 11. J. T. H. Connor, “ ‘Before the World in Concealed Disgrace’: Physicians, Professionalization and the 1898 Cuban Campaign of the Spanish American War,” in Medicine and Modern Warfare, ed. Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison, and Steve Sturdy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 29–58, quotation, 51; Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 238; Report of Surg. Henry S. Hewitt, U.S. Army, Medical Director, Department of the Ohio, May 1–September 8, 1864 (Atlanta Campaign), January 1865, ORA series 1, vol. 38/2, 533; see also Martha Derby Perry, ed., Letters from a Surgeon of the Civil War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1906), 52. 12. Silas Thompson Trowbridge, Autobiography of Silas Thompson Trowbridge, M.D. (1874; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 8; Wafer, Surgeon in the Army of the Potomac, xli, 6; John G. Perry, Letters from a Surgeon of the Civil War, compiled by Martha Derby Perry (Boston: Little, Brown, 1906) 10; Fielding H. Garrison, John Shaw Billings: A Memoir (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915), 27. 13. Moses Gunn to his wife, September 20, 1861, in J. A. Gunn, Memorial Sketches of Doctor Moses Gunn (Chicago: W. T. Keener, 1889), 70, and ibid., May 28, 1862, 157–58. 14. Garrison, John Shaw Billings, 20, 22; see also Billings, “Medical Reminiscences of the Civil War,” Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 27 (1905), 115–21; and Perry, Letters from a Surgeon, 6–7; Henry I. Bowditch, A Brief Plea: An Ambulance System for the Army of the United States (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), Appendix, 19–20. 15. For a discussion of the “Letterman System” see Frank R. Freemon, Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care during the American Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 67–76; and Fielding H. Garrison, Notes on the History of Military Medicine (Washington, D.C.: Association of Military Surgeons, 1922), 174–76; Charles O’Leary was the medical director of the Sixth Corps, and is quoted in Bennett A. Clements, Memoir of Jonathan Letterman, in Journal of the Military Service Institution 4, no. 15 (1883): 10–11. 16. Garrison, John Shaw Billings, 62–63, 64–65. 17. Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 102; Letterman, Medical Recollections, 98–99, 100–1; see also 112. 18. Letterman, Medical Recollections, 6–7, 9; on scurvy in the Civil War, see Alfred Jay Bollet, “Scurvy and Chronic Diarrhea in Civil War Troops: Were They Both Nutritional

248

Notes to pages 50–54

Deficiency Syndromes?,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 47 (1992): 49–67; and for contemporary reports, see, e.g., Joseph K. Barnes, ed., The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion between 1870 and 1880 (hereafter MSHWR), 6 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1870–88), part 3, vol. 1, chap. 5, “On the Diseases Allied to or Associated with the Paroxysmal and Continued Fevers,” III, “Diarrhoea and Dysentery,” 616–22; Hewitt, Report, ORA series 1, vol. 38/2, 531–32; Report of Surg. Charles S. Frink, U.S. Army, Surgeon in Chief (Atlanta Campaign), ORA, series 1, vol. 38/2, 695–96; and John S. Billings to Surgeon-General’s Office, June 17, 1865, ORA, series 1, vol. 42/1, 203. 19. Letterman, Medical Recollections, 98–99, 100–101; see also 112; Wilson Jewell, “Address before the American Medical Association, 2nd June, 1863” (Philadelphia: Collins, 1863), 18. 20. Letterman, Medical Recollections, 101; Kathryn Shively Meier, “U.S. Sanitary Commission Physicians and the Transformation of American Health Care,” in this volume; and Silas Weir Mitchell, In War Time (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1885), 7. 21. Cincinnati Lancet and Observer, April, 1863, 230–31; Hewitt, Report, 532. 22. Hewitt, Report, 533, 532. 23. Letterman, Medical Recollections, 114–15; William A. Hammond, Circular No. 2, May 21, 1862 (Washington, D.C.: Surgeon General’s Office, 1862), National Library of Medicine (NLM): http://collectionsqa.nlm.nih.gov/muradora/objectView .action?pid=nlm:nlmuid-101534229-bk (01 August, 2012); on the origins and development of the Army Medical Museum see Robert S. Henry, The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Its First Century, 1862–1962 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1964), esp. chaps. 1–3. The remit for the medical museum collections was expanded in 1863 to include requests for photographic representations of wounds; see Stanley B. Burns, M.D., Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Photography by R. B. Bontecou (New York: Burns Archive, 2011), 16. 24. Hammond, Circular No. 5, June 9, 1862 (Washington, D.C.: Surgeon General’s Office, 1862), National Library of Medicine (NLM): http://collectionsqa.nlm.nih.gov/ muradora/objectView.action?pid=nlm:nlmuid-101534229-bk (01 August, 2012); Letterman, memorandum to Corps Medical Directors, April 27, 1863, in Medical Recollections, 114–15; Hewitt, Report, 534. The extent to which Civil War surgeons achieved a specifically American approach to medicine is explored by Shauna Devine in Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 25. Sappol, Traffic of Dead Bodies, 238; Hewitt, Report, 535; see also Devine, Learning from the Wounded, 173–88. 26. Silas Thompson Trowbridge, “Lecture . . . Before the Ladies, Literary Library Association,” February 27, 1868, in Autobiography of Silas Thompson Trowbridge, M.D. (1874. Reprint. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 59–61. 27. Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 9; Trowbridge, “Lecture . . . Before the Ladies, Literary Library Association,” 89; Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 11; Warren Webster, An Address Delivered at the Inaugu-

Notes to pages 54–58

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ration of the Dale General Hospital, February 22, 1865 (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1865), 53. 28. Bowditch, Brief Plea, 20; Hewitt, Report, 535. 29. Anon. [Silas Weir Mitchell], “The Case of George Dedlow,” Atlantic Monthly 18, no. 105 (1866): 1–11, 1–2, 3–4, 5, 11. 30. George Templeton Strong, diary entries November 20 and October 31, 1860, in The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1952), vol. 3: The Civil War, 64, 56. 31. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” Atlantic Monthly 12, no. 69 (1863): 1–16, quotation on 12. 32. Frederic Bancroft and William A. Dunning, eds., The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (New York: McClure, 1908), vol. 3: 1863–1869, 37–39. 33. Cornelia Hancock, Letters of a Civil War Nurse, ed. Henrietta Stratton Jacquette (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 5; John W. De Forest, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867; New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 260–61; Edward Osborne Hewett quoted in R. A. Preston, “A Letter from a British Military Observer of the American Civil War,” Military Affairs 16, no. 2 (1952): 49–60, 55. Amputation remains a popular subject among scholars of the Civil War era; see Brian Matthew Jordan, “ ‘Living Monuments’: Union Veteran Amputees and the Embodied Memory of the Civil War,” Civil War History 57, no. 2 (2011): 121–52; Jennifer Davis McCaid, “ ‘With Lame Legs and No Money’: Virginia’s Disabled Confederate Veterans,” Virginia Cavalcade (Winter 1998): 14–25; David D. Yuan, “Disfigurement and Reconstruction in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s ‘The Human Wheel, Its Spokes and Felloes,’ ” in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, ed. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 71–88; Lisa Herschbach, “Prosthetic Reconstructions: Making the Industry, Re-Making the Body, Modelling the Nation,” History Workshop Journal 44 (Autumn 1997): 23–57; R. B. Rosenburg, “ ‘Empty Sleeves and Wooden Pegs’: Disabled Confederate Veterans in Image and Reality,” in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 204–28; and Erin O’Connor, “ ‘Fractions of Men’: Engendering Amputation in Victorian Culture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39, no. 4 (1997): 742–77. 34. Hewett, Report, 535; Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 12, 1861. 35. New York (Daily) Tribune, December 7, 1861; New York Times, “Quackery and Brutality on the Battlefield”; Michael A. Flannery, “Another House Divided: Union Medical Service and Sectarians during the Civil War,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 54 (October 1999): 480, 510. 36. Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 108, 102; Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 7, 103, 109–10; Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962; London: Chatto and Windus, 1987), 650. 37. Yuan, “Disfigurement and Reconstruction,” 78; Herschbach, “Prosthetic Reconstructions,” 48. 38. John H. Brinton, Personal Memoirs of John H. Brinton, Civil War Surgeon, 1861–1865 (1891; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 54. The history,

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Notes to pages 58–64

and public response to the AMM is discussed in Devine, Learning from the Wounded, 183–86. 39. Letterman, Medical Recollections, 11. 40. Hewitt, Report, 535. 41. Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 87, 27; ORA, see n. 7 above; MSHWR, see n. 18 above. 42. J. T. H. Connor and Michael G. Rhode, “Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Images, Memory, and Identity in America,” Invisible Culture (2003): http://www.rochester .edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_5/ConnorRhode/ConnorRhode.html (accessed 5 March, 2013); Devine, Learning from the Wounded, 184–88. 43. Joan Burbick, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 1–2; Hewitt, Report, 535. 44. Davis, “Life in the Iron Mills”; Barbara Sicherman, “The Paradox of Prudence: Mental Health in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History 62, no. 4 (1976): 895–96; Silas Weir Mitchell, Westways (New York: Century Company, 1913), 446–47; Anna Robeson Burr, Weir Mitchell: His Life and Letters (New York: Duffield, 1929), 388; S. Weir Mitchell, Roland Blake (New York: Century, 1905) 30; Burr, Weir Mitchell, 98; “The God of Modernity,” referring to nationalism, is a reference to Josep R. Llobera, The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe (Oxford: Berg, 1994). 45. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Human Wheel, Its Spokes and Felloes,” Atlantic Monthly 11, no. 61 (863): 567–68, 574; Stephen Smith, M.D., “Analysis of Four Hundred and Thirty-Nine Recorded Amputations in the Contiguity of the Lower Extremity,” and Joseph Jones, M.D., “Investigations Upon the Nature, Causes, and Treatment of Hospital Gangrene, as it Prevailed in the Confederate Armies, 1861–1865,” both in Surgical Memoirs of the War of the Rebellion, ed. Frank Hastings Hamilton (Cambridge, Mass.: Kurd and Houghton, Riverside Press for the United States Sanitary Commission, 1871); Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “The Soldier’s Faith: An Address Delivered on Memorial Day, May 30, 1895,” in Richard A. Posner, The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., ed. Richard A. Posner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 88. 46. Garrison, Notes on the History of Military Medicine, v. 47. Katherine Prescott Wormeley, The United States Sanitary Commission (Boston, 1863), quoted in Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 102. 48. Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 105.

To Save the Afflicted Union: Race, Civic Health, and the Sanitary Front Richard Newman I thank both Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai and Lorien Foote for their astute comments and exceptional editorial work. I also thank the volume’s other contributors for their helpful remarks and the anonymous reviewers for their incisive commentary. 1. Jane Curry Hoge, The Boys in Blue (New York, 1867), introduction.

Notes to pages 64–67

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2. “The Reason for Our Troubles,” Douglass’ Monthly, February 1862. 3. Among recent work on race and health in the Civil War and beyond, see especially Jim Downs, Sick From Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Gretchen Long, Doctoring Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). For an older but still authoritative treatment of nineteenth-century medical debates, albeit one that skims over Civil War issues, see Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1984). On death, disease, and suffering in wartime, see Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Kingdom: The Civil War and the Culture of Death (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), which features brief sections on African Americans; and Drew Faust, The Republic of Suffering (New York: Knopf, 2008). On conceptions of public health and cleanliness before the war, see especially Kathleen Brown’s Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009). 4. On the concept of the Union War, see Gary Gallagher’s recent book, The Union War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), introduction. 5. I take a cue here from George Fredrickson’s chapter on sanitary reformers in The Inner Civil War (reprint edition, Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), which while focusing on the sanitary front nevertheless confined it to a relatively small set of “conservative elites.” See page 102. 6. George Duffield, “Secession: Its Cause and Cure” (Detroit, 1861), 1–9. 7. George Duffield, “A Discourse . . . January 4, 1861” (Detroit, 1861), 22. 8. Strong quoted in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary, The Civil War, episode 1, “Secessionitis.” 9. Charles Stille, “Northern Interests and Southern Independence” (Philadelphia, 1863). 10. James McKaye, “The Mastership and Its Fruits” (New York, 1864), 21. 11. Dr. Charles Meigs, “Address Delivered before the Union League of Philadelphia, October 31, 1864” (Philadelphia, 1864), 4–5. 12. For two classic works on medical professionalization, see Joseph Kett, The Formation of the American Medical Profession: The Role of Institutions, 1780–1860 (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 1980), and Charles E. Rosenberg’s The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) for an institutional perspective. 13. On transatlantic influences on American medicine, see John Harley Warner, Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), especially the Introduction. 14. On the cultural dimensions of mania, asylums, and madness, see especially Lisa Hermsen, Manic Minds (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011). See also Benjamin Reiss, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 15. See Rosenberg’s catalogue essay to the 1998 Library Company of Philadelphia’s exhibition on popular medicine, “Every Man His Own Doctor,” available in pamphlet form at the Library Company.

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Notes to pages 67–72

16. See Rosenberg’s online essay, “A Book in the Sickroom: A Tradition of Print and Practice,” especially the introductory section subtitled “A Golden Age of Popular Medicine,” available at: http://www.librarycompany.org/doctor/rosen.html. 17. See Martin Melosi, The Sanitary City, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), especially Part 1. See also Judith W. Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). 18. See Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 77. 19. John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), introduction. 20. Among other work, see Charles E. Rosenberg and Jane Golden, eds., The Framing of Disease (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992). 21. See Christopher Irmscher, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), introduction, quote at 7. 22. Alfred Stille, “Medical Education in the United States” (Philadelphia, 1854). 23. See Julian M. Sturtevant, “The Lessons of Our National Conflict” (New Haven, 1861), 3–16. 24. See Trevor Royle, Crimea: The Great Crimean War, 1854–56 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 25. On women’s impact on Sanitary Reform, see especially Judith Ann Giesberg’s Civil War Sisterhood (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2006). 26. Philadelphia Inquirer, December 11, 1861. 27. Hoge, Boys in Blue, 441. 28. Charles Stille, Memorial of the Great Central Fair (Philadelphia, 1864). 29. Ibid. 30. Lincoln, Speech at the Great Central Fair, June 16, 1864, available online at http:// quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=lincoln;cc=lincoln;type=simple;rgn=div1;q1 =June20162C201864;view=text;subview=detail;sort=occur;idno=lincoln7;node =lincoln73A878. 31. See Philadelphia Inquirer, October 4, 1861; Franklin County (PA) Valley Spirit, November 27, 1861, and June 11, 1862. 32. On early Civil War emancipation debate, see Richard Newman, “The Age of Emancipating Proclamations: Early Civil War Abolitionism and Its Discontents,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (January 2013). 33. “Remarks of the Hon. B. F. Thomas of Massachusetts . . .” in the House of Representatives, April 10, 1862 (Boston, 1862), 19–21. Charles Stille, “Northern Interests and Southern Independence” (Philadelphia, 1863). 34. Turner quoted in the Christian Recorder, July 12, 1862. 35. Christian Recorder, February 9, 1861. 36. Douglass’ Monthly, September 1862. 37. See Sharla Fett, Healing Health and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). See also Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Notes to pages 72–78

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38. Christian Recorder, November 22, 1862. 39. See Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid (New York: Anchor, 2008), Part 1. Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). 40. See Samuel Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” Debow’s Review, no. 11 (September 1851). 41. Edward Jarvis, “Insanity among the Colored Population of the Free States,” Extracted from the American Journal of the Medical Sciences for January 1844. 42. Ibid. 43. See, for instance, an essay on the topic, titled “The Colored Population,” in African Repository, no. 19 (September 1843): 266–83. 44. The Davis blurb is found an advertisement for John Van Evrie’s “An American Ethnological View of the Negro Question,” printed in the Philadelphia Press, February 2, 1861. 45. Van Evrie, “Subgenation: The Theory of the Normal Relation of the Races” (New York, 1864). 46. Lancaster Intelligencer, June 24, 1862. See also the Clearfield Republican, December 4, 1861. 47. See Van Evrie, White Supremacy and Negro Subordination (New York, 1868), I, VII. 48. “The Reason for Our Troubles,” Douglass’ Monthly, February 1862. 49. Christian Recorder, October 11, 1862. 50. Christian Recorder, December 31, 1864. 51. On death and suffering in the Civil War, see Faust, Republic of Suffering. 52. Carol Emberton, “ ‘Only Murder Makes Men’: Reconsidering the Black Military Experience,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 3 (2012): 369–93. 53. Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over (New York: Vintage, 2007). 54. See Lydia Maria Child to Eliza Scudder circa 1864, in The Letters of Lydia Maria Child (Boston, 1887), 180. 55. Philadelphia Inquirer, December 10, 1863. 56. See the Philadelphia Press, February 24, 1863. 57. See Lincoln’s elongated report to Congress from December 9, 1863, reprinted under the headline of “The President’s Message” in the Philadelphia Inquirer, December 10, 1863, particularly the summaries subtitled “The Emancipation Proclamation” and “The Effects of the Proclamation.” See also Stanton’s report from December 5, 1863, reprinted under the heading “The War Department: Report of Secretary Stanton,” reprinted in the New York Times, December 10, 1863. 58. See the New York Education Department’s exhibit on the Emancipation Proclamation http://www.oms.nysed.gov/press/PreliminaryEmancipationProclamationExhibit .html. 59. Hoge, Boys in Blue, 357–58. 60. Harper’s Weekly, July 4, 1863. 61. “What shall be done with the slaves if emancipated?” Douglass’ Monthly (January 1862). 62. Downs, Sick from Freedom, 160.

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Notes to pages 78–84

63. Sanitary Reporter, August 15, 1863. 64. See the broadside for the St. Thomas Church Sanitary Fair, “Fair, for the Benefit of the Sick and Wounded Soldiers” (December 1864). 65. Sanitary Reporter, August 15, 1863. 66. Lincoln speech to the crowd at the Baltimore Sanitary Fair, April 18, 1864. See http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=1067. 67. Ibid. 68. See the United States Proprietary Medicine Company Circular for Blood Pills and Purifiers (Cincinnati, 1866). I. S. Johnson and Company of Maine, Circular for “Dr. Parsons’ Purgative Pills (Bangor, Maine, 1867) that healed afflictions caused by blood “impurities.” See also Austin Flynt, The Physiognomy of Man (New York, 1867), including sections on “circulation” and “blood.” 69. Dr. Horace Bushnell, “Addresses and Proceedings . . . by Rev. Dr. Bushnell at the commemorative celebration held July 20, 1865, in honor of alumni of Yale College Who Were in the Military or Naval Service . . .” (New Haven, 1865), 12–15, 17. 70. Michael E. Stevens, ed., As If It Were Glory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), chap. 9, esp. 161–87. 71. See “Letters from Directors of Mental Institutions,” in the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission Records, MS Am 702, series 1 and 2, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 72. J. H. Butler to American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (AFIC), Hartford, September 9, 1863, in series 2, ibid. 73. See George T. Chapman to AFIC, New York, August 27, 1863, series 1, ibid. 74. D. R. Anthony to AFIC, Leavenworth, August 30 and September 4, 1863, in series 2, ibid. 75. Worthington to AFIC, August 24, 26, 1863, ibid. 76. Kirkbride to AFIC, August 23, 1863, ibid. 77. Second Annual Report of the New England Freeman’s Aid Society,” printed in the Freedmen’s Record, April 1864, 54. 78. Ibid. 79. American Presbyterian, Philadelphia, February 16, 1865. 80. “Second Annual Report of the New England Freeman’s Aid Society,” printed in the Freedman’s Record, April 1864, 54. 81. Freedman’s Bureau Inspector to the Headquarters of the Freedman’s Bureau . . . for Kentucky, Tennessee, and Northern Alabama, July 31, 1865, in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, ed. Steven Hahn et al., series 3, vol. 1: Land and Labor (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 627–29. 82. See Downs, Sick from Freedom, introduction. 83. Commander of the 4th Subdistrict of the Military District of Charleston to the District Headquarters, November 7th, 1865, in Hahn, Freedom, 573–74. 84. Freedmen’s Bureau Assistant Superintendent at Clinton, La., to the Headquarters, July 29, 1865, in Hahn, Freedom, 375. 85. Statement of a South Carolina Planter, September 15, 1865, in Hahn, Freedom, 539–42.

Notes to pages 85–88

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86. Freedman’s Bureau Superintendent for Rutherford County, Tenn., to the Freedmen’s Bureau Assistant for Kentucky and Tennessee, December 16, 1865, in Hahn, Freedom, 643–44. 87. Downs, Sick from Freedom, esp. chap.3. 88. A. H. Witmer, “Incidence of Insanity in the Colored Race in the United States,” presented at the Tenth International Congress in Berlin, 1990, 9. 89. Octavia V. Rogers Albert, The House of Bondage (New York, 1890), 1, 164. 90. Frederick Douglass, “The High Wall of Race,” North American Review (July 1881), reprinted in Great Lives Observed: Frederick Douglass, ed. Benjamin Quarles (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968), 80–91.

John Codman Ropes: A Lawyer’s Historian Richard F. Miller The author thanks the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University for permission to quote from its Military Historical Society of Massachusetts archive, with special thanks to Assistant Director for Acquisitions Mr. Alexander N. Rankin. Thanks also to the Harvard University Archives for permission to quote from the John Codman Ropes’s class file, and, of course, to Mr. John Sherman and Mr. Irving Gorman of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts. 1. George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of Union (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), xi, viii; Ropes’s classmates who also figure prominently in Fredrickson are Robert Gould Shaw, who graduated in 1860, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., 1861, Charles Russell Lowell Jr., 1854, and Charles Francis Adams Jr., 1856. Based on various entries in War Letters, 1862–1865, of John Chipman Gray and John Codman Ropes, ed. Worthington C. Ford (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927) (hereafter War Letters), Ropes counted Holmes and Lowell as friends. See 14, 74, and 405. 2. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 266, 269. Faust’s book should prompt a rereading of Daniel Aaron’s classic study, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1887). Concerning Ropes, the law, and the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts (MHSM), one runs a risk in ignoring continuities by positing too sharp a break between pre– and post–Civil War developments: The law’s “modernizing” tendencies (especially procedural reform) were pronounced long before the Civil War began. William P. LaPiana, Logic and Experience: The Origin of Modern American Legal Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3–4; David Dudley Field, Law Reform in the United States and Its Influence Abroad [pamphlet], reprinted from the American Law Review of August 1891, with some changes and notes (St. Louis, Mo.: Review Publishing, 1891), 12. 3. “Weather Reports,” Boston Traveler, January 21, 1876; Records of Meetings, vol. 1, MHSM, AA1, 1–2, found in Special Collections, Boston University Archives, Military Historical Society Collection (MHSC hereafter); Meeting of January 20, 1876, 1:1; Class of

256

Notes to pages 88–92

1857, Class Book, Harvard University Archives (HUA hereafter), HUA.257.714F, 295–306 (hereafter Class Book). 4. Ezra J. Warner, Generals in Blue: Lives of the Union Commanders (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 177–78; Roger D. Hunt and Jack R. Brown, Brevet Brigadier Generals in Blue (Gaithersburg, Md.: Olde Soldier Books, 1997), 460; Report of the Class of 1857 in Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson and Son, 1893), 32; Report of the Class of 1858 of Harvard College, prepared for the Fortieth Anniversary of Its Graduation (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1898), 36–37; Francis H. Brown, Harvard University in the War of 1861–1865 (Boston: Cupples, Upham, 1886), 185, 126, 147; F. B. Heitman, Historical Register of the United States Army, from Its Organization September 29, 1789, to September 29, 1889 (Washington, D.C.: National Tribune, 1890), 618; The Crafts Family: A Genealogical and Biographical History of the Descendants of Griffin and Alice Craft of Roxbury, Mass., 1630–1890, compiled by James M. Crafts and William F. Crafts (Northampton, Mass.: Gazette Printing, 1893), 193; Engineering News: A Journal of Civil, Mechanical, and Electrical Engineering, vol. 41, series, January–June 1909 (New York: Engineering News, 1909?), 306. William T. Davis, Bench and Bar of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Boston: Boston History, 1895), 1:535. 5. John Codman Ropes, The Story of the Civil War: A Concise Account of the War in the United States of American between 1861 and 1865 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895), part 1, iv–v. 6. BUA, vol. 1, Meeting of February 7, 1876, 1, 2; The MHSM was organized on February 7, 1876 and incorporated on January 13, 1891. The Executive Documents of the House of Representatives for the Third Session of the Fifty-Third Congress, 1894–95, in Thirty-Five Volumes, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895), “Report of the Commissioner of Education,” 1585. David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 1–2. 7. “The Boston Bristow Club: Its Object and Its Officers,” National Aegis (Worcester, Mass.), April 29, 1876. The members were Gordon, Perkins, Stockton, Samuel M. Quincy (Harvard College, 1852), Francis A. Osborn, and Joseph Lewis Stackpole (Harvard College, 1857). Quincy and Stackpole were Civil War veterans and Boston lawyers. 8. By 1879 the list included William Tecumseh Sherman, James Longstreet, Winfield Scott Hancock, Irwin McDowell, Montgomery Meigs, George S. “Pop” Greene, Francis Channing Barlow, Lucius Fairchild, and Andrew Atkinson Humphreys. “Members: January, 1879,” contained in [Pamphlet] The Military Historical of Massachusetts, Established A.D. 1876 (Boston: Lyman, Rhodes, 1879), 5–11. 9. War Letters, 252; A Memoir of the Life of John Codman Ropes, LL.D, with Proceedings of Various Societies, Addresses, Papers, and Resolutions in Commemoration of Him (Boston: Privately Printed, 1901) (hereafter referred to as Memoir); quotation from “Address” by John C. Gray, contained in Memoir, 58. 10. John Codman Ropes, Campaigns of the Civil War, IV: The Army under Pope (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881; facsimile reprint, Weider History Group, 2009); John Codman Ropes, The Story of the Civil War: A Concise Account of the War in the United States of America between 1861 and 1865, Part I: To the Opening of the Campaigns of 1862 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895); John Codman Ropes, The Story of the Civil War:

Notes to pages 92–96

257

A Concise Account of the War in the United States of America between 1861 and 1865, Part II: The Campaigns of 1862 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1898); John Codman Ropes, “Memoir of Francis Winthrop Palfrey, A.M.” (Boston, 1891), pamphlet; “Memoir of Charles Devens, LL.D,” contained in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, November, 1891, 104–17; John Codman Ropes, The First Napoleon: A Sketch, Political and Military (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888); John Codman Ropes, The Campaign of Waterloo: A Military History (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893). For a complete Ropes bibliography, see Memoir, 111–15. 11. Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 268. 12. Psalm 30:11, KJV; John C. Ropes to John C. Gray Jr., 18 September, 1863, War Letters, 207–11. A. J. C. Sowdon, “A Memorial Sketch,” Memoir, 75–79. 13. John C. Ropes to John C. Gray Jr., 18 September, 1863, War Letters, 208. 14. Ibid., 208–9. 15. War Letters, 207–11. Also see Ropes to Gray, October 17, 1863, where he declares that writing a history “is of considerable importance”; War Letters, 237. 16. War Letters, 464, 303, 316, 87, 149, 116, 74, 256, 116, 298, 127, 134, 131, 135, 262, 141, 173, 289, 290, 347. 17. HUA, vol. 16, Faculty Records; “Bibliography,” contained in Memoir, 111. A Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Harvard University for the Academical Year 1860–61, First Term (Cambridge, Mass.: Sever and Francis, 1860), 42–43. For the religious influence of Ropes’s mother, Mary Anne Ropes, née Codman on his background, see Memoir, 2–4, 75. John Codman Ropes to Dr. Francis H. Brown, September 6, 1882, HUA 257.505, Harvard College, Class of 1857 (Box 2), Secretary’s File. 18. Unidentified newspaper obituaries, and “Death of William Ropes,” Boston Post, March 12, 1869, in John Codman Ropes Papers, BB15, MHSC; Harrison Ellery and Charles Pickering Bowditch, The Pickering Genealogy: Being an Account of the First Three Generations of the Pickering Family of Salem, Mass., and of the Descendants of John and Sarah (Burrill) Pickering, of the Third Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, Privately Printed, 1897), 2:389–91; “Report of the Historian,” contained in The NewEngland Historical and Genealogical Register, Supplement to April Number, 1904 (Boston: Published by the Society, 1904), liv. 19. Class Book, 295–96. 20. Class Book, 297; Leonard F. Peltier, M.D., Orthopedics: A History and Iconography (San Francisco,: Norman, 1993), 35; Harvard University: Quinquennial Catalogue the Officers and Graduates, 1636–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Published by the University, 1920), 33. Any modern diagnosis of Ropes is necessarily imprecise. Based on the existing evidence, one strong possibility is that Ropes suffered from idiopathic scoliosis, which often presents during adolescence. Ropes’s spinal curvature, which grew worse over time, elevated his shoulder and apparently elevated one hip, perhaps producing a limp of variable severity. Modern treatments were then unknown. The author wishes to thank Dr. Steven R. Flier of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, for his consultation about Ropes’s condition. 21. Class Book, 296–97; Memoir, 14; Harvard Memorial Biographies (Cambridge, Mass.: Sever and Francis, 1866), 2:319. The H Book of Harvard Athletics, ed. John A. Blanchard (no city, Harvard Varsity Club, 1923), 311–34. Lake Quinsigamond is near

258

Notes to pages 96–102

Worcester and was the site of many rowing competitions. For references to Ropes’s writing for the Boston Daily Advertiser, see War Letters, 300, 499. 22. Sixth Catalogue of the Officers and Members of the Institute of 1770 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill Press, 1909), iii; Class Book, 298–99. Ropes’s freshman and sophomore rankings may be found, respectively, UA.III.15.28, Box 11, Faculty of Arts and Science, Final Return Records, 1848–97, Freshman, second term, 1853–54; and UA.III.15.28, Box 13, Faculty of Arts and Science, Final Return Records, 1848–1997, Sophomore, second term, 1854–1855. 23. Class Book, 299. Articles in Harvard Magazine were unsigned and absent Ropes’s claims, authorship would remain unknown. The three articles he identifies are “Pycroft’s Course of English Reading,” Harvard Magazine 1, no. 8, (Cambridge, Mass.: John Bartlett, 1855), 357–61; “Chesterfield’s Philosophy,” Harvard Magazine 2, no. 9 (1856): 372–79; “College Societies, Again,” Harvard Magazine 2, no. 5 (Cambridge, Mass.: John Bartlett, 1856), 190–99. One book review is attributed to Ropes: a highly favorable treatment of William Hickling Prescott’s History of the Reign of Philip II, King of Spain (Boston, 1855), contained in Harvard Magazine2, no. 1, (1855) (Cambridge: John Bartlett, 1856), 43–44. 24. The date and approximate time when Ropes learned of Henry’s death is inferable from his letter to Gray of July 8, 1863, War Letters, 141. 25. Class Book, “Francis Codman Ropes,” 294–95; “John Codman Ropes,” 299. The characterization of the relationship of John and Henry is that of the author based on extensive reading of the Henry Ropes Letters, located in the Twentieth Massachusetts Collection, Boston Public Library. 26. Class Book, postscript, 299, 293. After graduation, Francis entered the Massachusetts Medical College and Harvard Medical School. 27. Edward Stanwood, “Memoir of Peleg Whitman Chandler,” contained in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd series, vol. 1: 1907, 1908 (Boston: Published by the Society, 1908), 281–90. 28. As quoted in Proceedings, 285; War Letters, 499; Ropes returned to law school in August 1860. 29. War Letters, 87–90. 30. Henry Ropes to John Codman Ropes, June 19, 1862, contained in Ropes Letters, vol. 2, Twentieth Massachusetts Collection, Boston Public Library. 31. War Letters, 236–37. 32. John Codman Ropes to Dr. Francis H. Brown, September 6, 1882, HUD 257.505. Harvard College, Class of 1857, Box 2, Secretary’s File, HUA. Frank L. Mott, A History of American Magazines (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), 144. 33. MHSC, vol. 1, 6–9; Lodge graduated from Harvard College, 1871; Devens, Harvard College, 1838; Higginson attended Harvard College but never graduated, although he was given an honorary degree in 1882; Lyman, Harvard College, 1855, and graduate school at the Lawrence, 1858; John C. Palfrey, Harvard College, 1853, and USMA, 1857; and Alfred P. Rockwell, Yale College, 1855 and Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, 1858. 34. MHSC, vol. 1, 6–9. 35. MHSC, vol. 1, 9.

Notes to pages 103–9

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36. MHSC, vol. 1, Meeting of April 10, 1876, 24–27; BUA, vol. 1, Meeting of June 1, 1876, 39–42. 37. MHSC, vol. 1, Meeting of October 9, 1876, 43–45. The two reports are included in the minutes, as was customary. 38. MHSC, vol. 1, Meeting of March 13, 1876, 13–15; MHSC, Volume I, Meeting of May 22, 1876, 30–33. This is rule 19 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP); the writer hastens to add that FRCP were adopted in 1934. 39. MHSC, vol. 1, Meeting of April 10, 1876, 24–27. 40. MHSC, vol. 1, Meeting of April 10, 1876, 26. 41. Report of Major John C. Gray Jr., “For the Committee on Investigation on the Delay in Concentration of the Army of the Potomac under McClellan at Antietam, and the Causes of the Delay of the Second Army Corps in entering into the Battle of Antietam,” Civil War and Miscellaneous Papers: Papers of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts (Boston: Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, 1918), vol. 14, ix–3 (hereafter Papers). 42. MHSC, vol. 1, Meeting of October 9, 43–45; Meeting of November 13, 86–87; Meeting of December 11, 121–22. 43. MHSC, vol. 2, Meeting of February 12, 1877, 203–205; Meeting of March 12, 1877, 247–50; Memoir, 68–69. A special army commission exonerated Porter in 1878, and President Cleveland commuted his sentence in 1886. 44. For members and leadership, see Campaigns in Virginia, 1861–1862, Papers of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, Volume 1 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1895), xviii–xxiv. 45. For example, see Papers, vol. 7, Campaigns in Kentucky and Tennessee, including the Battle of Chickamauga; vol. 12, for seven essays on the Civil War navy (and the battle of Manila Bay); vol. 14, with papers on Chattanooga and guerrilla fighting in Tennessee, military prisons, and a rare political assessment of Lincoln’s reelection on Southern morale. 46. Campaigns in Virginia, 1861–1862, 1:xviii–xxiv. 47. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), traces the growth of fraternalism at 199–200, 202–3, and later, its consequences, 356–57. 48. MHSC, vol. 2, Meeting of December 11, 1876, 120–23; Meeting of January 8, 1877, 162–63; Meeting of March 12, 1877, 247–50; Meeting of April 11, 1877, 283–88; Meeting of May 14, 1877, 339–42; Meeting of June 11, 1877, 368–71; Meeting of October 8, 1877. Campaigns in Virginia, 1861–1862, 1:xviii–xxiv. 49. Memoir, 43. 50. Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, xiii; War Letters, 142; Faust, Republic of Suffering, 93. 51. “James Amory Perkins,” Harvard Memorial Biographies (Cambridge, Mass.: Sever and Francis, 1866), 1:395–403; Memoir, 103.

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Notes to pages 110–12

Save a School to Save a Nation: Faculty Responses to the Civil War at Midwestern Universities Julie Mujic 1. “Four Months in the First Wisconsin in 1861,” Edward Gee Miller papers, Folder: Correspondence, biographical sketch, October 13, 1889, Wisconsin Historical Society (hereafter WHS); James L. High, “The University during the War,” Wisconsin Alumni Magazine, January 1900, 160; W. J. Lemke, ed., Captain Edward Gee Miller of the 20th WI: His War 1862–1865 (Fayetteville, Ark.: Washington County Historical Society, 1960), July 31, 1865. 2. For more information regarding southern and northern universities during the Civil War, see Michael David Cohen, Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012); Richard F. Miller, Harvard’s Civil War: A History of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2005); Willis Rudy, The Campus and a Nation in Crisis: From the American Revolution to Vietnam (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1996); John P. Dyer, Tulane: The Biography of a University, 1834–1965 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); Kenneth Roger Sager, “The Impact of the Civil War upon Higher Education in the United States” (MA thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1940); John Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Henry S. Burrage, Brown University in the Civil War (Providence, R.I.: Providence Press, 1868); Ellsworth Eliot Jr, Yale in the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1932); G. Wallace Chessman, Ohio Colleges and the Civil War (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1963); Peter S. Carmichael, The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Robert F. Pace, Halls of Honor: College Men in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004). George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 72. 3. For an analysis of the impact of the war on institutions of higher education and the growing federal role in education overall, see Michael David Cohen, Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). 4. John Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 76; Wyatt Rushton, “Training Student Soldiers: Obligatory Military Instruction in our Land-Grant Colleges,” American Review of Reviews 53 (February 1916): 201. 5. For excellent case studies regarding the impact of the Civil War in the North and consideration of the nature of dissent and nationalism, see Nicole Etcheson, A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011); William Blair, “We Are Coming, Father Abraham—Eventually: The Problem of Northern Nationalism in the Pennsylvania Recruiting Drives of 1862,” in The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War, ed. Joan E. Cashin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); Brett Barker, “Limiting Dissent in the Midwest: Ohio Republicans’ Attacks on the Democratic Press,” in Union Heartland: The

Notes to pages 112–14

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Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War, ed. Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013); Reid Mitchell, “Soldiering, Manhood, and Coming of Age: A Northern Volunteer,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Robert M. Sandow, Deserter Country: Civil War Opposition in the Pennsylvania Appalachians (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009); Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002). 6. Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 67. 7. Cohen, Reconstructing the Campus, 20. 8. Enrollment figures throughout this essay come from catalogues published by the universities, such as Indiana University, Annual Report of Indiana University Including the Catalogue for the Academical Year 1860–1861 (Indianapolis: Berry R. Sulgrove, 1861) (hereafter IU Catalogue, academic year); State University of Michigan Catalogue of the Officers and Students for 1860 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1860) (hereafter UM Catalogue, academic year); Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the Wisconsin State University, for the year ending June 27th, 1860 (Madison, Wisc.: Atwood & Rublee, 1860) (hereafter UW Catalogue, academic year). Harvey Reid to his family, April 20, 1861, Harvey Reid Papers, Box 1, Folder 6, Correspondence 1858–63, WHS. 9. Isaac H. Elliot, “Some of the Boys of ’57–’61,” Michigan Alumnus, vol. 9, 1902–1903, 248; Henry M. Utley and Byron M. Cutcheon, The Class of Sixty-One: University of Michigan and Something about What “the Boys” Have Been Doing during the Forty Years from 1861 to 1901 (Detroit: John Bornman and Son, 1902), 35. 10. George S. May, “Ann Arbor and the Coming of the Civil War,” Michigan History 36 (September 1952): 253. Charles M. Perry, Henry Philip Tappan: Philosopher and University President (New York: Arno Press and New York Times, 1971), 272; The Michigan State News, April 30, 1861; Ike Elliot, “Stepped from Class Room to Ranks of Union Army,” in Class of 1861 (University of Michigan) records, 1861 and 1910, Bentley Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan (hereafter Bentley Library); F. Clever Bald, “The University of Michigan in the Civil War,” in Michigan Institutions of Higher Education in the Civil War, ed. Willis F. Dunbar (Lansing: Michigan Civil War Centennial Observance Commission, 1964), 18. From the graduating class of 1861, 79 of the 150 students immediately enlisted in the Union military. According to Howard H. Peckham, after graduation, 32 of the 62 literary department graduates, 30 of the 44 medical department graduates, and 17 of the law department graduates enlisted. Howard H. Peckham, The Making of the University of Michigan, 1817–1967 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 47. Not all waited for graduation. In their book about the class of 1861, Henry M. Utley and Byron M. Cutcheon mention that William E. Crume, from Mississippi, left immediately for home and fought with the Confederacy. Two other students, Solomon Brockway of Albion, Michigan, and William Coyl from Detroit, enlisted in the army and left before receiving their diplomas. Utley and Cutcheon, Class of Sixty-One, 34. 11. High, “University during the War,” 155; Harvey Reid to family, April 20, 1861, WHS.

262

Notes to pages 114–17

12. William M. Daily, “Baccalaureate to the Law Class of 1857,” February 1857, William M. Daily Collection, 1835–1925, Office of University Archives and Records Management, Indiana University, Bloomington (hereafter IU Archives), 25; William M. Daily, “Zaph-Nath Pa-A-Né-Ah: A Baccalaureate to the Graduating Class of the Indiana University at the Commencement of MDCCCLVII,” (Bloomington: Published by the class, 1857), 10; Andrew Wylie, “Baccalaureate, Addressed to the Senior Class at the Late Commencement,” September 1847, IU Archives, 5. 13. Daniel Read, “A Momento to the Students of the Indiana University. An Address delivered before the Philomathean Society, at the annual commencement, August 5, 1856, by Daniel Reed, LL.D. Late Professor in the Indiana University, now of the State University of Wisconsin” (Bloomington, Ind.: By order of the society, 1856), 6. 14. Erastus O. Haven, “Increased Mental Activity of the Age; Its Causes and Demands. An Address, Delivered Before the Literary Societies of the University of Michigan, June 26th, 1854” (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Power Press of E. B. Pond, 1854), 27–28. 15. Cyrus Nutt, “Baccalaureate Sermon to the Graduating Class of the Indiana State University, June 23, 1861” (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Journal, 1861), 5. 16. Ibid. 17. High, “University during the War,” 155. 18. Emphasis in published version of the speech. Wisconsin State Journal, June 24, 1862. 19. Wisconsin State Journal, June 24, 1862, June 25, 1862. 20. Andrew D. White, Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White (New York: Century, 1922), 1:83, 87. 21. At Indiana University, the impact of the war revealed itself clearly at the opening of the fall semester in 1861. Instead of close to 120 students taking classes at the university level in the fall, only 88 students arrived. The largest impact was on the class that had begun as freshmen in 1860 and then had become sophomores in 1861. Apparently, those with the least invested in their education had the easiest time choosing to leave school; the class decreased nearly 53 percent in the fall of 1861. IU Catalogue, 1860–61, 1861–62. The enrollment situation at the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1861 was dire. The first sign that something was amiss was that the school included students in its published register for 1861–62 who were not on campus but away at war. They marked the names of these young men with an asterisk to denote their presence away from the school and in the army but still counted them in an attempt to hide the true enrollment figures for the year. After removing the student-soldiers in the catalogue from the calculations, the numbers were alarming. With just thirteen students, the sophomore class in the fall of 1861 was smaller by 73 percent than the freshman class that had started one year earlier, meaning that almost three-fourths of the freshman from 1860 decided not to continue at the University of Wisconsin. The junior class decreased by the same percentage, leaving that rank with only three students, and 75 percent of the eleven who would have been seniors did not return to the University of Wisconsin later in 1861 to complete their final year. The senior class, therefore, numbered two potential graduates. Not only would these three figures have been disconcerting enough for the school’s faculty, but there was also a 39 percent decrease in the number of incoming freshmen. Just thirty new young

Notes to pages 117–19

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men enrolled that fall. Thus the University of Wisconsin suffered greatly in its undergraduate departments immediately following the outbreak of war. Although it appeared on paper that the university had decreased by only five students between the 1860–61 and 1861–62 school years, a closer look revealed that the situation was much bleaker; the University of Wisconsin dropped in size by over one-third during the first summer of the war, with its undergraduate student body dipping below fifty students. The collegiate department, for example, appeared steady from the fall semester of 1862 through the fall of 1865, at just over forty students per year, but even this consistency contained some disturbing trends. The number of freshmen beginning their education each fall hovered in the low twenties, thus constituting about half of the total collegiate enrollment. However, beginning in 1863, the number of sophomores was in the single digits, meaning that the University of Wisconsin was failing to retain students. For example, from the fall of 1863 to the fall of 1864, the university lost 78 percent of its freshman class. UW Catalogue, 1861, 1862, 1863, 1864, 1865, 1866. Freshmen and sophomores failed to return to the University of Michigan in the fall of 1861 to take their places in the sophomore and juniors classes, respectively, in larger numbers than the other classes. The freshman class decreased by 19 percent and the sophomore class dropped 22 percent. Faculty also saw significant decreases in enrollment in the medical and law schools. UM Catalogue, 1860, 1861, 1862. 22. C. K. Adams to Andrew White, September 23, 1862; Henry S. Freize to Andrew White, October 24, 1862, White papers, Bentley Library; UM Catalogue, 1860, 1861, 1862. 23. Indiana University Faculty Minutes, May 28, 1861, Collection C236, IU Archives. 24. Merle Eugene Curti and Vernon Carstensen, The University of Wisconsin: A History, 1848–1925 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949), 116. The University of Wisconsin did not abandon its goal of obtaining a military school on its campus, and as late as 1866 continued to apply to various state and national departments for funding to hire a professor of military science. In the 1866 the Board of Regents reported another failure in acquiring a disabled or retired army officer for the position but remained optimistic that they would eventually find one. Board of Regents Annual Report, September 30, 1866, University of Wisconsin Archives. 25. Board of Regents Annual Report, September 30, 1862, University of Wisconsin Archives, 16. 26. Bald, “University of Michigan in the Civil War,” 21; Michigan State News, January 7, 1862; White, Autobiography, 1:91; The rejection came most likely from a combination of lack of funds and increasing dislike for Tappan. As his biographer Perry explained, Tappan grew increasingly unpopular with the legislature before his termination in 1863. The state’s denominational colleges tainted state leaders’ opinions of Tappan with their routine attacks against any potential favoritism toward the state university. Additionally, legislators developed a distaste for Tappan’s routine references to German educational methods and his overt arrogance in certain situations. On his last appearance in front of the state assembly, he expressed his frustration by saying, “The day will come, gentlemen, when my boys will take your places, and then something will be done for the University.” Perry, Henry Philip Tappan, 265.

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27. August 6, 1861, Charles L. Watrous to Andrew D. White, Andrew D. White Papers, Bentley Library. 28. July 12, 1863, Thomas Cooley to Andrew White, Thomas Cooley collection, Box 1, Folder 1853–62; 1863–64, Bentley Library. 29. J. V. Campbell, Closing Remarks of Prof. J.V. Campbell to the Graduating Class of the Law Department, March 21st, 1863 (Ann Arbor: Published by the Class, 1863), 4–6. 30. Elizabeth M. Farrand, History of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor: Register Publishing House, 1885), 156. Bald, “University of Michigan in the Civil War,” 25. 31. Perry, Henry Philip Tappan, 325. Utley and Cutcheon, Class of Sixty-One, 269–70. E. O. Haven, Autobiography of Erastus O. Haven (New York: Phillips and Hunt, 1883), 143. 32. Edward Danforth Eddy Jr., Colleges for Our Land and Time: The Land-Grant Idea in American Education (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1956), 16; Madison Kuhn, Michigan State: The First Hundred Years (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1955), 7–8. Henry Tappan to Andrew White, February 2, 1863, White papers, Bentley Library. Alan Creutz, “From College Teacher to University Scholar: The Evolution and Professionalization of Academics at the University of Michigan, 1841–1900” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1981), 460–61. As Creutz notes, the University of Michigan was not originally a land-grant university and was “not tied to the commitments of a land-grant mentality” (i.e., service to the state). The school was, Creutz argues, “at the nexus of the new intellectualism of Harvard and the popular ideology of the Old Northwest” (11). 33. Kuhn, Michigan State, 76–81. 34. James T. Lewis, Annual Message of James T. Lewis, Governor of the State of Wisconsin, January 14, 1864 (Madison: William J. Park, 1864), 9. 35. Ibid. Wisconsin State Journal, June 24, 1862. 36. Allan Nevins, The Origins of the Land-Grant Colleges and State Universities: A Brief Account of the Morrill Act of 1862 and its Results (Washington, D.C.: Civil War Centennial Commission, 1962), 20. 37. Thomas D. Clark, Indiana University: Midwestern Pioneer, vol. 1: The Early Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 111. Owen came in December 1864. January 27, 1864, IU Faculty minutes. “Synopsis of Lecture delivered by President Nutt, in Fifteen Counties of Central and Southern Indiana, in the Summer of 1864,” IU Catalogue, 1865–66, 31–32. Much to the state’s embarrassment, the 1860 census revealed that Indiana had the highest illiteracy rate among northern states. In fact, with more than 62,700 residents considered unable to read or write, Indiana’s illiterate population was more than triple that of Michigan and Wisconsin. The university catalogue acknowledged in the section titled “Sphere and Object of the University” that “it may be of comparatively little moment to our wealthy citizens whether there be a College in Indiana at all, and what its character may be.” The leaders of the university understood that many of the state’s best families continued to send their sons to Europe or to the East to be educated. Statistics of the United States, (including Mortality, Property, &c.) in 1860, United States Census Office, Eighth Census, 1860, 508; Indiana University, “Sphere and Object of the University,” IU Catalogue, 1862–63, 29.

Notes to pages 125–30

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38. “Synopsis of Lecture delivered by President Nutt, in Fifteen Counties of Central and Southern Indiana, in the Summer of 1864,” IU Catalogue, 1865–66, 33–35, 37–39. 39. Ibid., 37–38, 41. Kuhn, Michigan State, 55, 65. 40. “Synopsis of Lecture on Education. Delivered during vacation of 1864, in the southern counties of Indiana, by Professor R. Owen,” IU Catalogue, 1864–65, 32–33. 41. Ibid. 42. Clark, Indiana University, 112–16; Emma Lou Thornbrough, Indiana in the Civil War Era, 1850–1880 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1965), 711. 43. In addition to the two examples in this essay, see others in Julie A. Mujic, “Between Campus and War: Students, Patriotism, and Education at Midwestern Universities during the American Civil War” (PhD diss., Kent State University, 2012). 44. Hayden Kellogg Smith, “The Ideal Man,” University of Wisconsin commencement speech, 1854, John Yates Smith collection, WHS, 1. 45. Henry P. Tappan, A Discourse on the Death of Abraham Lincoln, Late President of the United States of America (Berlin: G. Lange, 1865), 38. 46. Lemke, ed., Captain Edward Gee Miller July 31, 1865.

Lessons of War: Three Civil War Veterans and the Goals of Postwar Education Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai A version of this essay was presented at the fifty-first annual meeting of the History of Education Society, November 3–6, 2011. I thank Michael Hevel, Julie Mujic, Amy Wells-Dolan, Timothy Williams, and other conference participants for their thoughtful comments and recommendations. Additionally, I acknowledge the supportive notes I received from my fellow historians at Angelo State University, Arnoldo De León and the late Guoqiang “Joe” Zheng. 1. Oliver Otis Howard, ever the religious man, even made the case that denial of education amounted to denial of Christianity. He reported that only around “one-tenth of the colored population has yet been reached by the schools, and those who have been reached are still far from being sufficiently taught.” Was it acceptable, he wondered, for two million people to exist “within the boundaries of a Christian land,” who could not “read the word of God[?]” Oliver Otis Howard, “Education of the Colored Man” [undated, circa 1868–76], Box 43, folder 50, 15–18, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College, Oliver Otis Howard Papers (repository hereafter cited as BCL; collection cited as Oliver Howard Papers, BCL). 2. Howard also tried to point out to northerners why they ought to support southern education. A wealthy man in Maine, he noted, might ask, “Of what possible use to me is the education of the blacks?” Howard explained, “The education of the blacks enhances the prosperity of the South, develops its resources, multiplies every article of trade, especially the staples of that portion of our country; commerce ceases to be apathetic, receives new life and energy, and demands additional vessels upon the seas, and consequently the shipbuilding interest, and the lumber trade of Maine received a corresponding impulse.” Howard, “Education of the Colored Man,” 19–20, 55, 58–59.

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3. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, official report, June 30, 1866, in Personal Memories and Letters of General S. C. Armstrong, ed. Helen W. Ludlow, vol. 3, in Williams College Archives & Special Collections, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 555, 557. 4. Samuel Chapman Armstrong to C. C. Armstrong, June 2, 1866, in Ludlow, ed., Personal Memories and Letters of General S. C. Armstrong, 2:560. 5. George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 165, 172–75, 184, 188–89, 215. 6. Robert F. Engs, Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited: Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Hampton Institute, 1839–1893 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 27; Wilson Smith, Professors and Public Ethics: Studies of Northern Moral Philosophers before the Civil War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1956), 8–9; D. H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), vii, 4–5, 12. 63–69. 7. James A. Berlin, Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 56. 8. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain to Nehemiah Cleaveland, October 14, 1859, Joshua L. Chamberlain Collection, M27, BCL (collection hereafter cited as Chamberlain Papers, BCL). 9. Oliver Otis Howard to Eliza Howard Gilmore, August 16, 1848, and Oliver Otis Howard to Eliza Howard Gilmore, March 26, 1849, Howard Papers, BCL; Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain to Benjamin Galen Snow, May 5, 1848, Chamberlain Papers, BCL. 10. Although trained as a soldier, Howard pondered leaving military service right before the war broke out. “I do not feel that it is a proper time to change my profession for the cause of Christ,” he admitted (Oliver O. Howard to unspecified brother, April 27, 1861, box 2, folder 24, Oliver Howard Papers, BCL). 11. Walter Stone Poor to Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, October 13, 1861, Papers of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as Chamberlain Papers, LC). 12. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain to Israel Washburn, August 8, 1862; Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain to Israel Washburn, July 14, 1862; Joshua L. Chamberlain to Fanny Chamberlain, October 26, 1862, in Through Blood and Fire: Selected Civil War Papers of Major General Joshua Chamberlain, ed. Mark Nesbitt (Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole Books, 1996), 14, 9, 27. For information about Chamberlain’s career, please consult one of his biographies, primarily Alice Rains Trulock, In the Hands of Providence: Joshua L. Chamberlain and the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 13. Charles Henry Howard to Rodelphus Gilmore Howard, January 13, 1862, Charles Henry Howard Collection, BCL. 14. Oliver O. Howard, The Folk of the Cumberland Gap (Burlington, Vt.: Thompson, Printer, [n.d.]), not paginated. 15. Samuel C. Armstrong to Archibald Hopkins, December 8, 1862 and Samuel C. Armstrong to Richard B. Armstrong, December 8, 1862, in Ludlow, ed., Personal Memories and Letters of General S. C. Armstrong, 2:283, 285.

Notes to pages 137–42

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16. Everett T. Tomlinson and Paul G. Tomlinson, A Leader of Freemen: The Life Story of Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Brevet Brigadier-General, U.S.A. (Philadelphia, Penn.: American Sunday-School Union, 1917), 34; Samuel C. Armstrong to Richard B. Armstrong, November 21, 1864, and Samuel C. Armstrong to C. C. Armstrong, January 22, 1865, in Ludlow, ed., Personal Memories and Letters of General S. C. Armstrong, 2:413–14, 423. 17. Charles C. Calhoun, A Small College in Maine: Two Hundred Years of Bowdoin (Brunswick, Maine: Bowdoin College, 1993), 189. 18. Chamberlain incorporated other hints of his military past in the inaugural address as well. The task of leading the college, he noted, “needed the eye and hand of a master in strategy, and resources equal to a siege, to call all these points.” He then paraphrased his former commanding general, Ulysses Grant from the 1864 Overland Campaign: “It must take more than one summer to ‘fight it out on that line.’ ” He had, however, “looked over the ground,” “made the preliminary dispositions,” and “pushed out reconnoissances [sic].” With “those able chiefs of divisions” holding “the strategic points of the field,” he reported, “We are ready to move.” Joshua L. Chamberlain, “The New Education,” Inaugural Address, 1872, box 9, folder 14, Chamberlain Papers, BCL. 19. Trulock, In the Hands of Providence, 344–45. 20. Ibid., 345; Joshua L. Chamberlain, “Regulations for the Interior Police and Discipline of the Bowdoin Cadets,” September 16, 1872, in The Grand Old Man of Maine: Selected Letters of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, 1865–1914, ed. Jeremiah E. Goulka (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 44–49; “The Bowdoin College Rebellion,” New York Times, May 27, 1874. 21. Joshua L. Chamberlain to William G. Waitt, October 13, 1873, in Goulka, ed., The Grand Old Man of Maine, 60; Calhoun, Small College in Maine, 191; Bowdoin College students opposed to the military drill to the “Faculty of Bowdoin College,” Joshua L. Chamberlain Administrative Records, Box 1, Folder 10: “1873 Nov, drill rebellion—student petition against the drill,” BCL. 22. Bowdoin College students opposed to the military drill to the “Faculty of Bowdoin College,” BCL; Boards of Trustees and Overseers to Joshua L. Chamberlain, November 12, 1873. George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College, Joshua L. Chamberlain Collection, M27. http://learn.bowdoin.edu/ joshua-lawrence-chamberlain/documents/1873-11-12.html (accessed February 11, 2013). 23. “The Bowdoin College Rebellion,” New York Times, May 27, 1874; Joshua L. Chamberlain to the mother of Horace Reed Patten, May 28, 1874, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College, Joshua L. Chamberlain Collection, M27. http://learn.bowdoin.edu/joshua-lawrence-chamberlain/ documents/1874-05-28.html (accessed February 11, 2013). 24. Joshua L. Chamberlain, “Statement on Bowdoin Drill Rebellion,” May 1874, in Goulka, ed., The Grand Old Man of Maine, 60–61. 25. Joshua L. Chamberlain to the mother of Horace Reed Patten, May 28, 1874. 26. Ibid. The historian Charles C. Calhoun has argued that “the notion of ‘manliness,’ as employed by both sides, is a key to the quarrel. To Chamberlain . . . manliness meant military prowess and a willingness to make sacrifices in the name of duty. To many of

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Notes to pages 142–46

the students, on the other hand, manliness meant independence and forthright expression of one’s point of view.” I contend that the concept of manliness is part of the lessons of character so important to Chamberlain’s educational plan. The president would have accepted the expression of independent viewpoints, but, in his eyes, the students had no standing to do so. Only after the students had graduated should they be viewed as men of character whose independent judgments ought to be taken seriously. Only educated men, with informed opinions, could render the best judgments consistent with manliness and character. Calhoun, Small College in Maine, 191, 193. 27. Mark Perry, Conceived in Liberty: Joshua Chamberlain, William Oates, and the American Civil War (New York: Viking, 1997), 375–76; H. W. Benham to Joshua L. Chamberlain, June 3, 1874, container 2, Chamberlain Papers, LC. 28. “The Rebellion at Bowdoin,” Memphis Daily Appeal, June 2, 1874, 2; “Peace and War Antagonism,” Nashville Union and American, June 7, 1874, 1. The Nashville Union and American was actually quoting an article published in the New York Journal of Commerce. The military historian David J. Silbey has written that the United States army “served a nation that simply was not interested in matters martial” in the period between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. David J. Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 17. 29. Calhoun, Small College in Maine, 193; Perry, Conceived in Liberty, 376. 30. Oliver O. Howard, Autobiography of Oliver Otis Howard, Major General United States Army (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1908), 2:390–391. 31. John A. Carpenter, Sword and Olive Branch: Oliver Otis Howard (1964; New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 158–59; Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 85–86. 32. Carpenter, Sword and Olive Branch, 161–62. 33. Ibid., 169–70; Howard, Autobiography, 2:397. 34. Carpenter, Sword and Olive Branch, 162. 35. Ibid., 165–66. 36. Oliver O. Howard, The Folk of the Cumberland Gap (Burlington, Vt.: Thompson, Printer, [n.d.]), not paginated. 37. “Education in Eastern Tennessee,” New York Tribune, February 4, 1899, 6; Oliver O. Howard, “Lincoln University,” New York Tribune, December 5, 1899, 6; “Gen. O. O. Howard’s Mission to the Mountain Whites,” Vermont Phoenix, June 1, 1900, 4. The historian Tom Lee has written about how Lincoln Memorial University also represented sectional reunion between North and South. According to Lee, “The courses of Berea College and Lincoln Memorial reflected the national retreat from race that corresponded with sectional reconciliation, the powerful appeal of the mountaineer image to benevolent northerners and southerners, and the power of the Unionist myth to bind northern donors to the institutions that used it so well.” Tom Lee, “The Lost Cause That Wasn’t: East Tennessee and the Myth of Unionist Appalachia,” in Reconstructing Appalachia: The Civil War’s Aftermath, ed. Andrew L. Slap (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 295–96.

Notes to pages 147–50

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38. Tomlinson and Tomlinson, Leader of Freemen, 51–52; Samuel C. Armstrong to unknown recipient, April 16, 1866, in Ludlow, ed., Personal Memories and Letters of General S. C. Armstrong, 3:545–47. 39. In many ways, Armstrong was a typical Freedmen’s Bureau agent. As the historian Eric Foner has observed, “The Bureau, like the army, seemed to consider black reluctance to labor the greater threat to its economic mission.” Samuel C. Armstrong, official report, June 30, 1866, in Ludlow, ed., Personal Memories and Letters of General S. C. Armstrong, 3:548–55; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988; New York: Perennial, 2002), 157. 40. Samuel C. Armstrong, official report, June 30, 1866, in Ludlow, ed., Personal Memories and Letters of General S. C. Armstrong, 3:555–56. 41. Tomlinson and Tomlinson, Leader of Freemen, 9–10, 56; Foner, Reconstruction, 146; Carpenter, Sword and Olive Branch, 162. 42. Samuel C. Armstrong to C. C. Armstrong, January 26, 1868, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, MC 1755: Series No. II, Box 14, Folder 27, Arthur Howe Jr. Papers. 43. Tomlinson and Tomlinson, Leader of Freemen, 57, 71–72; C. Kalani Beyer, “The Connection of Samuel Chapman Armstrong as Both Borrower and Architect of Education in Hawai‘i,” History of Education Quarterly 47, no. 1 (2007): 32. To be fair, Howard was also responsible for the bureau’s short existence. He, like the men who had authorized it, saw the agency as temporary. He believed that the freed people would gain the greatest benefits from being seen as equal to whites. With that in mind, he needed to prevent southern whites from thinking that freed people were being given special class status. Carpenter, Sword and Olive Branch, 159–60; Foner, Reconstruction, 148. 44. Tomlinson and Tomlinson, Leader of Freemen, 59. 45. Other Freedmen’s Bureau agents, including Oliver Howard, also believed that the freed people ought to accept gradual change in their conditions in the post-slavery world. African Americans were urged to seek education and work hard. Their civil rights would be secured in time. Robert F. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890 (original, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979; reprint, New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 83, 87–89, 158; Foner, Reconstruction, 146; Robert C. Morris, Reading, ’Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861–1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 151–52; Tomlinson and Tomlinson, Leader of Freemen, 62, 72. 46. As Eric Foner has noted, “The divorce of schooling from ideals of equal citizenship would come only after the end of Reconstruction when, under the auspices of Armstrong’s pupil Booker T. Washington and the South’s white ‘Redeemers,’ the Hampton philosophy gained ascendancy in Southern black education” (Foner, Reconstruction, 147). Meanwhile, C. Kalani Beyer, after studying Armstrong’s influence on the Hawaiian educational system, has observed that Armstrong’s educational policies were “profoundly negative” to native Hawaiians. According to Beyer, “After Armstrong’s visit to the islands in 1880, he helped change the Hawaiian education system so that Hawai-

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Notes to pages 150–55

ians, like blacks, were trained for subordinate roles. He had many times equated Hawaiians to blacks so it is not surprising that his involvement in Hawaiian education led to a similar outcome. His advice and actions led second-generation missionary educators to establish an education system that mirrored what he had accomplished in the American South” (Beyer, “The Connection of Samuel Chapman Armstrong as Both Borrower and Architect of Education in Hawai‘i,” 26–27, 48). 47. Morris, Reading, ’Riting, and Reconstruction, 156; Howard V. Young, Jr., “James A. Garfield and Hampton Institute,” in Stony the Road: Chapters in the History of Hampton Institute, ed. Keith L. Schall (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 34, 40–41. 48. Engs, Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited, 74, 76.

“The Rebels’ Last Device”: Theodore R. Davis and Faithful Representations of Black Soldiers during the Civil War Niki Lefebvre I thank Professor Patricia Hills in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Boston University for her guidance and invaluable commentary on many drafts of this essay. When I presented this paper in its early stages at the Americanist Forum, a series sponsored by the American and New England Studies Graduate Student Association at Boston University, Professor of History Marilyn Halter and Professor of the History of Art Kim Sichel each offered fresh insights that shaped my research thereafter. My dear friend and colleague Casey Riley read more drafts of this paper than I can count; her many insights, unwavering support, and friendship have fueled the completion of this project. Finally, I thank Professors Lorien Foote and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai for the opportunity to contribute to this important collection of essays. 1. Theodore R. Davis, “The Rebel Torpedoes,” Harper’s Weekly, September 19, 1863, 603. 2. Ibid., 597. 3. I have abbreviated the title of Davis’s image to improve the overall readability of this essay. 4. See Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Joshua Brown, “Jim Crow,” in Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); Lucia Zaucha Knoles, “The Black Image in the Northern Mind: Representations of African Americans by the Special Artists of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,” in Firsthand Civil War Era Drawings from the Becker Collection, ed. Judith Bookbinder and Sheila Gallagher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); William Fletcher Thompson, “Pictorial Propaganda and the Civil War,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 46, no. 1 (1962): 21–31. Also see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 8. 5. See William P. Campbell, The Civil War: A Centennial Exhibition of Eyewitness Drawings (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1961), 115; “Theodore R. Davis,” New York Times, November 11, 1894, 8. See William Fletcher Thompson, The Image of

Notes to pages 155–57

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War: The Pictorial Reporting of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 74. Almost certainly Davis joined in the revelry at Pfaff ’s Cave, a tavern where so many of New York’s young artists and writers were self-consciously constructing what has been called America’s first Bohemian movement. See Louis M. Starr, Bohemian Brigade: Civil War Newsmen in Action (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), 4–5, 111. 6. Thompson, Image of War, 75. 7. William Howard Russell, My Diary, North and South (Boston: T. O. H. P. Burnham, 1863), 46; “A Dinner Set,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 4, 1879, 8; “An Artist’s Retreat,” New York Times, August 16, 1891, 8; E. S. Martin, “Theodore R. Davis,” Harper’s Weekly, November 24, 1894, 1114; Starr, Bohemian Brigade, 253. 8. Thompson, Image of War, 74–85. 9. “An Artist’s Retreat,” New York Times, August 16, 1891, 8. 10. Theodore R. Davis, “How a Battle Is Sketched,” St. Nicholas, 1899, 661–68. 11. Thompson, Image of War, 7. 12. Quoted in Colin L. Westerbeck, “Frederick Douglass Chooses his Moment,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 24, no. 2 (1999): 154. 13. To give a clear sense of photography’s popularity, consider that by the 1860s soldiers could purchase a photographic portrait, usually a tintype, for only one dollar from any of the several thousand photographers trying to make a living during the war. See Shirley Samuels, Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7; Regarding special artists versus photographers, see Thompson, Image of War, 81–82; Anthony Lee, “The Image of War,” in Anthony Lee and Elizabeth Young, On Alexander Gardiner’s Sketch Book of the Civil War (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 24–26. 14. Davis, “How a Battle Is Sketched,” 661–68. 15. Lee, “Image of War,” 24. 16. Ibid., 22. 17. Frederick Douglass, “A Tribute for the Negro,” North Star, April 7, 1849, reprinted in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass: The Early Years, 1817–49, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 1:379–80. 18. Lucia Zaucha Knoles offers an excellent discussion of the negative and positive depictions of black soldiers after 1863 in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. See Knoles, “Black Image in the Northern Mind,” 90–102. 19. In fact, the chromolithograph was based on a painting by Theodore Kaufmann, which was in turn based on a photograph taken by Mathew Brady. 20. Quoted in Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 112–13. 21. By 1870, both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had passed, ensuring citizenship and the right to vote for African American men. 22. Foner, Forever Free, 51, 55. 23. Foner, Reconstruction, 3.

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Notes to pages 157–65

24. Ibid., 9. 25. Andrea G. Pearson, “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly: Innovation and Imitation in Nineteenth-Century American Pictorial Reporting,” Journal of Popular Culture 23, no. 4 (1990): 82–86. 26. Theodore R. Davis, “The Siege of Charleston—Scene of the Desperate Assault upon Wagner, July 18, 1863—A Shell from Fort Johnson,” sketch, Harper’s Weekly, September 26, 1863, 613. 27. Theodore R. Davis, “Fort Wagner,” Harper’s Weekly, September 26, 1863, 621. 28. Theodore R. Davis, “Rebel Negro Pickets as Seen through a Field-Glass,” sketch, Harper’s Weekly, January 10, 1863, cover. 29. The subject of black Confederate soldiers remains controversial and political to this day. Recently, John Stauffer, a Harvard University historian, has entered into the controversy, arguing that thousands of enslaved and freedmen served in the Confederate Army. For a synopsis of Stauffer’s argument, presented at the Harvard Faculty Club in September 2011, see Corydon Ireland, “Black Confederates: Their Numbers in Civil War Were Small, but Have Symbolic Value,” Harvard Gazette, September 1, 2011. 30. “Rebel Negro Pickets,” Harper’s Weekly, January 10, 1863, cover. 31. Ibid. 32. Thomas Nast, “Emancipation,” sketch, Harper’s Weekly, January 24, 1863, 56–57. 33. “Emancipation,” Harper’s Weekly, January 24, 1863, 55. 34. Thompson, “Pictorial Propaganda,” 23. 35. “Fair Wages for Fair Work,” Harper’s Weekly, September 5, 1863, 563. 36. Fahs, Imagined Civil War, 163–65. 37. “Robert Smalls, Captain of the Gunboat Planter,” engraving, and “Feeding the Negro Children under Charge of Military Authorities at Hilton Head, South Carolina,” sketch, Harper’s Weekly, June 14, 1862, 372. 38. The art historian Patricia Hills addresses this point in greater detail in her discussion of race in Eastman Johnson’s paintings. In short, white viewers feared the direct gaze of young black men because it granted them power. Therefore, artists tended to either turn the heads of young black men away from the viewer’s perspective or transform the young man into an older man. See Patricia Hills, “Painting Race: Eastman Johnson’s Pictures of Slaves, Ex-Slaves, and Freedmen,” in Teresa Carbone and Patricia Hills, Eastman Johnson: Painting America (New York: Rizzoli, 1998), 129. Smalls’s hair is also neatly coiffed and parted in a manner that recalls Frederick Douglass’s coiffure in his 1855 portrait, printed in the second edition of his autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. In that portrait, Douglass’s expression is famously thoughtful and his brow memorably furrowed. Smalls’s expression is unique, but reminiscent of Douglass’s thoughtfulness and bold forthrightness. 39. “Our Black Friends Down South,” Harper’s Weekly, June 14, 1862, 373. 40. “Pompey,” cartoon, Harper’s Weekly, January 10, 1863, 32. 41. Brown, Beyond the Lines, 113. 42. William Fletcher Thompson makes a passing reference to “The Rebels’ Last Device” in The Image of War, but he characterizes the sketch as an atrocity narrative, which I believe is misguided. See Thompson, Image of War, 173.

Notes to pages 165–74

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43. Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston: Allen & Ticknor, 1833), 6. 44. Theodore D. Weld, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839), 46. 45. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), 20–21. 46. The first printing of the Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb coincided with contentious debates over the Fugitive Slave Act. Sterling Lecator Bland Jr., ed., African American Slave Narratives: An Anthology (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 2001), 2:341–43. 47. See Elizabeth B. Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in America,” Journal of American History 82, no. 1 (1995): 465–70. 48. “A Typical Negro,” engraving, Harper’s Weekly, July 4, 1863, 429. 49. See Fahs, Imagined Civil War, 169–71. 50. Michael Hatt, “Sculpting and Lynching: The Making and Unmaking of the Black Citizen in Late-Nineteenth Century America,” Oxford Art Journal 24, no. 1 (2001): 19. 51. See Christopher J. Lukasik, Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 187. 52. Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 176–77. 53. See Lukasik, Discerning Characters. 54. Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” American Art 9, no. 2 (1995): 53–54. 55. Mead, “A Rebel Captain Forcing Negroes to Load Cannon under Fire,” sketch, Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1862, cover. 56. See Wood, Blind Memory, 22; See also Kirk Savage, “Molding Emancipation: John Quincy Adams Ward’s ‘The Freedman’ and the Meaning of the Civil War,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 31. 57. Note that one of the six illustrations of nude and semi-nude slaves printed in The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb in 1849 featured a variant of the seal. 58. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, “torpedo” referred to a land mine. 59. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, “saps” referred to the trenches constructed to cover soldiers from enemy fire. 60. Davis, “Rebel Torpedoes,” 603. 61. Foner, Forever Free, 9–15. 62. Hills, “Painting Race,” 128. 63. Clark, “Sacred Rights of the Weak,” 493.

For Their Adopted Home: Native Northerners in the South during the Secession Crisis David Zimring 1. John C. Pemberton quoted in Michael B. Ballard, Pemberton: The General Who Lost Vicksburg (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), 32.

274

Notes to pages 174–77

2. Ibid., 84; Mrs. Pemberton to Martha Thompson, April 23, 1861, quoted in John Pemberton, Pemberton, Defender of Vicksburg (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 23–24. 3. David Miller, Second Only to Grant: Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs (Shippensburg, Penn.: White Mane Books, 2000), 74, 91; George C. Barnes, Denver, the Man: The Life, Letters and Public Papers of the Lawyer, Soldier and Statesman (Strasburg, Va.: Shenandoah Publishing House, 1950), 255, 262–70; Andrew Rolle, John Charles Fremont: Character as Destiny (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 190; Jeffrey N. Lash, A Politician Turned General: The Civil War Career of Stephen Augustus Hurlbut (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2003), 5–60. 4. Daniel Sutherland, who used a similar strategy in his study of ex-Confederates in the North during Reconstruction, put it this way: “They may or may not be typical of other southerners in the North. . . . But for the moment, these hearty souls are in their own right an important group and worthy of close inspection.” Daniel Sutherland, “Former Confederates in the Post–Civil War North: An Unexplored Aspect of Reconstruction History,” Journal of Southern History 47 (August 1981): 394. 5. George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), vii, 10, 21–23. 6. For examples of the literature on Southern Unionists, see William Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Jack T. Hutchinson, Divided Loyalties: The Border States of the Upper South: Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri: Their Cultural Heritage and Divided Civil War Loyalties (Canton, Ga.: Jack Hutchinson and Signature Printing, 2005); Richard Nelson Current, Lincoln’s Loyalists: Union Soldiers from the Confederacy (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992); Daniel Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 7. David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 8–10, 472; David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 6, 248–51; Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), ix–xiv; Peter Parish, The North and the Nation in the Era of the Civil War, ed. Adam I. Smith and Susan-Mary Grant (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), xv, 92–95; Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords, “The Northern Origins of Southern Mythology,” Journal of Southern History 43 (November 1977): 569–70; Carl N. Degler, Place Over Time: The Continuity of Southern Distinctiveness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), chap. 3, 90–91; Rogan Kersh, Dreams of a More Perfect Union (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 1–21; Daniel Sutherland, “Southern Fraternal Organizations in the North,” Journal of Southern History 53 (November 1987): 590; Jan C. Dawson, “The Puritan and the Cavalier: The South’s Perception of Contrasting Traditions,” Journal of Southern History 44 (November 1978): 597–660; Susan-Mary Grant, North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 5–6, 17;

Notes to pages 177–79

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John M. McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 3–9; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991); Aviel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–6; Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 1–5; Kohn quoted in Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 136–37. For examples of this historiographical analysis, see Parish, The North and the Nation 114–15; Charles Joyner, “Forget, Hell! The Civil War in Southern Memory,” in Legacy of Disunion: The Enduring Significance of the American Civil War, ed. Susan-Mary Grant and Peter Parish (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 19; Mitchell Snay, Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites: Race and Nationality in the Era of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 10; Brian R. Dirck, Lincoln and Davis: Imagining America, 1809–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 241–46; Don E. Fehrenbacher, ed., History and American Society: Essays of David M. Potter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 61–108. 8. U.S. Census Office, Statistics of the United States (Including Mortality, Property, &c.,) in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns and Being the Final Exhibit of the Eighth Census, under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1866), lxi–lxii; Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 390–404. 9. Ezra Warner, Generals in Blue: Lives of the Union Commanders (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), 120; Edward Magruder Cook, ed., Justified by Honor: Highlights in the Life of General James William Denver (Falls Church, Va.: Higher Education Publications, 1988), 15–19, 65–85; Barnes, Denver, the Man, 255, 262–66. 10. James Denver to R. M. Briggs, June 5, 1861, quoted in Barnes, Denver, the Man, 269–70. For further examples of native southerners who moved to the North and fought for the Union, see Rolle, John Charles Fremont, 190; Miller, Second Only to Grant, 74, 91; Lash, Politician Turned General, 5–60. 11. Johnson quoted in Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 130–31. See also Annette Gordon-Reed, Andrew Johnson (New York: Henry Holt, 2011), 64–66. 12. John J. Crittenden quoted in The Life of John J. Crittenden, With Selections from His Correspondence and Speeches, ed. Chapman Coleman (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1871), 2:220–21; Crittenden quoted ibid., 227; John J. Crittenden Speech to the Kentucky Legislature, March 26, 1861, quoted ibid., 305–9. 13. Philip St. George Cooke quoted in Christopher J. Einolf, George Thomas: Virginian for the Union (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 92. 14. George H. Thomas quoted ibid., 85. 15. William R. Terrill quoted ibid., 107, 109. For further examples of Terrill’s thoughts on nationalism versus sectionalism, see ibid., 117–26. 16. Robert J. Schneller Jr., Farragut, America’s First Admiral (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2002), 30–32; Charles Lee Lewis, David Glasgow Farragut: Admiral in the Making (Annapolis, Md.: United States Naval Institute, 1941), 288–89; Loyall Farragut,

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Notes to pages 179–83

The Life of David Glasgow Farragut, First Admiral of the United States Navy, Embodying His Journal and Letters (New York: D. Appleton, 1879), 203–4; Winfield Scott quoted in General Marcus J. Wright, General Scott (New York: D. Appleton, 1893), 303–4. 17. Secretary of State Lewis Cass of Michigan likely said it best when he commented, “I speak to Cobb [treasury secretary] and he tells me he is a Georgian; to Floyd, and he tells me he is a Virginian; to you and you tell me you are Carolinian. I am not a Michigander; I am a citizen of the United States. The laws of the United States bind you, as they bind me, individually.” Cass quoted in Miller, Second Only to Grant, 74. 18. Christian B. Keller, “Keystone Confederates: Pennsylvanians Who Fought for Dixie,” in Making and Remaking Pennsylvania’s Civil War, ed. William Blair and William Pencack (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 21–22. Biographers of adopted southerners readily admit to the influence of location in drawing native northerners into the Confederate armies. See Edward Drummond, Confederate Yankee: The Journal of Edward William Drummond, a Confederate Soldier from Maine, ed. Roger S. Durham (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), xii; Ernest F. Dibble, Ante-bellum Pensacola and the Military Presence: The Pensacola Series Commemorating the American Revolution Bicentennial, 3 vols. (Pensacola, Fla.: Mayes Printing, 1974), 3:41; Nina Brown Baker, Texas Yankee: The Story of Gail Borden (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), 121. 19. Alice Farmer, The Times and Journal of Alice Farmer: Yankee Visitor to AcadianaNew Orleans, ed. Christopher G. Pena (Thibodaux, La.: C.G.P. Press, 2001), 24–43; Phoebe Farmer to L. B. Wright, August 27, 1860, quoted ibid., 21–22. 20. Calvin L. Robinson, A Yankee in a Confederate Town: The Journal of Calvin L. Robinson, ed. Anne Robinson Clancy (Sarasota, Fla.: Pineapple Press, 2002), 9–18, 37, 41–45. 21. Sally Hampton to Baxter family, December 1860, quoted in Sally Baxter Hampton, A Divided Heart: Letters of Sally Baxter Hampton, 1853–1862, ed. Ann Frip Hampton (Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint, 1980), 76; Sally Hampton to Samuel Ruggles, December 14, 1860, quoted ibid., 74–75; Sally Hampton to William Thackeray, April 5, 1862, quoted ibid., 118; Sally Hampton to Alfred Huger, January 5, 1862, quoted ibid., 111; Frank Hampton to Anna Baxter, January, 1861, quoted ibid., 95–96; Sally Hampton to George Baxter, March 19, 1861, quoted ibid., 108.; Sally Hampton to Sarah Weeks Carnes, March 23, 1861, quoted ibid., 110. 22. John H. B. Latrobe, “What Next?,” Baltimore American, January 14, 1861,. 1–2, Pamphlet Collection 3444, Rare Book, Manuscripts, and Special Collections, William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.. 23. Abiel Leonard to James O. Broadhead, December 25, 1860, quoted in Dennis Boman, Abiel Leonard, Yankee Slaveholder, Eminent Jurist, and Passionate Unionist (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 218. 24. Murphy quoted in John I. Smith, The Courage of a Southern Unionist: A Biography of Isaac Murphy, Governor of Arkansas, 1864–68 (Little Rock, Ark.: Rose Publishing, 1979), 21–38. 25. Roger Allen Griffin, “Connecticut Yankee in Texas: A Biography of Elisha Marshall Pease” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1973), 167–73. At the same

Notes to pages 183–86

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time, a few adoptive southerners returned to the North at the outbreak of war. See William Joseph Chute, “The Life of Frederick A. P. Barnard to His Election as President of Columbia College in 1864” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1951), 249–53, 285–88, 328–31; Charles Davenport, “Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard,” in National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Biographical Memoirs (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1939), 20:261; Frederick Barnard, “Letter to the President of the United States by a Refugee” (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1863), 20, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (repository hereafter cited as UVA); Record of the Testimony and Proceedings, in the Matter of the Investigation by the Trustees of the University of Mississippi, on the 1st and 2nd of March, 1860, of the Charges Made by H. R. Branham, Against the Chancellor of the University (Jackson, Miss.: Printed at the Mississippian Office, 1860), 2–3. 26. For similar arguments, see Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 1–10; Michael T. Bernath, Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 1–9; Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 286–89. 27. Henry Watson to Mr. Baker, March 8, 1861, Folder January–July 1861, Box 6, Folder 1860, Henry Watson Papers, Duke University, Durham, N.C.. 28. Henry Richardson to his parents, January 6, 1861, Henry B. Richardson Materials, Richardson and Farrar Family Papers 1860–1876, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill. John S. Ryan to A. F. Girard, January 15, 1861, John S. Ryan Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia (repository hereafter cited as USC). 29. Drew Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 14. 30. Edmund DeWitt Patterson Diary, December 31, 1861, quoted in Edmund DeWitt Patterson, Yankee Rebel: The Civil War Journal of Edmund DeWitt Patterson, ed. John G. Barrett (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 11. 31. Amelia Lines Diary, November 3, 1860, quoted in Amelia Akehurst Lines, To Raise Myself a Little: The Diaries and Letters of Jennie, A Georgia Teacher, 1851–1886, ed. Thomas Dyer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 166; Henry Watson to a Dear Friend, December 23, 1860, Folder 1860, Box 6, Henry Watson Papers, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; Ashbel Smith to his nephew, February 24, 1861, Box 2G224, Folder 8, Ashbel Smith Papers, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin (repository hereafter cited as UT). 32. Arthur McArthur to his father, December 31, 1860, McArthur Family Papers, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine; Arthur McArthur to his father, April 14, 1861, ibid. In this letter, McArthur also talked about how the Confederacy would eventually become a mighty Caribbean empire with the power of Ancient Rome. 33. Edward Wells to Thomas Wells, December 6, 1860, Folder 1, Papers of Smith and Wells Family, USC; Edward Wells to Thomas Wells, April 20, 28, 1861, Folder 2,

278

Notes to pages 186–89

ibid. Wells never regretted his stance and still espoused the same views fifty years after the end of the war. Edward Wells to unknown, March 3, 1904, and June 1909, Fiche 5, Edward Laight Wells Papers, Manuscripts Fiche M.73, USC. 34. Joseph Garey Diary, May 10, 1862, quoted in Joseph Garey, A Keystone Rebel: The Civil War Diary of Joseph Garey, Hudson’s Battery, Mississippi Volunteers, ed. David Welker (Gettysburg, Penn.: Thomas Publications, 1996), 95; Moses Curtis to Asa Gray, December 5, 1860, quoted in Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, A Yankee Botanist in the Carolinas: The Reverend Moses Ashley Curtis, D.D. (1808–1872) (Berlin, Penn.: J. Cramer, 1986), 190–91; John Slidell to S. L. M. Barlow, November 20, 1860, quoted in Fletcher Green, The Role of the Yankee in the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972), 23; Thomas Wharton Diary, April 14, 1861, quoted in Thomas K. Wharton, Queen of the South: New Orleans, 1853–1862, The Journal of Thomas K. Wharton, ed. Samuel Wilson Jr. (New Orleans: Historic New Orleans Collection and New York Public Library, 1999), 248; F. G. De Fontaine, American Abolitionism, from 1787 to 1861: A Compendium of Historical Facts Embracing Legislation in Congress and Agitation Without (New York: D. Appleton, 1861), 39–40, Library of Virginia, Richmond. 35. Robert Hatton to Lawrence Lindsley, January 13, 1861, quoted in James Vaulx Drake, Life of General Robert Hatton, Including His Most Important Public Speeches, Together with Much of His Washington & Army Correspondence (Nashville, Tenn.: Marshall and Bruce, 1867), 319–20. 36. Pratt quoted in S. F. H. Tarrant, Hon. Daniel Pratt, a Biography, with Eulogies on His Life and Character (Richmond, Va.: Whittet and Shepperson, 1904), 75–76, 111; George Kendall to Henry Randall, December 4, 1860, quoted in George Wilkins Kendall, Letters from a Texas Sheep Ranch: Written in the Years 1860 and 1867 by George Wilkins Kendall to Henry Stephens Randall, ed. Harry James Brown (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959), 129–30. 37. Jed Hotchkiss to Sarah Hotchkiss, August 16, 1861, http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/ papers/A2563. From the Letters of the Hotchkiss Family, 1861–1865, Augusta County Letters and Diaries, The War Years, Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the Civil War, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. 38. Patterson Diary, September 19, 1863, quoted in Patterson, Yankee Rebel, 136–37; Patterson, Yankee Rebel, xviii–xix. 39. Charles T. Quintard, Doctor Quintard Chaplain C.S.A. and Second Bishop of Tennessee: The Memoir and Civil War Diary of Charles Todd Quintard, ed. Sam Davis Elliott (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c. 2003), 10–16; Memphis Daily Appeal, November 17, 1865. 40. Editors and biographers make this argument on several occasions. See Drummond, Confederate Yankee, xxxi–xxxiv; John Bell, Confederate Seadog: John Taylor Wood in War and Exile (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002), 20–21; Jimmy Bryan Jr., More Zeal Than Discretion: The Westward Adventures of Walter P. Lane (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 5, 102–4; Keller, “Keystone Confederates,” 13. 41. Robert Hatton, “State of the Union, Speech of Hon. Robert Hatton,” 4–7, Rare Pamphlets, Vol. 94, UVA.

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42. Albert Pike, Letters to the People of the Northern States, Letter I, 2–4, Microfiche 11759, UT; Pike, Letters to the People of the Northern States, Letter II, 16–17, 21, ibid.; Albert Pike, “State or Province? Bond or Free?,” 31–37, UT. 43. John S. Ryan to A. F. Girard, December 4, 1860, January 30, 1861, John S. Ryan Papers, USC. 44. Moses Curtis to Asa Gray, December 5, 1860, quoted in Berkeley and Berkeley, Yankee Botanist in the Carolinas, 190–91; Daily Morning News, January 12, 1861, quoted in Herbert Phinehas Shippey, “William Tappan Thompson, A Biography and Uncollected Fictional Writings” (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 1991), 153. 45. Aaron Willington quoted in William Way, History of the New England Society of Charleston, South Carolina for One Hundred Years 1819–1919 (Charleston, S.C.: Society, 1920), sec. 2, 18. 46. Edward Wells to Thomas Wells, April 20, 1861, pp. 1–4, 10–12, Folder 2, Papers of Smith and Wells Families, USC; Edward Wells to Thomas Wells, April 28, 1861, ibid. 47. Edward Wells to Thomas Wells, April 20, 1861, pp. 1–4, Folder 2, Papers of Smith and Wells Families, USC; John S. Ryan to A. F. Girard, December 20, 1860, John S. Ryan Papers, USC; Ashbel Smith to Cousin Lydia, January 31, 1850, Ashbel Smith Journal, 1832–1857, Box 2G234, Ashbel Smith Papers, UT; Langhorne quoted in W. G. Bean, “The Unusual War Experience of Lieutenant George G. Junkin, C.S.A.,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 76 (May 1968): 184. 48. Patterson Journal, September 19, 1863, quoted in Patterson, Yankee Rebel, 136–37.

Thomas F. Meagher, Patrick R. Guiney, and the Meaning of the Civil War for Irish America: The Questions of Nationalism, Citizenship, and Human Rights Christian G. Samito 1. Christian G. Samito, ed., Commanding Boston’s Irish Ninth: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Patrick R. Guiney, Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 113–15. 2. Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 3, 11. On this debate, see William L. Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union’s Ethnic Regiments, 2nd ed. (1988; New York: Fordham University Press, 1998); Susannah Ural Bruce, The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Christian G. Samito, Becoming American under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War Era (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009). 3. Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:499–500; Susan-Mary Grant, North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 169. 4. Samito, Becoming American under Fire, 1–2, 175–76.

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Notes to pages 196–204

5. Grant, North Over South, 21, 31; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 9; Angela F. Murphy, American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Repeal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010). 6. Lawson, Patriot Fires, 161–67. 7. For more on Meagher, see Robert G. Athearn, Thomas Francis Meagher: An Irish Revolutionary in America (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1949), and Paul R. Wylie, The Irish General: Thomas Francis Meagher (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). 8. Wylie, Irish General, 118; Guiney to wife, July 9, 1861; August 20, 1861; March 9, 1862; April 2, 1863, all in Samito, Commanding Boston’s Irish Ninth, which contains letters to or from Guiney cited in this essay unless otherwise noted. 9. Samito, Commanding Boston’s Irish Ninth, xi–xiv. 10. For more on the Ninth Massachusetts, see Daniel George Macnamara, The History of the Ninth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, ed. Christian G. Samito (1899; New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). 11. Samito, Commanding Boston’s Irish Ninth, 117, 245–46, 250. 12. New York Times, August 30, 1861. 13. Ibid. 14. New York Times, September 16, 1861; Boston Morning Journal, September 24, 1861, quoted in Marion Archer Truslow, “Peasants into Patriots: The New York Irish Brigade Recruits and Their Families in the Civil War Era, 1850–1890” (PhD diss., New York University, 1994), 75–76; William D. Kelley et al., Addresses of the Hon. W. D. Kelley, Miss Anna E. Dickenson, and Mr. Frederick Douglass, at a Mass Meeting, Held at National Hall, Philadelphia, July 6, 1863, for the Promotion of Colored Enlistments [s.n., 1863], 5–7; Frederick Douglass, “Colored Americans, and Aliens—T. F. Meagher,” in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner, 5 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 5:365. 15. New York Times, October 26, 1861. 16. Thomas F. Meagher to William J. Onhan, Camp California, Virginia, March 7, 1862; New York Times, March 22, 1862. 17. New York Times, June 17, 1863. 18. Guiney to wife, June 4, 1861; July 24, 1861; September 4, 1861; October 7, 1861. 19. Guiney to wife, July 31, 1861; August 1, 1861; September 4, 1861. 20. George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (1965; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 30, 72–73, 154–55; Guiney to wife, July 2, 9, 1861; August 1, 7, 21, 1861; October 22, 1861; March 30, 1862; November 25, 1862; April 4, 1863; August 26, 1863; September 9, 1863. 21. Guiney to wife, July 31, 1861; August 29, 1862; Pilot, September 13, 1862. Guiney to John A. Andrew, October 22, 1862. 22. Guiney to wife, July 16, 1861; September 4, 1861; August 10, 1862; October 25, 1862; January 6, 1863; February 11, 1863; Guiney to Mrs. Shaw, June 2, 1864; Patrick R. Guiney scrapbook in the Patrick R. Guiney Papers (hereafter Guiney Papers), Dinand Library

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Rare Book Room, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts (hereafter cited as Guiney scrapbook), 2. 23. Pilot, August 24, 1861; October 19, 1861 (“trampled” quote); September 13, 1862; Macnamara, Ninth Regiment, 22–25; Thomas H. O’Connor, Civil War Boston: Home Front and Battlefield (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 76, 78–79. 24. Pilot, October 26, 1861; November 2, 1861; Samito, Becoming American under Fire, 107–8. 25. Guiney to Gov. John A. Andrew, October 22, 1862; Gov. John A. Andrew to Guiney, October 31, 1862, in Pilot, November 22, 1862; Guiney scrapbook, 7, 14. 26. New York Times, September 16, 1861; Pilot, April 11, 1863; Meagher to the Union Committee of Ohio, New York, September 23, 1863 (Irish-American, October 3, 1863); Irish-American, October 3, 1863; Athearn, Meagher, 128–29. 27. Letters on Our National Struggle, by Brig.-Gen. Thos. Francis Meagher (New York: Loyal Publication Society, 1863), 2, 3, 5, 14. 28. Irish-American, October 3, 1863; October 15, 1864; November 12, 1864; Athearn, Meagher, 139. 29. Meagher to Guiney, New York, October 7, 1863, in Samito, Commanding Boston’s Irish Ninth, 225–27. 30. Guiney to wife, July 14, 1861; September 1, 1861; May 22, 1862; July 16, 1863; Pilot, April 26, 1862; Macnamara, Ninth Regiment, 78–79; Guiney scrapbook, 10, 13; Samito, Becoming American under Fire, 126. Susan-Mary Grant noted a pattern wherein northerners often criticized southern development as backward alongside their praise for the North. Grant, North Over South, 43. 31. Capt. Timothy O’Leary et al. to Gov. John A. Andrew, July 31, 1862; Col. Thomas Cass to Guiney, undated [July 1862] in Samito, Commanding Boston’s Irish Ninth, 119–21. 32. Guiney to wife, June 24, 1862; August 29, 1862; Capt. John C. Willey to Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, Boston, July 30, 1862; Lt. Col. A. G. Browne Jr. to Maj. Gen. Fitz John Porter, Boston, August 5, 1862, both in Patrick R. Guiney Military Service Record, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as NARA); Maj. Gen. Fitz John Porter to Gov. John A. Andrew, Head Quarters 5th Army Corps, Harrison’s Landing Va., Aug. 6, 1862, in Ninth Massachusetts File in the Executive Department Letters, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston, Massachusetts. 33. Macnamara, Ninth Regiment, 429–537 (muster roll) and Massachusetts Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines in the Civil War, 8 vols. (Adjutant General of Massachusetts, 1931–37), 1:617, 622, 627, 640, 654, 655, 661, 667; Guiney scrapbook, 11, 13. 34. Charges and Specifications against Col. Patrick R. Guiney by Capt. Timothy O’Leary, August 9, 1862, in Guiney Military Service Record; Guiney to wife, August 6, 10, 29, 1862; Guiney to Gov. John A. Andrew, August 6, 1861; Capt. John W. Mahan Affidavit, August 16, 1862, and Lt. John M. Tobin et al., September 19, 1862, in Samito, Commanding Boston’s Irish Ninth, 123–27; Pilot, September 13, 1862. 35. Pilot, February 21, 1863; Boston Post, April 14, 17, 1863; May 16, 1863; Guiney to wife, February 26, 1863; April 6, 12, 13, 16, 25, 1863; May 8, 16, 1863; Guiney to Col. James McQuade, April 5, 1863; Guiney scrapbook, 2; Macnamara, Ninth Regiment, 486.

282

Notes to pages 211–15

36. Timothy O’Leary court-martial, Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (NN 3875), in Record Group 153, NARA; Guiney to wife, October 18 1862. 37. Timothy O’Leary courts-martial, Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (LL 651) and (NN 2055), in Record Group 153, NARA. Adjutant Michael W. Phalen, Capt. Michael Flynn, Capt. Thomas K. Roche, Lt. Michael A. Finnerty, and Sgt. John P. Murphy signed a letter in which they stated of McGunnigle’s allegations, “we believe them to be utterly false.” James F. McGunnigle Military Service Record, NARA; Guiney to wife, April 13, 1863; Michael W. Phalen et al., May 15, 1863, in Patrick R. Guiney Military Service Record. 38. Guiney scrapbook, 2; Daily Advertiser, October 7, 1864 in Guiney scrapbook, 12–13. For more on the transnational abolition movement and O’Connell’s criticism that slavery contradicted American republican ideals, see Murphy, American Slavery, Irish Freedom; Samito, Commanding Boston’s Irish Ninth, 257–59. 39. For more on this alliance between some Irish Americans and Republicans, see Samito, Becoming American under Fire, 186–91, which challenges Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995) and some other scholars of “whiteness” studies. Henry Wilson quoted in Boston Daily Journal, August 27, 1866, quoted in Dale Baum, The Civil War Party System: The Case of Massachusetts, 1848–1867 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 111; Proceedings of the Sixth National Congress of the Fenian Brotherhood, at Cleveland, Ohio, September, 1867 (New York: J. Craft, Steam Book & Job Printer, 1867), 4, 29. 40. Wylie, Irish General, 266–69. 41. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan, eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, Speeches, Debates and Interviews, 5 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1979–92), 4:69–70; Guiney scrapbook, 11–12; Pilot, June 25, 1864; May 27, 1865; October 13, 1866; March 31, 1877; A Memorial of Abraham Lincoln, Late President of the United States (Boston: J. E. Farwell, 1865), 72. Guiney’s commissions are in the Guiney Papers cited in note 22. 42. Twichell received 6,076 votes to Democrat William Aspinwall’s 2,544 and Guiney’s 437. Guiney scrapbook, 3, 8–10; Boston Herald, November 7, 1866; Biographical Directory of the American Congress (Washington, D.C., 1980), 1934; Pilot, October 13, 1866. Patrick Ford, who later used his periodical the Irish World and Industrial Liberator to endorse trade unions and promote women’s suffrage and black inclusion in the labor movement, had in 1862 enlisted with his brother in the Ninth Massachusetts. A postwar letter shows Ford had great respect for Guiney. Patrick Ford to Guiney, New York, July 19, 1873, in Guiney Papers cited in note 22; Samito, Becoming American under Fire, 224–25. 43. Form for a pension increase dated October 8, 1867, in Guiney Pension Record, NARA; Guiney to the Officers of the Ninth Regiment M.V.M., April 6, 1868, in Guiney scrapbook, 11. 44. See Samito, Becoming American under Fire, 172–216. 45. Guiney to Benjamin Butler, November 27, 1867, in Benjamin Butler Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 46. House Ex. Doc. 157, pt. 1, 40th Cong. 2d Sess., 343–44; Guiney scrapbook, 15.

Notes to pages 215–19

283

47. Guiney scrapbook, 13–14; Pilot, November 11, 1871; March 31, 1877; M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Portrait of an Independent: Moorfield Storey, 1845–1928 (Boston, 1932), 132. 48. Guiney to Louise I. Guiney, March 17, 1877; Pilot, March 31, 1877; Louise I. Guiney, “Patrick Robert Guiney,” Holy Cross Purple 3, no. 1 (1896): 42–43.

“This Most Unholy and Destructive War”: Catholic Intellectuals and the Limits of Catholic Patriotism William Kurtz 1. Metropolitan Record, September 7, 1861. 2. Brownson’s Quarterly Review (hereafter BQR), October 1861; Brownson was the only Catholic intellectual to receive any attention in George M. Fredrickson’s famous account of northern intellectuals during the Civil War (George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of Union [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993]). 3. James Hennesey, S.J., American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 149. 4. For recent discussions of antiwar northerners’ belief that being loyal to the Constitution was more patriotic than agreeing to all of Lincoln’s military and civil liberty policies, see Robert M. Sandow, Deserter Country: Civil War Opposition in the Pennsylvania Appalachians (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 10, 104–5, 140–41; Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–7, and Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002), 90–97. 5. Walter G. Sharrow, “Northern Catholic Intellectuals and the Coming of the Civil War,” New York Historical Society Quarterly 58 (January 1974): 36. 6. For important and recent studies that discuss how ethnicity influenced Catholic immigrants’ views of and participation in the Civil War, please see Susannah Ural Bruce, The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York: New York University Press, 2006), Christian G. Samito, Becoming American under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship During the Civil War Era (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), and Christian B. Keller, “New Perspectives in Civil War Ethnic History and Their Implications for TwentyFirst-Century Scholarship,” in This Distracted and Anarchical People: New Answers for Old Questions about the Civil War–Era North, ed. Andrew L. Slap and Michael Thomas Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 7. Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 113. Two essential treatments of how religion influenced Catholic attitudes on slavery and the war are John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003) and Michael Hochgeschwender, Wahrheit, Einheit, Ordnung: Die Sklavenfrage und der amerikanische Katholizismus, 1835–1870 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningen, 2006). 8. Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, viii–ix.

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Notes to pages 220–23

9. For an important treatment of the prewar alliance between Catholic northerners, the Democratic Party, and southern conservatives, please see W. Jason Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835–1860 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). 10. Jon Gjerde, Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America, ed. S. Deborah King (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2012), 15; Jay P. Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815–1865 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1975), 7–10; Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 7–9. 11. For a good discussion of Irish Catholic efforts to assert their patriotism against the criticisms of nativists in the 1840s, please see Angela F. Murphy, American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Repeal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2010), 11–12, 21–23. 12. John Hughes, Complete Works of the Most Rev. John Hughes, Archbishop of New York: Comprising His Sermons, Letters, Lectures, Speeches, Etc., ed. Lawrence Kehoe (New York: Lawrence Kehoe, 1866), 2:107–9, 114, 119–21; Gjerde, Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America, 33–47, 67–90; Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 126–52. 13. Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 65–78; Sharrow, “Northern Catholic Intellectuals,” 54–55; Catholic Telegraph, April 20, 1861; Pilot, April 27, 1861; Katholische KirchenZeitung, April 18, 1861; Pierre-Jean de Smet, S.J., Life, Letters and Travels of Father PierreJean de Smet, S.J., 1801–1873, 4 vols. (New York: Francis P. Harper, 1905), 4:1432–34, 1437–38; Bruce, Harp and the Eagle, 50–53. 14. Isaac Hecker to Cardinal Alessandro Barnabo, June 26, 1861; Bishop Francis P. McFarland to Hecker, July 9, 1861; Hecker to Bishop McFarland, July 11, 1861—all in Isaac Hecker Papers, Paulist Archives, Washington, D.C. Katholische Kirchen-Zeitung, May 16, 1861. Metropolitan Record, August 3, 17, 24, 1861. 15. Bp. Spalding to Abp. Purcell, April 11, 1861, Archdiocese of Cincinnati Collection, University of Notre Dame Archives (hereafter UNDA); Francis X. Weninger, Memoirs, trans. Susan X. Blakely, 201, Francis Weninger Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives, St. Louis, Missouri. For an extended discussion of Catholics’ belief that the evangelical Protestants shouldered much of the blame for the war see Judith Conrad Wimmer, “American Catholic Interpretations of the Civil War” (PhD diss., Drew University, 1980), 280–91. The Catholic criticism of evangelicals’ religious and antislavery fervor and the role it played in bringing on the war is echoed in some recent scholarship on religion during the war. For one recent popular example, see David Goldfield, America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011), 3–13. 16. BQR, October 1861; New York Freeman’s Journal (hereafter NYFJ), July 20, 1861; McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 45–46; Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 113–15. 17. Weninger, Memoirs, 201; Catholic Mirror, October 5, 1861; Metropolitan Record, October 12, 1861; Pilot, October 19, 1861. 18. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 79–80; Pilot, November 23, 1861; Weninger, Memoirs, 201; Katholische Kirchen-Zeitung, January 8, 1863.

Notes to pages 224–28

285

19. BQR, July 1863; Catholic, July 18, 1863; Frank Klement, “Catholics as Copperheads during the Civil War,” Catholic Historical Review 80 (January 1994): 36; For recent studies of the Copperheads, see Weber, Copperheads, and Sandow, Deserter Country. 20. David J. O’Brien, Isaac Hecker: An American Catholic (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), 191–92; Rev. Charles A. Costello, “Episcopate of Rt. Rev. J. M. Young, Bishop of Erie, Pennsylvania, 1854–1866” (MA thesis: University of Notre Dame, June 1951), 159–60; Bishop Young to Society for the Propagation of the Faith (SPF), March 14, 1864, Society for the Propagation of the Faith Records (hereafter PFP), UNDA; De Smet, Life, Letters and Travels, 4:1442–43. 21. Telegraph, January 15, September 3, 1862, April 8, 22, June 24, 1863; Anthony H. Deye, “Archbishop John Baptist Purcell and the Civil War” (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 1944), 65–69; NYFJ, April 18, May 2, 1863; Weninger, Memoirs, 202–3. 22. BQR, July 1863; Telegraph, May 6, 1863; McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 85; Cincinnati’s Catholic army chaplain, Father William O’Higgins, and a sergeant in the 28th Massachusetts, Peter Welsh, are a few examples of such Catholic men in the army who supported emancipation. Fr. William O’Higgins to Abp. Purcell, May 28, 1863, Archives of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati; Peter to Margaret Welsh, February 3, 1863, quoted in Peter Welsh, Irish Green and Union Blue: The Civil War Letters of Peter Welsh, Color Sergeant, 28th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers, ed. Lawrence F. Kohl (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), 64–68. 23. NYFJ, July 11, 1863; Metropolitan Record, July 11, 1863; Pilot, July 25, 1863; David Spalding, CFX, ed., “Martin John Spalding’s ‘Dissertation on the American Civil War,’ ” Catholic Historical Review 52, no. 1 (1966): 76–79. 24. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 73; Randall M. Miller, “Catholic Religion, Irish Ethnicity, and the Civil War,” in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, Charles Reagan Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); 282–83; BQR, October 1863; Telegraph, July 22, 1863; Tablet, July 25, 1863; Hennesey, American Catholics, 150–151. 25. Liberator, July 31, 1863; NYFJ, July 18, 25, 1863; Metropolitan Record, July 18, 1863; Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 115. 26. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 71; NYFJ, April 4, 1863; Spalding, “Dissertation on the American Civil War,” 79; Rev. Boniface Wimmer to Abraham Lincoln, June 10, 1863, cited in Boniface Wimmer, O.S.B., Boniface Wimmer: Letters of an American Abbot, ed. Jerome Oetgen (Latrobe, Penn.: Saint Vincent Archabbey Publications, 2008), 267–69. 27. For examples of such scholarship, see Keller, “New Perspectives,” 128–33, Susannah Ural, “ ‘Ye Sons of Erin Assemble’: Northern Irish American Catholics and the Union War Effort,” in Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest Conflict, ed. Susannah J. Ural (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 113, 117–27, and Kathleen Conzen, “German Catholic Communalism and the American Civil War: Exploring the Dilemmas of Transatlantic Political Integration,” in Bridging the Atlantic: The Question of American Exceptionalism in Perspective, ed. Elisabeth Glaser and Hermann Wellenreuther (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 119–44.

286

Notes to pages 228–34

28. Catholic, October 4, 1862; Katholische Kirchen-Zeitung, May 7, 1863; Wimmer to Gregory Scherr, February 26, 1863, in Letters of an American Abbot, 266; Weninger, Memoirs, 201; Hochgeschwender, Wahrheit, Einheit, Ordnung, 8–9; McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 51–52, 60–66, 75–76; Greeley’s attack on northern Catholic loyalty in a late December 1864 issue of his newspaper argues that antebellum antiCatholic stereotypes were confirmed by the war itself (New York Tribune, December 20, 1864). 29. Pilot, October 19, 1861. 30. Ural, Civil War Citizens, 3; Samito, Becoming American under Fire, 4–12. 31. BQR, October 1861. Contrary to Brownson’s claims, James McPherson has stated that “the Irish were the most under-represented group in proportion to population, followed by German Catholics” (James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 606–7). 32. Orestes Brownson, “The American Republic,” in The Works of Orestes A. Brownson, ed. Henry F. Brownson, 20 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 18:5. 33. Pilot, August 10, 1861; Telegraph, August 3, 1861. 34. Catholic, April 20, 1861; Weninger, Memoirs, 202. 35. Abp. Hughes to Card. Barnabo, February 13, 1862, Hughes Papers, Catholic University of America Archives, Washington, D.C.; Hennesey, American Catholics, 149; Pilot, August 1, 1863. 36. Bishop Young to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, March 14, 1864, PFP; George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 60–61, 78–79. 37. Hecker to Richard Simpson, September 12, 1862; Hecker to Bernard Smith, April 6, 1863; Hecker to Simpson, May 13, 1864, Paulist Archives. David J. O’Brien, Isaac Hecker: An American Catholic (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), 191–95; Young to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, June 23, 1864, PFP; Edward Sorin, The Chronicles of Notre Dame Du Lac, ed. James T. Connelly (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 276–77, 279–81. 38. New York Freeman’s Journal, July 13, 1861, May 17, 1862, July 25, 1863; McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 68–69; Metropolitan Record, July 25, 1863. 39. Hecker to Smith, June 26, 1861, Paulist Archives; NYFJ, July 20, 1861; Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 149–150. 40. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 62; Spalding, “Dissertation on the American Civil War,” 84; Pilot, August 22, 1863, September 17, October 29, 1864; NYFJ, August 23, 1862. 41. Spalding, “Dissertation on the American Civil War,” 83–85; Wimmer to Gregory Scherr, February 26, 1863, Letters of an American Abbot, 260, 264–65; McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 73, 75, 87–89; Weninger, Memoirs, 201–202; Ural, Harp and the Eagle, 136–37, 178–91. 42. New York Tribune, December 20, 1864. 43. Pilot, December 10, 1864, June 3, 1865; Tablet, January 7, 21, 1865; NYFJ, December 31, 1864; Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 183. 44. De Smet, Life, Letters and Travels, 4:1443–46; Catholic, January 28, 1865; Katholische Kirchen-Zeitung, November 30, 1865.

Notes to pages 234–35

287

45. Hennesey, American Catholics, 161–62; Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 186–88. 46. William Corby, Memoirs of Chaplain Life: Three Years with the Irish Brigade in the Army of the Potomac, ed. Lawrence F. Kohl (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), xx–xxv; David Power Conyngham, The Irish Brigade and Its Campaigns, ed. Lawrence Frederick Kohl (New York: William McSorley, 1867; reprint, New York: Fordham University Press, 1992); Hennesey, American Catholics, 198–202; Samito, Becoming American under Fire, 218–20, 233–34. 47. Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 199–216; McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 91–114; Ward M. McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1998), 3–7, 47–48, 53–54. 48. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 1985), 257–61; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 52–63; Bruce, Harp and the Eagle, 234–35; Hennesey, American Catholics, 172–83. 49. Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 306–20.

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Contributors

Lorien Foote is professor of history at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Seeking the One Great Remedy: Francis George Shaw and Nineteenth-Century Reform (Ohio University Press, 2003) and The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army (New York University Press, 2010), which was named honorable mention for the Lincoln Prize in 2011. Susan-Mary Grant is professor of American history at Newcastle University, UK. Her publications include A Concise History of the United States of America (Cambridge University Press, 2012), North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (University Press of Kansas, 2000), The War for a Nation: The American Civil War (Routledge, 2006), and Themes of the American Civil War: The War Between the States (Routledge, 2010). Her current research project explores the experiences of Civil War soldiers and veterans, and she is also working on a biography of the war veteran and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Professor Grant was a co-founder of BrANCH (British American Nineteenth-Century Historians) and former editor of American Nineteenth-Century History. She is a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society. William Kurtz is an assistant editor at Documents Compass, a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia (2012). He has written articles and given conference papers on the effect of the Civil War on American Catholics and is now revising a book for publication on this subject. His current project at Documents Compass is Founders Online, a website that will provide free access to the writings and correspondence of the first four American presidents as well as Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. Niki Lefebvre is a doctoral candidate in the American & New England Studies program at Boston University and Mellon Foundation Fellow for a John E. Sawyer Seminar titled “Reinterpreting the Twentieth Century.” Her dissertation traces the history of international trade and politics as refracted through American department stores from the Civil War to the Second World War. Kathryn Shively Meier is an assistant professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Meier’s first book, Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia, won both the 2014 Wiley-Silver Prize awarded by the Center for Civil War Research and the inaugural 2011 Edward M. Coffman Prize given by Society for Military History. Having published a number of articles and chapters on the early American military, environment, and medicine as well as teaching pedagogy, Meier

290

Contributors

is currently working on a biography of the Confederate general and Lost Cause architect Jubal A. Early. Richard F. Miller is an independent scholar who lives in Shirley, Massachusetts. Julie Mujic is an assistant professor of history at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. She is the author of an essay in Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War about University of Michigan students during the Civil War. She also published an article in Ohio Valley History about anti-abolitionists in 1840s Cincinnati. Her current project examines how Midwestern university students justified staying in school rather than enlisting to fight in the Civil War. Richard Newman is Edwin Wolf 2nd Director of the Library Company of Philadelphia. He was formerly professor of history at Rochester Institute of Technology, where he specialized in American and African American history. He is the author of Freedom’s Prophet (New York University Press, 2008), a biography of Richard Allen, the AME church founder. The book won the Foreword Magazine gold medal for biography. He is now working on a history of emancipation in American history from colonial times to the present. Christian G. Samito earned his law degree from Harvard Law School and his doctorate in American history from Boston College. He teaches legal history at Boston University School of Law and practices law in Boston. His most recent books are Becoming American under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War Era (Cornell University Press, 2009) and Changes in Law and Society during the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Legal History Documentary Reader (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009). His forthcoming book concerns Lincoln and constitutional amendment, and he is also editing a collection of essays about the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Joan Waugh is professor of history at UCLA. She researches and writes about nineteenthcentury America, specializing in the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age eras. Waugh has published many essays and books on Civil War topics, including U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai is an assistant professor of history at Angelo State University. He received his A.B. from Bowdoin College and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Mary Washington, and East Tennessee State University. His work examines the development of honor, nationalism, masculinity, leadership, and class identity in college-educated New Englanders. He has published essays in Maine History (January 2008), The Massachusetts Historical Review (November 2011), and Children, Youth, and the Sectional Conflict (New York University Press, 2012). He has a book forthcoming from Fordham University Press. David Zimring is an adjunct professor at Montgomery College Germantown and the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He received his Ph.D. from the University of

Contributors

291

Virginia and was previously a visiting assistant professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He has presented papers at numerous conferences, including the Society of Civil War Historians, and published “Secession in Favor of the Constitution: How West Virginia Justified Separate Statehood during the Civil War,” in West Virginia History. His book To Live and Die in Dixie: Native Northerners Who Fought for the Confederacy (University of Tennessee Press, 2015) examines the malleability of sectional and national identity in the context of cross-sectional emigrants in the antebellum and Civil War eras.

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Index

Abbott, Edward, 38 abolitionism: and American Catholics, 218, 222–28, 231, 232, 234; and contraband policies, 71; and depictions of African Americans, 154, 164–66, 169, 170; and Freedmen’s Aid Societies, 82; and Howard, 136–37; and Irish Americans, 195–97, 206, 208, 211; and native northerners in the South, 181, 184–85, 190; and sanitary reform, 65; and sectional identity, 184; and transnational context of the Civil War, 211 adoptive southerners, 174–76, 180–92 adversarial process, 102 African Americans: military service of, 8, 12, 65, 75–79, 106, 136–37, 153–54, 154, 157–58, 160, 160–62, 164, 165–73, 272n29; and postwar education, 129–32, 136–37, 144–52; and redemption narratives, 74–79; and sanitary reform, 70–74 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 71 Agassiz, Louis, 68, 167 Agnew, Cornelius R., 24, 26, 39–40 agrarian movements, 8 agricultural education, 111, 122–26 aid societies, 25, 81–82 Albert, Octavia V. Rogers, 85–86 Alcott, Louisa May, 4 Allan, William, 107 Allen, William T., 165 “allopathic” medicine, 22 almshouses, 83 alternative medicine, 21 American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (AFIC), 80–81 American Law Review, 100

American Medical Association (AMA), 23, 50–51, 66–67 American Medical Times, 43–44 American Missionary Association (AMA), 148 American Presbyterian, 82 American Protective Association, 235 The American Republic (Brownson), 234 American Revolution: and American Catholics, 220; and loyalism, 47, 192; and national identity, 14–15, 177; and public health discourse, 72 Americanist crisis, 235 Ames, Adelbert, 135 Amory, James, 92 amputation, 11, 46, 50, 54–58, 60–61 anatomization, 53 Ancient Order of Hibernians, 235 Anderson, Archer, 108 Andrew, John A., 197, 205, 208–9, 213 Ann Arbor, Michigan, 119, 123 antebellum era and mode of thought: academic influence of, 7; and American Catholics, 220, 223, 228, 231; and American national identity, 2–3; and battlefield amputations, 57; and depictions of African Americans, 154, 164, 167, 172–73; and education policy, 120, 126–28, 133, 137, 139, 151–52; and health care practices, 11; and hierarchical moral thinking, 8; intellectual legacy of, 17; and Irish Americans, 214; and medical reform, 31, 40; and military service of students, 113–15; and national identity, 13–14; and native northerners in the South, 175, 177, 179; and New England intellectuals, 4–5; and postwar

294 antebellum era and mode of thought (continued) education, 130–31; and public sanitation, 67–68; and Ropes, 87–88; and sanitary reform, 85–86; and service ethic, 111; and social reform, 9; and wartime medical care, 53, 61 anti-immigrant sentiment, 220, 233. See also nativism Antietam, battle of: and battlefield amputations, 57; and Civil War histories, 102, 104; and Irish Americans, 203, 210; and wartime medical care, 44, 59 The Antietam and Fredericksburg (Palfrey), 107 antislavery sentiment: and American Catholics, 224–25; and Irish Americans, 195–96; and the secession crisis, 184. See also abolitionism An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Child), 165 Appomattox Campaign, 88, 90, 104, 105 Appomattox Courthouse, 129, 135 apprenticeships, 22 Arkansas, 190 Armstrong, Samuel Chapman: academic training, 7; and the Freedmen’s Bureau, 130–31, 146–51, 269n39; and Hawaiian education policies, 137, 150, 269n46; military service, 136–37 Army Medical Department, 11, 46 Army Medical Museum (AMM), 52, 56, 58, 62 The Army of Northern Virginia in 1862 (Allan), 107 Army of the Ohio, 46 Army of the Potomac: and Civil War histories, 102; and Howard, 136; and Irish American units, 198; and Ropes, 91; and wartime medical care, 27, 44, 46, 50 Army of the Tennessee, 136 The Army under Pope (Ropes), 91, 97, 105, 107, 109 Atlantic Monthly, 41, 54, 55

Index Attie, Jeanie, 9, 26 authoritarian mode of thought, xi, 2–4, 8–9, 12, 17, 139, 152 Bachman, Aaron E., 28 “bad surgery,” 44 Baltimore Mirror, 223 Baltimore Sanitary Fair, 79 Barnabo, Alessandro, 230 Barnum, P. T., 200 Beecham, Robert, 80 Beecher, Henry Ward, 231 Bell, John, 187 Bellevue Hospital Medical College, 39 Bellows, Henry Whitney, 9, 25–26, 82 benevolence movements, 8 Benham, Henry W., 142 Berea College, 268n37 Beyer, C. Kalani, 269n46 Bible, 79 Bierce, Ambrose, 88 Billings, John D., 106 Billings, John Shaw, 46, 47–49, 52, 63 Bismarck, Otto von, 235 Black Republicanism, 185, 217 Blackwell, Elizabeth, 3 Bleak House (Dickens), 41 Blight, David, 90, 108 blood-sacrifice paradigm, 59 Blue-Gray reconciliation movement, 108 Blustein, Bonnie E., 42 boards of health, 67 body/mind view of disease, 20 Bollet, Alfred Jay, 44 Border States, 181–82, 218, 221–22, 223, 232 “born and bred” argument, 176–77 Boston, Massachusetts, 208–9 Boston Daily Advertiser, 96, 99 Boston Orthopedic Institution, 96 Boston Times, 197 Bowditch, 133, 134–35 Bowditch, Henry Ingersoll, 48, 54 Bowdoin College: Board of Trustees and Overseers, 140; Bowdoin Cadets, 139;

Index Chamberlain’s tenure at, 138–43, 151–52; liberal curriculum, 133; and military drill requirements, 131–32; and military enlistments, 134–36; postwar changes, 129; and rejection of paternalism, 12; and the secession crisis, 185 Bowdoin Prize, 94 Brahmin intellectuals, 12, 89, 202 Breckenridge, John C., 185 Brinton, John H., 46, 63 Bristow Club, 90 Brockway, Solomon, 261n10 Brook, John, 241n32 Brough, John, 206 Brown, Joshua, 164–65 Brownson, Orestes A., 217, 219, 221–24, 225, 229, 234 Brownson’s Quarterly Review, 217 Buchanan, James, 196–97 Bull Run. See First Bull Run, battle of Burbick, Joan, 60–61 Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 143 Burnside, Ambrose, 105 Bushnell, Horace, 79–80 Butler, Benjamin, 79–80, 214–15 Butler, James D., 114, 116–17, 123 Butler, Leslie, 5, 9 Calhoun, Charles C., 267n26 Cameron, Simon, 217, 223 Camp Randall, 118 Camp William Penn, 76 The Campaign of Chancellorsville (Dodge), 107 Campbell, James V., 121 Camper, Petrus, 167 cancer, 66–67 caricatures, 8 cartes de visite, 60 Cartwright, Samuel, 73 Cass, Lewis, 276n17 Cass, Thomas, 193, 197, 205, 208 Castleman, Alfred Lewis, 29

295 Catholic, 228 Catholic Telegraph, 219, 225–26 Catholic University of America, 235 Catholics: and antislavery sentiment, 224–25; and conservatism, 7, 12, 16–17; and ethnic politics, 219–21, 228–35; and outbreak of Civil War, 217–19; and secession crisis, 221–28 Chamberlain, Joshua Lawrence: and Bowdoin, 138–43, 151–52; and characterbased education, 7, 267n26; and Civil War histories, 101; education of, 133–34; and education policy goals, 131–32; inaugural address, 267n18; and paternal authority, 12; postwar career, 129 Chandler, Peleg W., 98–99 Chantilly (Ox Hill) engagement, 48 character education, 7, 133, 134 Chickamauga, battle of, 54 Child, Lydia Maria, 76, 165 Christian Commission, 10 Christian Recorder, 71–72, 75 Cincinnati Lancet and Observer, 51–52 citizenship issues: and American Catholics, 228–29, 234; and Irish Americans, 194–95, 199, 200–1, 214–15; and loyalty, 17; and military service, 62–63; and public service, 54; sacrifice-based citizenship, 7; and wartime medical care, 58 civic health, 21, 64, 69–70, 83–84. See also sanitary science and reform Clark, Elizabeth B., 165, 172 Clarke, Frances, 7, 10, 13, 15, 44 class issues: and antebellum legal training, 88; and Brahmin intellectuals, 12; and Irish Americans, 199, 202; northern intellectual society, 8–9; and postwar education, 133; and Ropes, 108; and the United States Sanitary Commission, 10 Class of Sixty-One (Utley and Cutcheon), 261n10 classical curricula, 125 Cleveland Plain Dealer, 56

296 Cliffburn Hospital, 48–49 Codman, Mary Anne, 95 Cohen, Michael David, 113 Cohen, Nancy, 8 Colborne, Edward, 56 collective space, 42 College of Physicians and Surgeons, 24, 39 college presidents, 112 commencements, 114–17, 118, 127 common schools, 144 communalism, 9 Confederate Conscription Act, 186 confiscation acts, 71 Congressional Medal of Honor, 136 Connor, J. T. H., 60 conscription, 217, 226, 227 conservatism: and Catholic identity, 7, 12, 16–17, 218–20, 222–24, 226–29, 231–32, 234–35; and nationalist sentiment, 14–15; and postwar education reforms, 133, 137; and sanitary reform, 68; and the Women’s Central Relief Association, 3 Constitutional Union Party, 187 contraband policy, 71, 72–73 Cooke, Philip St. George, 179 Cooley, Thomas, 120 Copperheads, 210, 224 Corcoran, Michael, 197, 221 courts-martial, 210–11, 282n37 Coyl, William, 261n10 Creutz, Alan, 264n32 Crimean War, 25, 69 Crittenden, John J., 178 cross-sectional emigrants, 176–77 Crume, William E., 261n10 cultural assimilation, 132, 183, 194 cultural history, 2, 6 curricula: classical, 125; and discourse of war, 7; and military discipline, 116–17, 152; and the Morrill Land-Grant Act, 125–26; and postwar education, 131, 133, 138–39, 149, 152; wartime changes to, 113, 120, 127, 263n24

Index Curry, Leonard, 42 Curtis, George William, 5 Curtis, Moses, 186 Cutcheon, Byron M., 261n10 daguerreotype, 155 Davis, Jefferson, 73–74 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 41, 58, 61 Davis, Theodore R., 159; background, 154–55; battle accounts of, 158; sketches, 156, 160, 160, 165, 166–67, 169–71; wartime service, 153 De Forest, John W., 56 De Smet, Pierre, 220, 224–25, 233 death-embracing culture, 6–7 Declaration of Independence, 1, 13, 194, 195–96 Dedlow, George, 54–55 Deep South, 182 democracy and democratization, 8, 19, 37, 131, 219, 234 Democratic Party: and American Catholics, 218–20, 222–24, 227–28, 231–33, 235; and Irish Americans, 16, 195–96, 199, 206–7, 208–9, 211–12, 214; and McArthur, 185; and politics of emancipation, 76 Denver, James William, 177 dependence rhetoric, 83 Der Wahrheits Freund, 226 Descartes, René, 61 Detroit, Michigan, 73 Devens, Charles, 101, 109 Dickens, Charles, 41 Dickinson, Emily, 4 dissection, 53 Dodge, Theodore A., 107 Doherty, John, 210–11 Donahoe, Patrick, 219, 221, 223, 226, 228–29, 232 Douglas, Henry Kyd, 108 Douglass, Frederick: on American racism, 86; on depictions of African Americans, 156–57, 162, 167; escape narrative,

Index 165; Faust on, 88, 92; and Guiney, 213; and Meagher, 200; on military service of African Americans, 75, 78; portrait, 272n38; and public health discourse, 72; and sanitary reform, 64 Downs, Jim, 85 Doyle, Jeannette. See Guiney, Jeannette Doyle Draft Riots, 207–8, 226, 227–28, 231, 233 Drapetomania, 73 Du Bois, W. E. B., 86, 145, 152, 162 Dublin Citizen, 206 Dublin Irishman, 206 Duffield, George, 66 Dunbar, Charles F., 99 Dupanloup, Felix, 225 Dyer, Jonah F., 29, 30 Eighth Illinois Volunteer Infantry, 46 Eighty-Fifth New York Infantry, 30 Eleventh Army Corps, 55 elite intellectuals, 14 Elliott, Isaac H., 113 emancipation, 64–65, 70–74, 217, 225–28. See also Emancipation Proclamation “The Emancipation of the Negroes, January 1863—the Past and the Future” (Nast), 161, 161 Emancipation Proclamation: and American Catholics, 222–24, 226; and military service of African Americans, 77; and representations of African Americans, 153–54, 157–58, 160–62, 161; and transnational context, 15 Emberton, Carol, 75–76 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 4, 155, 219, 221, 222 emigration, 189–90 empiricism, medical, 19–20, 23–26, 30, 36, 40 Enlightenment, 5 environmental view of disease, 20, 25, 31. See also civic health epidemic diseases, 35, 50 Episcopalian Church, 108

297 Excelsior Brigade, 201 Executive Committee, 102 Exodus, 72, 79 expatriation rights, 195, 214 experimental science, 45 Fahs, Alice, 6, 162 Fairchild, Charles, 89 Faneuil Hall, 213, 215 Fariola, Octave, 212 Farmer, Franklin, 180 Farmer, Phoebe, 180 Farragut, David, 179 Faust, Drew Gilpin, 87–88, 109, 184 “Feeding the Negro Children” (Smalls), 162–64, 163 Fenian Brotherhood, 212, 214 Fifteenth Amendment, 156, 213–14 Fifth Corps, 193 Fifth New Hampshire, 104 Fifth Wisconsin Infantry, 29 Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, 162 Finley, Charles, 24, 27–28 First Bull Run, battle of: and American Catholics, 217, 221, 231; and battlefield amputations, 56–57; and Irish Americans, 197–98, 203; and military leadership, 135; and sanitary reform, 68–69 First Congregational Church of Washington, 144 First Opium War, 95 First Tennessee Regiment, 189 Fisk University, 152 Fitzgerald, Edward, 203 Fitzpatrick, John, 204 Flannnery, Michael, 57 Fleche, Andre, 14, 15 folk healing, 20, 22, 68 Folsom, Charles W., 104, 105 Foner, Eric, 156–57, 172, 269nn39,46 Fontaine, Felix de, 187 Ford, Henry, 58 Ford, Patrick, 282n42 Forney, John, 76

298 Fort Monroe, Virginia, 72, 78 Fort Pillow, 79 Fort Sumter: and American Catholics, 221–22; and Irish Americans, 197; and military enlistments, 110, 113–14; and native northerners in the South, 174, 186–87; and patriotism, 56; and the secession crisis, 186 Fort Wagner, 153, 156, 169–71 Foucault, Michel, 42 Founding Fathers, 13, 184 Fourteenth Amendment, 156, 215 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 156–58 Fredericksburg, battle of, 48, 158, 203 Fredrickson, George M.: and anti-Catholic sentiment, 233–34; on class divisions, 202; on emancipation, 218–19; on federal role in education, 120; on fractured northern intellectual society, 176; on growth of federal power, 120, 127; on managerial modes of thought, 42; on military discipline, 241n30; on military recruitment, 110–13; on nationalist sentiment, 40; New England intellectuals, 87–88; on northern service ethic, 131; on Protestant millennial optimism, 220; scholarly influence of, xi–xii, 1, 3–15, 20; on secession, 221; on USSC leadership, 26; on wartime suffering, 49, 92, 109, 241n30 Freedmen’s Bureau, 83–85, 129–30, 144, 146–47, 149, 152, 269n39 French, Francis Ormond, 92 French Revolution, 181 Friends Asylum for the Insane, 81 Frieze, Henry S., 117 Fugitive Slave Law, 183–84 Fuller, Randall, 4 Gaines’s Mill, battle of, 193, 198, 208, 209–10 Gaither, George, 108 Gallagher, Gary W., 14 Garey, Joseph, 186

Index Garfield, James, 150 Garrison, Fielding, 62 Germany, 235 Gettysburg, battle of: and Chamberlain, 129, 135; and Ropes, 87, 98, 100; student casualties, 120; and wartime medical care, 55–56 Gettysburg Address, 1 Gibbs, Wolcott, 26 Giesberg, Judith Ann, 10 Gilded Age, 8 Ginzberg, Lori, 8, 10 Gordon (former slave), 77–78, 166 Gordon, George H., 88–89, 100, 101 Graham, Sylvester, 21 Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.), 234, 235 Grant, Susan-Mary, 10–11, 13, 20, 195 Grant, Ulysses S., 56–57, 100 Gray, John Chipman, Jr., 89, 91–92, 94, 104, 109 Great Central Fair, 70 Greeley, Horace, 226, 232–33 Grimké, Angelina, 165 Grimké, Sarah, 165 Guiney, Jeannette Doyle, 197–98, 202, 207–8, 219 Guiney, Louise Imogen, 197 Guiney, Patrick R.: background, 193–96; Civil War service of, 197–98, 202–5, 282n42; and nationalist sentiment, 194–96, 216; postwar years, 213–16; and the Republican Party, 206–12; and transnational context of war, 15–16 Gunn, Moses, 47–48, 51–52 Halleck, Henry W., 104, 105 Hammond, William A., 24, 27–28, 32, 39–40, 52 Hampton, Sally Baxter, 181 Hampton Institute, 146–50, 152, 269n46 Hancock, Cornelia, 56 Hardtack and Coffee (Billings), 106 Harper, Fletcher, 154, 158–61

Index Harper’s Weekly: depictions of former slaves, 77–78; on sanitary care, 36; and wartime sketches, 8, 153–56, 158, 158, 159, 162, 163, 164, 164–68, 166, 170–72 Harris, Elisha, 25, 40 Harrison, William Henry, 95 Harvard College, 90, 96–98, 108–9, 204 Harvard Magazine, 97, 99 Harvard Memorial Biographies, 109 Hatt, Michael, 166–67 Hatton, Robert, 187, 189 Haven, Erastus O., 115, 121, 122 Haven, Franklin S., 89, 103 Hawaiian Islands, 150–51, 269n46 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 4 Hayes, Rutherford B., 106, 108 Hayes-Tilden Compromise, 108 Hecker, Isaac, 219, 221, 224–25, 230–31 Henry Ropes Letters, 98 heroic medicine, 22, 28 Herrick, Henry E., 155 Herschbach, Lisa, 58 Heth, Henry, 108 Hewett, Edward Osborne, 56 Hewitt, Henry S., 46, 51–53, 54, 62 Higginson, Henry Lee, 101 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 5 High, James, 110 Hills, Patricia, 172, 272n38 historical methodology, 101, 106 History of the Civil War, 94, 100 The History of the Second Army Corps (Walker), 107 Hochgeschwender, Michael, 228 Hoge, Jane Currie, 64, 70 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 55, 61–62 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 62, 88, 101 home medical care, 21 homeopathy, 19, 22, 23 hospitals, 28–29, 59, 83 Hotchkiss, Jedediah, 108, 188 The House of Bondage (Albert), 85–86 Howard, Charles, 136 Howard, McHenry, 108

299 Howard, Oliver Otis: and Armstrong, 148–49; and character-based education, 7; and education of freed people, 143–46, 151, 152, 265nn1–2; and the Freedmen’s Bureau, 129–30, 143–44, 146, 148–49, 269nn43,45; postwar career, 129–32; and self-discipline, 133–34; wartime service, 133–37, 266n10 Howard Theological Seminary, 144 Howard University, 144–45, 148–49 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 80–81 Hughes, John, 217, 219–21, 223, 226, 229–30 human rights, 216 hygiene, 25, 30–31, 50 identity politics, 174–92 Illinois Soldiers’ Home, 77 illiteracy, 264n37 immigrant populations, 16, 201 In War Time (Mitchell), 41, 51 Indiana University: and illiteracy in Indiana, 264n37; and military enlistments, 113, 115, 262n21; and the Morrill LandGrant Act, 111, 123–26; and wartime curriculum changes, 117–18, 127–28 industrial education, 122, 125–26, 131, 146–51 Ingle, David, 59–60 The Inner Civil War (Fredrickson): on emancipation sentiment, 218; intellectual legacy of, xi–xii, 1; scope of, 3, 20; subjects of study, 87, 176; and wartime trauma, 109 intellectual history, 2 “intervention,” 68. See also preventive medicine Ireland, 16 Ireland, John, 234 Irish American, 206, 207 Irish Americans: and abolitionism, 195–97, 206, 208, 211; and Civil War service, 193–94, 196–206, 216, 286n31; and nationalist sentiment, 194–96, 216; and postwar years, 196, 212–16; and the Republican Party, 206–12

300 Irish Charitable Society, 209 Irish nationalism, 196–97 Irish News, 196–97 Irish World and Industrial Liberator, 282n42 Irishman, 207 Irmscher, Christopher, 68 Jackson, Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall,” 103 Jacksonian Democrats, 206 Jacksonian era, 21 Jenkins, John F., 24, 26, 35, 40 Jewell, Wilson, 50 Jim Crow, 164–65 Johnson, Andrew, 178, 179 Johnson, Eastman, 272n38 Jones, William, 108 Jones’s Wood, 198 journalism, 142–43, 157–58, 206–7 Junkin, George, Jr., 191 Keiser, Henry, 28 Kelly’s Ford, battle of, 54 Kendall, George, 187–88 Kirkbride, Thomas, 81 Knapp, Frederick N., 35, 37 Knights of Columbus, 235 Know Nothing Party, 200, 220, 222–23, 228, 230, 232 Kurtz, William, 7, 12, 16, 196 Lab of Freedom, 80 labor movements, 8, 58, 213, 282n42 Ladies of the Literary Library Association, 53 laizzes-faire liberalism, 53–54 Latrobe, John H. B., 181–82 The Law Reporter, 99 Lawson, Melinda, 9, 13, 194 Lee, Robert E., 104, 105, 174 Lee, Robert E., Jr., 108 Lee, Tom, 268n37 Lee, William Raymond, 109 Lefebvre, Niki, 8

Index Leonard, Abiel, 182 Letterman, Jonathan: and medical authority, 48–50, 52, 59; and professionalization of medicine, 52, 62; and public image of medicine, 44, 57, 63; and scurvy epidemic, 50; and wartime advances in medicine, 241n26; and wartime medical establishment, 46 leukemia, 67 Leutze, Emanuel, 155 Lewis, James T., 123 liberal arts education, 122–23, 125–26, 132 Liberal Members of the Medical Society, 39–40 liberalism, 5, 14–15 Life in the Iron Mills (Davis), 41, 61 The Limits of Religious Thought (Ropes), 94–95 Lincoln, Abraham: and abolitionism, 184–85; and American Catholics, 217, 227, 230–31; assassination, 128; and education of freed people, 146; Emancipation Proclamation, 153–54, 160–62, 222, 226; Gettysburg Address, 1; and international context of the Civil War, 200; and Irish Americans, 209, 211, 213; and midwestern colleges, 112, 126–27; and national identity, 16, 180, 194–95; and party politics, 195–96; and politics of emancipation, 76–77; and racial politics, 74; and the Republican Party, 206; and sanitary reform, 25, 70, 79; Second Inaugural, 79 Lincoln Memorial University, 146, 268n37 Lines, Amelia, 184 Lister, Joseph, 45 Livermore, Thomas L., 90, 104, 105, 107 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 101 “logic of prosthesis,” 58 London Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 169, 170 Longstreet, James, 104, 108 L’Osservatore Romano, 226 Lost Cause ideology, 106

Index Lowell, Charles Russell, 105 Lowell, James Russell, 5 Lowell, Josephine Shaw, xi–xii, 9 Loyal Publication Society, 15, 206 Lyman, Theodore, 101, 103, 104 Lynch, Patrick, 217 Mahan, John, 209–10, 211 Mahone, William, 104, 108 Malvern Hill, battle of, 198, 208, 209–10 managerial mode of thought, 11, 42–43, 46, 63 Manning, Chandra, 76 Marshall, Charles, 108 Marvin, Carolyn, 59–60 Maryland, 182 Mason, Herbert C., 89, 102 McArthur, Arthur, 185–86 McClellan, George B., 102–3, 104–5, 208, 212 McGreevy, John, 228 McGunnigle, James F., 209, 282n37 McKaye, James, 66 McMaster, James A., 219, 221–22, 227, 233 McPherson, James, 286n31 Meagher, Thomas Francis: background, 193–96; and Civil War service, 196–202, 205–6; and nationalist sentiment, 194–96, 216, 219, 221; postwar years, 212–13; and the Republican Party, 206–7, 212; and transnational context, 15–16 Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (MSHWR), 43, 52, 58–59, 62 medical licensing, 19 Meier, Kathryn Shively, 10–12, 42, 46, 50–51, 63, 67 Meigs, Charles, 66 Melosi, Martin, 67 Melville, Herman, 4 Memphis Daily, 143 Menand, Louis, 4–5 mental health, 32, 66–67, 72, 86

301 Metropolitan Fair, 70 Metropolitan Record, 221 Mexican-American War, 25 miasma theory of disease, 21, 31–32, 72 midwifery, 39–40 migration, 84 military authority and discipline: at colleges and universities, 12, 114, 118–19, 129, 131, 135, 139–43, 152; and medical reform, 26–30; and wartime medical care, 50, 58–59, 62–63 Military Historical Society of Massachusetts (MHSM), 12, 17, 87, 88–90, 93–94, 102–3 Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, 100 military service: and African Americans, 8, 12, 65, 75–79, 106, 136–37, 153–54, 154, 157–58, 160, 160–62, 164, 165–73, 272n29; and American Catholics, 229; and citizenship issues, 54; and Irish Americans, 193–94, 196–206, 216, 286n31; and midwestern universities, 118–20; and officer education, 135 militias, 181 millenialism, 220 Miller, Edward Gee, 110, 128 Miller, Richard, 12 Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (Colborne), 56 missionaries, 72, 148–49, 150–51, 270n46 Mitchell, Silas Weir, 39, 41, 54, 59 modernity, medical, 41–63 Montana Territory, 212–13 moral philosophy, 132–33, 134 moralistic idealism, 4 Morrill Land-Grant Act, 111–12, 119, 120–27 Morse, Robert McNeill, 92 Morton, Samuel, 167 Motley, John Lothrop, 90 Mugwumps, 8 Mujic, Julie, 7, 135

302 Mullay, John, 219, 221, 226–27, 231 Murphy, Isaac, 182 Napoleon I, 91–92, 109 Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 165 Nast, Thomas, 161, 161 nationalism: Cass on, 276n17; effect of Civil War on, 3; and Fredrickson’s scholarship, 12–14; and Irish Americans, 194–95, 196, 198, 201, 204–6, 212, 215–16, 221; and medical modernity, 63; and nation-states, 14–15; national identity, 13, 174–77, 179–80; and postwar education, 131–32; and the secession crisis, 177, 179, 192; and transnational context, 15–16; and the United States Sanitary Commission, 11; and wartime medical care, 59–61 Native Americans, 143, 150 nativism: and American Catholics, 220, 228–29, 235; and Irish Americans, 198, 204, 205–6, 215 naturalization, 195, 201, 216, 234 Nevins, Allan, 42 New England Freedmen’s Aid Society (NEFAS), 81–82 New England intellectuals, 3, 8. See also Brahmin intellectuals New Iberia, 180 New York (state), 74 New York Illustrated News, 156 New York Tablet, 226 New York Times, 44, 57, 107, 139 New York Tribune, 57, 146, 226, 233 Newberry, John S., 24, 26, 39, 40 Newman, Richard, 11–12, 15, 20, 55 Nineteenth Massachusetts Infantry, 29 Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 193, 197–98, 203–5, 209, 213, 214, 282n42 normal schools, 144, 148–49 North American Review, 86 North Over South (Grant), 13

Index The North Star, 156 Norton, Charles Eliot, 5 Numbers and Losses in the Civil War (Livermore), 107 nurses, 35, 37, 56 “Nurse’s Notes” column, 37 Nutt, Cyrus, 115–16, 118, 123–24, 125–26 O’Connell, Daniel, 206–7, 211 Oertel, Maximilian, 219, 221, 223, 228, 234 O’Leary, Charles, 48 O’Leary, Timothy, 209–11 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 24, 26–27, 29, 31, 82 On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery (Lister), 45 O’Neill, John, 212 Overland Campaign, 56–57, 232 Owen, Richard, 123, 125, 264n37 “Painting Race” (Hills), 172 Palfrey, Francis Winthrop, 89–90, 101, 107, 109 Palfrey, John C., 101 Palfrey, John Gorham, 89, 90 Papers of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, 105 Parkman, Francis, 90 Parsons, Theophilus, 98–99 party politics, 76, 184–85, 220. See also specific parties paternalism, 149–50 patriotism: and American Catholics, 194, 217, 229, 232–33; and college students, 120, 121; and Irish Americans, 194–95, 208; and midwestern universities, 116; and the secession crisis, 189; and wartime medical care, 62 Patten, Horace R., 141–42 Patterson, Edmund DeWitt, 184, 188, 191 “Paulists,” 219 Peace Democrats, 206 Pearson, Andrea, 156–58 Pease, Elisha, 182–83

Index Pemberton, John C., 174–75 Pemberton, Rebecca, 174 Peninsula Campaign: and Civil War histories, 105–6; and Howard, 136; and Irish Americans, 197–98, 202–3, 205; and Ropes, 100; and wartime medical care, 47, 50 Pennsylvania, 74 Perkins, George, 92 Perkins, James Amory, 109 Perkins, William E., 89 Perry, John, 47, 242n47 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 73 Philadelphia Academy of Music, 34 Philadelphia Inquirer, 76 Philadelphia Press, 76 Philadelphia Union League, 66 philanthropy, 3, 69, 75, 77 Phillips, Wendell, 196 photography, 57, 60, 155–56, 271n13 phrenology, 167 physiognomy, 156–57, 167, 168, 168–69, 172 Pike, Albert, 189–90 Pilot, 204–5, 223, 226, 228–29, 232–33 plagues, 66 Platonic ideal of historical truth, 12 political partisanship, 106, 160–61 “Pompey” (cartoon), 164, 164–65 Poor, Walter S., 135 Pope, John, 103, 105, 208–9 populism, 214 Porter, Fitz-John, 105, 209 Pratt, Nathaniel, 187 Prescott, William Hickling, 90 preventive medicine, 20, 25, 37, 68 professionalism, 3, 21–23, 38–40, 51–52, 62 Progressive Era, 9 propaganda, 15, 63, 161, 161 proslavery sentiment, 182 prosthetics, 57–58, 59 Protestants: and anti-Catholic sentiment, 227; and anti-slavery sentiment, 222; and Catholic activism, 229, 230, 231, 234–35; and education policy, 204; and

303 loyalism, 233; and modern values, 12, 220–21; and party politics, 196; and the Second Great Awakening, 241n32; and social institutions, 234–35 pseudosciences, 73–74, 132, 165–67, 169, 172 psychosis, 86 public health movement, 21, 64, 69–70, 83–84 public opinion: and Civil War histories, 92–93; and medical modernity, 63; and medical practices, 30–33, 38–39, 52 Purcell, Edward, 219, 221, 225–27 Purcell, John, 219, 222, 224–25, 227, 229, 234 Purdue, John, 126 Quigley, Paul, 13 Quintard, Charles, 189 Rable, George C., 6 racial pseudosciences, 73–74, 132, 165–67, 169, 172 Radical Republicans, 232–33 rationalism, 11, 22–23. See also scientific mode of thought Rawson, Michael, 68 Read, Daniel, 115 “A Rebel Captain Forcing Negroes” (Mead), 167–68, 168 “Rebel Negro Pickets as Seen through a Field-Glass” (Davis), 158, 160, 160–62, 164 “The Rebels’ Last Device in the Torpedo Line” (Davis), 8, 153–54, 154, 157, 165–73 Reconstructing the Campus (Cohen), 113 Reconstruction: and anti-abolitionist sentiment, 74; and Chamberlain, 138; and Civil War histories, 90, 106; and education of freed people, 129–30, 143–44, 150, 269n46; and the Hayes-Tilden Compromise, 108; and Irish Americans, 196, 212, 213–14, 216; and sanitary reform, 12, 65, 79–84, 85–86 Redeemers, 269n46

304 redemption narratives, 74–79 regulatory systems, 51 Reid, Harvey, 113 relief agencies/societies, 81–83 religious colleges, 124 Republican Party: and American Catholics, 217, 218, 232–33, 235; and education of freed people, 145; and Irish Americans, 16, 195, 196, 206–12; and politics of emancipation, 76; and racial politics, 74; and sectional identity, 184–85; and Union loyalism, 112 republicanism, 199, 201, 205, 212 Revels, Hiram, 157 Rhett, Robert Barnwell, 185 Rhode, Michael, 60 Richardson, Heather Cox, 42 Richardson, Henry, 183 Roberts, William R., 212 Robins, Edward Blake, 89, 101–2 Robinson, Calvin, 180–81 Rock City Guard, 189 Rockwell, Alfred P., 101, 103 romanticism, 5, 6 Ropes, Francis, 98 Ropes, Henry, 89–90, 92, 95–96, 98–100, 109 Ropes, John Codman: background, 87–88, 95–96; at Harvard, 96–98; and historical methodology, 105–8; and historical objectivity, 16–17; and History of the Civil War, 92–94; later life, 108–9; and origin of the MHSM, 88–91; and paternal authority, 12; prominent classmates, 255n1; and proposal for war history, 101–5; scoliosis, 87–88, 109, 257n20; wartime influences, 98–101; writings of, 91–92 Ropes, William, 87, 95 Ropes & Gray, 88, 100 Rose, Anne C., 5, 6 Rosecrans, William S., 225 Rosenberg, Charles, 45, 67

Index “Rules for Preserving the Health of the Soldier” (Van Buren), 33 Rush, Benjamin, 73 Russell, William H., 155 Ryan, John S., 183–84, 190–91 Sadlier, D. J., 226, 227 Samito, Christian, 15, 219, 224–25 Sanitary Bulletin, 36–37 Sanitary Commission Western Department, 24 Sanitary Reporter, 36, 78 sanitary science and reform: and Agnew, 39–40; and data collection, 25, 33–34, 36; and emancipation, 11–12, 70–74, 77–78; and hygiene education, 30–33; and medical authority, 26; and relief societies, 81–84; sanitary fair movement, 15, 69–70, 77, 78–79; and wartime conditions, 27, 30, 49–50, 69–70. See also United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) Sappol, Michael, 46, 53 Schantz, Mark S., 6–7 Schurz, Carl, 55–56 scientific mode of thought: and agricultural colleges, 125–26; and American Catholics, 234; and battlefield amputations, 57–58; and medical practices, 22–23, 26, 38–39, 42–43; and the modern state, 42; and nationalism, 131; and public awareness, 30–33, 36; and public health discourse, 73–74; and racial pseudosciences, 73–74, 132, 165–67, 169, 172; and sanitary reform, 68; and the United States Sanitary Commission, 11; and utopian idealism, 8–9 scoliosis, 87–88, 109, 257n20 Scott, Winfield, 179–80 scurvy, 50 secession: and American Catholics, 222–23, 230; and amputation metaphor, 55; and antislavery sentiment,

Index 184; medical metaphors, 65–69; and nationalism, 177, 179, 192; and personal loyalties, 174–78 Second Great Awakening, 21, 241n32 sectarianism, 19 sectional identity, 16–17, 174–80, 182–87, 190–92 segregation, 78, 144 self-help, 148 Seminole War, 25 Seven Days’ Battles, 193 Seymour, Horatio, 206 Sharrow, Walter G., 218 Shattuck, George O., 98–99 Shaw, Francis George, 9 “The Siege of Charleston” (Davis), 153, 154, 158, 159 Silber, Nina, 14 Silbey, David J., 268n26 Sixty-Ninth New York State Militia (Irish Brigade), 193, 197, 201, 203, 229 slavery, 70–71; and American Catholics, 217, 218, 223–24; and Irish Americans, 208; proslavery sentiment, 182; slave rebellions, 225; and transnational context of the Civil War, 211–12. See also abolitionism; emancipation Slavery As It Is (Weld), 165 Slidell, John, 187 Smalls, Robert, 162–64, 163, 272n38 Smith, Ashbel, 185 Smith, Hayden Kellogg, 127 Smith, Stephen, 61–62 Smith, William M., 30 Smyth, Eneas, 210 social control agenda, 46–47 social reform, 21–22 The Soldier’s Friend (USSC publication), 36 Sorin, Edward, 230 The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 162 South Carolina, 83–84, 185, 190–91 Southern Historical Society (SHS), 107–8 Southern Unionism, 177–79, 182

305 Sowdon, Arthur John Clark, 92, 96–97 Spalding, Martin, 219, 222, 226–27, 232 Spanish-American War, 45 Sparks, Jared, 90 spinal disease, 97–98 Sproat, John G., 8 Stanton, Edwin M., 39, 66, 77, 144 state loyalties, 177 states’ rights, 186 Stauffer, John, 272n29 stereotypes, 8, 71, 84, 165, 169, 172–73 Sterling, John W., 114 Stevenson, Greeley S., 102 Stille, Alfred, 69 Stille, Charles, 66, 70, 71 Stockton, Howard, 89, 103 The Story of the Civil War (Ropes), 91 Strong, George Templeton, 25–26, 49–50, 55, 66 Sturtevant, Julian M., 69 subgeneation, 74 suffrage, 90, 213–14 Summit House Hospital, 78 Sumner’s Corps, 104–5 Surgeon General of the United States, 24 surgeons: and advancement of medical science, 51–61, 61–63, 241n26; and “collective space” of war, 42–43; contrasted with physicians, 11; equipment shortcomings, 242n51; and medical authority, 43–51; and medical professionalization, 20, 43; and public views of medicine, 30–33; and redemption narrative, 43; and scientific modes of thought, 22, 24–26, 30; and USSC’s medical agenda, 33–38 Sutherland, Daniel, 274n4 Swinton, William, 107 Tappan, Henry, 113–14, 121–22, 128, 263n26 teacher education, 149 temperance reform, 39–40 Terrill, William R., 179

306 Texas, 191 textual communities, 59–60 Third United States Colored Regiment, 154, 170, 172–73 Thirteenth Amendment, 156 This Republic of Suffering (Faust), 87–88, 92, 109 Thomas, B. F., 71 Thomas, George H., 179 Thompson, William Fletcher, 161–62 Thompson, William Tappan, 190 Thomson, Samuel, 22–23 Thoreau, Henry David, 219 tintypes, 271n13 Tougaloo University, 149 Tower of London, 95 traditional medicine, 39, 45 transnational context of the Civil War, 5, 15–16, 17, 205–6, 211 “Treatment of Social Diseases” (Bellows), 26 Trowbridge, Silas Thompson, 46–47, 53–54, 63 Turner, Henry McNeil, 71 Twentieth Maine Volunteer Regiment, 135 Twichell, Ginery, 214 Twichell, Joseph H., 33–34 “A Typical Negro” (McPherson and Oliver), 166, 166 Union Army, 3, 111 Union Club, 88, 91, 100 Union Leagues, 9, 40, 206 Union Medical Corps, 48 Unionism, 112, 216 United States Colored Troops, 136–37 United States Military Academy (West Point), 135–36 United States Sanitary Commission (USSC): agenda and influence of, 19–21, 33–38; and authoritarian leadership, 9–10; creation of, 69–70; and Fredrickson’s work, 3; key members of, 240n19; and medical empiricism,

Index 23–26; and medical professionalization, 21–23, 38–40, 43, 51–52, 62; and military medical reform, 26–30; origin of, 24–25; and public views on medicine, 30–33; and relief societies, 82; and sanitary improvement, 48; and transnational context, 15; and wartime medical care, 63 United States Veteran Military League, 213 United States War Department, 139 University of Michigan: and military enlistments, 113–15, 261n10; and the Morrill Land-Grant Act, 111, 121–23, 264n32; and wartime curriculum changes, 117, 119–20, 127–28 University of Michigan Board of Regents, 121–22 University of Wisconsin: and military enlistments, 113–18, 262n21; and the Morrill Land-Grant Act, 111, 123; response to beginning of war, 110–11; and wartime curriculum changes, 127–28, 263n24 urbanization, 68 U.S. Army, 174 U.S. Congress: and citizenship rights, 215; and enfranchisement of freedmen, 90; and land grants to universities, 124; and medical reform, 27; and the Morrill Land-Grant Act, 111; and politics of emancipation, 77; and the secession crisis, 189; and soldiers’ protests, 156 U.S. Constitution: and antislavery sentiment, 221; and antiwar northerners, 218–19, 222–23, 231; and citizenship issues, 215; and national identity, 1, 177–79; and religious freedom, 220; and secession crisis, 184, 188, 192 U.S. Department of State, 215 U.S. Medical Bureau, 19 U.S. Medical Department, 22 Utley, Henry M., 261n10 utopianism, 8–9

Index Vallandigham, Clement, 206 Valley Spirit, 27 Van Buren, William H., 25–26, 33 Van Evrie, John, 73–74 veterans: and college presidencies, 112; and postwar education, 129–52; veterans’ associations, 234, 235 Victorian culture, 5–6 vigilantes, 145 voluntary medical associations, 22 volunteerism: and American Catholics, 229; and citizenship issues, 54; and national identity, 13; and sanitary care, 9–10; and sanitary fair movement, 15, 70; and women, 3 voting rights, 90, 213–14 Wafer, Francis, 47 Waitt, William G., 139–40 Walker, Francis A., 107 Wallis, Brian, 167 Walton, Charles, 197 War Democrats, 196 War Letters, 1862–1865 (Ford), 91, 94, 97, 99 The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (ORA), 60 Warner, John Harley, 22, 42, 45, 68 wartime healing, 78 Washburn, Israel, 135 Washington, Booker T., 150, 152, 269n46 Washington Crossing the Delaware (Leutze), 155 water quality, 32–33, 67–68 Waterloo, battle of, 91–92 Watson, Henry, 183, 185 Waugh, Joan, 9 Weld, Stephen M., 103, 105 Weld, Theodore, 165 Wells, Cheryl, 44 Wells, Edward, 185–86, 190–91

307 Weninger, Francis, 220, 222–23, 225, 228–30, 232 Wharton, Thomas K., 187 White, Andrew D., 114, 117, 119, 122 “White Supremacy and Negro Subordination” (Van Evrie), 74 Whitman, Walt, 4, 88, 112–13, 221 Whittier, Charles A., 103 Wiebe, Robert H., 4 Wilderness Campaign, 56–57, 198 Willard, Sidney, 92, 209 Willey, John C., 208 Williams College, 136–37 Willington, Aaron, 190 Wills, Garry, 1 Wilmer, Skipwith, 108 Wilson, Edmund, 57 Wilson, Henry, 145, 212–13 Wimmer, Boniface, 219–20, 227, 232 Winthrop, Robert C., 213 Witmer, A. H., 85 Woman’s Central Association of Relief (WCAR), 25 women: and benevolence movements, 9; and medical reform, 37–38; and relief associations, 3, 25; and sanitary reform, 69–70; women’s hospitals, 39–40 Women’s Central Relief Association of New York, 3 Wongsrichanalai, Kanisorn, 7, 12, 14, 112 Wood, Ephraim, 35 Workingman Party, 213 World War I, 44–45 Worthington, J. H., 81 Yancey, William Lowndes, 185 Young, Josue, 224–25, 230 Yuan, David, 57–58 Zalinski, Edmund L., 89 Zimring, David, 16

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The North’s Civil War Andrew L. Slap, series editor

Anita Palladino, ed., Diary of a Yankee Engineer: The Civil War Story of John H. Westervelt, Engineer, 1st New York Volunteer Engineer Corps. Herman Belz, Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era. Earl J. Hess, Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and Their War for the Union. Second revised edition, with a new introduction by the author. William L. Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union’s Ethnic Regiments. Hans L. Trefousse, Carl Schurz: A Biography. Stephen W. Sears, ed., Mr. Dunn Browne’s Experiences in the Army: The Civil War Letters of Samuel W. Fiske. Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid–Nineteenth Century. Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War. With a new introduction by Steven K. Rogstad. Lawrence N. Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters during the Civil War and Reconstruction. John A. Carpenter, Sword and Olive Branch: Oliver Otis Howard. Thomas F. Schwartz, ed., “For a Vast Future Also”: Essays from the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. Mark De Wolfe Howe, ed., Touched with Fire: Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. With a new introduction by David Burton.

Harold Adams Small, ed., The Road to Richmond: The Civil War Letters of Major Abner R. Small of the 16th Maine Volunteers. With a new introduction by Earl J. Hess. Eric A. Campbell, ed., “A Grand Terrible Dramma”: From Gettysburg to Petersburg: The Civil War Letters of Charles Wellington Reed. Illustrated by Reed’s Civil War sketches. Herbert Mitgang, ed., Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait. Harold Holzer, ed., Prang’s Civil War Pictures: The Complete Battle Chromos of Louis Prang. Harold Holzer, ed., State of the Union: New York and the Civil War. Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments. Mark A. Snell, From First to Last: The Life of Major General William B. Franklin. Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., An Uncommon Time: The Civil War and the Northern Home Front. John Y. Simon and Harold Holzer, eds., The Lincoln Forum: Rediscovering Abraham Lincoln. Thomas F. Curran, Soldiers of Peace: Civil War Pacifism and the Postwar Radical Peace Movement. Kyle S. Sinisi, Sacred Debts: State Civil War Claims and American Federalism, 1861–1880. Russell L. Johnson, Warriors into Workers: The Civil War and the Formation of Urban-Industrial Society in a Northern City. Peter J. Parish, The North and the Nation in the Era of the Civil War. Edited by Adam L. P. Smith and Susan-Mary Grant. Patricia Richard, Busy Hands: Images of the Family in the Northern Civil War Effort.

Michael S. Green, Freedom, Union, and Power: The Mind of the Republican Party During the Civil War. Christian G. Samito, ed., Fear Was Not In Him: The Civil War Letters of Major General Francis S. Barlow, U.S.A. John S. Collier and Bonnie B. Collier, eds., Yours for the Union: The Civil War Letters of John W. Chase, First Massachusetts Light Artillery. Grace Palladino, Another Civil War: Labor, Capital, and the State in the Anthracite Regions of Pennsylvania, 1840–1868. Christian B. Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory. Sidney George Fisher, A Philadelphia Perspective: The Civil War Diary of Sidney George Fisher. Edited and with a new Introduction by Jonathan W. White. Robert M. Sandow, Deserter Country: Civil War Opposition in the Pennsylvania Appalachians. Craig L. Symonds, ed., Union Combined Operations in the Civil War. Harold Holzer, Craig L. Symonds, and Frank L. Williams, eds., The Lincoln Assassination: Crime and Punishment, Myth and Memory. A Lincoln Forum Book. Earl F. Mulderink III, New Bedford’s Civil War. David G. Smith, On the Edge of Freedom: The Fugitive Slave Issue in South Central Pennsylvania, 1820–1870. George Washington Williams, A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865. Introduction by John David Smith. Randall M. Miller, ed., Lincoln and Leadership: Military, Political, and Religious Decision Making. Andrew L. Slap and Michael Thomas Smith, eds., This Distracted and Anarchical People: New Answers for Old Questions about the Civil War–Era North.

Paul D. Moreno and Johnathan O’Neill, eds., Constitutionalism in the Approach and Aftermath of the Civil War. Steve Longenecker, Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North. Harold Holzer, Craig L. Symonds, and Frank L. Williams, eds., Exploring Lincoln: Great Historians Reappraise Our Greatest President. A Lincoln Forum Book. Lorien Foote and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, eds., So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War–Era North.