The Civil War and the Rise of Modern America
by Glenn W. LaFantasie
Out of unimaginable violence and bloodshed, the Civil War generation forged modern America. The cost was extremely high. Approximately 360,000 Union and 260,000 Confederate soldiers lost their lives. No one knows how many civilians—directly or indirectly—were killed or wounded in the conflict; no one has ever calculated how many American lives, North and South, were smashed, ruined, or broken because of the war. The proportion of military deaths to total population would in our own time equal 5 million for the North and more than 13 million for the South. Nearly every American family was touched by the war. After describing the agonizing suffering of the wounded in the field hospitals at Gettysburg, Major General Carl Schurz of the Union army, a German immigrant who fought throughout the war and became a close political friend to Lincoln, said grimly: “There are those who speak lightly of war as a mere heroic sport. They would hardly find it in their hearts to do so, had they ever witnessed scenes like these, and thought of the untold miseries connected with them that were spread all over the land.” The war ended lives; the war changed lives. America would never be the same.
The Civil War—so catastrophic in its scope, so revolutionary in its dimensions—shook the very foundations of the North and South, ending lives, uprooting lives, ruining lives, and sucking everything into its vortex. In the aftermath of war, it was difficult for members of the Civil War generation, now much reduced in number, to pick up the pieces of their interrupted lives. One Union soldier, Oscar Ladley, a blacksmith who served as a sergeant in the fighting ranks of the 75th Ohio, returned home after the war only to discover that he could find no employment there. He moved on to LaFayette, Indiana, but admitted in the spring of 1866 that "I have not succeeded in any thing yet but intend to keep trying until I do[,] as something must turn up after a while." After failing in several enterprises, Ladley reenlisted in the army in 1867 and received a commission as a second lieutenant in the 22nd U.S. Infantry. For Ladley, who looked to carry on his life as he had known it before the war, his only recourse became going back in the army and continuing the new life the war had begun.
Countless Northerners and Southerners like Ladley knew from personal experience that the war had fundamentally reshaped their lives and their nation. Even before the war was over, the
New York Herald declared that “all sorts of old fogy ideas, habits, manners, and customs have gone under, and all sorts of new ideas, modes and practices have risen to the surface and become popular.” A writer for the
New York Times looked backward in amazement two years after the war ended: “The truth is neither section, and but few persons in either section, appreciate fully the tremendous effect of Civil War, and especially of such a war as ours, upon every interest and every sentiment of the whole community. . . . The contest touches everything, and leaves nothing as it found it. . . . It leaves us a different people in everything from what we were when it came upon us.” In 1869, George Ticknor, a Harvard historian, wrote that the war had created “a great gulf between what happened before it in our century and what has happened since, or what is likely to happen hereafter. It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born.”
The novelists Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner agreed. In their work,
The Gilded Age, published in 1873, they described the war as having “uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations.” To these opinions may be added the prosaic sentiments of a less prominent Virginia woman, Lucy Buck, who wrote: “We shall never any of us be the same as we have been.” George Templeton Strong, the New York City attorney who kept a fulsome diary during the war years, summed up American perceptions of the war when he wrote, noting the march of events since April 1861, that “we have lived a century of common life since then.”
America in the postwar years was very different from the antebellum nation. It was not only that a huge proportion of the American population, mostly male, had been cut down on the battlefields or had withered away in the crude military hospitals from poorly treated wounds or untreated diseases; nor was it only that the American landscape, at least east of the Mississippi and south of the Ohio river, now showed the signs of battle scars and wartime devastation. In many places below the Mason-Dixon line—and not just in Georgia, where Sherman’s army cut its swath, or in the Shenandoah Valley, where Sheridan and his men had desolated the land—farms, villages, homes had been ravaged. Homeless whites and blacks roamed the countryside looking for loved ones, looking for work, looking to rebuild or remake their lives. Many white Southerners, perhaps most of them, faced years of hardship, privation, and poverty. Black southerners, once jubilant over the breaking of their chains and the blessings of freedom, discovered that their new start in life lacked any visible means of support. Southern whites, eager to reinstate their traditional ways in the war’s aftermath, concocted the means by which blacks would be kept subservient for decades to come, despite the reality of the so-called Civil War amendments to the Constitution—the Thirteen, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.
Life in the North also seemed peculiar and strange for those who had endured four years of sacrifice and loss. Although some historians argue that industrial expansion in the United States during the Civil War was uneven, due to slippage in the textile industry that had been deprived of Southern cotton during the war years, and that overall economic growth seems not to have been accelerated by the war itself, but it is true nevertheless that war dramatically altered the distribution of wealth and per capita commodity output in the North and South. For example, per capita wealth of white Southerners in 1860 had been 95 percent higher that of white Northerners; a decade later, per capita wealth of white Northerners was 44 percent higher than that of white Southerners. Similarly, in 1860, Northern and Southern per capita commodity output had been approximately equal; ten years later, the per capita commodity output of the North was 56 percent higher than that of the South. With the rise of this new, industrial and urban North, Americans living above the Mason-Dixon line encountered unfamiliar conditions and novel challenges during the postwar decades. New industries and mass production in factories created jobs in some locations, but most antebellum Americans had been family farmers, not wage earners. “In this generation,” wrote a Minnesota journalist, “a new era has dawned upon the earth. Formerly cities grew slowly, or by degrees, and were centuries in attaining their stable proportions; but in this age it is different. They spring up suddenly and progress rapidly towards completion, until some unlooked for obstacles check their progress.”
The rise of industry, mass production, and national markets changed the nature of how men earned their livings and resumed their lives after the war. Soldiers coming home from combat always have difficulty readjusting to civilian life, but after the Civil War, Union veterans—like Oscar Ladley—occasionally discovered that jobs in their former trades or livelihoods, such as village blacksmithing, could not readily be found or no longer existed. For some former soldiers, the war had ruined them by training them to be good soldiers, but preparing them for little else. Those who suffered from battle wounds or lingering illnesses contracted during the war often received poor or no medical treatment for their maladies. Former Union soldiers (and probably Confederate veterans, too) experienced a variety of medical problems, some of which were difficult to identify, even when veterans received proper medical treatment. In the North and South, wounded and ill veterans caused something of a health crisis, if only because their numbers were so large and their need for medical treatment so acute. The Civil War changed American ideas about physical disabilities and how the disabled should be treated. The war also shaped modern perceptions of veterans and their place in society.
Americans realized in the postwar years that there was something different about the way that people related to one another. Their actions had changed, and so had their language. In the South, men and women went through confusion in their households as they redefined their gender identities and domestic roles in light of the war and its aftermath. Within the Southern household, the war also brought about a transformation in domestic law that reshaped the patriarchy and the role of the state. In the North, women’s experiences during wartime expanded their place in society and created opportunities for women in professional and public life. In the household and in the public sphere, men gave up their exclusive control in the public realm, which, in turn, helped to loosen the patriarchal bonds between males and females. For many in the Civil War generation, the war years engendered a crisis of faith that also eroded traditional bonds of affection, gender roles, personal identities, and individual autonomy. In the workplace, labor became defined not only by productivity but also by the clock; the industrial workday was set by the clock rather than by the agricultural routine of sunup and sundown. Men and women now craved to be safely ensconced in the middle class, and they worked long and demanding hours to secure their status, which was not always achieved. The postwar world was new, alien, and exacting. Modern American life, while holding the promise of great rewards, also bred frustration, disappointment, and bewilderment. For ordinary Americans in nearly every walk of life, the Civil War altered the ways in which they did business, worked for a living, raised their families, worshipped their God, and dealt with one another.
Without overturning the fundamental institutions of society or destroying the social order, and without totally supplanting traditional relationships and customary behaviors, the Civil War carried with it a revolution in the way that people interacted with each other. Mary Chesnut, the famous Southern diarist, admitted in July 1865 that she no longer had interest in keeping her detailed diary, which she had begun with the inception of the Confederacy. She especially feared that emancipation would lead to a revolt by blacks against their former masters. But it was not simply that Yankees now occupied South Carolina and her family’s slaves were now free. Instead, it seemed as if everything in her life had been altered, irrevocably, and her diary no longer seemed worth the effort: “I do not write often now—not for want of something to say, but from a loathing of all I see and hear. Why dwell upon it?” By the end of the month, Mary Chesnut stopped making diary entries. The Confederate phase of her life was over.
Language also took on new forms and meaning for the Civil War generation, largely because of wartime influences. Slang words and expressions—like shoddy, goobers, skedaddle, fit to be tied, and fit as a fiddle—added to the vocabulary of Americans and to their style of expression. Soldier life and the experience of becoming inured to death and human suffering produced new ways of speaking and writing, including more direct forms of communication that favored declarative sentences, the expunging of florid figures of speech, and a realism in literature that would soon supplant the romanticism of the antebellum years. The telegraph also stimulated truncated forms of expression, hastened the decline of regional speech and dialects, and effectively combined transportation and communication into one medium. “The Civil War,” wrote Henry James, “marks an era in the history of the American mind”—by which he meant that literature after the war would be different from that written before the war, if only because the war itself had caused the death of American innocence. Indeed, the language of war gave rise increasingly to the use of words as weapons in a newly constructed American vernacular. It was not simply that the war became the subject of American essays and books, particularly memoirs and recollections published after 1876. More to the point, the language of war could be heard on the lips of most Americans, soldiers and civilians alike.
The Civil War changed American life forever. War struck down the Civil War generation’s youth, crushed its dreams, ended its purity. Certainly other generations have endured war, tragedy, afflictions, and obstacles. But the Civil War generation suffered the desolation of the nation’s worst cataclysm. “With this generation,” said a Texas judge, “scenes of blood have been so common that their moral sensibilities have been benumbed.” A news correspondent for the
New York Times agreed: “Carelessly as the ghastly record of a stricken field has come be regarded; slight and insignificant as the death of the individual soldier, among the hecatombs of his comrades, may seem to be the habit-hardened mind, each life was linked to other lives, and interwoven with interests that made its loss an anguish.” Everywhere the Civil War generation looked, all it could see was “a frightful picture of calamity and desolation.”
My goal as a historian and biographer has been to understand the tremendous consequences of the Civil War by examining the kinds of change that the conflict wrought in both the North and the South. While some of my scholarship focuses rather tightly on Gettysburg, my larger interests are directed toward the ordinary lives of soldiers and civilians, on political and military leaders, on the nature of the war as a modern conflict or a “total war,” and on the ways in which Americans in general survived the horrible four-year long ordeal of steadily increasing casualties and the lengthening rolls of the dead. My current and future research projects are aimed at coming to grips with the awful costs of the Civil War—including the human toll in lives and suffering—and with explaining how the war itself produced a new and modern America. The Civil War ended slavery and made moot the issue of secession. But it did not solve all the problems of antebellum America. And it did not leave in its wake a new America that was necessarily any better than the old one. Henry Adams gloomily saw that the United States had lost its innocence in the Civil War: “I doubt whether any of us will ever be able to live contented in times of peace and laziness. Our generation has been stirred up from its lowest layers[,] and there is that in its history which will stamp every member of it until we are all in our graves.” That lack of contentment would become the very essence of the modern American condition.
Copyright © 2008 by Glenn W. LaFantasie
-718421.jpg)
-780727.jpg)
-720791.bmp)
