…A soldier who had endured the third day of Gettysburg, and emerged unhurt, and who had then seen his own boys destroy Pickett’s (12,500 Confederates participated in the charge on July 3, the last day of the battle. Only half of them made it safely back to their own lines.) and so destroy the myth of Robert Lee’s invincibility, had already passed the zenith of his life. Nothing like this would ever happen to him again. For a generation enmeshed in the ethical web spun so tightly by mid-Victorian Protestantism—these were Christian soldiers who fought in armies marked by intense waves of wartime revivalism—the excitement of battle generated a profound moral contradiction. In This Republic of Suffering, a superb account of coming to terms with the scale of death the Civil War generated, Harvard president and historian Drew Gilpin Faust describes the experience of a stunned Confederate who, during a firefight, came to the aid of a shrieking comrade, only to find out that he was “executing a species of war dance,” exulting over the body of the Union soldier he’d just killed. In another battle in 1862, Union soldiers on the firing line called their shots, as if combat were billiards: “Watch me drop that fellow,” one said to his comrades; it was, indeed, like a game.[1]
The killing didn’t end when the war did. Violent crime rose at three times the rate of population growth in the decades following the war, and perhaps as many as two-thirds of the nation’s convicted felons were veterans.[2] Soldiers understood, on some level, that combat had changed them irrevocably and some worried about it. Society, one Vermont soldier wrote his sister, “will not own the rude soldier when he comes back, but turn a cold shoulder to him, because he has become hardened by scenes of bloodshed and carnage.”[3] He was, in many respects, right: some of the soldiers who came home to Vermont, New Jersey or Iowa brought with them a measure of fear—they had become, in the Civil War novelist Michael Shaara’s term, “Killer Angels.”
Many Union soldiers had demonized themselves and by extension all of their comrades by celebrating their mustering out with epic alcohol binges and episodic violence throughout the demobilization summer of 1865.[4] A Chicago civilian’s insulting comment about William Sherman set off a saloon brawl that cascaded into a riot that police were helpless to put down. Only the fortuitous appearance of the legendarily hard-drinking Gen. Joseph Hooker, who had the credibility to intervene with combat veterans, brought the violence to an end.
But for even the most sober of veterans that was precisely the problem with homecoming: it brought them little peace. Professor Jordan describes a sense of what, at its mildest, could be called disorientation. Home wasn’t home anymore. Even little farm towns had changed so much in four years that, for some veterans, that they didn’t feel like home at all. Soldiers from the hard-fighting regiments of the Old Northwest, states like Iowa and Minnesota, couldn’t reconcile themselves to the cold winters they’d forgotten while fighting in Mississippi or Georgia. There was a more sinister change to which they couldn’t adjust: Union veterans resembled the little boys who’d survived the 1918 influenza epidemic and were finally let out to play, only to find there was no playmate on their city block left alive. The survivors of “Pals” Battalions who’d joined the Great War’s British Army together went home to neighborhoods empty of the young men with whom they’d grown up together. Their pals were gone, swallowed up by the Western Front.
Gone too, in 1865, were whole towns of young men in New York or Vermont or Indiana, dead and buried on Southern farmland that had been poisoned by violence, land still studded by spent bullets. Other young men had vanished without a trace in dark, dense woodlots or fetid swamps. Soldiers came home, then, ostensibly alive and whole and strong but with unseen dead spaces inside where their comrades had once lived. Missing them, or the trauma of seeing them killed, figured in the chronic depression that so many veterans fought. Now that the war was done, they still were caught in its aftermath like swimmers in an undertow, struggling to break surface, to find light and cool air, to breathe again.
Their struggle was only intensified by the recognition that what they had fought for—for the rededication of the democracy Lincoln had described at Gettysburg in November 1863—was fast slipping away. Union veterans remained intently suspicious of and hostile toward the defeated South; Lincoln’s assassination had been one impetus for their rancor but their anger only intensified when they read the newspaper accounts of the postwar emergence of the old Slave Codes, now called Black Codes. They read, too, of defiance and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, co-founded by a cavalryman, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had bedeviled some of them in the Deep South. When Reconstruction ended in 1877, Jim Crow laws revived white supremacy in a way that rivaled the days of slavery. The Union veterans’ hostility was exacerbated because the other side refused to admit—significantly, on a moral level—that they’d lost the war. Typical, in 1894, were the dedicatory remarks that accompanied the unveiling of a Confederate memorial in Richmond, when newspapers noted that the clouds parted and the sun emerged when the speaker, the Rev. R.C. Cave, began an oration that included passages like this:
But brute force cannot settle questions of right and wrong. Thinking men do not judge the merits of a cause by the measure of its success; and I believe
The world shall yet decide
In truth’s clear, far-off light,
that the South was in the right; that her cause was just; that the men who took up arms in her defence were patriots who had even better reason for what they did than had the men who fought at Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and that her coercion, whatever good may have resulted or may hereafter result from it, was an outrage on liberty.[5]
| At least two veterans seem to have worked out a truce at the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion. Library of Congress. |
Similar remarks by Southern speakers invited to a Gettysburg reunion in 1913, Professor Jordan notes, rankled the same Union veterans who had protested another unveiling, in 1909, in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall: a sculpture of Robert E. Lee. They would protest again at the rapturous reception, one that included the Southern-bred President Woodrow Wilson, awarded the D.W. Griffith film Birth of a Nation, which depicts Klansmen as chivalric heroes who reassert Southern white supremacy over rapacious carpetbaggers and predatory African Americans. “It is like writing history with lightning,” the president said, “and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”[6] The most enduring image of the 1913 Gettysburg reunion is that of Confederate survivors of Pickett’s Charge reaching across the stone wall–fifty years before, it had been their objective– to shake the hands of Pennsylvania veterans. What goes unmentioned is the fistfight at the same event that sent seven aged Yankees and Confederates to the hospital.[7]
Even as Southern whites reasserted their social and political primacy, American democracy in the North was no tribute to the sacrifice of Civil War veterans, either. The Radical Republican Congress and Andrew Johnson finished what should have been Lincoln’s second term in what resembled the political equivalent of a Western range war. Johnson escaped conviction on impeachment charges by one Senate vote. Grant’s relentlessness and drive had served him well in the struggle against Lee, but another aspect of his personal character—an almost childlike credulity—ate his presidency alive in a series of scandals perpetrated by subordinates who betrayed Grant as surely as Warren G. Harding would be betrayed by his “Ohio Gang” in the 1920s (Harding had the good sense to die mysteriously as the worst scandal broke—Teapot Dome, which also involved kickbacks involving the Elk Hills reserve, just over the San Luis Obispo County line. By contrast, in some ways Grant’s finest hours were his dying ones, as he raced, penniless and reliant on Samuel Clemens’s charity, to finish his memoirs, now a classic, as cancer slowly took his life.) The corruption penetrated to state houses, where the lobbyist for the Santa Fe Railroad kept a slush fund in his office safe for the frequent lubrication of Kansas legislators about to vote on regulatory bills; the monopoly that railroads enjoyed in their American fiefdoms and the freight rates they demanded were so egregious that it cost a farmer more to ship a bushel of wheat from Topeka to Chicago, by rail, than it did to ship that bushel from Chicago to Liverpool, mostly by water. Machine politics dominated cities from New York to San Francisco, where Irish-American voters really did vote early and often, and deceased. In New York, the most famous political machine was Tammany Hall, and it was Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed disbursed the equivalent of $4 million to a Tammany plasterer for two days’ work on City Hall.
| Charles Bristol typifies the restlessness of his generation. After his service–he’s seen holding his wartime 8th Michigan Cavalry saber here—he lived in Missouri and Kansas before moving to Nipomo, just south of Arroyo Grande, in 1892. Photo Courtesy of Blake Bristol. |
In both their disillusionment and in their restlessness, the Civil War generation seems to resemble the generation that came of age during the First World War. Afterward, they became expatriates–Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos among them—young men, many of them veterans, who no longer recognized or understood the America they’d known as boys. They were among the young people of Gertrude Stein’s “Lost Generation.” During the 1920s, they were always on the move: Ernest and Hadley Hemingway, for example, lived in Paris–a Paris captivated by American musicians like Sidney Bechet and entertainers like Josephine Baker– fished mountain streams and watched matadors at their work in Spain and put up in little Italian penziones. In fact, the couple moved so frequently that on one trip they left behind a steamer trunk that contained everything young Hemingway had ever written. It was never found.
So, like the young people of the 1920s, Civil War veterans were members of a generation on the move. In postwar America, veterans, according to a 2010 study by Seoul University economist Chulhee Lee, were 54% more likely to move to a different state and 36% more likely to move to a different region than non-veterans.[8] Lee posits several reasons for this phenomenon: a central one is the idea that veterans had been exposed to the concept of a wider nation, one beyond their rural farms or row tenements, by campaigns in the South. Westerners, too, fought along the Atlantic seaboard, and some Easterners saw combat or garrison duty during the 1860s Indian Wars on the frontier. Lee’s point is a key one: Americans had been so isolated and disparate before the war that an outbreak of measles that would make a New York regiment sick would kill soldiers in the Iowa regiment bivouacked alongside, soldiers that, before the war, were so geographically isolated that they lacked the immunity to that particular strain of measles. (Measles, in fact, killed 11,000 soldiers during the war.[9]) Ironically, the war and the troop movements necessary to fighting it had opened young soldiers’ minds to the vastness of their nation and to the possibility of starting over somewhere else.
This pattern of increased mobility was a key factor in the lives of Arroyo Grande’s Union veterans. Over fifty would settle the Arroyo Grande Valley and nearby Nipomo. Enough census data exists to follow twenty-three of them, in the course of their lives. After the war, seven of them moved once from the state they’d served as soldiers; seven had moved twice. Nine had moved three times or more. So the men who came to Arroyo Grande had come as far as they could—like Jody’s grandfather in the Steinbeck novella The Red Pony, they had to stop because they’d arrived at the Pacific: their days of “Westering” were over. Most of them were farmers—census data show them living in the Huasna Valley, the Branch Tract of the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, Los Berros, Oak Park, the Arroyo Grande Township, Pismo Beach, and Oceano or in Nipomo.[10] They’d arrived here when the area was being touted as a kind of agricultural paradise, marked by dairy farming and by the truck gardening of vegetables, tree crops, and seed flowers.
| A Waller Seed Company employee tills a field in the Lower Arroyo Grande Valley. Photo courtesy Richard Waller. |
Most of the veterans had arrived in the Valley earlier, but nearly all of them were established by 1900, when Arroyo Grande’s population was approaching 1,000. Thirty-eight years before, in a single day’s combat, Antietam had claimed the equivalent of twenty-two Arroyo Grandes in killed and wounded men. Whatever wounds these men still carried inside, they made a decision to move their lives forward; here, they had work to do in planting pumpkins and onions, peas and tomatoes, squash and beans. They were still, in their mature years, building a nation that had come perilously close to disappearing in the darkest months of the Civil War, in the long casualty lists produced by Antietam and the humiliation of the defeat inflicted at Chancellorsville.
[1] Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. Vintage Books: New York, 2008, pp. 37-38.
[2] Michael C.C. Adams, Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 2014, p. 198.
[3] Edward Alexander, “Life of the Civil War Soldier in Battle: And Then We Kill,” Hallowed Ground Magazine, Winter 2013, http://www.civilwar.org/hallowed-ground-magazine/winter-2013/life-of-the-civil-war-soldier-battle.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/
[4] Jordan, pp. 46-47.
[5] R.C. Cave, “Dedicatory Remarks, Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, May 30, 1894,” Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 22. Reverend J. William Jones, Ed. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2001.05.0280%3Achapter%3D1.27%3Asection%3Dc.1.27.198
[6] “D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation,” The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, PBS., http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_birth.html
[7] Jordan, p. 197.
[8] Chulhee Lee, “Military Service and Economic Mobility: Evidence from the American Civil War,” February 2010. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014498312000046
[9] “Civil War Diseases,” http://www.civilwaracademy.com/civil-war-diseases.html
[10] Census figures were taken from the website ancestry.com
A Work in Progress 