January 3, 1865---Children

JANUARY 3, 1865:  

Children played a vital but underappreciated role in the Civil War. Much of what a child’s role was was dependent upon his or her socioeconomic class.

Poor and working-class rural children were at first least affected by the war. It had always been traditional that members of farm families contributed to the work on the farm as soon as they were able. Young children worked the kitchen garden and were sent into the henhouse to collect eggs as soon as they were able to do so without breaking them. Little boys were allowed to tag along and help (to the limits of their abilities) with chores, and little girls were schooled in the traditional home economics. None of this changed with the coming of the war, except that boys and girls oft took on responsibilities earlier and greater than had been usual to compensate for fathers and older brothers gone to war. 

Poor and working class urban children were often impacted more severely than rural children. In a nation with no Child Labor laws, Northern youngsters often went to work to supplement family incomes as fathers and older boys went off to war.  Children were sometimes chained to the machinery they operated in order to keep them from wandering. Industrial accidents were common and often tragic. 

School-age children in attendance were kept in school as long as possible. By 1860, all northern States had compulsory (though erratically enforced) education laws, and the relative lack of disruption on the Northern home front during the war kept most school children who attended in attendance. Disruptions occurred when teachers went off to war, when the battle lines came into the North, and when fathers were killed in battle. Often, children had to drop out of school to help support their families. The absence (or loss) of the male parent frequently resulted in the descent of the family into penury, for though poor and working-class women were employed they most often earned barely more than their young working children. 

To counteract this serious social problem, Theodore Roosevelt Senior, of New York, devised the Allotment System, through which Union soldiers could have a portion of their pay sent directly home. In 1862, the United States instituted the first Disability Pensions for wounded warriors; by war’s end, these payments were extended to widows, orphans, and survivors. As of 2014,  Irene Triplett, aged 84, the daughter of Civil War veteran Mose Triplett (who became a father at 84) remains the last person to receive a Civil War Survivor’s Benefit of $73.13 per month. (Mose, who switched sides in the war at least once, received his pension as a Union soldier; Confederate soldiers were not permitted to receive payments for their service until 1958 --- and only one man ever received a check on that basis.)

Most southern States did not pass compulsory education laws until after 1900.  Southern children were often homeschooled during the war; regular schoolhouse education was spotty, particularly as areas of the South became battlefields time and again.  

Among the upper middle class and the wealthy (whether Northern burgher or Southern planter) childhood resembled the Victorian ideal of Nanny (or Mammy) and Nursery. Wealthy men (like Theodore Roosevelt Senior) could afford to pay $300 for a substitute to take their place in the ranks, and so remained at home (though among a certain class of Southerners this was considered unmanly. Such men often raised and equipped their own brigades or regiments and led them in combat). 

For the children of wealthy Northerners, the war had a certain distance; some loved ones died, of course, but such losses did not generally drive their families into poverty. For such children, publishers (almost exclusively in the North) produced colorful maps and atlases such as Following the Flag so they could follow the war. Faux uniforms with toy swords and firearms were popular toys for boys, as were brightly-painted leaden toy soldiers like The Virginia Campaign, 1864. Young Teedie Roosevelt was perhaps not very uncommon when he asked God in his prayers to “grind the Southern troops to powder,” although what his Georgia-born Mother, Grandmamma and Auntie thought of this supplication can only be guessed.

Such fripperies were rarer in the South with its more limited resources, though the well-off families of Richmond, Charleston, and other such locales could afford to have such books printed or toys custom made. Occasionally, toy shipments were smuggled in from the North and the blue uniforms of the toy soldiers were painted gray! 

The "Virginia Campaign" playset marketed by a Northern toymaker

Southern children suffered directly the losses of friends and loved ones and homes, the dislocations that all victims of war are heir to. Carrie Berry wrote mournfully in her diary, “Wednesday. this was my birthday. I was ten years old, But I did not have a cake times were too hard so I celebrated with ironing. I hope by my next birthday we will have peace in our land so that I can have a nice dinner.”

The Confederate government encouraged a kind of cultic nationalism. Books on “Confederate” history, “Confederate” science, “Confederate” math and “Confederate” spelling were subsidized by the leadership in Richmond.  

Rarely recognized for their contributions are the boy soldiers of the Civil War. The Confederate Army enforced a minimum age requirement of 16 for its soldiers, though as the war lengthened and manpower needs grew, in practice this became 14, and recruiters turned a blind eye to strapping 12 year olds who chose to pick up the rifle.  Neither the Confederate nor the Union Navy had a minimum age requirement, and ten year olds sometimes shipped out as cooks’ assistants, messboys, and the like. The Union too had a minimum age of 16 for combat soldiers, though many younger fellows signed up. The drummer boys of both armies and the powder monkeys of both navies were often selected based on their build and height (the slighter the better) and these very young men were routinely under fire in combat.  The record-holder as the youngest boy to serve in the Civil War was a nine year old drummer boy who saw action at Antietam.

A Union Navy "Powder Monkey," aged about ten

A Union Drummer Boy, aged about ten

Orphans were a terrible and ubiquitous by-product of the Civil War. It is estimated that besides the 700,000 soldiers who died while in service at least 150,000 civilians died --- of disease, of privation, or because they were trapped between the warring armies. 

A common photopose of the Civil War was one in which a child clasped a picture of his or her absent parent. Frequently that parent was deceased.

The statistics are uncertain, but a significant portion of the civilians killed in the war were women with children --- often many children. In the depths of crisis some desperate women sold their children for money or food. Annie Oakley (1860-1926) the famous exhibition shooter, was one of these bartered children.  

Annie Oakley

In 1860, approximately 50% of Americans were under the age of 19. This meant that there was an immense population of youths in need of care during the Civil War. 

At the end of the war no one could begin to guess the number of widows, orphans and half-orphans in America. There are, however, 1.3 million Civil War Widow and Orphan Pension applications on file in the National Archives today (all applicants were Unionists, since former Confederate survivors were not permitted to apply; however, .75 million otherwise-potentially qualified persons may have lived in the South). 

Shattered families clearly posed a massive, unaddressed social problem on the same scale as Reconstruction and the fate of the Freedmen. 

Orphaned children roamed the worst sections of cities in packs perpetrating crimes to survive; many (females and males) became child prostitutes; others became hopeless drug addicts; some simply wandered the country seeking food, shelter and care.  

A typical "Orphan Train" of the late 19th-early 20th Centuries crammed with homeless children. Orphans to be adopted were shipped west in boxcars just like cargo, and were put up on display at the various stations along the way. Whether they thrived in loving homes or were physically, mentally, and sexually abused or treated as chattels was entirely up to luck. There was no social service system to monitor their well-being.

The various States, and numerous social welfare and religious societies, built the “classic” huge, impersonal, and forbidding stone and brick orphanages of yore; other groups sponsored “Orphan Trains” which resettled orphans with families on the frontier.  The Orphan Train system operated between 1854 and 1929, and 250,000 children were “put up” to be shown and adopted, often on the same platforms where slaves had once been sold. There was little regulation of these efforts, and little follow-up. How many of these orphans died or were abused, neglected, and exploited may never be known. The orphan problem remained surprisingly invisible in the contemporary Press, though there is little doubt that the issue provided the first spark for the subsequent enlightenment of the later Progressive Era.  On the positive side of the equation, the modern concept of adoption was born out of the Civil War.

January 2, 1865---Songsters

JANUARY 2, 1865:             

Just as the penny novel became a vehicle reflecting wartime morale and goals, so did music. Hundreds of songs, remembered and unremembered today, helped define the Civil War for contemporaries. Aura Lee, Kathleen Mavourneen and Lorena, When This Cruel War Is Over, Home, Sweet Home, and, of course, Dixie were just a few. Cheaply made pocket-sized “songsters” were churned out by the tens of thousands containing an assortment of popular song lyrics for use ‘round the piano at home, and the violin and banjo in camp. Musical notes were usually not included in songsters as the songs were all sung to popular and well-known airs. The early denizens of Tin Pan Alley were kept busy throughout the war celebrating victories and mourning losses. Miles O’Reilly’s Memorial, Miles O’Reilly’s Word, and Good-Bye Jeff were three songs that recalled the occupants of the empty chair. 

Originally strictly a Union innovation, the songster eventually crossed the Potomac and went South. As they developed, songsters became increasingly specific in subject --- there were songsters produced for the Irish Brigades (North and South, with different songs and/or lyrics), songsters produced for the German Brigades in the North (with German language folk and patriotic tunes), songsters with gospel lyrics, abolition songsters, and patriotic songsters for both sides. 

Besides Dixie (in the South) and The Battle Hymn of The Republic (in the North), and The Battle Cry of Freedom (on both sides of the line with different lyrics) forgotten compositions like The Alabama Secession Galop (sic), Beauregard’s Charleston Quickstep, Beauregard’s Manassas Quickstep, The Shiloh Victory Polka, The Captain With His Whiskers, Hooker’s Grand March and Two-Step, I Am Fighting For The Nigger, The Nation Is Weeping, God Save The South, and I Fights Mit Sigel populated the pages of the various songsters.

   

 

Songsters could also be subversive. Disgust with conditions in the army was reflected in song titles such as I’d Like To Change My Name, Grafted Into The Army, How Are You, Greenbacks?, He’s Got His Discharge From The Army, and Give Us Back Our Old Commander. Give Us Back Our Old Commander was used (with slightly changed lyrics) as a campaign song for General Grant when he ran for President in 1868. The author of He’s Got His Discharge From The Army, a man by the name of Winner, was openly criticized for impairing morale in the North; after selling 80,000 copies of his songster, he turned to writing children’s songs in 1864, including Ten Little Indians. Conditions on the home front were addressed in Two Inflation Songs.

Songsters also promoted reconciliation as the war ground on. Dixie For The Union and The Bonnie Blue Flag With The Stripes And Stars appealed to nascent Southern Unionism.   

    

Although few original songsters remain (just like the penny novels they were printed on cheap stock and fell apart quickly), a surprising number of the lyrics have been collected. 

The songsters were the ancestors and the inspirations for later musical compositions such as He’s In The Army Now, God Bless America, and The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B of later generations. 

  

         

January 1, 1865---Pulp Fiction

JANUARY 1, 1865:        

Wartime pulp fiction was a relatively late development of the Civil War.  

Authors, both Northern and Southern, churned out penny novels that ran the gamut from swashbuckling retellings of the (fictional, quasi-fictional, and non-fictional) adventures of (fictional, quasi-fictional and non-fictional) war heroes, to romance novels, to pornographic stories that were either titillating or merely crass (cheap photobooks of nude and semi-nude women were also available, often through sutlers in the army camps).  Most of the pulp fiction available on the home front, however, was directed toward women (there was also a thriving children’s literature about heroic youngsters defending their respective causes). Due to their very cheap production values, few of these publications have survived the years.

 

Southern Field and Fireside, a monthly Georgia publication, specialized in serialized romantic tales about damsels in distress of being ravished by leering Yankees. Rescued at the last moment by noble, handsome Southern men who defended their honor, the women were inevitably taken away on horseback to a better life, and just as inevitably, irresistibly seduced under a full moon at the end of the story. They lived happily ever after, and very few women made it into combat in Confederate pulp fiction.

Not so their Federal sisters. Unionist women were portrayed as more assertive and proactive by far. Northern authors presented their readership with tales of cross-dressing women who undertook men’s tasks always with greater success than their male counterparts (in fact, some 400 women served both sides of the Civil War in drag, unrecognized by their fellow male compatriots). Charles Wesley Alexander (writing as Wesley Bradshaw), the dean of the wartime pulp novelists, wrote stories such as Pauline of The Potomac: Or, General McClellan’s Spy, loosely (very loosely) based on the reported adventures of the real Major Pauline Cushman. Another Bradshaw novel, Maud of The Mississippi: General Grant’s Daring Spy, was about a Unionist woman living among the enemy while supporting the North’s cause at grave danger to herself. General Sherman’s Indian Scout was a similar tale of feminine elan and derring-do.

Bradshaw also wrote The Picket Slayer about a “demonic” Englishwoman (described from the outset as “a child of sin”) who told Jefferson Davis, “My mission hither, President Davis, is to render your cause assistance, not because it is holy, as you hypocritically say, but because it is the most diabolical that could be conceived.” 

The women in Bradshaw’s and other writers’ stories were frequently possessed of magical powers or were of foreign, exotic birth or mixed race.  The Picket Slayer, who could become invisible and pass through walls to kill men, may have influenced Sheridan LeFanu’s female vampire story, Carmilla (1871), which in turn influenced Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic Dracula.   

December 31, 1864---New Year's Eve: The Last Full Measure For The Confederacy

DECEMBER 31, 1864:       

Carrie Berry, again living in Atlanta, is mastering her multiplication tables: “I learned the eight line today, and I learned it very well.” She fears for her father, who was “called to Macon” (the temporary Confederate State capital) to explain why he stayed in Atlanta during the Yankee occupation. 

Elsewhere in America, the brutally cold weather has limited the Blue and the Gray to nothing more than a few skirmishes. Confederate holdouts in Kentucky and Tennessee are being run to ground.

On this New Year’s Eve 1864, it has become obvious to all but a handful of Confederates that the Union will win the war. 

Every major Confederate port is in Northern hands except for Wilmington, which is inevitably next. Food stocks are low, and the hard winter is taking a terrible toll. Although many Southerners managed to scrounge together a Christmas dinner of sorts, for many of them it is the only extravagance they will see for a long time coming. 

Historian Jay Winik has written that at its best the Confederacy looks “like an abandoned fairground.” At its worst, it looks like what it is, a war-torn region where shattered tree trunks blasted bare stand like haunting sentinels over lands pockmarked with craters large and small. The falling shells, the cannon shot, the mortars, all the vomit of war, has scarred the land perhaps beyond healing.  

The winter weather has bestowed one dark blessing, that the stench of putrefaction is not daily in the nostrils of the people, many of whom wander like stunted ragpickers over the empty landscape, looking for what --- food? Loved ones? Scraps of their old lives? 

When the weather warms kites and turkey vultures will circle in long, slow gyres, smelling corruption from miles away, gathering like hideous monks at a refectory board to squabble over and gobble the torn rotting flesh of horses and men. Starving hogs will root up bodies buried in shallow graves to gnaw at bones and crack eyeless skulls so that they can feast on the dessicated brains within. The scarecrow corpses will have shreds of blue cloth or gray cloth dangling from them, and will it matter?

Only to those still living. Bullets zip and zing and make a sound like tearing calico as they fly past living men’s ears, or sound a dull smack as they pierce bodies, the sound obscured by the gasp or scream or immense silence of shock as the men struck realize that the vultures will soon be turning for them.  

On bare ground, odd shaped clumps of verdant green will grow this April as they have for the last four, taking vague shapes of men where blood and urine and vomit and entrails have fed the soil and made it nutrient-rich.

Many men have given up to go home and rebuild their lives. As they wander across the country many will die for lack of food or shelter in this deathly winter. Others will be cut down by men gone rogue who will kill them for a better overcoat, a pair of socks, a hat or buttons to keep the wind out of their ragged jackets. Others will be killed by frightened women, driven to desperation for their children’s sake and terrified of being raped --- perhaps again --- for trusting the wrong wanderers. 

Still other wandering men will band together, pool their shot and powder, and rob the near-bare shelves of crossroads-towns general stores. Some will go up into the hills where rumor has it a band of men is fighting on for the Cause. Some will find those bands, and the killing --- which has become their way of living --- will go on.  Some will swear never to lay down their arms and will be the scourges of any man whose paths they cross. As time passes, they will find their way to the frontier where the law of men is weak and the law of survival trumps all, to become darkly legendary.

Madness has gripped some men of the South, who, though they know the war is lost, intend to slay before the end as many of the enemy as they can with “infernal devices” that will kill indiscriminately. For, after all, aren’t they all the enemy? Southerners whose faith is flagging, Sherman’s bummers, little boys in blue playing soldier with wooden swords, the mothers that bore them, the little women who will someday bear more, and the old folks who taught them to love the cursed Union?  

Other men will plot to kill --- anyone, even the Northern President whose mad insistence on preserving the Union has brought them to this place.  Some already tried and failed. On Christmas Eve in the lobby of the National Hotel in Washington D.C., a handsome young man famed as Brutus hatched yet another conspiracy that will soon enough be of terrible effect.

In the meanwhile, the Union Army, grown to gargantuan proportions, is destroying the South region by region.  The Florida Panhandle, once a bucolic land of small villages and large plantations, then as now sometimes called South Alabama, is a smoking ruin. Crops have been pulled up, animals slaughtered, towns burned, people made homeless. In Georgia, a more famous less destructive March has rendered the crops-growing, goods-processing, and industrial heart of Georgia prostrate, phalanxes of men in blue having moved over the land like one of the Ten Plagues of old. Those in the South pray that the master of all this destruction will move his men away by sea, but this hope will be proven futile.

There are those who simply refuse to see that the end is near --- civilians, generals, and politicians. The President of the Confederacy is among them, though he is not their leader. If, at the end of 1864, the Confederacy has a leader it is Robert E. Lee. 

1864 has been the year when the South’s mettle has been tested. Beginning in gloom, the Confederacy nearly won the war in mid-July, only to find that the bottom has dropped out of the bucket in December. 

Like the Union after Cold Harbor, Dixie is suffering from combat exhaustion. The losses of “The Forty Days” of Grant’s Overland Campaign were greater in numbers and more damaging in morale for the Union, but the hard truth is that the Confederacy sustained losses in those merciless slaughters that it could never afford. Though Lee was not defeated, he has been penned in to a small area centered on Petersburg and Richmond while elsewhere the Union armies have run riot. Grant has not outmatched Lee in battle, but he has forced Lee into a corner and it will be difficult to fight his way out. Lee still waits for the Confederate Congress, the only place in Richmond where the air is decidedly hot this winter, to approve the arming of the slaves.  

The rail lines and the roads and the telegraph wires of the South have all but ceased to exist. The southern nation is no longer contiguous, making communication and movement all the more difficult. The Confederate war machine, smaller but more intensely focused than the Union’s, had reached a peak of productivity in the summer that it will never see again. Shells of buildings stand where factories once hummed. Oats and grain, and foodstuffs and cotton --- oh, King Cotton! --- rot untouched on sidings for want of rolling stock, for want of locomotives, for want of unbroken rail connections. Things have not reached their nadir, not quite yet, but sooner than later the starving men of The Army of Northern Virginia will be sifting through warm horse manure for undigested kernels of corn and cereal grains. 

Still, the Army of Northern Virginia hangs on. There have been mass desertions, and there have been unexpected self-instituted holiday furloughs, but the men --- the toughest and stringiest, and most ornery of them, men with blazing eyes and indomitable spirits --- have returned to the lines. Some men from other, shattered, commands --- John Bell Hood’s, Sterling Price’s, and Jubal Early’s to name a few --- will wander into the Confederate lines near Richmond as the winter eases, making up in some part for the men who have given up. The best of Confederate combat troops will make their stand with Lee.   

Precisely how many men the Confederacy has as 1865 begins is unclear, except that it is not enough. Historians estimate between 150,000 and 200,000 combat troops still remain to fight the Union’s 600,000. 

The Confederacy as of December 31, 1864

Part of the difficulty in estimating Confederate strength is that men deserted and returned, often re-enlisting under different names to avoid punishment. Also, historians disagree on what constitutes an available Civil War soldier. In the Confederacy (as in the Union), there was a core of “regular” officers and men, supplemented and outnumbered by State-raised regiments. There were also State Militias. In the Confederacy, with its broader interpretation of States’ Rights, the State Militias often stayed intrastate, ordered by the various State Governors (or electing not to) cross State lines to fight in “alien” territory. 

Additionally, there were any number of county and local militiamen, too old or out of shape to fight in the big armies, men who protected their communities with shotguns and squirrel rifles, men whose sons and grandsons were in the big fights, but men who did not go to war themselves until the Union reached their little towns, places like Saltville, Virginia or Marianna, Florida. 

Besides these, there were “irregulars” --- “Partisan Rangers,” guerrillas, bushwackers, leaderless bands of men numbering from 2 to 200, and individual wandering soldiers who just might come back if they could sense a victory --- any victory --- in the offing.

Too, the raw numbers do not tell the entire story. As 1865 dawned, the Army of Northern Virginia had between 25,000-35,000 men in the ranks. The Army of Tennessee had ceased to exist as such.  Perhaps 25,000-30,000 men served in divided commands held the Carolinas. An equal number of men under General Richard Taylor (the son of former U.S. President Zachary Taylor, and a one-time resident of the White House) held Mississippi, Alabama and southwestern Georgia.  Nathan Bedford Forrest had 2500 superb men. John Singleton Mosby had 1,900.

The Army of the Trans Mississippi had perhaps 30,000-40,000 men scattered over a vast area reaching from El Paso to Shreveport, but it was poorly armed, poorly provisioned, and geographically isolated from the rest of the Confederacy. It also faced certain unique challenges. In the far western Texas Panhandle, the troops were far more involved in fighting Kiowas and Comanches than in fighting the occasional Federal incursion.  Along the Rio Grande, the Confederates (and the Federals who controlled enclaves there) were faced with Mexican insurgents who were fighting the forces of Emperor Maximilian I, and who frequently sought refuge over the river in what had been, until a generation ago, familiar Mexican territory. The Blue and Gray troops in the area struggled to keep that civil war from spilling over into their own Civil War. 

Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan all fear the splintering of the Confederate armies into smaller and smaller independent units. They know that fighting an insurgent war may take generations and will retard the healing and growth of the United States possibly forever. 

In the South, Jefferson Davis is considering just such a move and is more and more encouraging random acts of terror against Union military installations, towns, villages, and people. He has issued orders to field commands that are unable to comply or that no longer exist. 

Isolated in his bubble within the Confederate White House, imperiously disdaining his advisors, the President of the Confederacy is hastening the end of the war he wishes to win. Traveling back and forth between the city and the lines, Robert E. Lee has time to reflect on his Commander-in-Chief’s ruminations. His reflections will alter the course of the war in early 1865.