This Republic of Suffering [139]
58. Herman Melville, “The Armies of the Wilderness,” in Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1866), p. 103.
CHAPTER 2. KILLING
1. Tolstoy quoted in Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), p. ix; Orestes Brownson, The Works of Orestes Brownson, ed. Henry F. Brownson (Detroit: T. Nourse, 1882–87), vol. 17, p. 214.
2. Grossman, On Killing, p. xiv. See also Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
3. Theophilus Perry, quoted in Randolph B. Campbell, A Southern Community in Crisis: Harrison County, Texas, 1850–1880 (Austin: Texas State Historical Press, 1983), p. 239; [Mrs. Frances Blake Brockenbrough,] A Mother’s Parting Words to Her Soldier Boy (Petersburg, Va.: Evangelical Tract Society, 186–), p. 3; Confederate Baptist, December 3, 1862; Knox Mellon Jr., ed., “Letters of James Greenalch,” Michigan History 44 ( June 1960): 198–99; Christian Recorder, October 18, 1864.
4. Scott quoted in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, August 3, 1861, p. 178;T. Harry Williams, “The Military Leadership of the North and the South,” U.S. Air Force Academy, Harmon Memorial Lecture no. 2, 1960, p. 6, online at www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usafa/harmon02.pdf.
5. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 18, 1861, p. 3. On baptism of fire, see also Joseph Allan Frank and George A. Reaves, “Seeing the Elephant”: Raw Recruits at the Battle of Shiloh (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989). The language of virginity was also often used to describe initiation into battle. See, for example, Creed Davis Diary, entry for May 11, 1864, VHS. On soldiers, killing, and religion, see also Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking, 1988), pp. 138–39.
6. Hugh McLees to John McLees, March 18, 1864, McLees Family Papers, SCL; Oliver Norton quoted in James I. Robertson Jr., Soldiers Blue and Gray (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 220–21.
7. “Sensations Before and During Battle,” clipping in George Bagby Scrapbook, 3:149, VHS; Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 279.
8. Byrd Charles Willis Journal, August 25, 1864, Diary Collection, ESBL. See T. I. McKenny to Earl Van Dorn, March 9, 1862, for description of federal dead being tomahawked and scalped in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1883–1901), ser. I, vol. 8, p. 194; see report of Thomas Livermore of the Fifth New Hampshire at Antietam ordering his men to put on paint and leading them with a war whoop, James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 123.
9. Osmun Latrobe Diary, October 16, 1862, May 10, 1863, transcript at VHS, original in Latrobe Papers, MS 526, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore. Redman quoted in Kent Masterson Brown, Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics, and the Pennsylvania Campaign (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), p. 234. On love of killing, see Theodore Nadelson, Trained to Kill: Soldiers at War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 72; Drew Gilpin Faust, “‘We Should Grow Too Fond of It’: Why We Love the Civil War,” Civil War History 50 (December 2004): 368; William Broyles, “Why Men Love War,” Esquire, November 1984, pp. 54–65; Bourke, Intimate History of Killing, p. 31; Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), pp. 92–93.
10. John W. De Forest, A Volunteer’s Adventures: A Union Captain’s Record of the Civil