This Republic of Suffering [30]
In the aftermath of battle, when the intensity and the frenzy dissipated, when the killing at least temporarily ceased, when reason returned, soldiers confronted the devastation they had created and survived—“the unmistakable evidence,” as one soldier put it after Spotsylvania, “that death is doing its most frightful work.” William Dean Howells later wrote of the lasting impact of the Civil War on James Garfield, a Union general and later U.S. president: “at the sight of these dead men whom other men had killed, something went out of him, the habit of a lifetime, that never came back again: the sense of the sacredness of life and the impossibility of destroying it.” Dead men whom other men had killed: there was the crux of the matter. Battle was, as a North Carolina soldier ruefully put it, “majestic murder.” The carnage was not a natural disaster but a man-made one, the product of human choice and human agency. Neither North nor South had expected the death tolls that Civil War battles produced, and the steadily escalating level of destruction continued to amaze and horrify. The Mexican War had claimed approximately 13,000 U.S. lives, of which fewer than 2,000 had been battle deaths; the First Battle of Bull Run in August 1861 had shocked the nation with its totals of 900 killed and 2,700 wounded. By the following spring at Shiloh, Americans recognized that they had embarked on a new kind of war, as the battle yielded close to 24,000 casualties, including approximately 1,700 dead on each side. Shiloh’s number of killed and wounded exceeded the combined totals of all the major engagements of the war that had preceded it. The summer’s fighting on the Virginia Peninsula would escalate the carnage yet again. “We used to think that the battle of Manassas was a great affair,” Confederate Charles Kerrison wrote home to South Carolina in July 1862, “but it was mere child’s play compared with those in which we have lately been engaged.” By the time of Gettysburg a year later, the Union army alone reported 23,000 casualties, including 3,000 killed; Confederate losses are estimated between 24,000 and 28,000; in some regiments, numbers of killed and wounded approached 90 percent. And by the spring of 1864 Grant’s losses in slightly more than a month approached 50,000.39
Faced with the Civil War’s unprecedented slaughter, soldiers tried to make sense of what they had wrought. As they surveyed the scene at battle’s end, they became different men. For a moment they were relieved of the demand to kill; other imperatives—of Christianity, of humanity, of survival rather than courage or duty—could come again to the fore. And now they had time to look at what was around them. Union colonel Luther Bradley described this transformation:
Of all the horrors the horrors of the battlefield are the worst and yet when you are in the midst of them they don’t appal one as it would seem they ought. You are engrossed with the struggle and see one and another go down and say, “there goes poor so-and-so. Will it be my turn next.” Your losses and dangers don’t oppress you ’till afterwards when you sit down quietly to look over the result or go out with details to bury the dead.
Dealing with the “afterwards” required work lest, as a Confederate soldier worried after Shiloh, the spectacle “dethrone reason or pervert the judgment.” Henry C. Taylor wrote to his parents in Wisconsin after a grim night collecting the dead and wounded from an 1863 battle in Kentucky, “I did not realize anything about the fight when we were in action, but the battlefield at midnight will bring one to a realizing sense of war. I never want to see such a sight again. I cannot give such a description of the fight as I wish I could. My head is so