This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [20]
Such arguments offered permission to kill, or at least softened deeply held prohibitions against it. But soldiers and even commanders still struggled with taking other men’s lives. Union general in chief Winfield Scott observed before First Bull Run how thin a line separated war from murder. “No Christian nation,” he insisted, “can be justified in waging war in such a way as shall destroy five hundred and one lives, when the object of the war can be attained at a cost of five hundred. Every man killed beyond the number absolutely required is murdered.” From his perspective in 1861, Scott would have regarded the ultimate slaughter of hundreds of thousands and the profligate squandering of lives that was to come at places like Malvern Hill, Marye’s Heights, Cold Harbor, and Gettysburg as unforgivable. Scott’s successor as Union commander, George B. McClellan, shared this aversion to killing. “When he had to lose lives he was almost undone,” observed historian T. Harry Williams. General George Gordon Meade believed that in order to ensure minimal losses on both sides, the North should prosecute the war “like the afflicted parent who is compelled to chastise his erring child, and who performs the duty with a sad heart.” It was in this context that Meade’s bloody victory at Gettysburg would seem appalling, and that Grant’s casualties in the spring campaigns of 1864 would be attacked as “butchery.”4
As they took up arms and, in the phrase they commonly used to describe initiation into battle, went “to see the elephant,” individual soldiers worried about their direct personal responsibility for killing. A Massachusetts man wrote of his first experience under fire in Baltimore in April 1861, when a mob of irate southern sympathizers attacked Union troops heading through the city to Washington. Edwin Spofford pulled the trigger almost without thinking after a soldier standing next to him was killed. “The man who shot him fell dead by my rifle,” he wrote. “I felt bad at first when I saw what I had done, but it soon passed off, and as I had done my duty and was not the aggressor, I was soon able to fire again and again.” Duty and self-defense released him from an initial sense of guilt and helped him to do the work of a soldier. Implicit yet present here too was the motive of revenge. Spofford came to kill almost as a reflex, as a response to what he saw as the murder of the comrade beside him.5
“The Sixth Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteers Firing into the People, Baltimore, April, 1861.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 30, 1861.
As the intensity of this war and the size of its death tolls mounted in the months and years that followed, vengeance came to play an ever more important role, joining principles of duty and self-defense in legitimating violence. The desire for retribution could be almost elemental in its passion, overcoming reason and releasing the restraints of fear and moral inhibition for soldiers who had witnessed the slaughter of their comrades. Hugh McLees of South Carolina wrote of the struggle not to abandon his principles in his treatment of a group of Union prisoners. “I saw some nasty blue Yankees in the cars at Atlanta,” he wrote in 1864,
and as I looked at our poor Boys there with their grisly wounds and some of them cold in death I could much more easily have taken a dagger and said to them see there what a carnival of blood you have made and as you love it take still more that of your own hearts take that with what you have already drunk I could more easily have done that than I could act toward them in the part that I know a truly brave magnanimous man must ever act toward a foe in his power and unarmed. May God give me grace to live a Christian.
As it reiterated “take…that…take that,” McLees’s letter home enacted in language the violence he had abjured; the pen freed him to express a brutality he had resisted with dagger or sword. Yankee Oliver Norton proved less controlled