UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
It was here perhaps that Adams’ eyes partially opened; his sudden plummet from grace gave the lie to the very myths that lured him into the army.
The war controlled him, not the other way around.
Paradoxically, the war at different times both magnified and subverted his elite connections in civil life; he had pulled wires, only to find they pulled back.
Despite his best efforts to convert his presidential bloodline into battlefield heroics, or his desire to shape or compose the war to his designs, the converging whirlwinds of race and war had set his imagined world on its head.
He had become a marked man.
“Gradually a noticeable change took place in my position,” he noted, “I became an ill-used, injured man to whom redress was due.”
Sometime in late April, Adams received orders to encamp his soldiers along the James, probably as a way to keep his accused soldiers away from the city.
And in early May, just as many black soldiers feared, the Fifth along with much of the Twenty-Fifth Corps (consisting entirely of black soldiers) received orders to encamp at Light House Point, Virginia (Camp Lincoln), in preparation for a new assignment in Texas.
Once in garrison, the screws tightened — the soldiers endured what must have seemed like meaningless drilling and enforced uniform codes.
They had to wear dress jackets, keep boots blackened, polish brass, and keep their beards trimmed.
But the increased discipline was not a way to prepare the haggard black soldiers for the approaching grand review in Washington, D.C. — the Twenty-Fifth Corps and the Army of the James would not be invited.
Instead, they moved to City Point in late May where Adams’s men baked in sweltering tents, awaiting word to move to the ships.81
Though he once glowed about his regiment’s behavior in Richmond, he came to believe that the whole difficulty arose from “certain horse-stealing propensities of my men."
"They stole horses at just the wrong time.”82
And Adams felt he too was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Had he accepted the offer to be inspector-general of General Humphreys’ Corps, Charles would have had his hand in defeating Lee at Appomattox.
In one of his final war letters Adams lashed out at his soldiers, ending on a note he would carry for the next fifty years.
“They can only understand the sternest discipline and must be punished to enforce discipline in a way I never heard of in my old regiment.”
His closing invectives would become the keynote for the rest of his life.
“I no longer wonder slave drivers are cruel."
"I am."
"I no longer have any bowels of mercy….”83
Adams washed his hands.
He tried to reform the forlorn children of slavery.
Then came the “wretched breaking down.”
Crestfallen, and perhaps because of his depression, his recurring bout with malaria and diarrhea returned with vengeance.
Over the next few weeks Adams’s body shrunk to nearly one hundred and thirty pounds.
Continuous doses of opium wracked his nerves while his soldiers, unwilling to be shipped to southern Texas, edged toward mutiny.
In this state of affairs, Adams, “a confirmed invalid,” was forced to “crawl ignominiously home.”
The infections and malarial poison had corroded his intestines.
His swollen joints robbed him of sleep.
The war had unraveled his mind and body.
If, in these days of disillusionment and opiates, Adams reflected on the reasons he joined the army, his distant vision of that bronzed prizefighter in the hotel mirror must have seemed like cruel mockery.
81 Warner, ""Crossed Sabres: A History of the Fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry, an African-American Regiment in the Civil War."", 413-15
82 Many of the Fifth’s troopers were without horses when they moved into Richmond: See ibid., 404, 411-12
83 C.F. Adams, Jr., to John Quincy Adams, H.Q. 5th Mass. Cav’y, May 2, 1865, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume II, 267-69
TO BE CONTINUED ...
GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Throughout his service he had walked in the shadows of greatness, but in the end he missed his “ripe reward.”84
And although he came to the war as a way to take on a new mode of physical manliness, he left it a victim of his own broken body.
A Foot-ball of Passion and Accident
During the harrowing experience of war, if Adams ever yearned for the bosom of Jesus, he did not share it in his letters.
One would be hard pressed to find even a partial foxhole conversion.
Before he entered the war, he had already come to associate worship with what he sensed was wrong with his upbringing.
Looking back on his childhood Adams rued the fact that his father “had the old New England sense of duty in religious observances.”85
Perhaps Charles’s ill feeling for his father’s personal piety tells us as much about his troubled relationship to his father, as it does his actual religious sensibilities.
His carping about somber Sabbath mornings possibly reflects his unfulfilled desire to be a more physical child, as much as it does any direct aversion for the doctrines of Christianity.
But even after he created some distance between himself and his father, he continued to hack away at his religious roots — so much so, that a few years after quitting the war, when he attended the final sermon delivered in his old congregational church in Boston (which was about to be torn down) Charles exited down its familiar stairs, not with nostalgic reverence, but able to say to himself: “There, that is behind me."
"Never, never again shall I enter those doors, or sit in that pew.”86
It is striking that while Adams wrote nothing in his autobiography about any religious conversion, he did claim that “in truth” the war was his true “salvation.”
It hardened him for the modern world, and provided a vital education.
He would later censure his father for failing to burst out of “two hundred years of ancestral swaddling clothes.”
Charles, though, used the war to slit them to shreds.
“Those New England Sabbaths actually embittered my youth,” he confessed.
And “it required the drastic war education to emancipate” him from them.
The war, however, may not be the place where he fled from his father’s unchanging God so much as it was the crucible where Adams, more compelled to dwell upon and perhaps yearn for the ordering claims of religion, came to believe that God could no longer hold the world still.87
Not only had Adams grown disillusioned by the “newspaper battles,” the cronyism, and the lack of correlation between merit and rank; He came to feel that the world was passing him by.
No matter how much Charles claimed he wanted to extricate himself from his father, he at least partially wished to repeat his father’s successes and obtain a similar station in society.
84 Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 165-67
85 Adams wrote: “All through my childhood how I disliked Sunday! I was glad when Monday came; for me it wasn’t ‘black Monday,’ for it was six days before another Sunday. I remember now the silence, the somber idleness, the sanctified atmosphere of restraint of those days, with their church-bells, their sedate walk and their special duties. We children had to be brought up strictly in the way we should go; for then we would not depart from it when we were old! Wouldn’t we! The recollection of those Sundays haunts me now.” See: Adams, ibid., 13-14
86 ibid., 12-17
87 Though Charles Jr., would later grow fond of August Comte’s three sweeping chronological stages of human knowledge — theological, metaphysical, and then positive science — his own family actually ran the course somewhat backwards. It is always perilous to measure someone’s religiosity, but it might be helpful here to sketch out Charles’ religious roots. His father was certainly no religious zealot and he rejected the harsh God of Calvin, preferring instead to worship a more “cheerful” maker. But he may have been the most theologically and behaviorally committed to Christianity of the four generations between John Adams and Charles Jr. Charles Sr., put to rest the perplexing questions dealing with the historical reality of the Bible, Christ’s conception and birth, etc. He bracketed biblical contradictions and claimed his intellectual qualms with Christianity to be eclipsed by the call for duty and obedience. As his biographer has written, “[Charles Francis Adams, Sr.] did not wish to question, he wished to believe; he desired not stimulation but certainty….But along with his own doubts and his permissiveness, he did feel strongly that religion should be the result of moderation rather than passion, leading men to virtue, not enthusiasm.” John Quincy Adams was much more skeptical than his son — at least in the first half of his life. And he seldom wrote about religion or theology in his earlier days. He rented a pew at William Emerson’s church in Boston, but his attendance was perfunctory. In his youth he frequently engaged in pointed debates with his Uncle John Shaw, who unsuccessfully tried to convert John to Calvinism. Young John Quincy Adams came to detest the evangelical emphasis of passion over reason. But throughout his adult life, and especially after the death of his infant (and only) daughter, he studied the Bible each morning for an hour, regularly reflected in his diaries and letters about religion and his standing with God — and began attending two or three services on Sundays. Though he identified with Unitarianism, he occasionally attended other denominations and came to accept Original Sin, the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, and the final judgment. But it is important to note that John Quincy Adams and much of the Adams family regularly used language about religious sentiments and morals rather than specifying Christian dogma. And religious discussion, especially that of John Adams, had a utilitarian flavor, as it was only as good as it was able to hold society together, promise morality and prevent vice and passion. John Quincy Adams, though he evoked images of a messianic age where men were slowly perfected and prepared to meet God, often did so while discussing the nation’s advancing technologies and increased knowledge. John Adams, (who once referred to himself as a “churchgoing animal for seventy-six years”) in a letter to Benjamin Rush, called the Bible “the most republican book in the world” and for that reason alone he “revered” it. John Adams also thought religion was the one thing that preserved his own bloodline: “What has preserved this race of Adamses in all their ramifications, in such numbers, health, peace, comfort, and mediocrity? I believe it is religion, without which they would have been rakes, fops, sots, gamblers, starved with hunger, frozen with cold, scalped by Indians, &c., &c., &c., been melted away and disappeared….” It is interesting that Charles Francis Adams Jr.’s apparent faith in the Bible came to a crisis around the time the nation was on the cusp of collapse — somewhat true to his great grandfather’s faith in Christianity as a means to nationalistic ends. John Adams never latched on to the belief of the perfectibility of humans — especially after the French Revolution — but he did believe that mankind, prodded by religion and education, was slowly progressing toward an extremely elusive perfect state. See: Martin B. Duberman, Charles Francis Adams, 1807-1886 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 36-37.; Robert Vincent Remini, John Quincy Adams, 1st ed. (New York: Times Books, 2002), 3-4, 43,121.; East, "John Quincy Adams; the Critical Years: 1785-1794", 90-91, 101-103; Lynn H. Parsons, John Quincy Adams (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998), 105-06, 271.; John Adams and others, The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805-1813 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1966), 61-62, 65, 75-6, 83-4, 106, 127, 153, 160, 186, 192, 224-45, 228, 230, 239, 248-49, 255, 281-82.; John R. Howe, The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University press, 1966), 40-41, 157-59, 226-27.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Throughout his service he had walked in the shadows of greatness, but in the end he missed his “ripe reward.”84
And although he came to the war as a way to take on a new mode of physical manliness, he left it a victim of his own broken body.
A Foot-ball of Passion and Accident
During the harrowing experience of war, if Adams ever yearned for the bosom of Jesus, he did not share it in his letters.
One would be hard pressed to find even a partial foxhole conversion.
Before he entered the war, he had already come to associate worship with what he sensed was wrong with his upbringing.
Looking back on his childhood Adams rued the fact that his father “had the old New England sense of duty in religious observances.”85
Perhaps Charles’s ill feeling for his father’s personal piety tells us as much about his troubled relationship to his father, as it does his actual religious sensibilities.
His carping about somber Sabbath mornings possibly reflects his unfulfilled desire to be a more physical child, as much as it does any direct aversion for the doctrines of Christianity.
But even after he created some distance between himself and his father, he continued to hack away at his religious roots — so much so, that a few years after quitting the war, when he attended the final sermon delivered in his old congregational church in Boston (which was about to be torn down) Charles exited down its familiar stairs, not with nostalgic reverence, but able to say to himself: “There, that is behind me."
"Never, never again shall I enter those doors, or sit in that pew.”86
It is striking that while Adams wrote nothing in his autobiography about any religious conversion, he did claim that “in truth” the war was his true “salvation.”
It hardened him for the modern world, and provided a vital education.
He would later censure his father for failing to burst out of “two hundred years of ancestral swaddling clothes.”
Charles, though, used the war to slit them to shreds.
“Those New England Sabbaths actually embittered my youth,” he confessed.
And “it required the drastic war education to emancipate” him from them.
The war, however, may not be the place where he fled from his father’s unchanging God so much as it was the crucible where Adams, more compelled to dwell upon and perhaps yearn for the ordering claims of religion, came to believe that God could no longer hold the world still.87
Not only had Adams grown disillusioned by the “newspaper battles,” the cronyism, and the lack of correlation between merit and rank; He came to feel that the world was passing him by.
No matter how much Charles claimed he wanted to extricate himself from his father, he at least partially wished to repeat his father’s successes and obtain a similar station in society.
84 Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 165-67
85 Adams wrote: “All through my childhood how I disliked Sunday! I was glad when Monday came; for me it wasn’t ‘black Monday,’ for it was six days before another Sunday. I remember now the silence, the somber idleness, the sanctified atmosphere of restraint of those days, with their church-bells, their sedate walk and their special duties. We children had to be brought up strictly in the way we should go; for then we would not depart from it when we were old! Wouldn’t we! The recollection of those Sundays haunts me now.” See: Adams, ibid., 13-14
86 ibid., 12-17
87 Though Charles Jr., would later grow fond of August Comte’s three sweeping chronological stages of human knowledge — theological, metaphysical, and then positive science — his own family actually ran the course somewhat backwards. It is always perilous to measure someone’s religiosity, but it might be helpful here to sketch out Charles’ religious roots. His father was certainly no religious zealot and he rejected the harsh God of Calvin, preferring instead to worship a more “cheerful” maker. But he may have been the most theologically and behaviorally committed to Christianity of the four generations between John Adams and Charles Jr. Charles Sr., put to rest the perplexing questions dealing with the historical reality of the Bible, Christ’s conception and birth, etc. He bracketed biblical contradictions and claimed his intellectual qualms with Christianity to be eclipsed by the call for duty and obedience. As his biographer has written, “[Charles Francis Adams, Sr.] did not wish to question, he wished to believe; he desired not stimulation but certainty….But along with his own doubts and his permissiveness, he did feel strongly that religion should be the result of moderation rather than passion, leading men to virtue, not enthusiasm.” John Quincy Adams was much more skeptical than his son — at least in the first half of his life. And he seldom wrote about religion or theology in his earlier days. He rented a pew at William Emerson’s church in Boston, but his attendance was perfunctory. In his youth he frequently engaged in pointed debates with his Uncle John Shaw, who unsuccessfully tried to convert John to Calvinism. Young John Quincy Adams came to detest the evangelical emphasis of passion over reason. But throughout his adult life, and especially after the death of his infant (and only) daughter, he studied the Bible each morning for an hour, regularly reflected in his diaries and letters about religion and his standing with God — and began attending two or three services on Sundays. Though he identified with Unitarianism, he occasionally attended other denominations and came to accept Original Sin, the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, and the final judgment. But it is important to note that John Quincy Adams and much of the Adams family regularly used language about religious sentiments and morals rather than specifying Christian dogma. And religious discussion, especially that of John Adams, had a utilitarian flavor, as it was only as good as it was able to hold society together, promise morality and prevent vice and passion. John Quincy Adams, though he evoked images of a messianic age where men were slowly perfected and prepared to meet God, often did so while discussing the nation’s advancing technologies and increased knowledge. John Adams, (who once referred to himself as a “churchgoing animal for seventy-six years”) in a letter to Benjamin Rush, called the Bible “the most republican book in the world” and for that reason alone he “revered” it. John Adams also thought religion was the one thing that preserved his own bloodline: “What has preserved this race of Adamses in all their ramifications, in such numbers, health, peace, comfort, and mediocrity? I believe it is religion, without which they would have been rakes, fops, sots, gamblers, starved with hunger, frozen with cold, scalped by Indians, &c., &c., &c., been melted away and disappeared….” It is interesting that Charles Francis Adams Jr.’s apparent faith in the Bible came to a crisis around the time the nation was on the cusp of collapse — somewhat true to his great grandfather’s faith in Christianity as a means to nationalistic ends. John Adams never latched on to the belief of the perfectibility of humans — especially after the French Revolution — but he did believe that mankind, prodded by religion and education, was slowly progressing toward an extremely elusive perfect state. See: Martin B. Duberman, Charles Francis Adams, 1807-1886 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 36-37.; Robert Vincent Remini, John Quincy Adams, 1st ed. (New York: Times Books, 2002), 3-4, 43,121.; East, "John Quincy Adams; the Critical Years: 1785-1794", 90-91, 101-103; Lynn H. Parsons, John Quincy Adams (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998), 105-06, 271.; John Adams and others, The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805-1813 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1966), 61-62, 65, 75-6, 83-4, 106, 127, 153, 160, 186, 192, 224-45, 228, 230, 239, 248-49, 255, 281-82.; John R. Howe, The Changing Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University press, 1966), 40-41, 157-59, 226-27.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
But his father, like some broken heavyweight, could only pass down yesterday’s secrets in a rapidly changing sport.
Young Charles felt like the son born into a line of master ironworkers — in the age of steel.
For example, right before Charles enlisted he received a letter from his father, where the latter concluded that John Quincy Adams was the most complete statesman the nation had known.
Jefferson, Webster, Hamilton, these men revealed greatness, but upon inspection from “the foundation to the apex,” none except Charles’s grandfather were guided entirely by principles.
John Quincy Adams alone mastered “the whole theory of morals which makes the foundation of all human society.”88
Though the Whig party broke into pieces a decade earlier (mostly over slavery and the Compromise of 1850), Charles — at least through his father — still heard the party’s hue and cry about self-control and the debilitating effects of giving in to passion and popular whim.
This letter gets to the marrow of Whig culture, so pervasive throughout the second quarter of the nineteenth century, especially among certain New Englanders like the Adams family.
John Quincy Adams, after all, was a key architect and defender of this culture — with its belief in progress, forging state policies that intervened in economic and private affairs in order to promise prosperity and safeguard against collective vice, and (most importantly for our purposes), as Daniel Walker Howe has described it, a dedication “to the ideal that an individual could and should reshape himself and the world around him through the exercise of willpower….”89
Not only did John Quincy Adams spend his waking hours deciphering between right and wrong, continued Charles Sr., he systematically applied his conclusions to his daily actions.
Perhaps referring to Charles Jr.’s aimlessness and indecision, his father continued at length:
many men never acquire sufficient certainty of purpose to be able to guide their steps at all. They then become the mere sport of fortune. Today they shine because they have caught at a good opportunity. Tomorrow, the light goes out, and they are found mired at the bottom of a ditch. These are the men of temporary celebrity…. Other men, more favored by nature or education, prove their capacity to direct their course, at the expense of their fidelity to their convictions. They sacrifice their consistency for the sake of power, and surrender their future fame in exchange for the applause of their own day….In my opinion no man who has lived in America had so thoroughly constructed a foundation for his public life as your grandfather. His action always was deducible from certain maxims deeply graven on his mind90
But then, as if to remind his son that even his grandfather had fallen out of step with the nation, he added that these same attributes made John Quincy Adams “fail so much as a party-man."
"No person can ever be a thorough partisan for a long period without sacrifice of his moral identity.”
Charles, even more than his father, had to come to terms with the ways in which American leadership drew less and less from traditionally accumulated powers (that is, hereditary distinction with its accompanying education) and instead favored those willing to harness the short gusts of popular sentiment.
This perceived decline had been festering for some time in the family.
John Adams, after all, failed to secure a second presidential term when by 1800, national political parties controlled the Electoral College.
In 1824, his son John Quincy Adams ascended to the presidency under a cloud of suspicion — having failed to win a majority of the Electoral College votes.
And in what many called a “corrupt bargain” he was chosen by the House of Representatives over the self-proclaimed champion of the common man, Andrew Jackson.
But John Quincy Adams, like his father, failed to secure a second presidency — losing four years later to the roughcast Jackson, a son of plebian immigrants, and defender of majoritarian democracy.91
In short, the virtues attributed to John Quincy Adams and his father had become the tender Achilles heel of their grandsons.
88 Charles Frances Adams Sr., to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, November 8, 1861, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume I, 67-69
89 Howe, "The Political Culture of the American Whigs", 11-22 As Lee Benson has argued, the Whigs espoused a “positive liberal state,” that is, one that would “promote the general welfare, raise the level of opportunity for all men, and aid all individuals to develop their full potentialities.” See: Benson, "The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case", 103
90 Charles Frances Adams to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, November 8, 1861, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", 67-69
91 After his father lost to Jefferson in 1800, John Quincy Adams accused the latter of “pimping to the popular passions.” Quoted in: Richard Brookhiser, America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918 (New York: Free Press, 2002), 67.. John Adams insisted, “I have never sacrificed my judgment to kings, minister, nor people, and I never will.” Daniel J. Boorstin argued that “as democracy in America progressed, the capacity of the Adamses for national leadership declined. An egalitarian nation, motley with recent immigrants, no longer acquiescent to genteel New England leadership, left the Adamses behind. And with them, their Calvinistic morality, their belief in the battle of Virtue against Vice, their independence of popular whim, their noblesse oblige. By the late nineteenth century, John Adams’ talented but bitter descendants used all the apparatus of classical learning and modern physics to document their frustration, to justify their pessimism, to prove that what was wrong was not just with the Adams clan or with America, but with the forces at work in the universe.” See: Boorstin and Boorstin, "Hidden History", 29-30
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
But his father, like some broken heavyweight, could only pass down yesterday’s secrets in a rapidly changing sport.
Young Charles felt like the son born into a line of master ironworkers — in the age of steel.
For example, right before Charles enlisted he received a letter from his father, where the latter concluded that John Quincy Adams was the most complete statesman the nation had known.
Jefferson, Webster, Hamilton, these men revealed greatness, but upon inspection from “the foundation to the apex,” none except Charles’s grandfather were guided entirely by principles.
John Quincy Adams alone mastered “the whole theory of morals which makes the foundation of all human society.”88
Though the Whig party broke into pieces a decade earlier (mostly over slavery and the Compromise of 1850), Charles — at least through his father — still heard the party’s hue and cry about self-control and the debilitating effects of giving in to passion and popular whim.
This letter gets to the marrow of Whig culture, so pervasive throughout the second quarter of the nineteenth century, especially among certain New Englanders like the Adams family.
John Quincy Adams, after all, was a key architect and defender of this culture — with its belief in progress, forging state policies that intervened in economic and private affairs in order to promise prosperity and safeguard against collective vice, and (most importantly for our purposes), as Daniel Walker Howe has described it, a dedication “to the ideal that an individual could and should reshape himself and the world around him through the exercise of willpower….”89
Not only did John Quincy Adams spend his waking hours deciphering between right and wrong, continued Charles Sr., he systematically applied his conclusions to his daily actions.
Perhaps referring to Charles Jr.’s aimlessness and indecision, his father continued at length:
many men never acquire sufficient certainty of purpose to be able to guide their steps at all. They then become the mere sport of fortune. Today they shine because they have caught at a good opportunity. Tomorrow, the light goes out, and they are found mired at the bottom of a ditch. These are the men of temporary celebrity…. Other men, more favored by nature or education, prove their capacity to direct their course, at the expense of their fidelity to their convictions. They sacrifice their consistency for the sake of power, and surrender their future fame in exchange for the applause of their own day….In my opinion no man who has lived in America had so thoroughly constructed a foundation for his public life as your grandfather. His action always was deducible from certain maxims deeply graven on his mind90
But then, as if to remind his son that even his grandfather had fallen out of step with the nation, he added that these same attributes made John Quincy Adams “fail so much as a party-man."
"No person can ever be a thorough partisan for a long period without sacrifice of his moral identity.”
Charles, even more than his father, had to come to terms with the ways in which American leadership drew less and less from traditionally accumulated powers (that is, hereditary distinction with its accompanying education) and instead favored those willing to harness the short gusts of popular sentiment.
This perceived decline had been festering for some time in the family.
John Adams, after all, failed to secure a second presidential term when by 1800, national political parties controlled the Electoral College.
In 1824, his son John Quincy Adams ascended to the presidency under a cloud of suspicion — having failed to win a majority of the Electoral College votes.
And in what many called a “corrupt bargain” he was chosen by the House of Representatives over the self-proclaimed champion of the common man, Andrew Jackson.
But John Quincy Adams, like his father, failed to secure a second presidency — losing four years later to the roughcast Jackson, a son of plebian immigrants, and defender of majoritarian democracy.91
In short, the virtues attributed to John Quincy Adams and his father had become the tender Achilles heel of their grandsons.
88 Charles Frances Adams Sr., to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, November 8, 1861, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume I, 67-69
89 Howe, "The Political Culture of the American Whigs", 11-22 As Lee Benson has argued, the Whigs espoused a “positive liberal state,” that is, one that would “promote the general welfare, raise the level of opportunity for all men, and aid all individuals to develop their full potentialities.” See: Benson, "The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case", 103
90 Charles Frances Adams to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, November 8, 1861, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", 67-69
91 After his father lost to Jefferson in 1800, John Quincy Adams accused the latter of “pimping to the popular passions.” Quoted in: Richard Brookhiser, America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918 (New York: Free Press, 2002), 67.. John Adams insisted, “I have never sacrificed my judgment to kings, minister, nor people, and I never will.” Daniel J. Boorstin argued that “as democracy in America progressed, the capacity of the Adamses for national leadership declined. An egalitarian nation, motley with recent immigrants, no longer acquiescent to genteel New England leadership, left the Adamses behind. And with them, their Calvinistic morality, their belief in the battle of Virtue against Vice, their independence of popular whim, their noblesse oblige. By the late nineteenth century, John Adams’ talented but bitter descendants used all the apparatus of classical learning and modern physics to document their frustration, to justify their pessimism, to prove that what was wrong was not just with the Adams clan or with America, but with the forces at work in the universe.” See: Boorstin and Boorstin, "Hidden History", 29-30
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
“[John Quincy Adams] leans on nothing external,” wrote Charles Sr., to his son who was about to enlist.
“He derives support from every thing he can seize."
"But if the circumstances force it out of his hands, he is still standing firm and alone….”92
But what could Charles make of this over the course of his service?
War would make it hard for him to believe in the unencumbered individual leaning on nothing but principle.
How could a soldier stand independent of external forces when promotion depended so heavily on webs of cronyism?
And even heroics on the battlefield were only made possible by the seemingly arbitrary windfall of being at the right place at the right time — and even then, comrades had to play their part.
Charles would learn too that his inability to compromise, to harness popular opinion, would cost him dearly in the eyes of those who could promote him.93
This presented a maddening paradox: one often had to surrender to the currents of popularity in order to gain control of one’s future.
The war became for Charles the vivid last scenes of an extended passion play where he witnessed the slaughter of his father’s maker — the God who promised individuals, after slow accretions of wisdom and character through study, reflection, and diligence, the power to effectuate desired change.94
Charles began to doubt that the world could be transformed or won through internal forces alone.
Individuals were not unencumbered sovereigns, but instead strung together by their specific histories and the vagaries of experience.
Worse, as many aspiring officers came to see, individuals were tangled in a massive web of institutional connections.
92 Charles Frances Adams to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, November 8, 1861, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume I, 67-69 Charles Francis Adams Sr., also once wrote that “A natural rule must be followed or there is no security — It consists of those experiences as the best to produce happy effects.” Quotes found in: Duberman, "Charles Francis Adams, 1807-1886", 36
93 Adams revealed the ways in which he ignored building friendships as a way to secure support and promotion. He noted to his father how he had secured his men’s respect and loyalty. But “they don’t care for me personally. They think me cold, reserved and formal. They feel no affection for me, but they do believe in me, they have faith in my power of accomplishing results and in my integrity….” In short Adams tried to create loyalty through his “power” of effecting desired results, rather than becoming likeable, popular, or beloved. See: Charles Francis Adams, Jr., to Charles Francis Adams, January 16, 1864, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865"
94 This is not to say that Charles Sr., John Quincy Adams, or John Adams were providentialists. John Adams, in fact, admitted that there seemed to be little correlation between morality and God’s actions. That is, hailstorms pounded chapel windows like they did the tavern. And he often claimed that the human mind could not make sense of the often mysterious ways of God. Yet John Adams insisted humans could chart a goodly course, with virtue and religion, and had the duty to persuade others to follow.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
“[John Quincy Adams] leans on nothing external,” wrote Charles Sr., to his son who was about to enlist.
“He derives support from every thing he can seize."
"But if the circumstances force it out of his hands, he is still standing firm and alone….”92
But what could Charles make of this over the course of his service?
War would make it hard for him to believe in the unencumbered individual leaning on nothing but principle.
How could a soldier stand independent of external forces when promotion depended so heavily on webs of cronyism?
And even heroics on the battlefield were only made possible by the seemingly arbitrary windfall of being at the right place at the right time — and even then, comrades had to play their part.
Charles would learn too that his inability to compromise, to harness popular opinion, would cost him dearly in the eyes of those who could promote him.93
This presented a maddening paradox: one often had to surrender to the currents of popularity in order to gain control of one’s future.
The war became for Charles the vivid last scenes of an extended passion play where he witnessed the slaughter of his father’s maker — the God who promised individuals, after slow accretions of wisdom and character through study, reflection, and diligence, the power to effectuate desired change.94
Charles began to doubt that the world could be transformed or won through internal forces alone.
Individuals were not unencumbered sovereigns, but instead strung together by their specific histories and the vagaries of experience.
Worse, as many aspiring officers came to see, individuals were tangled in a massive web of institutional connections.
92 Charles Frances Adams to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, November 8, 1861, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume I, 67-69 Charles Francis Adams Sr., also once wrote that “A natural rule must be followed or there is no security — It consists of those experiences as the best to produce happy effects.” Quotes found in: Duberman, "Charles Francis Adams, 1807-1886", 36
93 Adams revealed the ways in which he ignored building friendships as a way to secure support and promotion. He noted to his father how he had secured his men’s respect and loyalty. But “they don’t care for me personally. They think me cold, reserved and formal. They feel no affection for me, but they do believe in me, they have faith in my power of accomplishing results and in my integrity….” In short Adams tried to create loyalty through his “power” of effecting desired results, rather than becoming likeable, popular, or beloved. See: Charles Francis Adams, Jr., to Charles Francis Adams, January 16, 1864, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865"
94 This is not to say that Charles Sr., John Quincy Adams, or John Adams were providentialists. John Adams, in fact, admitted that there seemed to be little correlation between morality and God’s actions. That is, hailstorms pounded chapel windows like they did the tavern. And he often claimed that the human mind could not make sense of the often mysterious ways of God. Yet John Adams insisted humans could chart a goodly course, with virtue and religion, and had the duty to persuade others to follow.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Coming to feel that life was a series of unforeseen contingencies that could only be escaped through some godless, and partially malevolent form of grace (understood as desirable accidents and having precious wires to pull) he necessarily viewed death as the absence of such grace.
Though for most of the war he walked along the peripheries of major battles, when he did see action he took a psychological beating from the violence and carnage.
Either sleeping on the margins, or witnessing the butchering of his friends in seemingly meaningless engagements, Adams lost hope in controlling the war.
No wonder, then, that throughout the war Adams felt drawn to men who seemed to shape their world through resolve.
He admired fellow soldiers, who, like his depicted grandfather, were driven by “first principles.”
He was so impressed with General Francis Barlow, for example, that Charles, in the summer of 1864, first began hinting he would serve in the African-American army should Barlow lead the way.
“It’s pleasant and refreshing to meet a man like Barlow among the crowds of mediocrity,” Charles wrote Henry.
“Here’s a man who goes into the army and in everything naturally recurs to first principles.”95
A month earlier Charles read a letter from his father where the patriarch boiled the war down to a struggle of personal wills.
Grant “makes himself felt” and not the other way around, Charles’ father insisted.
“This is one of the most important elements of success in warfare.”
The imagination provided the vast power in upholding human force.
Overmatched Rebels lasted as long as they did only because of “self reliance.”
Their determination crushed “the feebler will” of northern commanders.
Until Grant, that is.
Confederate will did not shape him; he instead etched his will onto his enemy’s mind.96
But Charles grew to admire Grant for significantly different reasons.
Early in the war Charles once lamented the removal of General McClellan, not because Little Mac was a brilliant commander, but because his replacement would have to “learn by his own mistakes” and unavoidably spill more blood.
Adams wasn’t looking for a military genius; he wanted a leader who, through the accretion of wisdom and experience, could navigate the treacherous waters of war.
Adams consoled himself that McClellan’s successor, General Halleck (whose academic prowess earned him the nickname “old brains”) had earned the reputation of a “very strong man” and “that his touch [was] already felt” in the western theatre.97
95 C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, H.Q. Cav’y Escort A. of P., July 22d, 1864, ibid., Volume II, 166-68
96 C.F. Adams, Sr., to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, June 24 1864, ibid., Volume II, 156-57
97 C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, Washington, D.C., November 19, 1862, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume I, 194-95
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
Coming to feel that life was a series of unforeseen contingencies that could only be escaped through some godless, and partially malevolent form of grace (understood as desirable accidents and having precious wires to pull) he necessarily viewed death as the absence of such grace.
Though for most of the war he walked along the peripheries of major battles, when he did see action he took a psychological beating from the violence and carnage.
Either sleeping on the margins, or witnessing the butchering of his friends in seemingly meaningless engagements, Adams lost hope in controlling the war.
No wonder, then, that throughout the war Adams felt drawn to men who seemed to shape their world through resolve.
He admired fellow soldiers, who, like his depicted grandfather, were driven by “first principles.”
He was so impressed with General Francis Barlow, for example, that Charles, in the summer of 1864, first began hinting he would serve in the African-American army should Barlow lead the way.
“It’s pleasant and refreshing to meet a man like Barlow among the crowds of mediocrity,” Charles wrote Henry.
“Here’s a man who goes into the army and in everything naturally recurs to first principles.”95
A month earlier Charles read a letter from his father where the patriarch boiled the war down to a struggle of personal wills.
Grant “makes himself felt” and not the other way around, Charles’ father insisted.
“This is one of the most important elements of success in warfare.”
The imagination provided the vast power in upholding human force.
Overmatched Rebels lasted as long as they did only because of “self reliance.”
Their determination crushed “the feebler will” of northern commanders.
Until Grant, that is.
Confederate will did not shape him; he instead etched his will onto his enemy’s mind.96
But Charles grew to admire Grant for significantly different reasons.
Early in the war Charles once lamented the removal of General McClellan, not because Little Mac was a brilliant commander, but because his replacement would have to “learn by his own mistakes” and unavoidably spill more blood.
Adams wasn’t looking for a military genius; he wanted a leader who, through the accretion of wisdom and experience, could navigate the treacherous waters of war.
Adams consoled himself that McClellan’s successor, General Halleck (whose academic prowess earned him the nickname “old brains”) had earned the reputation of a “very strong man” and “that his touch [was] already felt” in the western theatre.97
95 C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, H.Q. Cav’y Escort A. of P., July 22d, 1864, ibid., Volume II, 166-68
96 C.F. Adams, Sr., to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, June 24 1864, ibid., Volume II, 156-57
97 C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, Washington, D.C., November 19, 1862, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume I, 194-95
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
As the war staggered forward Charles continued to place faith in experienced commanders — but for radically different reasons.
Far too many times Adams believed that Union soldiers could take Petersburg or Richmond through dint of will or prescience.
In the summer of 1864, Confederates stretched themselves around the prized cities carving up the Virginia landscape into fortifications, trenches and treacherous abatises.
By then the war in Virginia became a battle of attrition as soldiers from both sides slept, fired, and bled from trenches.
Maneuverings and charges into the enemy became synonymous with regimental suicide.
While assessing General Grant’s response to this new face of war Adams wrote: “Grant is a man of such infinite resource and ceaseless activity — scarcely does one scheme fail before he has another on foot; baffled in one direction he immediately gropes round for a vulnerable point elsewhere….”98
The war, then, would be won by relentless groping, more than imagination, will, or “first principles.”
Charles proclaimed to his father that the world had never seen “fiercer or more determined assaults” on the cities of Richmond and Petersburg.
But the war, for soldiers in the Armies of the Potomac and the James, had become a defensive endeavor.
Great generals did not make themselves felt so much as they simply outlasted.
He believed that “no possible vigor, or determination, or training” could overcome the decided advantages of the defensive position — unless aided by “skill or its equivalent luck.”
Here Charles’s words are crucial.
For him luck had become skill’s “equivalent,” because, as he was coming to view things, both were unwrought and not to be created through will.
While antebellum Americans had substantially broken from predestinarian forms of Calvinism, replacing it with faith in the ability of humans to remake the world and themselves, Adams found himself swinging back to the powerless self.
This time though, God had nothing to do with the forces dictating history.
“I do not believe that training can do anything more for our troops,” he added.
“The question is now one of pure skill and endurance.”99
Notice, though, that these somewhat fatalistic lines came from Adams just before he began commanding in the black Massachusetts Fifth Cavalry.
Strangely, only a handful of letters later, Charles would begin scheming to remake the black race, get his soldiers mounted, and make a run at his imminent reward.
He would, in other words, make himself felt.
Thus, Charles’ last-ditch attempt to capture glory was something like the expiring man’s final hallucinations before giving up the ghost.
Here, race made the grandiose images believable.
It was through black soldiers that he saw a way to gain control of his own fate.
With them, Adams wanted to wager his life for a chance to remake himself; But in the process he, perhaps unwittingly, leveraged — and lost — the collapsing worldview bequeathed by his grandfather.
Charles sloped back to his home, the cradle of American Puritanism, with the cosmological equivalent of empty pockets.
Luckless gamblers loose their shirts; Charles, though, returned home leaving his “two hundred years of ancestral swaddling clothes” scattered all over Virginia’s war fields.
Charles had rubbed up against the brutal, physical world inhabited by blacks, which he dreamed of remaking.
Within their ranks he had glimpsed the unseemly side of the American myth of self-making, and learned that tugging at wires was the preserve of privileged white men — particularly those who did not conflate their fortunes with those of the oppressed.
Early in the war, trying to make sense of his sudden exposure to ex-slaves in Port Royal, Charles had confessed to Henry that he worried about ex-slaves’ ability to deal with postwar society if they were not first nurtured and cared for.
He knew that the war would bring “great blessings to America and the Caucasian race.”
But for the African I do not see the same bright future. He is the foot-ball of passion and accident, and the gift of freedom may prove his destruction100
At war’s end Charles no longer asked “who would care for them?” but cursed his black soldiers while giving his blessings to the violence of slavery.
His black soldiers exposed the very thing that Charles went into the army to conceal: that his life, too, was subject to the external forces of passion, accident — that he could not will away failure.
Adams came to doubt the centrality of the individual’s will in the making of the world.
98 For an assessment of Grant as a general who bucked military wisdom and unquestioned battlefield tactics, preferring at times his own gut instincts, see: T. Harry Williams, "The Military Leadership of North and South" In Why the North Won the Civil War, ed. David Herbert Donald (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), 54-55. C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, H.Q. Cav’y Escort A. of P., Before Petersburg, August 13, 1864, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume II, 178-82
99 C.F. Adams, Jr., to father, H.Q. 5th Mass. Cavalry, Pt. Lookout, Md., September 10, 1864, ibid., Volume II, 190-93
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
As the war staggered forward Charles continued to place faith in experienced commanders — but for radically different reasons.
Far too many times Adams believed that Union soldiers could take Petersburg or Richmond through dint of will or prescience.
In the summer of 1864, Confederates stretched themselves around the prized cities carving up the Virginia landscape into fortifications, trenches and treacherous abatises.
By then the war in Virginia became a battle of attrition as soldiers from both sides slept, fired, and bled from trenches.
Maneuverings and charges into the enemy became synonymous with regimental suicide.
While assessing General Grant’s response to this new face of war Adams wrote: “Grant is a man of such infinite resource and ceaseless activity — scarcely does one scheme fail before he has another on foot; baffled in one direction he immediately gropes round for a vulnerable point elsewhere….”98
The war, then, would be won by relentless groping, more than imagination, will, or “first principles.”
Charles proclaimed to his father that the world had never seen “fiercer or more determined assaults” on the cities of Richmond and Petersburg.
But the war, for soldiers in the Armies of the Potomac and the James, had become a defensive endeavor.
Great generals did not make themselves felt so much as they simply outlasted.
He believed that “no possible vigor, or determination, or training” could overcome the decided advantages of the defensive position — unless aided by “skill or its equivalent luck.”
Here Charles’s words are crucial.
For him luck had become skill’s “equivalent,” because, as he was coming to view things, both were unwrought and not to be created through will.
While antebellum Americans had substantially broken from predestinarian forms of Calvinism, replacing it with faith in the ability of humans to remake the world and themselves, Adams found himself swinging back to the powerless self.
This time though, God had nothing to do with the forces dictating history.
“I do not believe that training can do anything more for our troops,” he added.
“The question is now one of pure skill and endurance.”99
Notice, though, that these somewhat fatalistic lines came from Adams just before he began commanding in the black Massachusetts Fifth Cavalry.
Strangely, only a handful of letters later, Charles would begin scheming to remake the black race, get his soldiers mounted, and make a run at his imminent reward.
He would, in other words, make himself felt.
Thus, Charles’ last-ditch attempt to capture glory was something like the expiring man’s final hallucinations before giving up the ghost.
Here, race made the grandiose images believable.
It was through black soldiers that he saw a way to gain control of his own fate.
With them, Adams wanted to wager his life for a chance to remake himself; But in the process he, perhaps unwittingly, leveraged — and lost — the collapsing worldview bequeathed by his grandfather.
Charles sloped back to his home, the cradle of American Puritanism, with the cosmological equivalent of empty pockets.
Luckless gamblers loose their shirts; Charles, though, returned home leaving his “two hundred years of ancestral swaddling clothes” scattered all over Virginia’s war fields.
Charles had rubbed up against the brutal, physical world inhabited by blacks, which he dreamed of remaking.
Within their ranks he had glimpsed the unseemly side of the American myth of self-making, and learned that tugging at wires was the preserve of privileged white men — particularly those who did not conflate their fortunes with those of the oppressed.
Early in the war, trying to make sense of his sudden exposure to ex-slaves in Port Royal, Charles had confessed to Henry that he worried about ex-slaves’ ability to deal with postwar society if they were not first nurtured and cared for.
He knew that the war would bring “great blessings to America and the Caucasian race.”
But for the African I do not see the same bright future. He is the foot-ball of passion and accident, and the gift of freedom may prove his destruction100
At war’s end Charles no longer asked “who would care for them?” but cursed his black soldiers while giving his blessings to the violence of slavery.
His black soldiers exposed the very thing that Charles went into the army to conceal: that his life, too, was subject to the external forces of passion, accident — that he could not will away failure.
Adams came to doubt the centrality of the individual’s will in the making of the world.
98 For an assessment of Grant as a general who bucked military wisdom and unquestioned battlefield tactics, preferring at times his own gut instincts, see: T. Harry Williams, "The Military Leadership of North and South" In Why the North Won the Civil War, ed. David Herbert Donald (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), 54-55. C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, H.Q. Cav’y Escort A. of P., Before Petersburg, August 13, 1864, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume II, 178-82
99 C.F. Adams, Jr., to father, H.Q. 5th Mass. Cavalry, Pt. Lookout, Md., September 10, 1864, ibid., Volume II, 190-93
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
The individual was shaped from the outside in; one’s “skill or its equivalent luck” merely exploited the scraps gifted by the unforgiving universe.
In other words, external systems, both institutional and natural, combed over the masses, rewarding those fortunate enough to have skills, or fortunate enough to have fortune, and punishing those with nothing inside to show.
If this sounds like a mind upon which Darwinian ideas had been pressed, leaving their unmistakable impression — it is not.
It is, instead, a mind in convulsion after cutting loose its original beliefs — a mind with all the approximate contours to prepare it for its future embrace of Darwin.
As the gray haired Adams would be disposed to put it, Darwin “fiercely assailed the Mosaic cosmogony, including its origin of man, with all that implied of celestial or providential interference….”
Since then “what had before seemed chaos has become order and law."
"No longer descended from angels — a son fallen from grace — the race of man upon earth has become like other kindred developments, matter for classification and systematic study."
“Before,” Charles continued, “[man] was the plaything of fate….”101
Now he was not.
He was part of a comprehensible and transparent system of laws.
The new worldview that Adams would soon embrace after the war, promised order that not even his forefathers believed in, or needed.
Years after the war, in the end of one of his historical monographs, Adams would write, “all is logical, all is necessary, all is the subject and outcome of law.”102
These are the words of someone who, after becoming incapable of believing the grand promises made by one God, latched onto to a new order because it promised to both kill and mimic the original.
Like a jilted lover, he found a new maker that would keep all the promises that the first could not.
When right after the war he stumbled upon an essay about August Comte, his intellectual faculties, as Adams put it, “had then been lying fallow.”
Moving closer to the truth, Charles confessed: “I was in the most recipient condition.”103
The war transformed him into a mendicant — begging for order.
He yearned for an order that shed light on the forces acting upon the nation, and on the jarring experience of war, race, and frustration — an order that rescued him from becoming a “foot-ball of passion and accident.”
In the summer of 1863, Henry, who fretted throughout the war about not having followed his brother into the army, feeling he had squandered his chances, queried whether the war had undone him and his brother-turned-soldier.
“Have we both wholly lost our reckonings and are we driven at random by fate, or have we still a course that we are steering though it is not quite the same as our old one?”104
This was Charles’ question too — until he found a new belief system that prioritized experience over theology, and allowed him to restore order to the narrative of human experience.
His plans to transform ex-slaves, his acquisition of horses, his depiction of battles as artistic expressions of generals, his hopes that the war would catapult him into the political echelons of his forefathers — all reveal how Adams imagined the war to be something he could operate, control, master.
He soon learned to distrust such imagination.
It was a fanciful myth that traced back to Moses, created ultraist abolitionists, led northerners to weep over Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and ratified radical reconstruction.
It was this kind of imagination, after all, that Charles would turn to ashes in his fireplace.
100 C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, Milne Plantation, Port Royal Island, Monday, April 6, 1862, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume I, 124-33
101 Charles Francis Adams Jr., "Address by the President," Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings XIII (Second Series) (1899, 1900), 89-91.
102 Adams quoted in: Robert L. Beisner, "Brooks Adams and Charles Francis Adams, Jr.: Historians of Massachusetts," New England Quarterly 35, no. 1 (1962), 63.
103 Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 179
104 Henry Adams to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, May 1, 1863, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume I, 278-79
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, continued ...
The individual was shaped from the outside in; one’s “skill or its equivalent luck” merely exploited the scraps gifted by the unforgiving universe.
In other words, external systems, both institutional and natural, combed over the masses, rewarding those fortunate enough to have skills, or fortunate enough to have fortune, and punishing those with nothing inside to show.
If this sounds like a mind upon which Darwinian ideas had been pressed, leaving their unmistakable impression — it is not.
It is, instead, a mind in convulsion after cutting loose its original beliefs — a mind with all the approximate contours to prepare it for its future embrace of Darwin.
As the gray haired Adams would be disposed to put it, Darwin “fiercely assailed the Mosaic cosmogony, including its origin of man, with all that implied of celestial or providential interference….”
Since then “what had before seemed chaos has become order and law."
"No longer descended from angels — a son fallen from grace — the race of man upon earth has become like other kindred developments, matter for classification and systematic study."
“Before,” Charles continued, “[man] was the plaything of fate….”101
Now he was not.
He was part of a comprehensible and transparent system of laws.
The new worldview that Adams would soon embrace after the war, promised order that not even his forefathers believed in, or needed.
Years after the war, in the end of one of his historical monographs, Adams would write, “all is logical, all is necessary, all is the subject and outcome of law.”102
These are the words of someone who, after becoming incapable of believing the grand promises made by one God, latched onto to a new order because it promised to both kill and mimic the original.
Like a jilted lover, he found a new maker that would keep all the promises that the first could not.
When right after the war he stumbled upon an essay about August Comte, his intellectual faculties, as Adams put it, “had then been lying fallow.”
Moving closer to the truth, Charles confessed: “I was in the most recipient condition.”103
The war transformed him into a mendicant — begging for order.
He yearned for an order that shed light on the forces acting upon the nation, and on the jarring experience of war, race, and frustration — an order that rescued him from becoming a “foot-ball of passion and accident.”
In the summer of 1863, Henry, who fretted throughout the war about not having followed his brother into the army, feeling he had squandered his chances, queried whether the war had undone him and his brother-turned-soldier.
“Have we both wholly lost our reckonings and are we driven at random by fate, or have we still a course that we are steering though it is not quite the same as our old one?”104
This was Charles’ question too — until he found a new belief system that prioritized experience over theology, and allowed him to restore order to the narrative of human experience.
His plans to transform ex-slaves, his acquisition of horses, his depiction of battles as artistic expressions of generals, his hopes that the war would catapult him into the political echelons of his forefathers — all reveal how Adams imagined the war to be something he could operate, control, master.
He soon learned to distrust such imagination.
It was a fanciful myth that traced back to Moses, created ultraist abolitionists, led northerners to weep over Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and ratified radical reconstruction.
It was this kind of imagination, after all, that Charles would turn to ashes in his fireplace.
100 C.F. Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, Milne Plantation, Port Royal Island, Monday, April 6, 1862, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume I, 124-33
101 Charles Francis Adams Jr., "Address by the President," Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings XIII (Second Series) (1899, 1900), 89-91.
102 Adams quoted in: Robert L. Beisner, "Brooks Adams and Charles Francis Adams, Jr.: Historians of Massachusetts," New England Quarterly 35, no. 1 (1962), 63.
103 Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 179
104 Henry Adams to C.F. Adams, Jr., London, May 1, 1863, Ford and others, "A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865", Volume I, 278-79
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, concluded ...
When Adams exited the war his men were “almost in a state of mutiny.”
Like many white officers, Adams accurately noted the swelling discontent of black soldiers while revealing nothing about its root cause.
This not only suggested that blacks were naturally mutinous, but betrayed a fundamental disconnect, breakdown of communication.
Since Benjamin Butler had been returned to Massachusetts, the Army of the James finally had its hand in celebrated victories like the fall of Richmond and Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
Black regiments, however, were often held back or pushed to the margins during the mayhem of these symbolic victories.105
For those officers genuinely committed to equality, and the welfare of African Americans, the post-Butler regime was cause for concern.
At the very period when Butler lost his job, his successor, Edward Ord, was in Washington paying visits to key friends in the senate and judicial branch in order to procure a recommendation for promotion to brigadier general in the regular army.106
Ord and Butler hated one another, partly because of the deep jealousies between political generals and West Pointers, and, more likely because of tensions over Butler’s aggressive acquisition of black soldiers.
Officers with abolitionist leanings like General Wild accused Ord of being an enemy to the interests of blacks, and undoing the accomplishments of Butler.
General Birney quipped that Ord “spelt ‘negro’ with two G’s.”
Birney surely must have known, though, that Ord’s orthographic sins were army wide.
To get an idea of the state of affairs, and the ways in which race was both a lever for promotion and weapon for censure, in hopes of removing General Kautz (a fellow Negrophobe) from the service, Ord transferred Kautz from command over the corps cavalry, to lead an entire division of black soldiers.
“Thinking that I would decline and thus get rid of me,” Kautz wrote a female friend, “[Ord] sent me to the niggers.”
But Kautz, who would at times serve as Cole’s immediate commander, wrote that “I could not decline the niggers at this time as that would throw me out of a command altogether, just at the commencement of what may possibly prove the closing campaign of the war.”
With Richmond on the brain, Kautz could imagine this short stint leading to coveted postwar appointments.
Plus, the advantage to commanding black troops, Kautz added, was that he would “feel less regret over the slain than if my troops were white.”
The disadvantage though was that “if I must fall myself I should prefer to die with my own color.”
In other words, for many officers in the USCT, images of death — a central component to every soldier’s psychological makeup — were infused with racial fears.107
When General Ord assumed command he immediately began digging up Butler’s well laid pipes.
He urged Grant to approve an investigation of Butler, while quashing the vibrant illicit trade channels that thrived under Butler’s watch, especially in Norfolk.
But — and this would crucially undercut the condition of the many African Americans within his authority — Ord believed that Butler also used war-time humanitarianism as a way to funnel money into the hands of so-called teachers and charity workers among the black populace.
He looked for and found ways to cut down on the daily rations distributed by the government.
In this way, Ord’s eagerness to expose Butler’s corruptions fit nicely with his hatred for dependence, and his apparent loathing for African Americans.
He had the populations canvassed, heads counted, and all “able-bodied” men forced into labor or into the army.
Ord also replaced several superintendents (one was arrested) from Butler’s brainchild, the Office of Negro Affairs.108
Whether or not Ord had “good” intentions in cleaning up after Butler’s regime, as Cole’s story testifies, his “reforms” aggravated tensions between black soldiers and their white counterparts.109
Though Cole at times had served in close proximity to Adams and those who rushed into Richmond, Cole’s regiment, except for maybe a small detachment, was officially “unattached” doing garrison duty in various places in Virginia, away from the action.110
Finally, as the white officers began returning home, and thousands of agitated black soldiers were retained for postwar occupation of the South, Cole ironically obtained his coveted promotions while a volcano throbbed below.
105 Longacre, "Army of Amateurs: General Benjamin F. Butler and the Army of the James, 1863-1865", 289-90, 300, 309
106 Cresap, "Appomattox Commander: The Story of General E.O.C. Ord", 139-40
107 General Kautz to Mrs. Savage, March 29, 1865. August V. Kautz, "Papers, 1864-1865", 1864-1865).
108 Cresap, "Appomattox Commander: The Story of General E.O.C. Ord", 147-56
109 In his insistence of making African Americans exhibit sufficient work ethic, Ord actually fought to keep lands for them to work, bringing in horses and supplies used up from the war. Also, in the name of shutting down corrupt military agencies, once aided by Butler, Ord dissolved much of the military governments and allowed civil governments to take control of their respective spheres. But, as one southern Unionist complained to Butler, in Richmond this led to a quick return of secessionist in power, printing papers, running the courts. See: ibid., 150-55; Longacre, "Army of Amateurs: General Benjamin F. Butler and the Army of the James, 1863-1865", 274-75; Burnham Wardwell to General Butler, May 21, 1865, in Butler, "Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War. Vol. 5, August 1864-March 1868", 623-24
110 Longacre has Cole’s regiment listed together with Adams’s Fifth Cavalry, waiting outside of Richmond. But regimental reports have Cole’s men scattered at various locations in Virginia. Also, had Cole entered Richmond triumphantly, his attorneys, after the war, would have exploited such a thing. See: Janet Hewett and others, Supplement to the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot Pub. Co., 1994), Part II, Volume 77, pages 110-17.; Dyer, "A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion", Volume III, p.1720; Longacre, "Army of Amateurs: General Benjamin F. Butler and the Army of the James, 1863-1865", 283-84
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 5: NO LONGER “THE PLAY-THING OF FATE”, concluded ...
When Adams exited the war his men were “almost in a state of mutiny.”
Like many white officers, Adams accurately noted the swelling discontent of black soldiers while revealing nothing about its root cause.
This not only suggested that blacks were naturally mutinous, but betrayed a fundamental disconnect, breakdown of communication.
Since Benjamin Butler had been returned to Massachusetts, the Army of the James finally had its hand in celebrated victories like the fall of Richmond and Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
Black regiments, however, were often held back or pushed to the margins during the mayhem of these symbolic victories.105
For those officers genuinely committed to equality, and the welfare of African Americans, the post-Butler regime was cause for concern.
At the very period when Butler lost his job, his successor, Edward Ord, was in Washington paying visits to key friends in the senate and judicial branch in order to procure a recommendation for promotion to brigadier general in the regular army.106
Ord and Butler hated one another, partly because of the deep jealousies between political generals and West Pointers, and, more likely because of tensions over Butler’s aggressive acquisition of black soldiers.
Officers with abolitionist leanings like General Wild accused Ord of being an enemy to the interests of blacks, and undoing the accomplishments of Butler.
General Birney quipped that Ord “spelt ‘negro’ with two G’s.”
Birney surely must have known, though, that Ord’s orthographic sins were army wide.
To get an idea of the state of affairs, and the ways in which race was both a lever for promotion and weapon for censure, in hopes of removing General Kautz (a fellow Negrophobe) from the service, Ord transferred Kautz from command over the corps cavalry, to lead an entire division of black soldiers.
“Thinking that I would decline and thus get rid of me,” Kautz wrote a female friend, “[Ord] sent me to the niggers.”
But Kautz, who would at times serve as Cole’s immediate commander, wrote that “I could not decline the niggers at this time as that would throw me out of a command altogether, just at the commencement of what may possibly prove the closing campaign of the war.”
With Richmond on the brain, Kautz could imagine this short stint leading to coveted postwar appointments.
Plus, the advantage to commanding black troops, Kautz added, was that he would “feel less regret over the slain than if my troops were white.”
The disadvantage though was that “if I must fall myself I should prefer to die with my own color.”
In other words, for many officers in the USCT, images of death — a central component to every soldier’s psychological makeup — were infused with racial fears.107
When General Ord assumed command he immediately began digging up Butler’s well laid pipes.
He urged Grant to approve an investigation of Butler, while quashing the vibrant illicit trade channels that thrived under Butler’s watch, especially in Norfolk.
But — and this would crucially undercut the condition of the many African Americans within his authority — Ord believed that Butler also used war-time humanitarianism as a way to funnel money into the hands of so-called teachers and charity workers among the black populace.
He looked for and found ways to cut down on the daily rations distributed by the government.
In this way, Ord’s eagerness to expose Butler’s corruptions fit nicely with his hatred for dependence, and his apparent loathing for African Americans.
He had the populations canvassed, heads counted, and all “able-bodied” men forced into labor or into the army.
Ord also replaced several superintendents (one was arrested) from Butler’s brainchild, the Office of Negro Affairs.108
Whether or not Ord had “good” intentions in cleaning up after Butler’s regime, as Cole’s story testifies, his “reforms” aggravated tensions between black soldiers and their white counterparts.109
Though Cole at times had served in close proximity to Adams and those who rushed into Richmond, Cole’s regiment, except for maybe a small detachment, was officially “unattached” doing garrison duty in various places in Virginia, away from the action.110
Finally, as the white officers began returning home, and thousands of agitated black soldiers were retained for postwar occupation of the South, Cole ironically obtained his coveted promotions while a volcano throbbed below.
105 Longacre, "Army of Amateurs: General Benjamin F. Butler and the Army of the James, 1863-1865", 289-90, 300, 309
106 Cresap, "Appomattox Commander: The Story of General E.O.C. Ord", 139-40
107 General Kautz to Mrs. Savage, March 29, 1865. August V. Kautz, "Papers, 1864-1865", 1864-1865).
108 Cresap, "Appomattox Commander: The Story of General E.O.C. Ord", 147-56
109 In his insistence of making African Americans exhibit sufficient work ethic, Ord actually fought to keep lands for them to work, bringing in horses and supplies used up from the war. Also, in the name of shutting down corrupt military agencies, once aided by Butler, Ord dissolved much of the military governments and allowed civil governments to take control of their respective spheres. But, as one southern Unionist complained to Butler, in Richmond this led to a quick return of secessionist in power, printing papers, running the courts. See: ibid., 150-55; Longacre, "Army of Amateurs: General Benjamin F. Butler and the Army of the James, 1863-1865", 274-75; Burnham Wardwell to General Butler, May 21, 1865, in Butler, "Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War. Vol. 5, August 1864-March 1868", 623-24
110 Longacre has Cole’s regiment listed together with Adams’s Fifth Cavalry, waiting outside of Richmond. But regimental reports have Cole’s men scattered at various locations in Virginia. Also, had Cole entered Richmond triumphantly, his attorneys, after the war, would have exploited such a thing. See: Janet Hewett and others, Supplement to the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot Pub. Co., 1994), Part II, Volume 77, pages 110-17.; Dyer, "A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion", Volume III, p.1720; Longacre, "Army of Amateurs: General Benjamin F. Butler and the Army of the James, 1863-1865", 283-84
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”
The Un-Closing of War
Several weeks after Adams departed the war, in early June ’65, Cole received orders to prepare an entire brigade of black soldiers to “embark rapidly.”
The destination, though, was not a battlefield.
What was perhaps his most significant mission came when the war had already petered out in the fields, at home, and all around him.1
Within a week of the order, Major General Henry Slocum would stand before Cole’s home town, promising Syracusans that returning veterans were “better men, physically and mentally” and the “mass of them uninjured in morals.”2
Nearly two months had passed since the vanquished General Lee told his half-starved troops to “Go to your homes and resume your occupations.”
Since then a string of rebel holdouts, one by one, gave up the ghost.
First rebel troops evacuated the port city of Mobile; then in late April, General Joseph E. Johnston, commander over the remaining troops in the eastern theatre, submitted to Sherman’s recently stepped-up terms of surrender.
By the end of May the confederate military fizzled out entirely — in Alabama, then finally in the trans-Mississippi.
As May closed General Sherman waxed nostalgic over his troops’ litany of victories.
After warning his soldiers not to yield to the temptation of seeking similar adventures
abroad, he informed them that most would soon “mingle with the civilized world.”3
Days later, General Grant promised the Union troops that “you will soon be permitted to return to your homes and families….”4
White soldiers from the Army of the James had recently given their counterparts from the Army of the Potomac tours of fallen Richmond, as the latter made their way home, towards Washington.5
Butler tirelessly continued defending his war record while he and his cronies busily made plans for his political resurrection.
Charles Adams was home with his fiancé whom he met on a furlough, possibly making plans with her for the year long tour of Europe to recuperate his body and recover his mind.6
War bodies were coming to various levels of repose.
In April, the Union army numbered over one million soldiers.
By early August roughly two thirds of these soldiers would be mustered out; by rail and river nearly 700,000 Union soldiers would make their way back to seventeen different states.7
Most city papers ran regular columns about the returning soldiers, listing returning regiments, officers, with battlefield credentials.8
In New York, debates about battlefield strategies had given way to questions of what to do with the thousands of veterans looking for employment, and the many disabled veterans wandering the city.9
In papers printed from Boston to Atlanta, one could read about war heroes who had already begun parlaying their military credentials into public politics — lecturing, giving interviews, glad-handing their way into political trenches.
Meanwhile, with less fanfare, southbound trains delivered gaunt confederate captives who hobbled in from northern prisons into Richmond streets.10
As the broken, maimed, and militarily anointed drifted from the den of conflict, Abe Lincoln’s corpse, dressed in the suit he wore for his second inauguration, lay in a vault awaiting its grave and Jefferson Davis languished with manacled ankles between thick stone walls in his Fort Monroe prison.11
1 United States. War Dept and others, "The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies", Series 1, Volume 46, Part III, p. 1253.
2 New York Times, June 18, 1865.
3 Richmond Whig, June 5, 1865, page 1.
4 ibid., Series 1, Vol. 49, part II, p. 948
5 General Turner to General Butler, May 7th, 1865 in Butler, "Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War. Vol. 5, August 1864-March 1868", 616-17
6 Cresap, "Appomattox Commander: The Story of General E.O.C. Ord", 72, footnote #36; Colonel Shaffer to General Butler, May, 14, 1865 in Butler, "Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War. Vol. 5, August 1864-March 1868", 619-20; Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 168-69
7 Ida M. Tarbell, "How the Union Army was Disbanded," Civil War Times Illustrated 6, no. 8 (1967), 1-9, 44-7-9, 44-47.
8 ibid., 44
9 New York Times, June 16, 1865.
10 Richmond Whig, June 15, 1865.
11 Richmond Whig, June 6, 1865, page 3; Richmond Whig, May 30, 1865.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”
The Un-Closing of War
Several weeks after Adams departed the war, in early June ’65, Cole received orders to prepare an entire brigade of black soldiers to “embark rapidly.”
The destination, though, was not a battlefield.
What was perhaps his most significant mission came when the war had already petered out in the fields, at home, and all around him.1
Within a week of the order, Major General Henry Slocum would stand before Cole’s home town, promising Syracusans that returning veterans were “better men, physically and mentally” and the “mass of them uninjured in morals.”2
Nearly two months had passed since the vanquished General Lee told his half-starved troops to “Go to your homes and resume your occupations.”
Since then a string of rebel holdouts, one by one, gave up the ghost.
First rebel troops evacuated the port city of Mobile; then in late April, General Joseph E. Johnston, commander over the remaining troops in the eastern theatre, submitted to Sherman’s recently stepped-up terms of surrender.
By the end of May the confederate military fizzled out entirely — in Alabama, then finally in the trans-Mississippi.
As May closed General Sherman waxed nostalgic over his troops’ litany of victories.
After warning his soldiers not to yield to the temptation of seeking similar adventures
abroad, he informed them that most would soon “mingle with the civilized world.”3
Days later, General Grant promised the Union troops that “you will soon be permitted to return to your homes and families….”4
White soldiers from the Army of the James had recently given their counterparts from the Army of the Potomac tours of fallen Richmond, as the latter made their way home, towards Washington.5
Butler tirelessly continued defending his war record while he and his cronies busily made plans for his political resurrection.
Charles Adams was home with his fiancé whom he met on a furlough, possibly making plans with her for the year long tour of Europe to recuperate his body and recover his mind.6
War bodies were coming to various levels of repose.
In April, the Union army numbered over one million soldiers.
By early August roughly two thirds of these soldiers would be mustered out; by rail and river nearly 700,000 Union soldiers would make their way back to seventeen different states.7
Most city papers ran regular columns about the returning soldiers, listing returning regiments, officers, with battlefield credentials.8
In New York, debates about battlefield strategies had given way to questions of what to do with the thousands of veterans looking for employment, and the many disabled veterans wandering the city.9
In papers printed from Boston to Atlanta, one could read about war heroes who had already begun parlaying their military credentials into public politics — lecturing, giving interviews, glad-handing their way into political trenches.
Meanwhile, with less fanfare, southbound trains delivered gaunt confederate captives who hobbled in from northern prisons into Richmond streets.10
As the broken, maimed, and militarily anointed drifted from the den of conflict, Abe Lincoln’s corpse, dressed in the suit he wore for his second inauguration, lay in a vault awaiting its grave and Jefferson Davis languished with manacled ankles between thick stone walls in his Fort Monroe prison.11
1 United States. War Dept and others, "The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies", Series 1, Volume 46, Part III, p. 1253.
2 New York Times, June 18, 1865.
3 Richmond Whig, June 5, 1865, page 1.
4 ibid., Series 1, Vol. 49, part II, p. 948
5 General Turner to General Butler, May 7th, 1865 in Butler, "Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War. Vol. 5, August 1864-March 1868", 616-17
6 Cresap, "Appomattox Commander: The Story of General E.O.C. Ord", 72, footnote #36; Colonel Shaffer to General Butler, May, 14, 1865 in Butler, "Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War. Vol. 5, August 1864-March 1868", 619-20; Adams, "The Autobiography of Charles Francis Adams", 168-69
7 Ida M. Tarbell, "How the Union Army was Disbanded," Civil War Times Illustrated 6, no. 8 (1967), 1-9, 44-7-9, 44-47.
8 ibid., 44
9 New York Times, June 16, 1865.
10 Richmond Whig, June 15, 1865.
11 Richmond Whig, June 6, 1865, page 3; Richmond Whig, May 30, 1865.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: GENERAL COLE AND THE MURDER OF SEN. HISCOCK
UNMADE: AMERICAN MANHOOD IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA, continued ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
Throughout the nation, and especially in Virginia, the pulse of war ceased.
Signs changed.
On June 10th, Union command warned ex-confederate soldiers in Virginia that sufficient time had elapsed to trade in their ragged uniforms for civilian clothes.
Any sympathizer wearing military buttons, or any insignias of rank or rebel service would be subject to arrest.12
As diehards were forced to scissor their confederate coat buttons, or cover them with cloth, the dismantling of war fortifications in the state moved into full speed: from Petersburg and Richmond alone Union soldiers heaved and dragged together acres of cannon, caissons, and ambulances.
In Petersburg, local blacks led Union officials to the “graves” where retreating, embittered rebels buried more than a hundred cannons and marked them with soldiers’ headboards.13
In Richmond, auctioneers peddled tens of thousands of war mules and cavalry horses that had weathered the struggle.14
In early May, Richmond’s post office opened its doors.
Grocers stocked shelves.
Halted printing presses swung into operation.
Come June, military officials partially restored the Richmond police force.15
With the Confederacy now a relic, the Department of Virginia even established a Bureau of Public Archives in order to preserve the paperwork left behind by the defunct nation.
By the end of summer, officials would send some eighty boxes of confederate war records to Washington.
Ship- and trainloads of paper, steel and materiel rolled and steamed northward, while one executive from the Petersburg Railroad was journeying to New York to procure the needed materials for impending repairs.16
Another president of a local Virginia railroad began negotiations with the federal government to replace the stretches of iron that confederates had taken up to patch together another rail line more vital to confederate survival.17
As early as the closing days of April, the commander of the Department of Virginia, General Ord, had authorized the resumption of railroad and canal services in and around Richmond.18
By May all but one of Richmond’s major tracks moved cars.19
Central Railroad laborers began rebuilding the fallen bridge over Rivanna River; and owners of the Petersburg South Side Railroad hired hands, purchased timber, and began fabricating bridge trestles.
Within days Virginians would be able to travel by rail from Lynchburg and Charlottesville, and from there to Richmond.20
For ex-slaves in particular, and all those who had trained themselves to listen closely to the war, soundscapes marked the biggest change of all.
At war’s beginning the not entirely imagined serenity of agriculture and slavery gave way to the thuds and ringing of armory; by war’s end, not only had the din of artillery ceased, but white southerners were left with an unsettling sonic irony.
With many southern church bells melted into cannon, they could not have rung in the victory had they won the war; and with empty belfries they could not mourn with clanging bells the massive loss of life that came with defeat.
Partially filling the audible void, blacks flocked in town streets, laughing, singing, and talking loudly, publicly rejecting the controlled sounds and space of slave labor.21
12 New York Times, June 17, 1865.
13 New York Times, June 17, 1865.
14 Richmond Whig, June 1, 1865.
15 Longacre, "The Army of the James, 1863-1865: A Military, Political, and Social History." (Vol. 1-4)", 989
16 Richmond Whig, June 6, 1865.
17 Richmond Whig, May 31, 1865.
18 ibid.980
19 ibid.980
20 Richmond Whig, June 9,1865.
21 Mark M. Smith, "Of Bells, Booms, Sounds, and Silences: Listening to the Civil War South" In The War was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War, ed. Joan E. Cashin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 9-34.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
by Michael E. DeGruccio
CHAPTER 6: THE “INFLAMMATORY STIMULUS”, continued ...
Throughout the nation, and especially in Virginia, the pulse of war ceased.
Signs changed.
On June 10th, Union command warned ex-confederate soldiers in Virginia that sufficient time had elapsed to trade in their ragged uniforms for civilian clothes.
Any sympathizer wearing military buttons, or any insignias of rank or rebel service would be subject to arrest.12
As diehards were forced to scissor their confederate coat buttons, or cover them with cloth, the dismantling of war fortifications in the state moved into full speed: from Petersburg and Richmond alone Union soldiers heaved and dragged together acres of cannon, caissons, and ambulances.
In Petersburg, local blacks led Union officials to the “graves” where retreating, embittered rebels buried more than a hundred cannons and marked them with soldiers’ headboards.13
In Richmond, auctioneers peddled tens of thousands of war mules and cavalry horses that had weathered the struggle.14
In early May, Richmond’s post office opened its doors.
Grocers stocked shelves.
Halted printing presses swung into operation.
Come June, military officials partially restored the Richmond police force.15
With the Confederacy now a relic, the Department of Virginia even established a Bureau of Public Archives in order to preserve the paperwork left behind by the defunct nation.
By the end of summer, officials would send some eighty boxes of confederate war records to Washington.
Ship- and trainloads of paper, steel and materiel rolled and steamed northward, while one executive from the Petersburg Railroad was journeying to New York to procure the needed materials for impending repairs.16
Another president of a local Virginia railroad began negotiations with the federal government to replace the stretches of iron that confederates had taken up to patch together another rail line more vital to confederate survival.17
As early as the closing days of April, the commander of the Department of Virginia, General Ord, had authorized the resumption of railroad and canal services in and around Richmond.18
By May all but one of Richmond’s major tracks moved cars.19
Central Railroad laborers began rebuilding the fallen bridge over Rivanna River; and owners of the Petersburg South Side Railroad hired hands, purchased timber, and began fabricating bridge trestles.
Within days Virginians would be able to travel by rail from Lynchburg and Charlottesville, and from there to Richmond.20
For ex-slaves in particular, and all those who had trained themselves to listen closely to the war, soundscapes marked the biggest change of all.
At war’s beginning the not entirely imagined serenity of agriculture and slavery gave way to the thuds and ringing of armory; by war’s end, not only had the din of artillery ceased, but white southerners were left with an unsettling sonic irony.
With many southern church bells melted into cannon, they could not have rung in the victory had they won the war; and with empty belfries they could not mourn with clanging bells the massive loss of life that came with defeat.
Partially filling the audible void, blacks flocked in town streets, laughing, singing, and talking loudly, publicly rejecting the controlled sounds and space of slave labor.21
12 New York Times, June 17, 1865.
13 New York Times, June 17, 1865.
14 Richmond Whig, June 1, 1865.
15 Longacre, "The Army of the James, 1863-1865: A Military, Political, and Social History." (Vol. 1-4)", 989
16 Richmond Whig, June 6, 1865.
17 Richmond Whig, May 31, 1865.
18 ibid.980
19 ibid.980
20 Richmond Whig, June 9,1865.
21 Mark M. Smith, "Of Bells, Booms, Sounds, and Silences: Listening to the Civil War South" In The War was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War, ed. Joan E. Cashin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 9-34.
TO BE CONTINUED ...