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Materials > Readings > All That Makes a Man |
A Fountain of Waters, pt. 1
Oh! that my heart was a fountain of waters
that I might weep it away for this my ruined country*
For most antebellum Americans, disunion was, to use one of their favorite metaphors, a dark cloud brooding endlessly on the horizon, a storm ever building, never breaking. To be sure, there were some few who eyed it greedily, imagining its power to reorder lives and circumstances. But far more viewed it as a peripheral grimness. The cloud had been there every day of their national existence, and, while they did not like the look of it, they had had ample time to get used to it. When finally it crashed about their heads, then, they might have reacted with a weary fatalism. But the surprising thing is how surprised they were -- how suddenly and powerfully secession gripped them and shook them. In the early fall of 1860, there was in most Southerner's correspondence a stunning lack of attention paid to the election or its possible consequences. By December the subject was omnipresent, inescapable. "Nothing was talked of but secession," remembered one Southerner, "in every company, at every street corner, whenever two people met that was the subject discussed." How could Southerners not have seen secession coming, especially as they were, taken as a group, its architects? They did see it coming, of course. They voted and acted in ways that made it a likely, then an inevitable, then an accomplished fact. But they did not, could not, have foretold how it would feel.1
And how did it feel? In diary after diary, letter after letter, Southerners describe themselves as being in a state of what might be termed political shock. The particulars and timing, of course, vary from state to state, family to family, person to person-but the trajectory goes something this. Passing references to political affairs begin to lengthen, deepen, become more personal; the abstract busy-ness of everyday life takes on direction, then energy, it begins to surge, then swirl and build, until the writers find themselves at the epicenter of something mammoth and unknown to them. It is a curious feeling, so immediate and strong, so much larger than the little bodies which seek to apprehend it, direct it, join it. Eventually, when political affairs have achieved sufficient gravity, time begins to warp. The months that stretch out between the election and Sumter become a hurtling calm, a furious wait. And, then, finally, the wait-timeless and brief, exhilarating and terrifying-is over. It will be War. The mammoth something has swallowed up all the little writers, leaving of each only a disembodied narrative voice to comment distantly on the life it has surrendered to the rush.
This was an aspect of the secession crisis white Southerners shared regardless of political stripe. They were, all of them, at the center of the furious calm, safe for the moment but watching nervously as a storm raged about them, beyond their power and their ken. Men who had dedicated their whole lives to Southern independence pinched themselves as events they had set into motion took on a life of their own…and then slipped quietly out of their control. Others more removed from politics were altogether thunderstruck, exhilarated and dazed by turns. In diary after diary, unionist and disunionist alike document a reaction that seems a lot like shock. "Things seem to progress in a slow but certain way," Meta Grimball marveled from her South Carolina plantation. "Everything goes on as usual, the planting, the negroes, all just the same; and a great Empire tumbling to pieces about us." North Carolinian William Bingham compared the feeling to that of being drugged. "I am in a sort of stupor as to the political state of things," he noted, "and am waiting patiently for evils that are surely coming.…" Virginian Judith McGuire felt equally helpless: "Can it be that our country is to be carried on and on to the horrors of civil war?…I shut my eyes and hold my breath when the thought of what may come upon us obstrudes itself; and yet I cannot believe it." William Russell, a visiting Englishman, preferred a meteorological metaphor, claiming he'd been caught in the eye of a hurricane. "The chaos of opinions into which I was at once plunged over head & ears," he noted, "was all so opposite & so violent that like opposing forces they produced at the unhappy centre to which they directed their course complete absence of all motion." Here, in a freak calm within a funnel of whirling wind, Russell wrote, men gave themselves over to the storm, surrendering their destinies to the march of events. "Every man is an atom in a gale," he explained, "overwhelmed & controlled by the force which has set it and its fellows in motion & can of itself effect nothing or go beyond the blind submission to chance." Tellingly, each of these observers situated themselves at the quiet center of something inescapable and immense-Mrs. Grimball within a tumbling empire, Mr. Bingham at the patient forehead of evil, Mrs. McGuire before an unwatchable unknown, Mr. Russell within an atomizing gale-yet somehow their own centrality has the paradoxical effect of distancing them from the action-Mrs. Grimball potters about the empire's ruin, Mr. Bingham blinks heavily through his stupor, Mrs. McGuire's eyes are closed, and Mr. Russell can of himself "effect nothing." In each case, the writer does not even touch upon politics. What has captured them is not a particular position or ideology but a feeling, a sort of political vertigo. Events have rushed far ahead, leaving their witnesses disoriented in the wake.2
Without question, political persuasion and economic interest played the largest roles in determining whether a person supported secession. Personality and the psychology of the individual, however, determined the style of that support. Those who took to disunion with a sort of devotional enthusiasm tended to believe in romantic risk generally. They were comfortable with long odds, reckless posturing, and doomed causes, at their happiest and best when acting cavalier. Pessimistic and risk-averse Southerners, by contrast, knew in their bones that nothing good ever came of destruction. They were comfortable with compromise, steady living, and the status quo, at their happiest and best when worrying-and in the coming of war they had worries aplenty. These differences in emotional style are critical to understanding secession as an experience. As each of the would-be Confederate states seceded, the Southerners within it had to secede too.
Secession, then, was a mosaic of a million American unbecomings, each with their own peculiar dynamics. To Dolly Lunt and Louisiana Burge, disunion offered an opportunity to feel and speak in ways altogether new to them. The girls were cousins and playmates situated on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon line. In the winter of 1860-61 they exchanged a series of bitter letters, seizing, as they put it, the "chance for vehement language." They wrote as if their opposing views of secession were "final and unshakable," as if their former love for each other meant nothing amid the chaos of the times. "It was bombast on both sides," remembered Dolly Lunt. "We flew to trample and intimidate…to ride roughshod, and crush underfoot by trenchant sarcastic bluster." Partly, of course, they argued because they were ideologically opposed to each other's position. But the way they argued was an indulgence; they were drunk on rhetoric, tight with politics, delighting in damning the proprieties of the well-mannered lady in their epistolary howlings. And, as Dolly later admitted, they had imperiled their love for each other not because it meant nothing, but because it meant something, as all true sacrifices must. In these girls' secession psychodrama, their love for each other was the most important prop-in dashing it they made real their claim to have turned their backs on an entire section of the country they knew less well than they despised it.3
Secession was a particular godsend for the South's adolescent boys. This is not to say that most were fire-eaters; they weren't. But for anyone waiting for something dramatic to happen-and this would include most of the young men of any period-the wait was over. "We did not think; we were not capable of it," Samuel Clemens remembered, "As for myself, I was full of unreasoning joy to be done with turning out of bed at midnight and four in the morning…grateful to have a change, new scenes, new occupations, a new interest. In my thoughts that was as far as I went; I did not go into the details; as a rule [a young man] doesn't." Ill-suited or ill-disposed to their schoolwork and their clerkships, most of the South's young men, like Clemens, put aside the mundane drudgery of building a career and took up indulgent visions of adventure and fame. "Every man," remembered George Eggleston, "was a hero in immediate prospect." War had not yet come-it might never come; and in the posturing and bravado of arguing the secession line there was a sort of bristling manliness that better comported with their sense of who it was they wanted to be in the eyes of others. Southern prep schools and colleges, particularly, became hotbeds of secessionism. Buoyed by the spirit of student rebellion endemic in any age, Southern schoolboys happily poured their adolescent angst into a newly legitimated political form. Away at the West Military Institute in Nashville, C.O. Bailey wrote home that the town and the university were practically at war over a secession flag the boys had raised over the school. Bailey and his friends eventually took the flag down, but they published an article in the local paper taunting the townies and challenging them to a brawl. "The challenge has not been answered yet," noted a disappointed Bailey, but if it ever was he promised the boys would be ready. John Henderson was equally determined to take his stand against the establishment. Barely fifteen, Henderson was a student at the Alexander Wilson academy in Melville, North Carolina. "This evening I wore my [secession] cockade in to supper," he wrote his parents, "which offended young Dr. Wilson so much that he told me to take it off." Henderson refused, explaining to the headmaster that he had not intended to give offense and was merely expressing his own opinion. Dr. Wilson informed the boy that he had given offense, and intimated that only men knew enough of themselves and the issues to wear such things. Needless to say, Henderson's cockade remained right where it was, and, raging, he marched out of the dining room. Still livid the next day, Henderson consoled himself with the fact that his friends had been so impressed by his stand that they had all determined to wear cockades. In the spring of 1861, boys like Clemens, Henderson, and Bailey flooded into hastily organizing drilling companies, blithely leaving parents and sisters to worry for their welfare. "I am I own loth to see him engage in [such things]," wrote Amanda McDowell about her brother Fayette's joining up, "[but] I know it is hard…for a young man with any spirit to stay away now they make so much noise." Thus it was that across the South an army of children dropped their dusty books and took up the only role they knew to be worthy of men-fighters for freedom-and they knew it to be worthy because their books had taught them so. For any still curious as to why young men fought in the Civil War, they need look no farther than this-they fought because they were young. "It was such a 'Crossing of the Rubicon' as rarely happens at so early an age," remembered Randolph Shotwell, "It was more than the mere giving up of school, acquaintances, property, comfort; it was the complete cutting loose from boyhood to assume the responsibilities and perils of manhood; both magnified by youth's inexperience."4
Middle-aged men were by no means unaffected by this heady spirit. When Laurence Keitt received the telegram that South Carolina had seceded, he leapt into the air and waved the paper about, trumpeting that he felt "like a boy let out from school." Many of the South's thirty-somethings felt the same way. Their youth slipping away from them, their ambitions faded and dulled, secession was a chance to go through the male rite-of-passage again, and to this time get it right. When Georgia-born Lordy King set off for Harvard in 1848 he had promised his father that he would be the pride of the family. "It may sound ridiculous to say so now," he claimed, "but I hope or rather think that I will be one of these days or years a great man, whether a Washington or a Napoleon, a Bishop or a Tom Paine." On his twenty-ninth birthday in 1860, after twelve years of billiards, whist, drinking, smoking, whoring, and carousing, and after three years of hapless studying for the bar, Lordy woke to an awful truth. "How little have I done to be proud of," noted the would-be Napoleon, "how much to be sorry for." Needless to say, Lord King took to secession like a drowning man to driftwood. For Edward Butler it was not a birthday but a New Year's that triggered this personal stock-checking. "These annual summings up are unpleasant enough to those who are prosperous and happy," he wrote a friend in 1860, "but to those who are the reverse, who are discontented with themselves, and find their youth passing away with nothing done, no victory gained in the great battle of Life, surely the reflection can bring nothing but remorse and bitterness." By year's end Edward was in uniform. "I joined the Army," he admitted, "because I found I was good for nothing else." Daniel Hamilton didn't need a holiday to tell him he was on the wrong track. "It will be but a few days more and my connection with Government will cease," he wrote his son. "I am heartily glad for it has been a galling service, and I pant for the disenthralment of the South." The ease with which Daniel conjoins his own independence to that of the South is, of course, revealing. One wonders which was more important to him-the disenthralment of the South or the disenthralment of Daniel Hamilton. It need hardly have mattered, of course-they were, for the moment at least, one and the same.5
In late November 1860, Virginian William Thomson wrote his son, William, Jr., in Tennessee, decrying the foul work of the fire-eaters. The peace and business of the country, he claimed, were being threatened with destruction by madmen, and he begged his son to "keep cool and unexcited amidst the wrath." In his response, William Jr. told his father not to worry-"those…in favor of disunion are mostly a lawless set," the son agreed, stirred up by "bustling politicians" hell-bent on rule or ruin. Having secured a sympathetic ear, the father then fired back another anti-secession harangue. "I begin to think there is almost as much fanatic sentiment in the South as in the North," he claimed. "The nigger question and the everlasting nigger is about to drive many crazy and turn our country into a huge insane hospital." But William Jr.'s sympathetic ear suddenly turned deaf. Every day, he wrote his father, the locals were becoming "more and more embittered against the north, until at last they have come out for secession openly." William Jr. had himself converted to secessionism while participating in a debate over the question, "Has any state a right to secede from the Union?" There were five or six speakers scheduled to answer the question in the negative and only two or three in the affirmative, so he had taken the affirmative. When all the other speakers had taken their turn, there were, William Jr. claimed, "loud cries for 'Thomson' so I took the stand, and spoke, until I was from the bottom of my heart a secessionist, and I guess you are too." He guessed wrong. "Well, you say you are for secession," William Sr. wrote dejectedly, "I am not at all."6
Throughout the winter of 1860-61, the Thomsons exchanged long letters, attempting to win each other over. The son's letters are a veritable laundry list of secession's typical tones and phrases: Cotton was King, the South was unconquerable before its hearthstones, the Northern masses were about to rise up, and civil war was preferable to the alternative-seeing "the dusky sons of Ham leading the fair daughters of the South to the altar." Young Thomson even went so far as to take "Better death than dishonor" as his personal motto. William Sr.'s arguments were more personal; he was fighting not for the union but for his son. It was as if the boy had joined some kind of cult and had, with the standard-issue secession kit, set about building airy castles on borrowed rhetoric. "The young and sanguine are rapidly carried away into dreamy fields and flawed visions," the father warned. "Let yourself down to earth; don't take pictures for realities.… Cotton is not King, it is a vulgar error; by its frequent repitition the cotton states have come to look upon the words as facts.… Calm down! Down! Don't by the plaudits of the thoughtless carry yourself or permit yourself to lose sight of ancient and holy remembrances." But William Sr. understood that "ancient and holy remembrances" were fusty nothings to a young man full of pluck and that the real draw of secession was not what it was but what it was not-the humdrum everydayness of William Jr.'s new profession. William Jr. had gone out west to Tennessee to become a schoolteacher, but several of his students were as old as he was, and their parents were annoyingly intractable on questions of discipline and curriculum. "My scholars are over me too much," William Jr. admitted in one letter. "Some of them will come to school with no lessons at all, and if I say a word to them, they will insult me; and if I attempt to carry out any rules the parents get angry and if they don't learn they are angry." Responding to such complaints, William Sr. folded career counseling into his anti-secession argument, understanding that secession and schoolteaching were competing professions in the young man's mind. If he could make schoolteaching sound suitably dramatic, he seemed to think, secession might lose its allure. "The icebergs and rough seas [young men] encounter," he told his son, give them "often a greater staunchness and sagacity in navigating unexplored regions than those who are accustomed to smooth waters and close to shore sailing.…Lay yourself down to the work of acquiring greater endurance and double determination and you will rise equal to all difficulties that present themselves for your conquest." But most important, William Sr. advised, "Don't be hurried by the plausable appeal of young or old and artful secessionists…into placing your hopes of advancement and gratification of ambition on anything that may be offered in this destruction."7
Exchanges like the Thomsons' were rife in the winter of 1860-61. "John has resigned and gone to town to offer his services to the Governor," Meta Grimball grumbled of her son in December. "He is very much enchanted at getting rid of a profession his heart was not very much interested in." James Petigru thought he discerned the same impulse animating his nephew Johnston. He has given "into the general sentiment," Petigru wrote of the young man, "and being put the head of a regiment of Volunteers is no longer a pale inmate of the obscure building in St. Michael's Alley, where he used to pore over dusty books in a foreign tongue; but bestrides a gallant steed, with gay trappings, long spurs and bright shoulder knots." While such grumblings undoubtedly contain more than a grain of truth, their tone suggests that parents sometimes underestimated the depth of their sons' predicament - and their resolve. "You must not take up the erroneous idea that all this is a mere freak," Virginia-born Richard Corbin wrote his mother on running off to join the Confederacy. "My future happiness depends upon this step [for] if I don't shake off this dull sloth, my life will for evermore be embittered by the most galling and humiliating regrets.… Just think that if you have now any affection for your idle, useless son, how much more that affection will be enhanced if it is mingled with a little pride at his manliness."8
Men's enthusiastic embrace of soldiering, then, is easy to understand. Unlike their pre-war professions, the war combined with a felicity too perfect to be possible the twin drives of the masculine enterprise. To be sure, men joined the army to fight for cause, comrades, and country, and they gave fealty to these motives in their public remarks. But privately they were fighting, as they always had, for women and for eminence, and they confused the two as liberally as ever. "I always thought that you deserved something better," boasted William Pender to his wife on receiving a Colonelcy. "I would like to be a great man for your sake." Their pre-war professions had demanded discipline and patience and offered only sluggish prospects for advancement. The war, by contrast, demanded only an assent (I will join) and offered the possibility of a meteoric rise to distinction. Where antebellum society had condemned Southern men for their drinking, sloth, sin, and miscegenation, the war would reward them for the open-tempered expression of masculinity's most basic impulses to conquer and kill. And, most important, their drive for distinction and their role as women's protectors would be synonymous in a way they had never known. "I shall fight [the Yankees] as if they were entering your dwelling or ready to give the deadly blow to my dear wife and child," promised one Georgia recruit in a letter to his beloved. "I tell you, I shall feel like I am fighting for home, sweet home."9
So it was that across the South, each county seat became a muster ground, ostensibly dedicated to drilling, but more particularly to a celebration of the opportunity God occasionally gave a man to rise and be counted. The Confederate army would eventually become quite good at the grit and the grimness of war, maiming and killing as effectively as any that had come before it. But in the spring of 1861, this transformation lay well in the future. For now men were content to pose as soldiers rather than kill like them, standing more fixedly, more splendidly, before the daguerreotypist than ever they would before the enemy. Decked out in uniforms hand-tailored by their sisters and sweethearts, sporting "epaulets of gorgeousness rarely equaled except in portraits of field-marshals," they stared into the future with that rare certainty-they were, for the moment at least, exactly where they wanted to be. And why not? Marching and maneuvering was, after all, a blithe respite from their books and their professions, and they obeyed the commands of the drillmaster "not so much by reason of its being proper to obey a command," George Eggleston remembered, "as because obedience was in that case necessary to the successful issue of a pretty performance in which [we] were interested." In the evenings, the married men threw themselves into their letters home with all the fire of their early courtship, loving all the more intensely for the fact that their wives were some distance away. "Sitting down to write you a love letter carries me back to old times," James Williams told his wife. "You ought to be delighted at my occasionally leaving you," noted William Pender in a letter to his beloved, "for it shows me more plainly than anything else that you are my wife indeed." Reconfirmed in their patriotism, their manhood, and their marriages, the Penders and Williams could then sit back to enjoy their cigars, tug at their hipflasks, chat with their fellows, or avail themselves of the camp's many sporting women. The times were festive, death loomed just close enough to make life taste the sweeter, and all indiscretions could be explained away as the wages of patriotism. "Henry and I, after dinner, started off to hunt a good bathing place," Edgeworth Bird informed his wife from camp. "After steering over country, passing a few farm houses, a sick camp, or so, a great many fine views from high hill tops, and sundry well-opened chinkapin bushes, we found ourselves by a clear, cool branch, some 3 miles from camp." Stripping to the "natural man," Edgeworth and Henry plunged into the river and "by dint of soap and violent manipulation…became new creatures." Washed of their camp dirt and clad in clean garments, the men picked out a clover patch and sat down to enjoy some teacakes and "a little rye juice from a flask accidentally found in a pocket." They lit up their meerschaums and had begun to drift off to sleep when it began to rain. "Before we dreamed of it, so comfortably were we lolling and puffing away, the rain was upon us," Edgeworth noted. "Through rain and slush we tramped it to camp, forgetful that we had turned out pleasure seeking and thoroughly impressed with the belief that we were two flaming lights on the altar of patriotism, breasting the storm and fatiguing forced march for our country's good." So it was with most would-be Confederates. Forgetful that they had turned out pleasure seeking, they strutted about in their uniforms content in a world that made sense, a world where men did the fighting and women did the worrying.10
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