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Materials > Readings > All That Makes a Man |
A Fountain of Waters, pt. 2
Oh! that my heart was a fountain of waters
that I might weep it away for this my ruined country*
.... 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
What they were ill-prepared for, however, was the world of dying they had unwittingly embraced. The political ideology of the average Confederate could be-often was-boiled down to a simple phrase: death before dishonor. As the war ground on, however, many Confederates discovered a fatal contradiction in this simple sentiment-death could, in and of itself, dishonor a man. How much nobility is there in dying of dysentery? How much grandeur in a gurgling gutshot? As their fellows and friends fell to pieces at their sides, the soldiers left standing were forced to admit, even through their grief, that a dead man's sacrifice was not so very pretty when viewed from up close. In the maimed, mangled, and decomposing patriots left to rot upon the field, there was a sort of dishonor to the body that ate well into the honor one gained in dying for cause and country. "This fight beggars description," James Edmonston wrote home after Shiloh and the Seven Days Campaign, "I have never before witnessed anything to compare to it and I pray God that I may never witness anything like it again. On the battlefield men are lying in great piles dead [and] mangled horribly in every way [and] decomposition has gone on so far that it is almost if not impossible to go upon the fields." It was not the prospect of dying, per se, that had shaken Edmonston; it was the fact that, heedless of the cause for which a man might fall, death remained intractably corporeal. "A death upon the battle field would lose half of its horrors to me," he noted, "were it not for the fact that I have no very near relatives here who would or could attend to me, and the probability is that I would lie rottening upon the battle field unburied." Even if a soldier could steel himself against the corporeality of death, however, there was the matter of its indiscriminacy, impersonality, and randomness. For many Confederate soldiers, death came suddenly and unceremoniously, catching them unaware, picking them out of a crowd with a sniper's bullet, a rogue shell, a ricochet, or friendly fire. In more than a few cases, a man was killed while chatting amiably with friends who could only stare on in wonder as he fell. Intelligence or decency could not guarantee a man's survival; bravery and mettle could not guarantee a good death. Ordered to drop back behind a tree line, Joshua Callaway and most of the Twenty-Eighth Alabama did as they were told. One member of the company, however, decided to contradict the order, not wishing to be seen fleeing before the enemy. "One of our boys told him if he did not get behind a tree he would be shot," Callaway noted, but he just "smiled & replied, 'I am not afraid of them.'" A minute later a ball struck the man in the privates, putting an end to his defiant gesture and unmanning him rather completely. Needless to say, this was not what most men had in mind when they proclaimed their willingness to pour out their all on the altar of patriotism.11
Nor were the indignities of random, impersonal, and gory death the only ones a soldier had to bear. Smaller, daily indignities added their share of miseries as well. The life of a soldier, William Nugent noted, consisted mostly of "mud, filth, rain; every imaginable species of vermin crawling all around you; little sleep, hard work & fed like a race horse; constantly annoyed with stray bullets, whizzing shells & pattering grape; dirty clothes and not a change along; little or no time to wash your face and hands and very little soap when the opportunity offers." Nugent was even plagued by his government-issue underwear. "I have three pair of drawers purchased from Government," he noted, "which have become all unsewed and hang very loosely about my person. They are about 2 sizes too large and are perfectly loose." Edwin Fay had the same reaction to his Confederate undergarments. "If you have an opportunity of sending me you had better send me a pair of drawers," he wrote home. "Those I drew from the Government would not fit any body in the world." These might seem petty concerns for soldiers under fire, but it was a little difficult for a man to screw himself up to an honorable death with his underwear down around his ankles.12
If death and soldiering did not look too good up close, neither did the army itself. Victorian Americans were not a cynical people; they tended to confuse easily at the notion that moral ends could be achieved by immoral means, and an army was undoubtedly an immoral instrument. Confederate soldiers were horrified, for instance, at the effect their own armies had on the countrysides they were supposed to protect. "A country could hardly have a worse curse or plague than to have a large army march through it," Joshua Callaway wrote home. "We completely eat it out as we go. The locusts of Egypt were not more destructive." Other Confederates agreed. "Amanda, I never knew how mean the army could do in a country," noted one Georgia recruit. "I believe our troops are doing as much harm in this country as the Yankees would do.… Where this army goes the people is ruined." Another Louisiana recruit described the damage inflicted by the army on its own supporting populace as "scarcely inferior" to any the poor farmers might fly to. This was particularly troubling given the fact that many of the soldiers had themselves been simple farmers before they volunteered. Then, too, like any bureaucracy, the Confederate army was plagued by imbeciles and their concomitant nonsensities. Generals were often drunken and foolish, politicians were often wrangling and petty, and soldiers were often left to be governed by policies that defied common sense, a subject on which every man considered himself an expert. Edwin Fay described a typical army Catch-22: A sick man, he said, could not be discharged unless he was on his deathbed. By then of course he was too sick to move and would be sent to a hospital where he could not be discharged until he got better. Once better, he would be put back on active duty until such time as he got sick again. Governed by policies like these, soldiers were left to wonder if they would be discharged when they died or if they would still be required to muster for reveille. "I believe that after I am done being a solider," noted James Williams testily, "I'll be a philosopher!" After all, he figured, "I have learned to submit my will and my personal comfort even-to men who are fools."13
Civil War armies were composed of amateur soldiers, men who had kissed their wives, slung their rifles over their shoulders, and headed out to scare some Yankees. Most of their soldiering experience was limited to spotty militia service and reading the romances of Sir Walter Scot and the epics of Homer, books whose heroes rose in valorous rage, slaying at will and single-handedly carrying the field. Confederate soldiers were not fools, however. Such festivals of gore might make for compelling reading, but even the schoolboys knew that the Romans provided the best model for an army. In the Roman scheme, each soldier was but an interchangeable part of a larger unit; victory was more important than heroism, the army was more important than the man. European tactics had codified the system, but this was the basic philosophy behind Civil War armies. Drilling was about stamina, obedience, discipline, and, within these, the subsuming of the self. The cadences of drum, voice, and march were designed to facilitate this process, to play and replay the same tired rhythm until the individual did not act or react but was simply carried along in the hypnotic motion of the multitude. Thus it was that a collective collapsed into a singularity-a regiment, a division, an army.14
Discipline, of course, was not something grown Southern men were accustomed to receiving, especially at the hands of other men. The most convenient model for such a relationship-one man directing the labor of another-was slavery, which undoubtedly rubbed some Confederates the wrong way. "It grinds me to think that I am compelled to stay here," Joshua Callaway remarked typically, "I've got a dozen masters, who order me about like a negro." The twentieth-century sensibility seizes on such vocabulary instantly-an Old Southerner comparing himself to a negro!-but the truth is Southerners compared themselves to slaves all the time. The least little chore-toting a bucket, roofing a house, digging a ditch-was apt to invite the comparison. In fact, given a sufficiency of ill-humor and a moment's reflection, every white bucket-toter in the South probably indulged the idea that such things were unworthy of his whiteness. As an index to disgruntlement, then, such language is easily over-read. Callaway himself followed up the comment about his dozen masters with "but I talk very plain to them occasionally"-something slaves rarely did with impunity. "To all this [discipline]," he noted in another letter, "[the soldier] soon becomes accustomed and, if naturally ambitious and resolute, he is jolly at all times and under all circumstances." So, if it was slavery, it didn't really chafe all that much. An army did not work without discipline-Joshua Callaway understood this; following orders was not submissive and the directives of a superior officer were not personal affronts (the sticky point in the South). Discipline, moreover, went both ways-from the top down, certainly, but also from the bottom up. "An officer has to be very careful of his reputation for courage," William Nugent informed his wife, "for upon that in a great measure depends his efficiency & ability to command the soldiers under him. When once the troops lose confidence in the bravery of their Commanders they necessarily have an utter contempt for him, and will not cheerfully obey his orders. I know I would dislike to have a cowardly Captain over me, and I presume my Subs are pretty much like me in disposition." So long as they were devoted to a common cause (whatever that might be), most Confederate soldiers were willing to accept army discipline.15
But if soldiers accepted the discipline, they resisted the loss of themselves. The notion that men were interchangeable flew directly in the face of Southerners' self-beliefs. Depersoning was supposed to be a Yankee phenomenon, like soulless machines, soulless men, and the cult of interchangeable parts. In the South, a man was supposed to be able to find his own way, claiming for himself all that his decency and his dignity demanded. But to their own frustration, soldiers found that the loss of self was an impersonal enemy; try as they might they could not locate its source in the actions of a man who could be challenged or knocked down. Rather, it seemed a part of the air they breathed or the dirt they slept in, elemental, an inalienable part of the project itself.
Lafayette McLaws's dissolution of self began almost instantly. In June 1861, he boarded a Virginia-bound train with 116 volunteers from Lowndes County, Georgia. It being summer, the boys removed their shirts, then their shoes, then whatever they chose. The resulting odor, McLaws noted, was "tremendous," and the fact that the boys sang and cheered most of the way only contributed to the all-out assault on his senses. Disoriented by the bellowing yells and the stifling smells, McLaws began to lose himself in the general press of humanity; a tangle of limbs, a stew of sweat, a symphony of patriotic huzzahs, the occupants of the train car were one man, singing with one voice, stinking with one stink. "From that time," McLaws noted, "there was an end of all individuality." From then on men marched and ate and died just the same. The abstracting process was so irresistible that some men even began to forget what they looked like. "I have no opportunity of judging of my appearance," James Williams complained to his wife. He had seen "the reflection of a dirty dust begrimed face once or twice in a glass," but could he even be sure that it was his own face he saw? "You can hardly tell one man from another," Joshua Callaway noted. "Everybody's hair, whiskers, skin and clothes are the same color." Eating, drinking, sitting, sleeping, living, and dying in dirt, men finally just seemed to become dirt, vacant golems with pretty dreams. The whole experience convinced Edwin Fay that Moses had been right-men were composed of the dust to which they would surely return. In the case of soldiers, however, God had added a generous portion of some more substantial element. "I think the 'dust' of which soldiers…were made must have been comminuted atoms of iron," Fay told his wife. "No man whose sinews are not of triple steel and whose frame is not of Brass can stand a 3 yrs. Campaign if I judge from my experience." Fay had been physically toughened by the war. He could make day-long marches without food or break, then throw himself down and sleep soundly on the ground. But did the war stop there? If it was making steel of his sinews and brass of his frame, what was it making of his softer organs? Collapsed on the ground, Fay had ample time to consider what he had become. "I am not worthy to live," he wrote his wife helplessly, "I am unfit to die. My heart has become harder than the nether Mill Stone. I have no love for anything save you and my child." But did he not also fear that he had become too hard even for this last love? A metallicized Fay might survive the war, might even find his way home, but of what use was a metal man to a wife of flesh and blood? Was such a man worthy of her affections, her touch, her bed? "If I come home," Fay told his beloved, "I think I shall bivouac for the future in your flower yard." Perhaps that was as close as a golem dared dream of being to something so much softer than himself.16
Across the South, the war remade men in its unforgiving image. "War is fast becoming the thing natural, tho' abhorrent to my feelings," noted William Nugent. "I go at it just as I used to go at law-suits. Still I am not by any manner or means fond of the profession. The idea of being continually employed in the destruction of human life is revolting in the extreme. Necessity imperious and exacting, forces us along and we hurry through the dreadful task apparently unconscious of its demoralizing influences and destructive effects both upon…nation[s] & individuals." In distancing themselves from the death they caused and witnessed, men found themselves also at a disconcerting distance from their own decency, and it was a gap they wondered if they should ever close. "[We are] hardly allowed to sigh at the fall of our friends and relatives," noted Joshua Callaway, "and if we do happen to shed a tear secretly, it is soon dried up to make room for one for some one else. We never will have time to contemplate and comprehend the horrors of this war until sweet, delightful peace is restored to us, & we can take a retrospective view."17
It has long been maintained that such demoralization was mitigated by the fact that Civil War soldiers volunteered, fought, and died alongside kinsmen and townsmen. A unit was composed not of strangers but of friends and relations who had known each other all their lives. The privates were all schoolmates; their captain was the local grocer, planter, lawyer, or alderman. They had joined up together; they would see it through together; they were comrades. Yet, in reading soldiers' correspondence, one is struck not by the deep familiarity but by the deep dysfunctionality of such all-male ensembles. Camp living was, for the most part, womanless living, which drew its expected share of complaints. "Occasionally a woman passes camp and it is three days wonder," noted Edwin Fay. Tally Simpson echoed the sentiment: "There is not a woman that passes camp but there are a hundred men, more or less, huddled together, gazing with all their eyes." When Willie Bryant was finally transferred to a post in a town, he shuddered to think of going back to camp life: "For 10 months I had not held half an hours conversation with a woman, not two conversations with the same woman; that alone shows that I must have been unfortunately and unhappily situated." But if the unrelieved womanlessness was a problem so was the unrelieved maleness. Men smelled bad; they drank too much, talked too much, cursed too much, played too hard, couldn't cook, couldn't wash a dish, didn't respect property, and tended to spit on the floor. This was all an accepted, even a celebrated, aspect of male/male society, but when taken to extremes it began to compromise the project itself.18
To be sure, plenty of younger men enjoyed the mud fights and wrestling matches that were an inevitable part of camp life. But for the vast majority, some combination of age, natural reserve, and social standing made such pastimes seem a trifle undignified. Men kept each other at a distance; that was the point-the distance was the measure of the other man's respect, and in consequence the measure of one's own self-respect. Normally, of course, women were available to fill in these emotional distances and to help mediate men's relations with each other. But in a womanless camp, all this distant self-respecting made for a very lonely life. "In contact with men I am philosophic, to a certain extent stoical and self possessed," William Nugent wrote his wife Nellie, "with you I am swayed by an impulsive affection, and the simple story of love." None of this is to say that men were never impulsive or affectionate with each other, but most preferred not to do so for prolonged periods. "I would be the gladdest person in the world to see you all and talk with you a while," Benjamin Jackson wrote his wife Martha, "for I see nobody here but men and they appear to be very sorry company for me."19
Isolated within themselves, touchy and standoffish, men stewed in their self-imposed distances, deploring from afar their touchy and standoffish comrades. These men were sharing, as Oliver Wendell Holmes would later put it, "the incommunicable experience of war," an experience most of them would remember and celebrate the rest of their lives. But while they were sharing it, they were not much inclined to share with each other; however mammoth the experience that bound them up together, each man felt dependent on himself alone. "In these times the best motto is take care of Number One," argued John Fort. "Generosity has ceased to be a virtue, for you can lend or give anything away and have nothing yourself." "I have never seen so selfish a place as a camp," Edwin Fay reluctantly agreed. "No one seems to care much for any one else." Some of this selfishness, certainly, originated in the nature of war itself. So much misery and deprivation, indignity and death, throws each man back on himself alone, severing the ties that bind him both to individual men and to humanity generally. Isolation becomes the soul's best defense against the corrupting influences of the world around it. "There is so little of that human nature which makes the whole world kin, nowadays," William Nugent explained, "that we cannot rely upon any one with certainty. The distress everywhere prevailing…[has] thrown every individual upon his own resources for a support and have had the effect to isolate, it seems, every human being." Other men, though, were less willing to excuse such selfishness as a product of the extreme circumstances of war. They believed they discerned within it a familiar pattern, a pattern that had dogged them in their professions and in their schools, a pattern which lurked not in war or in humanity generally, but in the hearts of men specifically. "I tell you, it is awful to think of the wickedness and corruption attending an army," noted William Dickey. "I sometimes think there is not enough goodness to save us from being destroyed. I believe if the country is ever saved, it will be from the many prayers of the good women of our country. Don't understand me to say there is no good men. But there is comparatively speaking, so few."20
The remedy for all of the common consequences of war-the brutality of death, the depersoning of soldiers, the selfishness of men-was simple: a man needed to find his way back to his sweetheart, to the decency she symbolized and the succor she provided. At the beginning of the war, each man had planted his patriotism in the sturdier soil of his love of woman. It was for her that he was fighting; it was for her that he would suffer and die. Let the men spit and the politicians wrangle; let the generals drink while the soldiers fought-it was all endurable while she could make sense of it. Rejecting a subordinate's request to visit his dying spouse, Stonewall Jackson famously put it to the anxious officer that a man's devotion to his country was more important than his devotion to his wife. From all indications, Jackson was one of the few Confederates who felt this way. "A man's family is dearer to him than anything in the world," noted Edwin Fay, "at least mine is & 40 Confederacies may go to the devil if I am to be kept away from all I hold dear during the rest of my life." William Nugent concurred: "May the remembrance that I have so gentle and noble a creature for my life companion," noted Nugent, "ever buoy me up amid the many trials through which I am called to pass and nerve my arm in the dread hour of a battle. Dear is my country to me, yet dearer far is [the] treasure [I have] in [my] little woman." Indeed, for most Confederate soldiers choosing between wife and country was impossible, ridiculous. Their woman was their country and their cause, the reason for which they fought and killed. Choosing between them was like choosing between female virtue and manly honor-silly on the face of it because they were mutually reinforcing. "What would poor man do," asked Walter Taylor, "what would he be worth but for the softening, purifying, all powerful influence of his most precious gift, his highest treasure-woman!?" Taylor worked as an adjutant on General Lee's staff, and his duties could be petty, pesky, and often beneath him. But Bettie made them all sufferable, gave them a larger, more tangible purpose that he could grasp and hold on to. "Whenever I am harassed by an accumulation of miserable paper calling for my attention," he wrote his sweetheart, "or annoyed by any imaginary unreasonableness or ill temper on the part of my Chief, how much it adds to my patience and stimulates me to greater efforts to perform my duty manfully with a single eye to the good of our cause, when I imagine your face looking over my shoulder with its encouraging smile and an approving look in those dark fathomless eyes, so pure, so irresistible in their expression? Ah! My good angel, it is a sweet and yet a sad reflection to me, to think of the unlimited control exercised over my whole life, my every act, by my intense desire to win and be worthy of you."21
In woman, then, a man could rejuvenate himself and his cause, finding in his love of her the grounds for his love of country. The key to this process of romantic renewal was letter-writing. In the exchange of letters between swain and sweetheart, a man was given a chance to rekindle his enthusiasm-for love, for life, for dying in defense of them both. In writing to his beloved, a man poured out his heart, damning those who deserved damning, rewarding those who deserved rewarding, remembering, as the words and phrases tumbled onto the page, that there was individuality and dignity within him yet, and that there was at home something to live for, fight for. Composing a letter, however, was no mean feat. Pens were as apt to cut the paper as to ink it. Ink was as apt to smear or trail off invisibly as to render a smooth stroke. In winter, pens froze to hands so numb they could barely be forced into operation. "It is cold enough this morning to freeze the hair off a cast Iron dog," one soldier remarked acerbically, "my ink is ice and fingers here in the open are not far short of it." In summer soldiers had the opposite problem-papers were soaked with sweat and pens were slippery as men baked their brains in stifling tents or browned their skins under a merciless sun. "The weather, Lizzy," noted a member of the Twenty-First Alabama, "demands a 'mere-mention' to-day, as having attained [a] degree…compatible with [the] existence [of no] one but a Salamander or the Fire King." Rain and snow, of course, added their own miseries, particularly for those in leaky or nonexistent tents.22
Regardless of shortfalls and heedless of inconveniences, however, soldiers and their sweethearts persisted in writing-on anything, with anything. Men who had foresworn scavenging among the Yankee dead made an exception for writing materials. Others crushed strawberries for ink and sharpened sticks for pens. One soldier promised his wife that if they had to take pencils to corn shucks they would always write to each other. "O you have no idea how it helps me to get a letter from you," Joshua Callaway wrote his wife, "Really it is all my solace." George Peddy felt the same way: "You cannot tell how well I like to read [your letters]," he told his beloved Zerlina. "The lines you write look like they are written with gold & the words seem to mean volumes to me." Letters were all-important; nothing took precedence. One soldier told his wife to let their farm go to seed rather than shorten her letters: "Letters are to be attended to before work," he commanded. "Work can be put off." Another soldier consumed a letter rather than his dinner, though he admitted he was half-starved. "Although I was very hungry and had eaten but one mouthful," he wrote his wife, "I rushed to a smouldering oak fire to devour the contents of the long looked for epistle." One man even went so far as to claim that if he received a letter during battle, he would not hesitate to stop, drop, and read. It did not particularly matter what the letter said. The letter was important even as a thing. It had mass, though little, dimension, though unimpressive, and substance, though frail; but, most important to the soldier, it had a point of origin-a world away. This frail little something came from somewhere else, proving thereby the existence of a place beyond the trenches and the minie balls, a place delicate and undefiled, capable still of making such wonderful things out of paper.23
But the attempt to find one's way home by mail was fraught with problems beyond material shortages and inconveniences. The Confederate mail service was slow and unreliable, and, particularly late in the war, a man might go a month without hearing from anyone. In the long stretches between letters, Tally Simpson remembered, a man's mind could go dormant, as if in some kind of hibernation. "Inactivity, indolence, and various other things," he wrote home, "have very nearly reduced me to the lamentable state of a nontalkative Quaker. I lay my back upon my pole bed, lost to every thing around me like a snake in winter time, and am only aroused from my stupor by a call to dinner (if a few biscuits & a little rank bacon gravy can be called dinner) or the tap of the drum to roll call. But I must confess that the reception of a letter from old P [his hometown] moves my spirit, and Quaker-like I must up and speak for myself." Then, too, the war had a way of disrupting the letter-writing process, and with it the metaphysical journey home. Seated in his tent, Winston Stephens was just beginning a letter to his young bride when he became aware of a man at the door. "Through courtesy I invited him [in]," Winston noted, but "he came in with his pipe in mouth and then Gabe Priest came among and in he walked with his pipe in his mouth." Pretty soon it seemed to Winston as if the men had chosen his tent for some kind of smoke-off, making it impossible for him to lose himself in a letter to his beloved. Edgeworth Bird was also deeply offended at the intrusions of men upon his epistolary reveries. "As lovely a Sabbath day beams upon us this morning, my darling, as is ever the good fortune of mortals to witness. It is bright, cool, and bracing. Of late, we've had fine rains, there is no dust and the fields are putting on a fresh suit of velvet green.…" One can almost picture Edgeworth, settling into this pastoral rhythm, preparing himself for a long, letter-sponsored daydream of home. His own words begin to lift him, transport him to some spring meadow near his house in Hancock County, itself resplendent in a suit of velvet green. He puts his back against a familiar tree…he laces his fingers behind his head…and soon…he is drifting…drifting.… And then, just like the man in the meadow, Edgeworth is suddenly startled from his reverie-the wind has shifted over the meadow, bringing with it the telltale odor of some nearby cow pasture. "The strong passions of men sweep like a desolating sirocco over all this…beauty," he wrote his wife peevishly, "and there is no pleasure, no peace." For James Williams it was not pipe smoke or a "desolating sirocco" that cramped his epistolary pleasure but the constant teasing at the hands of his "comrades." "They make so much fun of me for writing so often to you," he wrote his wife, "that I sometimes do it almost on the sly: taking time when Col. Cayce is absent, or spreading out some report before me, that I might appear to be copying."24
Even if time and materials could be found, a man needed someone to write to. Letters to and from fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers were important, but it was the exchanges with a sweetheart that fired a man's self-belief. His love for her was the foundation on which he could build and rebuild his love of country; his all-consuming belief in her provided the sacred space in which he could surrender and reclaim his soul, remembering himself and the reasons for which he fought. But what could a man do if he had no sweetheart? How could he fire his patriotism and steady his arm if he had no woman to anchor and make meaningful his many sacrifices? The case of John Floyd King (known by his middle name) and Lin Caperton illustrates the lengths to which a man would go to find a female focus for his war effort. Floyd met Lin while attending school in Virginia. Their courtship was perfectly typical up to a point, progressing easily along a trajectory that had launched many a successful Victorian marriage. Floyd requested permission from Lin's father to write to her, didn't exactly get it, but wrote her anyway; they exchanged photographs; and finally Floyd confessed his love for her in the parlor of the Caperton's Elmswood plantation. The problem, though, was that Lin was quite young, had grown to know Floyd as a family friend, was somewhat confused when his affections turned so grave, and would probably have agreed with her father when he noted that she was too young even to know her own head aright.25
It was at this point, while Lin did not know her own head aright, that Floyd was swept into the army. There Lin became the center of his world. "The severities of the service softened by your influence are by no means unpleasant now," he wrote in one of his weekly letters, "and my duties no matter how irksome, when I think of you pass off as lightly as possible." "You and you alone engage my thoughts and the tenderest of my heart's joys," he noted in another. "Of you and you only…can I think, and dream, and live." Lin's letters to Floyd were more cautious, tepid. She could not return his love, she said, but she did appreciate it. "I know myself too well not at least to respect the love of your very generous heart," she told him. Even while respecting his heart, however, she sought to deflate it a little, as if it was some beautiful balloon, risen to dizzying heights on nothing but air. "Tis your own goodness…that can ascribe to me qualities which I regret sadly not to possess," she informed him, "but I will say nothing more upon this subject tho' I do feel so deeply."26
Lin's demure responses only complicated an already confusing situation for Floyd. Floyd claimed that his affection for Lin was perfectly "celestial." Undoubtedly, it was. But his missives also contain some rather earthy overtones. "I shudder! lest my love, in the innocence of its nudity, may press too much upon you," he wrote Lin in one letter. "I cannot resist making [confessions of love] whenever I commence writing you," he told her in another. "My pent-up emotions, always pressing to be relieved, rush to my pen, the moment I give them the slightest opportunity." Floyd was not aware of these overtones, of course. He would himself have been rather shocked at the nudity rushing in upon his celestial Lin. His was a torrential prose style; the words came in an ecstatic surge, undisciplined and unself-conscious. What was this thing that had seized him? He seemed powerless to stop it, powerless to explain it. Even when he tried, he seemed only able to pair his own inconsistencies with the word yet. "My heart is so full I do not know what to say, yet I am urged by a resistless desire to express myself." "How tiresome my confessions must be to you!… I feel it, yet I cannot resist." "I cannot see why I had any hope of your returning my affections and yet I would think you cruel if you did not." "I would do all, yet I dare not know what to do to win your heart. Can you not tell me?" But Lin could not tell him. There was after all nothing to tell. She did not love him. And yet… How could this be? She had become everything to Floyd. "Through vicissitudes and through grief," he wrote her, "through the din of cities and through the pleasures of home; through the changes of traveling by land and by sea; through the duties of garrisons and the long fatigue of marches; through the rain and cold of the midnight watch, through the camp and through disease, and through death I have ever loved you constantly, and with my whole heart!" The Confederacy could not warm him in the snow; slavery could not give him a reason to march; honor could not explain disease or death. Lin explained the war to Floyd; she made sense of it. He was fighting for her. "My devotion to you is based upon my love of country," he confessed, "for were it to be conquered, and disgraced, with what power, or with what conscience could I come forward to claim your hand? A degraded soldier I would seek obscurity in some distant hemisphere, never forgetting you, and, ever holding you dearest in my heart, I should live in the unhappy knowledge that you and my country had been taken from me by the force of arms alone." Lin sustained Floyd's war effort, through rain and snow, disease and death, until finally-after enough rain and snow, disease and death-she simply became his war effort.27
And it was at this point that Lin's head righted itself, and she requested that Floyd not correspond with her anymore. Floyd was incredulous, furious-even though he had on occasion described his love for her as unrequited. "Dearest Miss Lin, my beloved, what can you mean? Have you raised me to Heaven merely to cast me out again?… Surely, surely you love me still. Oh!, I am too embittered to speak, yet I must write on." Floyd begged her to reconsider, or to at least postpone her decision. He needed from her only a shred to hope on, but he needed that shred. "Tomorrow, our Generals say we will have a battle here," he noted, shameless now. "What do you think will be my feelings when riding down the lines of action to be conscious that I have been discarded and disgraced for no reason by the one I love & whose honor I am fighting for?…Should some considerate ball find my heart, remember thro' life how I have loved you." But did he love her? Certainly he loved the opportunity she gave him to love himself, to know himself, to feel himself. And he loved the meaning she gave the war. But somewhere within his torrential prose lurked the truth. "At times when I have shut out all others save yourself from my mind," Floyd wrote his beloved, "I wonder whether I am laboring under a mental aberration or whether my dreams are real." Floyd did not want Lin; he wanted a dream; he wanted the version of her that helped him through the snow. What's more he expected her to give it to him. "I desire only to understand you," Floyd lied, "Yet I would rather remain in darkness than to be enlightened as to any conclusion of yours that would be disastrous to myself!! You see selfishness rules me still. I want you to tell me all, yet only that which is to render me happy! Oh, Miss Lin, what would life be without you? Surely it would be a day without a sun."28
Floyd King sustained himself on a romance he in part invented. Tally Simpson, a soldier in the Third South Carolina Volunteers, sustained himself on a romance he wholly invented. Tally had been excited early in the war by the attentions paid him by women, attentions that formed no little part of his enthusiasm for the war itself. "Ladies at little stations, and even in towns and cities," he wrote his sister of his trip to Richmond, "go up to the soldiers, any and every one, and converse with them as familiarly as old friends." Shortly thereafter, however, Tally's regiment settled into camp and suddenly there were no women at all, at least no available or respectable ones. His sense of womanlessness was further aggravated in 1862 when his brother and fellow volunteer Dick Simpson married and was discharged from the army due to ill health. Now trudging through the war alone, Tally became all the more envious of the married men around him, but he was himself without prospects, and camp was no place to look for a wife. "I am entirely without a gal," he lamented, "my future is a blank, but if my life be spared and I reach home safely after peace has been declared, that blank shall be filled if there is any gal in all this big world fool enough to say y-e-s." Tally spent some time fantasizing about this as-yet faceless fool, but he needed some more fixed point on which to focus his imagination. Rained on and shot at did not mean much without a woman, and if Tally died before he found one, for what, for whom, would his life have been sacrificed?29
Finally, it was Tally's aunt who dispelled his ennui, writing richly embroidered missives about a young woman she felt would be perfect for him if ever they met. Tally was beside himself. "Your description of Miss Fannie is truly charming," he wrote his aunt gratefully, "and my feelings have already been enlisted in her favor. Tho you say it is impossible for me as any young man to fall in love with a girl without seeing her first…I place implicit confidence in what you say and [your letters] have created curious as well as pleasant feelings in my heart." After a few more of his aunt's letters, Tally owned that he had completely fallen for Fannie, a woman he had never met and never corresponded with, a woman who quite possibly didn't know his name and quite definitely didn't know the depths of his feelings for her. Tally's sisters apprised him of the impropriety of loving a woman to whom he had not been introduced and questioned whether he could know her character well enough to consider bringing her into the family. None of this mattered to Tally. "I picked up a pamphlet some time ago and found a portrait of a most magnificent looking lady," he wrote a cousin, "[and] I showed it to Harry, and he declared that it looked exactly like Miss F. I looked at it hard and studied it well. Then I cut it out and put it carefully away to look at it every now and then for my own gratification. It is before me now, and I imagine I see Miss F in all her glory." Tally did not need an actual woman; all her quirks and faults might even have gotten in the way. What he needed was a focal point on which to specify his love for women generally-and through them his love for life. Miss Fannie suited this purpose admirably. Precisely because he did not know her, she became Everywoman, a divine amalgam of woman's best traits. Yet precisely because she did exist, out there, some where, drawing her beautiful breath from a place he longed to be, she helped to anchor his dreams of outliving the war. In flying to her, he flew home, a way he could not find so easily without her. Miss Fannie was Tally's life-wish, drawing its breath from that place beyond the camps and the killing. And that was a place worth defending. "Tis woman's influence that chastens the orator's eloquence," noted Tally, warming to his favorite subject, "that increases and exalts the statesman's patriotism and compels him to exert his great intellectual powers for the promotion of the nation's welfare. Tis her influence that nerves the arm and emboldens the heart of the warrior and causes him to give full utterance to the noble expression, 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,' [It is sweet and seemly to die for one's country]."30
Southern soldiers began the war with a sense of simple synonymity between their love of woman and their love of country. They were encouraged in this by period propaganda, but it was a conflation they made easily, routinely, well before the war. As this study has suggested, antebellum men were accustomed to seeing women as an essential part of the masculine enterprise; women were witnesses to male becoming, sponsors who allowed a man to feel that his acts of self-love were acts of self-sacrifice, thus bolstering his self-belief. The Civil War amplified these basic dynamics, borrowing against the enormity of death to transform Love, Sacrifice, and Belief from the merest platitudes into the constituting elements of a man's life. The distracting mundanities of the antebellum period melted away and masculinity's twin drives-a love to fill the heart and a bid to live forever-were renewed, reenergized, and felt, perhaps for the first time, in all their purity and power.
A Confederate's patriotism, then, was planted in sturdy soil; his love of country was anchored in his love of woman which was his love of self in part. Even early in the war, this cozy arrangement proved susceptible to certain pressures. Instead of facing Death, Confederates faced Inconvenience, Unpleasantness, and Discomfort, adversaries hardly more appropriate as a test of manhood than the ones they had faced in their prewar professions. As important, their comrades fortified their will to die (in maddened charges on entrenched enemies) but could not give them a reason to die. Only a woman could do this. To be sure, men understood themselves to be dying for some ideology or other, and so they were. But the meaning of that sacrifice, their emotional experience of it, was, like all men's sacrifices, only possible because a woman bore it witness. So long as a man could see himself through the idealized eyes of a woman, he would continue to fight. If ever he could not, romance and patriotism, love of woman and love of country, might become disaggregated, and then he would be forced to choose between them.
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