An odd name for a war in that there was precious little civility in it.
Watching the Ken Burns’ magnificent historical documentary, The Civil War, once again, I learned some facts of which I was ignorant.
Regarding the first shot fired in The Civil War, that being the shelling of Ft. Sumter in Charleston, S. C. The fort was commanded by Robert Anderson, the Confederates by P. T. G. Beauregard. Both men had attended West Point prior to the outbreak of hostilities between North and South. Anderson had been Beauregard’s artillery instructor. Beauregard was so gifted that Anderson asked him to stay on an extra year following his graduation, to serve as his assistant. As he sat inside the besieged fort, Anderson could have not possibly escaped the irony of that battle, and its combatants.
As the war heated up, the Union asked for 75,000 volunteers; 200,000 made application. In the South, the Confederacy asked for volunteers. 100,000 showed up, but a third of them were sent back home, either because the South couldn’t outfit them, or, as was a common feeling by both sides at the outset that this would be but “a ninety-day war”; thus, more than that would not be required to defeat the North.
Many unusual groups answered the Union call; in several cases, entire towns volunteered. The mayor would serve as their commanding officer, the town doc would be the surgeon for his group, etc. The 6th New York volunteers had so many toughs [Bowery Boys] it is said you had to have a criminal record to be accepted.
The average height of the Civil War soldiers was five foot six, the same as in the Revolutionary War. [In our day, the average height of an American male is five foot ten.]
On July 7th 1865, Mary Surratt was hung with three other conspirators of Lincoln’s assassination. I am informed she was the first white woman hung by orders of the United States government. I am likewise informed that the evidence against her was thin, but as Burns implied, retaliatory passion for Lincoln’s murder trumped due process.
It is said it took the convicts five minutes to die which, accurately interpreted, means they died of strangulation, not hanging. Hanging someone properly meant the large knot [which contained – interestingly – thirteen loops] was to snap the neck of the victim imposing near instantaneous death. We are left to conclude that the executioners in this case were not very proficient at their task. Then again, in the spirit of those times, perhaps they were…
Sorrowfully, in the aftermath of many of those battles, it was not uncommon to find in low gullies, and strewn about fields and rock walls, dead boys who had seen but thirteen or fourteen winters, and would never see another. Lying tangled near them perhaps, their instruments evermore in tatters, dead drummer boys from both sides, their ages often but nine to ten years; and other soldiers moaning as their blood drained freely upon the ground. Such an upending perversity: To spend your whole life in fear of dying, and to fill your final hours praying for it.
This is why, while recognizing its occasional necessity, I hate war. How many of these soldiers – as well as the families they left behind – might, under other circumstance, have been good friends or warm neighbors? I sometimes wonder if the cloaked-in-thunder individuals who provoke or declare the wars which others must fight, might be given a reality check by waking one morning to find themselves on the front lines. These leaders seem to have a high tolerance for pain, as long as the pain is someone else’s.
But even this “front line” thought has a flaw: such an experience might cause them to flinch, to hesitate when a war is truly needed. [Think ISIS.]
I ran across a poem attributed to English poet Thomas Hardy re: The Boer War [circa 1900.]:
THE MAN HE KILLED
Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
I shot him dead because –
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That’s clear enough; although
He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps
Off-hand like – just as I –
Was out of work – had sold his traps –
No other reason why.
Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half- a- crown.
Unfortunately their encounter was in a completely different setting where they had predetermined roles; their only possible relationship was as enemies. It seems a most natural action that infantrymen would shoot at and possibly kill each other. Bringing tolerance, forbearance into battle, may well end fatally for you.
And yet… and yet, sometimes compassion seeps into the most vile of confrontations; like The Christmas Truce of 1914 in Belgium, The Angel of Marye’s Heights, The Lone Survivor [Marcus Luttrell], The Fetterman Massacre, and many other forgotten, unrecorded acts of compassion, one ‘enemy’ to another throughout the history of man.
It is not our madness, but our humanity – which sustains us.
May it ever be so.
Lucky Garvin
