Linderman, Gerald F. (1980). Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War. (click preceding link for information on purchasing from Amazon)New York: The Free Press.
Excerpts permanently located on a Library of Social Science Website here.
Abstract (from page 91): “Another appeal from “The Women of the South” appeared during the summer of 1863: “It is impossible for us to respect a coward and every true woman who has husband, father, brother, or lover . . had rather see him prostate before her with death’s signet on his noble brow that has never been branded by cowardice or dishonor, than have him forfeit his good name and disgrace his manhood by refusing to do his duty to his country.”
1—“Every war begins as one war and becomes two, that watched by civilians and that fought by solders.”
8—“Many soldiers called combat the test of manhood. They often spoke of courage as the “manliest” of virtues. In corroboration, the 1861 edition of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language identified as virtues “much valued” by Americans, “chastity in females” and “bravery in men.” A failure of courage in war was a failure of manhood. A Union staff officer warned that cowardice robbed the soldier of all his manhood.
9—“A Louisiana sergeant, Edwin Fay, the target of Federal balls that narrowly missed, did not “believe a bullet can go through a prayer,’ for faith is a much better shield than steel armor.” The common understanding was that the more complete the soldier’s faith, the greater would be God’s care. Perfect faith seemed to offer the possibility of perfect safety.”
10—“Godliness bore not only on individual survival but on the outcome of battles. A conviction of wide currency was that God would ensure the victory of the army whose collective faith was sturdiest.
Indeed, soldiers on both sides professed confidence that the benefactions of godliness would manifest themselves on every social level—that the faithful soldier would survive combat; that the army of greatest faith would win the battle at hand; that the cause whose adherents possessed the faith indomitable would prevail in the war.
As courage and godliness were linked, so were cowardice and disbelief. the Catholic chaplain of the 14th Louisiana was convinced that none were more cowardly than those who failed to renew their faith and relieve themselves of mortal sin by taking the sacraments prior to battle. In the mind of the soldier, godliness sustained courage and victory; doubt underwrote cowardice and defeat.”
12—“Perfect courage was thus the best guarantor of an honorable reputation. The linkage between honor and courage manifested itself in Civil War solders’ frequent referenced to the “honorable death”—inevitably the courageous death—and the “honorable wound”—inevitably suffered in the course of courageous action. Wounded at Ball’s Bluff, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., contemplated with joyful pride the prospect of dying a “soldier’s death.”
21—“Reduced to tactical terms, courage was preeminently the charge—the boldest actions were assumed to be those of offensive warfare.” In the first years of the war the rank-and-file held themselves to a strict standard that of fighting “man fashion.” They were expected to wait stoically through the tense and difficult period just prior to battle; to stand and receive enemy fire without replying to it(one of Lee’s soldiers called this “the most trying duty of the soldier”); and to resist all urges to quicken their pace under fire, to dodge or duck shells, or to seek cover.”
22-23—“Dame and his comrades were apprehensive far in advance of the test of battle, for they knew that mercilessness awaited failure. Seeing in battle a soldier so fearful that he was about to run, Rutherford B. Hayes threatened him with a pistol and vowed that “he would kill him on the spot” if he did not “go in and fight.” The man regained control, returned to the battle, and was immediately killed. Hayes was glad to have given the weakling the death of a hero rather than that of a coward.”
25—“Soldiers did not often challenge those harsh reactions to evidence of fear in battle, because they considered the results of the test decisive and unalterable. They thought of the test as if it were a litmus revealing their single essence, either courage or cowardice.”
29---Pain expressed, however, was weakness revealed. “Our American man,” Whitman wrote, “ holds himself cool and unquestioned; master above all pains and bloody mutilations.” Thus wounds offered opportunities to demonstrate a courage transcending even that of the battlefield. Mary Livermore, a Sanitary Commission organizer and frequent traveler to battle sites and hospitals, thought that “it may be easy to face death on the battle-field, when the pulses are maddened by the superhuman desire for victory.
But to lay suffering in a hospital bed for months requires more courage.” Hospital courage meant staying calm and not complaining, even to the point of death. “He made no display or talk; he met his fate like a man.” The coward, on the other hand, abject and groveling, gave voice to his pain.”
Whitman recorded the testimony of a doctor who in six months among the wounded had seen none who had died “with a single tremor of unmanly fear,” and the poet’s own experience bore out the claim: Not one case of a soldier’s dying “with cowardly qualms of terror.” He thought that record was the “last-needed proof” of American democracy. Mary Livermore did encounter a dying soldier who told her, “I have lived an awful life, and I’m afraid to die. I shall go to hell.” “Stop screaming,” she commanded. “Be quiet. . . .If you must die, die like a man, and not like a coward.”
31—“Thus the state of one’s courage remained until the end—and especially at the end—a matter of the most intense concern, both to the soldier and to those who surrounded him.
31-32—“A more accurate gauge of the weight with which courage’s war bore down on soldiers was to be found in their discussions of wounds as desirable, even valued, acquisitions. Rutherford Hayes “fiercely wished” a wound—and was rewarded with five. The colonel of the 9th New York complained to a wounded fellow officer: “You are a lucky man, Colonel. I’d give a thousand dollars if I had your wound. I am afraid my friends in New York will think me a coward because I never can get hit.”
32—“Searching for his wounded son on the field at Antietam, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., observed of the survivors that the “wounds they bore would be the medals they would show their children and grandchildren by and by. Who would not rather wear his decorations beneath his uniform than on it?”
One of Louisa May Alcott’s patients, shot through the cheek, requested a mirror; his image worried him. “I vow to gosh, that’s too bad! I warn’t a bad looking chap before, and now I’m done for’ won’t there be a thunderin’ scar? and what on earth will Josephine Skinner say?” To Alcott the answer came easily: His fiancée would surely admire his “honorable scar,” “lasting proof that he had faced the enemy, for all women thought a wound the best decoration a brave soldier could wear.”
32-33—“As George Stevens of the 77th New York watched the ritual dismissal of a New Jersey officer caught in cowardice, he thought, “how much better it would have been to have fallen nobly on that field of battle, honored and lamented, than to live to be degraded and despised.” A Wisconsin private wrote home that he “would rather have been under ground, than to have been branded as a coward before the whole Reg’t.”
An Indiana small-town soldier, Theodore F. Upson, told of his colonel’s confrontation with one of the regiments skulkers. “Get up . . .Cherry. Go to your Company and show yourself a man for once. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” “I will go, Colonel, since you insist, but I am sure if I go up there I shall be killed” “You had better be killed than have the reputation of a coward.” Cherry went up on the line and was killed instantly by a shot from a Confederate battery.
36—“But in the Civil War indiscipline was chronic, and without the power of the ideal of courage both to impel and compel men to combat, neither the Union nor the Confederate government could have mounted so comprehensive an effort. In courage was the armies’ cohesiveness.”
62—“If the good did die, they died good deaths. The conviction early in the war, again reduced to the most direct terms of popular belief, was that the hero’s death was a happy death. As an infantryman in Lee’s army, Hunter watched from the heights above Fredericksburg the charge of the Union’s Irish Brigade.
He and those about him were “filled with wonder and a pitying admiration for men who could rush with such unflinching valor, such mad recklessness into the jaws of destruction.” Though that evening the Irish Brigade could count standing only 250 of the 1,400 who had charged, Hunter said of the fallen that because their behavior had been “superb,” “none of the bitterness of death was theirs.” “A brave man dies but once, a coward dies a thousand times.”
“By applying that calculus, armies beaten in such battles as Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg could ignore the outcome as measured by traditional indices—the comparative numbers of dead and wounded, the army forced from the field—and stress instead the triumph of comportment to the exclusion of results.”
63—”Northerners’ accounts of the Fredericksburg defeat carried the same message, if anything intensified. They acclaimed the courage of Union soldiers exactly as if that bravery had carried the day. A colonel of the 77th New York wrote: “None were ever more brave or more desirous to test their valor. The heroic deeds of those who did advance against the enemy will ever redound to the glory of our arms.”
Walt Whitman reported that “never did mortal man in an aggregate fight better than our troops at Fredericksburg. In the highest sense, it was no failure.” Though the attackers could see before them strong Southern batteries and rifle pits, “Yet all the brigade went forward unflinchingly. . . [S]till the men advance with unsurpassed gallantry—and would have gone again further, if ordered.” Currier and Ives pointed the same moral in their print of the battle: “This battle shows with what undaunted courage the Lion-Hearted Army of the Potomac always meets its foes.”
63-64—“Even who acknowledged defeat often found palliation in courage. Chamberlain of the 20th Maine spent the night following the battle in “a ghastly bivouac among the dead,” building breastworks of bodies stripped of clothing. Still, their valor had been “splendid” if unavailing and their ghosts were “glorious.”
Colonel George B. Sanford of the Regular Army’s 2nd Dragoons was remorseless in his description of the battle: “[T}he most desperate piece of fighting in the war, as from the first men realized the utter futility of the attempt. It was simply to go up and be killed without even the hope that finally the position would be taken.” Nevertheless, courage offered some redemption: “It was a horrible battle, relieved only by the wonderful gallantry of the men and officers.”
Such distinctions between battlefield conduct and battlefield verdict carried Unionists through the long months between mid-1861 and mid-1863 as Federal forces suffered heavy defeats at the hands of Confederate armies in the East.
64—“Courage also helped to insulate the soldier against the trauma of combat. Its code ordained that the soldier react to the sights of the battlefield with sang froid, the ability to remain unmoved by the horrors of war. Consider the manner in which John Esten Cooke chose to establish the bravery of John Pelham, the Confederate artillerist: “He saw guns shattered. . .or men torn to pieces, without exhibiting any signs of emotion. . . the ghastliest spectacle of blood and death left his soul unmoved—his stern will unbent.
Similarly, when a Northern volley struck at head level a line of Mississippians and they lay eyes open, faces bleached by “a sickly summer rain” and foreheads “stained with ooze and trickle of blood,” Stonewall Jackson passed by, looking long, but did not shudder. “Not a muscle quivered,” Stiles admiringly reported. “He was the ideal of concentration—imperturbable, resistless.” To tremble might signal horror, and to feel horror was to yield to despicable effeminacy.”
65—“Given particularly the kinship of courage and godliness, courage could hardly be exercised by evil men or incorporated in an evil cause. If courage was a universal virtue of constant quality—and all soldiers thought it was—it became difficult to deny that demonstrations of courage were proofs of an ennobling purpose. Should the foe then prove courageous, a basis for mutual respect and sympathy would be created.”
75—“Those who assaulted Missionary Ridge were described as “completely and frantically drunk with excitement.” It was likened to a dream state. Poague recalled that in his first battle, actually a Shenandoah Valley skirmish, a “curious mental exaltation seized us; an inward questioning as to whether it was all a dream.”
At times both dream and intoxication entered the description. When Ripley charged Confederate guns in Peninsula fighting during the fall of 1864, ‘it was a dream, so great was the intoxication of the excitement.” Some felt it as a state of physical abnormality: seized by “the fever of the rush”; “gone wild with battle fever”; “wild with uncontrollable delirium”; delirious with . . . wild excitement.” It became even a species of dementia, a temporary insanity: the charge raising “one mad desire” to trample down everything.
88-89—“Women promised rewards to the willing, ordinarily less mixed than those offered in this Southern poem:
And now, young man, a word to you:
If you would win the fair
Go to the field where Honor calls
And win your lady there;
Remember that our brightest smiles
Are for the true and brave,
And that our tears are all for those
Who fill a soldier’s grave.”
91—“Another appeal from “The Women of the South” appeared during the summer of 1863: “It is impossible for us to respect a coward and every true woman who has husband, father, brother, or lover had rather see him prostate before her with death’s signet on his noble brow that has never been branded by cowardice or dishonor, than have him forfeit his good name and disgrace his manhood by refusing to do his duty to his country.”