the physical devastation of battle. And yet death ultimately remained, as it must, unintelligible, a âriddle,â as Herman Melville wrote, âof which the slain / Sole solvers are.â 58 Narratives of the Good Death could not annul the killing that war required. Nor could they erase the unforgettable scenes of battlefield carnage that made soldiers question both the humanity of those slaughtered like animals and the humanity of those who had wreaked such devastation.
CHAPTER 2
KILLING
âThe Harder Courageâ
âI am aposed to one man killing another [but]â¦I shall fight.â
THEOPHILUS PERRY
T olstoy once wrote that what fascinated him about war was âits realityâânot the strategies of generals or the maneuvers of troops but âthe actual killing.â He was âmore interested,â he explained, âto know in what way and under the influence of what feelings one soldier kills another than to know how the armies were arranged at Austerlitz and Borodino.â 1 Killing is battleâs fundamental instrument and purpose. And in the Civil War it was killing, not dying, as Orestes Brownson observed in 1862, that demanded âthe harder courage,â for it required the more significant departure from soldiersâ understandings of themselves as human beings and, in mid-nineteenth-century America, as Christians.
Most Civil War combatants were very like one anotherâmetaphorically, if not literally, brothers, in the oft-repeated trope of the war. When racial difference eroded this common identity, killing became easier, as in the many reported instances of atrocities against black soldiers, such as the infamous 1864 massacre at Fort Pillow. But in most circumstances and for most individuals during the war, killing posed a problem to be overcome. In this respect Civil War soldiers were hardly different from their fellow combatants in other wars. Studies of warriors in ancient times, in Napoleonic armies, in World Wars I and II, and in the Falklands confirm the judgment of Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, U.S. Army Retired, specialist in military psychology and former West Point faculty member, that âman is not by nature a killer.â Indeed, he often resists even firing his weapon. 2
But just as human beings die differently in different times and places, they come to kill differently too. Human reluctance to murder expresses itself within a particular historical and cultural moment. Civil War killing, like death more generally, required workâintellectual and psychological effort to address religious and emotional constraints, as well as adaptation to the ways this particular warâs technologies, tactics, and logistics shaped the experience of combat.
The first challenge for Civil War soldiers to surmount was the Sixth Commandment. Dying exemplified Christian devotion, as Jesus had demonstrated on the cross, but killing violated fundamental biblical law. As one Texas recruit explained his fears, fighting in battle seemed âthe mostâ¦blasphemous thing perhaps on earth.â Sermons and religious publications North and South invoked and explored the traditional âjust warâ doctrine, emphasizing that killing was not merely tolerated but required in Godâs service. There is ânothing in the demands of a just and defensive warfare at variance with the spirit and duties of Christianity,â an oft-reprinted tract for soldiers emphasized. Citing a variety of Old Testament texts, the
Confederate Baptist
insisted that men were exempt from the commandment not to kill âwhen lawful war calls for the slaying of our countryâs foes.â While southerners most often appealed to self-defense against invasion as the source of the warâs justness, they invoked as well the notion of divine sanction for a holy war in which they served as Confederate crusaders. Northerners just as avidly claimed God for their side as
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