This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust Page B

wrote of the struggle not to abandon his principles in his treatment of a group of Union prisoners. “I saw some nasty blue Yankees in the cars at Atlanta,” he wrote in 1864,

    and as I looked at our poor Boys there with their grisly wounds and some of them cold in death I could much more easily have taken a dagger and said to them see there what a carnival of blood you have made and as you love it take still more that of your own hearts take that with what you have already drunk I could more easily have done that than I could act toward them in the part that I know a truly brave magnanimous man must ever act toward a foe in his power and unarmed. May God give me grace to live a Christian.

    As it reiterated “take…that…take that,” McLees’s letter home enacted in language the violence he had abjured; the pen freed him to express a brutality he had resisted with dagger or sword. Yankee Oliver Norton proved less controlled after his messmates fell victim to Confederate fire, for he abandoned all thoughts of magnanimity or Christianity. The feeling “uppermost in my mind,” he explained, “was a desire to kill as many rebels as I could.” 6
    Once the constraints of conscience and custom loosened, some soldiers, especially in the heat of combat, could seem almost possessed by the urge to kill. A soldier in action became “quite another being,” one of “almost maniac wildness,” with eyes darting, nostrils flared, and mouth gasping, a correspondent for a southern newspaper observed. A
New York Tribune
reporter at Shiloh described this frightening transformation. “Men lost their semblance of humanity,” he wrote, “and the spirit of the demon shone in their faces. There was but one desire, and that was to destroy.” It was difficult for him to think of these men as Christian soldiers, or even as beings who were fully human. 7
    Soldiers, too, found themselves surprised by the power of some comrades’ exhilaration. Byrd Willis of the Army of Northern Virginia wrote in his journal about seeing a member of his unit “jumping about as if in great agony” during an 1864 skirmish. “I immediately ran up to him to ascertain when he was hurt & if I could do any thing of him—but upon reaching him I found that he was not hurt but was executing a species of Indian War Dance around a Poor Yankee (who lay on his back in the last agonies of death) exclaiming I killed him! I killed him! Evidently carried away with excitement & delight, I left James to continue his dance.” Numbers of Civil War letters and diaries describe similar instances of soldiers playing at being Indians—imitating war whoops, painting their faces with mud or soot from cartridges in what they saw as Indian style—when going into battle. By replacing their own identities with those of men they regarded as savages, they redefined their relationship both to violence and to their prewar selves. 8
    The emerging delight in killing was not restricted to the heat of battle. Confederate artillery officer Osmun Latrobe described his pleasure contemplating a job well done after Antietam: “I rode over the battlefield, and enjoed the sight of hundred[s] of dead Yankees. Saw much of the work I had done in the way of several limbs, decapitated bodies, and mutilated remains of all kinds. Doing my soul good. Would that the whole Union army were as such, and I had had my hand in it.” For Latrobe, this “work” represented a successful execution of his duties as a soldier. Vengeance was simply a form of justice, the mutilated bodies equivalent to the biblical eye and tooth of retribution. Half a year later Latrobe would be celebrating “glorious heaps of Yankee dead” after Chancellorsville. Sergeant William Henry Redman was in pursuit of Confederates retreating after Gettysburg when he wrote his mother of his near obsession with destroying the rebels who