1958: RIFLES FOR WATIE by Harold Keith
The mules strained forward strongly, hoofs stomping, harness jingling.
“I've seen and done things I want to forget;
I've seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat,
Blown and shot out beyond belief.
Arms and legs were in the trees.”
-PJ Harvey, “The Words that Maketh Murder”1
How do you teach a child about the Civil War? How would you teach a class of middle schoolers about the political disagreements that grew into political conflicts that grew into our bloodiest war, a war whose end and aftermath still reverberates through our politics today? Would you, to your class, point out that the war was kind of stupid?
“What a stupid war it was. To him, the issues seemed all mixed up. Each state in the Union seemed to have a different reason for fighting. In Kansas, it was the Free State party versus the proslavery people. In Missouri, the Union faction living in the southern part of the state was fighting the rebels living to the north. In the Cherokee Indian Nation, it was the Stand Watie Cherokees fighting the John Ross Cherokees over the old removal bitterness, and slavery seemed very little involved. In fact, he had heard that John Ross, leader of the Northern Cherokees, owned a hundred Negro slaves and apparently was satisfied with the custom. And in all the states and territories, gangs of bushwhackers who didn’t know what they were fighting for, roamed and pillaged the war-torn country, defying both the Union and rebel armies.”
I haven’t read a lot of books about the Civil War that contain the line “what a stupid war it was.” Even though hundreds of thousands of people were killed, this was still the Good War, the one that the Good Guys won because they fought for the Good Reasons. They kept the Union together. They abolished slavery. They proved to the world that democracy could survive. Glory glory hallelujah, His truth is marching on or whatever. And as I read Rifles For Watie, the 1958 medalist and first Civil War novel I had read for the newsletter, I thought back to how I learned about the Civil War in middle school history class. It was tragic, sure, a lot of people died, but I definitely remember all of the heroic figures who came through and did great things during this era; surely this couldn't be a "stupid war" if it gave us men like Abraham Lincoln, maybe the only man who could hold our nation together. Surely it couldn't be a stupid war if it gave us Ulysses Grant, the brilliant general who succeeded where so many others had failed2. Surely it couldn't be a stupid war if it gave us the man I remember very distinctly from middle school history, the guy who my teacher made sound like the biggest badass in American history, General William T. Sherman.
To eighth-grade Tony, Sherman ruled. He was, of course, fiercely dedicated to the Union, to Lincoln's vision, and to the abolition of slavery. But Lincoln had to shrewdly accrue and spend political capital to navigate the fractured country as a politician; as Grant eventually rose through the ranks to become Lincoln's Commanding General, and then eventually President, this became a bigger part of his job as well. But Sherman's primary job was to destroy the Confederacy. Literally, physically destroy it. Not just in masterminding tactics to 'out-general' the rebel states, although he did that, too: he is, of course, most famous for marching through the state of Georgia in order to sever Confederate supply lines, confiscating everything his army could use, and burning down everything else in sight. In his Special Field Orders 119 and 120, Sherman set the tone for his march to the sea:
"In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested, no destruction of each property should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless, according to the measure of such hostility."
My middle school teacher taught me that as part of "a devastation more or less relentless", Sherman's soldiers tore up the railroad ties across the state, and to make extra-sure that the Confederacy couldn't get the trains started back up again, the soldiers would partially melt the railroad ties over flames and the twist the molten metal around trees. Sherman was so awesome to learn about as a kid, and while I was reading Rifles, I happened to be concurrently reading Sherman's own memoirs, which are full of badass bon mots like the "more or less relentless" crack:
"This war differs from European wars in this particular: we are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies."
Or this one:
"In accepting war, it should be “pure and simple” as applied to the belligerents. I would keep it so, till all traces of the war are effaced; till those who appealed to it are sick and tired of it, and come to the emblem of our nation, and sue for peace. I would not coax them, or even meet them half-way, but make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it."
Or this one:
"I know we can manage this class, but only by action. Argument is exhausted, and words have lost their usual meaning."
I don't know, man, I live in an era where there seem to be a bunch of white supremacists just running around and taking over state legislatures and oh yeah running for president while they're on trial for the time they refused to accept that they lost the previous election which is also part of what the secessionist states believed, and it feels kind of good to read the words of a badass general who kicked all of their asses back in the 1860s and said stuff like “argument is exhausted” instead of “we sent yet another New York Times reporter to yet another Indiana diner to understand this Klansman’s economic anxiety”.
But the thing about General Sherman - and Grant, and Lincoln - is that he hated war. As effective as he was at waging it, he knew it was a tragedy as it was happening. More often than those badass quotes about putting the rebels in their place, you will find other laments from Sherman like “every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster”, or this one:
“You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.”
Every war is stupid and no war is civil. Every war is thousands upon thousands of breathing moving human bodies being exploded and dismembered and carved up and starved and frozen and bludgeoned, as if a sadistic child were playing with dolls made of meat. Sherman wasn’t a badass because there weren’t badasses in the Civil War, there were only breathing moving human bodies, and then human bodies that weren’t breathing or moving anymore.
Jeff Bussey3, a boy of sixteen who grew up in Bleeding Kansas, is the protagonist of Rifles. As the novel opens, the rebel states have just started to secede, and the Bussey home is repeatedly assaulted by “bushwhackers”, small-scale domestic terrorists jumping over the state line from Missouri to viciously attack the free-staters next door, because the horrifying political violence of the Civil War was both preceded and succeeded by different horrifying political violence. Inspired by seeing a pre-presidential Lincoln give a speech when he was a child, Jeff enlists in the Union infantry and hears the ominous comment from his medical examiner that “lots of fellers nowdays can’t wait to put on some blue clothes and go out and shoot at perfect strangers.” But he brushes that off and keeps itching to see battle, wondering “what made everybody so gloomy? War was a lark, an adventure made for men.” And you can probably guess where things go from here: Jeff eventually sees battle, eventually sees his friends die, and spends years getting shot at and frozen and terrorized. In the climax of the novel, he’s able to bust a double agent who is selling weapons to a Confederate general, but the first three-quarters of the story are just a punishing run through the miseries of war (author Harold Keith had collected interviews with Civil War veterans while working on his master’s degree in history, and his notes formed the foundation of his eventual novel), through a “hospital town” where piles of bodies lie out and rot in the street, through having to confiscate food from a starving family, through legions of soldiers that all seem to have different ideas of what the objective of the war actually is, through an actual battle that’s just two crowds of men slamming together and starting to beat the crap out of each other, because that’s what the Civil War was, it was just lumps of meat punching each other:
“Hot with battle now, he felt only that he wanted to encounter the worst and get it over as quickly as possible. Then with shrill yells and screams and do-or-die expressions, they met the rebels hand-to-hand in the dark gloom of the trees, using clubbed muskets, fists, knives, stones, anything they could get hold of. Jeff hurled himself upon a big fellow in brown, shrieking at the top of his lungs and thrusting upward with his bayonet.”
That’s why Sherman hated war, and Grant, and Lincoln. It’s why Lincoln lamented the war’s existence in his second inaugural address, and went so far as to say that America deserved so vicious a punishment for the sin of slavery. In his 2003 analysis of political violence Rising Up And Rising Down, William T. Vollmann provided a deep analysis of Lincoln’s justifications for fighting the war, opening with the tragic fact that Lincoln probably would have done anything to avoid the war entirely if he could:
“Lincoln, we must begin by saying, hates slavery almost as much as John Brown, is sickened by the cruelty and sheer selfish unfairness of it. Among his papers a fragment from this period states that ‘if A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B. - why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A.?’ Unlike John Brown, however, Lincoln stands at a miserable loss as to what to do. Seeking, as the saying goes, to do well by doing good, one sometimes finds oneself - like the whole nation - at cross-purposes.”
And the war came. The stupid war.
I was in the marching band when I was in college, and I was told, at one point, about a tradition that the band used to have: they would stand at the main entrance to the university and play as students left the school to fight in a war. They don’t have this tradition anymore with an all-volunteer military, but when large numbers of students were drafted (or enlisted en masse) to fight in both world wars or Korea or Vietnam, the band was there to play for them. And they were there to play when students left to fight in the Civil War as well, and students left the university to fight for both armies in the Civil War.
What do you even say to each other in that situation? A guy who sat next to you in class, lived next to you in a dorm, you’re going to say “well, goodbye, I sure hope I’m not running into a crowd of people to punch you or carve you up with my bayonet”? Except that you kind of do hope that, because that’s how wars are won? May we never find ourselves in that situation again, and if we find ourselves heading that way, may we be brave enough to say to the person next to us “this is stupid”.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1939 medalist, Thimble Summer by Elizabeth Enright.
Harvey’s 2011 album Let England Shake is more directly about the first World War and not the American Civil War but the sentiment still applies.
Also - I'll say it! - a very underrated president. Grant is one of my favorite figures in American history. Read his memoir.
Please just go with it.