Listening to Nineteenth-Century America by Mark M. Smith

Author:Mark M. Smith [Smith, Mark M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 19th Century, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Technology & Engineering, Acoustics & Sound
ISBN: 9781469625560
Google: 6vTGDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2015-12-01T02:56:43+00:00

( ( ( PART IV

Noises Hideous, Silences Profound, Sounds Ironic

Listening to the Civil War and Reconstruction

The American Civil War was a contest between sections concerning matters of monumental importance. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost on the battlefield and at home over questions of bondage and freedom, states’ rights and nationalism, and liberalism and conservatism. But because antebellum elites in both the North and the South had become accustomed to hearing as much as seeing these fundamental issues, they listened hard to the war and the reconstruction that followed.

Listening and hearing occurred in a context defined by the gravest constitutional issues and monumental slaughter, which were themselves inscribed with aural meanings that helped shape how and which events were heard. Listening to the heard war is helpful for several reasons. First, it muddies the tidy distinction sometimes made about the separateness of home and battlefield and contributes to a more recent emphasis stressing the conceptual necessity of blending the two, especially when trying to understand the Confederacy.1 Second, listening shows how particular constituencies constructed the soundscapes of the Civil War differently. There were, in effect, multiple acoustic battlefields and home fronts during the war. Third, listening to actual and perceived soundscapes in the Civil War South suggests how, in addition to all the other well-known forces that wilted the southern will to prosecute the war, the introduction of new noises and the muting of old sounds probably enervated white southerners and so helped erode their ability to resist their noisy northern enemy.2

While the unprecedented scale of the war, the industrial might needed to prosecute it on both sides, and the introduction of new technologies (such as rifled muskets) meant that the Civil War generally created different and louder sounds than any war that had preceded it, Confederates experienced new, jarring noises and silences on the home front to a far greater extent than northerners, who found many of the fewer qualitatively new noises compatible with their imagined and preferred future.3 While mobilization in the North was, for the most part, in literal and metaphoric harmony with Federals’ idealized and actual industrial, free labor soundscape, gearing up for war in the South became too northern for many white southern ears. Because the actual sounds of war were far fainter in the North, there was less adjustment to make than in the South, where noises of battle and strife increasingly encroached on the tranquil, idealized home front. For other southern constituencies, slaves in particular, the sounds of war were the welcomed melody of freedom.

The Civil War was fought with the aural idioms of antebellum sectionalism in participants’ ears and minds. Those fighting the war on the battlefield and at home commented on the tumult of battle, the noise of military loss, the sound of victory, and the silence of defeat. Listening to how they heard the war allows us to appreciate the complexity of contemporaries’ understandings of the conflict. Sounds of war and noises of military encounter were not spatially delimited:

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