Living Hell by Michael C. C. Adams

Author:Michael C. C. Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2014-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

But the grandsire’s chair is empty,

The cottage is dark and still;

There’s a nameless grave in the battle-field,

And a new one under the hill.44

Individual grief often overshadowed news of victories. “Alas,” wrote Emma Holmes after Lee’s spring 1862 victories, “we have scarcely the heart to rejoice, for our land is filled with mourning for the heroes who had shed their life-blood for its liberty.…” The military custom of allowing clusters of hometown boys into one unit made the burden of loss worse, as a whole family or half a village might get wiped out in a day. After a skirmish in which Georgia militia tangled with the Federal 46th Ohio and 97th Indiana in November 1864, a bluecoat knelt by a badly-wounded fourteen-year-old Rebel who told him the adjacent corpses belonged to his father, two brothers, and an uncle. On the Prairie Grove field in December 1862, a Union officer watched a woman with children clinging to her skirts searching among the gray-coated dead. She found a brother, then another. When she reached her husband, she emitted a “wild unearthly shriek.” He thought that “the suffering of that woman none but God can know.”45

Grief often could not be contained or bottled up. Richmond socialite Thomas DeLeon described Mrs. Breck Parkman, a guest at an autumn 1862 wedding, trying to get through the ceremony in a church where only a year before she had married a soldier, now dead. She “tottered to a chancel pew, and threw herself prone upon the cushions, her slight frame racked with sobs.” Louisiana diarist Sarah Morgan conjures for us, finally, the razor-sharp cut of devastating loss. On February 5, 1864, she recorded brother Gibbes’ death and her initial denial: “Not dead! not dead! O my God! Gibbes is not dead. Where O dear God!” Just six days later, on February 11, she wrote of her other brother: “O God O God have mercy on us! George is dead! Both in a week! George our sole hope—our sole dependence.” They had been killed in the same action.46

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