Civil War Citizens

At its core, the Civil War was a conflict over the meaning of citizenship. Most famously, it became a struggle over whether or not to grant rights to a group that stood outside the pale of civil-society: African Americans. But other groups--namely Jews, Germans, the Irish, and Native Americans--also became part of this struggle to exercise rights stripped from them by legislation, court rulings, and the prejudices that defined the age. Grounded in extensive research by experts in their respective fields, Civil War Citizens is the first volume to collectively analyze the wartime experiences of those who lived outside the dominant white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant citizenry of nineteenth-century America. The essays examine the momentous decisions made by these communities in the face of war, their desire for full citizenship, the complex loyalties that shaped their actions, and the inspiring and heartbreaking results of their choices-- choices that still echo through the United States today. Contributors: Stephen D. Engle, William McKee Evans, David T. Gleeson, Andrea Mehrländer, Joseph P. Reidy, Robert N. Rosen, and Susannah J. Ural

"I feel impelled to write": male intimacy, epistolary privacy, and the culture of letter writing during the American Civil War

This dissertation sheds light on the gendered and commemorative history of the Civil War. Many historians have recognized the importance of soldiers' letters as evidence of the cultural and ideological mentalities of Americans in wartime. Yet the scholarship has failed to notice the urgency with which soldiers sought to control and maintain the privacy of their correspondences. For millions of combatants, the Civil War presented problems of maintaining privacy unknown in civilian life. Yankees and rebels alike defined their letters as a form of personal property and regarded unauthorized access to their letters not simply as theft but as violations of their person. The safeguards they sought to impose on their mail reveal how these soldiers tried to defend the boundaries of privacy in the midst of a military environment generally devoid of personal space. This dissertation draws on thousands of soldiers' letters held at over three dozen archives and libraries across the United States. The prevailing model of combat motivation emphasizes the ideological components of cause and country. Soldiers' wartime letters suggest they fought not just for nation and ideology but also for the personal stakes associated with their public standings as honorable men. Women on the home front played key roles as the epistolary confidants of soldiers. After the war, these women, as well as veterans themselves, sought to maintain the public façade of masculine heroism by silencing the wartime admissions of fear, doubt, and desertion

Engineering Victory: The Ingenuity, Proficiency, and Versatility of Union Citizen Soldiers in Determining the Outcome of the Civil War

My dissertation explores the critical advantage the Union held over the Confederacy in military engineering. The skills Union soldiers displayed during the war at bridge building, railroad repair, and road making demonstrated mechanical ability and often revealed ingenuity and imagination. These skills were developed during the antebellum period when northerners invested in educational systems that served an industrializing economy. Before the war, northern states’ attempt at implementing basic educational reforms, the spread of informal educational practices directed at mechanics and artisans, and the exponential growth in manufacturing all generated a different work related ethos than that of the South. Plantation slavery generated fabulous wealth for a tiny percent of the southern white population. It fostered a particular style of agriculture and scientific farming that limited land use. It curtailed manufacturing opportunities, and it stifled educational opportunities for the middle and lower classes because those in political power feared that an educated yeomanry would be filled with radical ideas such as social equality, and, worst of all, abolition These differences in the North and South produced unique skill sets in both armies, and consequently, resulted in more successful and resourceful Union engineering operations during the war. Between 1861 and 1865 the North engineered victory

Combat Reconsidered: A Statistical Analysis of Small-Unit Actions During the American Civil War

Historians often emphasize the physical features of battleterrain, weaponry, troop formations, earthworks, etc.in assessments of Civil War combat. Most scholars agree that these external combat conditions strongly influenced battle performance. Other historians accentuate the ways in which the mental stresses of soldiering affected combat performance. These scholars tend to agree that fighting effectiveness was influenced by such non-physical combat conditions as unit cohesion, leadership, morale, and emotional stress. Few authors argue that combat's mental influences were more significant in determining success or failure than the physical features of the battlefield. Statistical analysis of the 465 tactical engagements fought by twenty-seven Federal regiments in the First Division of the Army of the Potomac's Second Corps throughout the American Civil War suggests that the mental aspects of battle affected fighting efficiency at least as muchand probably more thancombat's physical characteristics. In other words, the soldiers' attitudes, opinions, and emotions had a somewhat stronger impact on combat performance than their actions, positions, and weaponry

THE RHETORIC OF DESTRUCTION: RACIAL IDENTITY AND NONCOMBATANT IMMUNITY IN THE CIVIL WAR ERA

This study explores how Americans chose to conduct war in the mid-nineteenth century and the relationship between race and the onset of “total war” policies. It is my argument that enlisted soldiers in the Civil War era selectively waged total war using race and cultural standards as determining factors. A comparative analysis of the treatment of noncombatants throughout the United States between 1861 and 1865 demonstrates that nonwhites invariably suffered greater depredations at the hands of military forces than did whites. Five types of encounters are examined: 1) the treatment of white noncombatants by regular Union and Confederate forces; 2) the fate of noncombatants caught up in the guerrilla wars of the border regions; 3) the relationship between native New Mexicans, Anglo Union troops and Confederate Texans; 4) the relationship between African American noncombatants and Union and Confederate forces; and 5) the conflict between various Indian tribes and Union and Confederate forces apart from the Civil War. By moving away from a narrow focus of white involvement in a single conflict and instead speaking of a “Civil War era,” new comparisons can be drawn that illuminate the multi-faceted nature of American warfare in the mid-nineteenth century. Such a comparison, advances the notion that there has been not one “American way of war,” but two – the first waged against whites, and the second against all others. A thorough study of the language soldiers employed to stereotype explains how the process of dehumanization functioned and why similar groups of men behaved with restraint in one instance and committed atrocity in another. Though the fates of Hispanic, black, and Indian noncombatants have generally been obscured by the “greater” aspects of the Civil War, they are integral to understanding both the capacity of mid-nineteenth century Americans to inflict destruction and the importance of race in shaping military responses. Ultimately, the racialist assumptions of white soldiers served to prevent atrocities against white noncombatants, while the desire to maintain white privilege virtually guaranteed the implementation of harsh tactics against nonwhites

Enduring the Elements: Civil War Soldiers’ Struggles Against the Weather

This dissertation is an environmental history that studies the variety of ways that soldiers in the American Civil War experienced the pressures of weather over the course of their military service. For the troops of the U.S. and Confederacy, the weather was more than simply a passive backdrop to their time in the military, but a central preoccupation. This dissertation analyzes how weather intersected with some of the most central experiences of soldiering – tent camping and winter quarters, marching, bivouacking, manning sentry posts and field fortifications, and fighting in battles. Life in Civil War armies consisted of all of these assorted activities, with most troops engaging in many, if not, all of them. These various facets of wartime service were nowhere near as exacting and challenging when they took place in mild weather, as they were in adverse conditions such as rain or heat. Rank-and-file U.S. and Confederate troops accumulated knowledge and experience as they soldiered that shaped the ways that they perceived, reacted, and adjusted to the weather. Though their responses were conditioned by the different aspects of military service, men devised numerous methods, using any means available, to combat inclement weather and to alleviate its difficulties and hardships. Adapting to the environment turned out to be a critical element in how common soldiers became hardened veterans. But it was not only that. Federals and Confederates strove to adapt to the weather because they connected it to their identity as men. To these troops, successfully contending with human opponents as well as meteorological adversaries proved their manhood

Peculiar Pairings: Texas Confederates and Their Body Servants

Peculiar Pairings: Texas Confederates and their Body Servants is an examination of the relationship between Texas Confederates and the slaves they brought with them during and after the American Civil War. The five chapter study seeks to make sense of the complex relationships shared by some Confederate masters and their black body servants in order to better understand the place of "black Confederates" in Civil War memory. This thesis begins with an examination of what kind of Texans brought body servants to war with them and the motivations they may have had for doing so. Chapter three explores the interactions between master and slave while on the march. Chapter four, the crux of the study, focuses on a number of examples that demonstrate the complex nature of the master slave relationship in a war time environment, and the effects of these relationships during the post-Civil War era

Liberty protected by law: race, rights, and the Civil War in Illinois

Illinois was a hostile place for free blacks to live before the Civil War. Its racial laws, built on the principles of white supremacy and exclusivity, were among the most restrictive in the antebellum North. Illinois’s legal code discouraged blacks from moving to the state and severely circumscribed the rights of those who did. Yet, only weeks before the Civil War ended, Illinois lawmakers repealed the state’s most oppressive black laws. This dissertation explores how the war destabilized the racial order that white Illinoisans had constructed. It travels from the home front to the frontlines in order to understand the ways civilians and soldiers responded to a war that evolved into an assault on slavery. As Illinois soldiers became willing participants in the process of emancipation, Republicans back at home strove to eliminate the vestiges of slavery by striking down state statutes that denied blacks natural rights and equal protection under the law

Color No Longer A Sign of Bondage: Race, Identity and the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry Regiment (1862-1865)

"Color No Longer A Sign of Bondage" is an account of the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry Regiment from its earliest days in 1862 to the regiment's triumphant return to Kansas in November 1865. This work encompasses the racial attitudes of the black and white communities of Kansas, Indian Territory, and Arkansas, and the military service of the regiment through campaigns in the service of the Union's Army of the Frontier. The evolution of white support for black enlistment in Kansas, the regiment's acceptance by white Union regiments, and the concurrent conflicts with Confederate sympathizers and military organizations are central themes of this work. Although black military service in the Union was not officially countenanced in Kansas prior to 1863 and the Emancipation Proclamation, the First Kansas Colored fought for recognition and shed blood despite the opposition of Kansas civil and military authorities alike. The irregular enlistment and employment of the regiment jeopardized its existence through the fall of 1862, and despite official disapproval the regiment survived to become a vital part of the Army of the Frontier. White and black Kansans alike took note of the regiment's military service and through the sterling service of the regiment in an unforgiving theater of war, the regiment won the admiration of white regiments and a skeptical black civil populace. The deeds of the First Kansas Colored in battle and in garrison ultimately undergirded the black drive for civil rights and proved that black men could serve as soldiers in an army that often relegated its black soldiers to fatigue duty. The First Kansas Colored was a fighting regiment that won honors in Kansas, Indian Territory, and Arkansas and by its actions demanded respect. The manhood denied to blacks prior to the Civil War was not won through legal battles, but through courageous conduct in war and the blood shed by its soldiers in combat. The First Kansas Colored never faltered in its service to the Union; nor did it fail its supporters and the families of those who served in its ranks. The First Kansas Colored proved that color was no longer a sign of bondage and, although recognition for its deeds often proved ephemeral, its legacy endures

0703: Rosanna A. Blake Collection, 1818-2000

This collection consists of manuscript and other paper items collected by Rosanna A. Blake. Included are letters, diaries, correspondence, unit rosters, Confederate imprint forms and currency, 1860-1865. Also included are 3D items including firearms, edged weapons, tin soldiers, original Civil War art work, the Volck shield, and Southern periodicals relating to the Civil War. Notably, the collection includes 3 original Robert E. Lee letters, 1 Jefferson Davis letter, and 2 general orders dictated by Lee. The O\u27Brien sub-collection contains Civil War pamphlets and booklets, over 300 monographs and books, photos, CDV\u27s, original Civil War art work, the Volck shield, ambrotypes and tintypes, one original Robert E. Lee letter, original Civil War sketches and etchings, and other 3D items. Most materials are Confederate related. To view materials from this collection that are digitized and available online, search the Rosanna Blake Collection, 1818-2000 here