Trophies of War: Material Culture in the Civil War Era

When Federal troops appeared at the home of Mary Cochran’s father, a place called Glen Ora in northern Virginia, the family expected trouble. Mary, a middle-aged doctor’s wife with several children, supported the Confederacy. Her husband owned house slaves, and they had kinsmen in the rebel army. She had already recorded instances of the northern army looting personal belongings from white civilians, and this was late in the war, December 1864. But the soldiers’ conduct nonetheless astonished her. They plundered her father’s house and then pillaged the home of a neighbor, a Mr. Beverly. They took food, which was allowed under military regulations, as well as bedclothes and housewares. The soldiers then took some children’s dolls and ground them under their feet. Beverly complained to the officers on the scene, one of whom replied, “‘The men have permission to take what they want.’”¹

In fact, the troops did not have permission to take what they wanted. Soldiers violated military policy when they seized clothes or stomped on children’s dolls, regardless of what their officers said. As we will see, men in the Union and Confederate armies—both armies—plundered on a regular basis. The war generated a massive traffic in objects, and it transformed the material culture of the entire country, prompting the redistribution of millions of objects. Many actors were involved—soldiers, civilians, men, women, northerners, southerners—in getting, giving, relinquishing, buying, selling, and keeping these objects, and they acted with a multitude of motives. Soldiers and civilians in both regions used the words “trophy,” “relic,” “souvenir,” and “artifact” interchangeably to describe objects taken during the War. Their behavior reveals a timeless fascination with objects, which convey a multitude of cultural messages that are not always easy to say with words. Nor was there anything unusual about pillaging during the war, for troops have pillaged with alacrity in other wars. Furthermore, the traffic in objects helped shape the collective memory of the war. Scholars of the war have explored the abundant documentation in the archives, but they have neglected physical objects as historical evidence.²

This article describes the ways human beings acquired those objects, what they did with them, and what those objects meant to the war’s participants. We will concentrate on nonperishable goods that were not necessary to prosecute the war and on events that took place on land, where most of the fighting took place. This article concerns itself with actions taken by white Americans against other white people, since the war’s racial dynamics raise a host of complex issues that cannot be addressed here. (Slaves, for example, occasionally took souvenirs from white people but also lost their belongings to soldiers who took objects as war relics, even as most bondsmen were primarily concerned with escaping bondage.) Nor will we treat objects generated by prisoners of war, which were created under duress and present a different set of issues about symbolic value.³

In the dispute over “destructive war,” “total war,” and “hard war,” historians have debated the issues of plunder and pillage, but they have overlooked trophy-hunting as an aspect of this behavior. Moreover, they have concentrated on the intentions of high-ranking officers in the two armies, and they have assumed that soldiers for the most part followed orders. They disagree, of course, on the extent of the war’s destructiveness. Charles Royster focused on the careers of William T. Sherman and Stonewall Jackson, and he argued that the war became more destructive as it unfolded, with considerable plundering. Mark Grimsley countered that the Union army rarely pillaged. He argued that northern troops treated civilian property with leniency until about 1863, when U. S. Grant and other commanders changed policy because of military reverses at the hands of the Confederates. Mark E. Neely Jr. has suggested that white men in the Union army were reluctant to pillage objects or hurt civilians because they shared the same racial background as southern troops and civilians. He also specified that northern troops exempted women and children from mistreatment. Despite the...