Across the Divide: Union Soldiers View the Northern Home Front

Introduction

>> 1 Introduction “The people up North do not know what war is,” John Brobst, a Union Army private from Wisconsin, wrote a friend. “If they were to come down here, they would soon find out the horror of war.”1 Brobst spoke for many Union soldiers during the Civil War who held views of their own families, communities , and home states that defy the traditional picture of national unity based on their perception that civilians did not comprehend what it meant to be a Union soldier. Stressed by the demands of combat, often frustrated by the lack of success, and burdened by the hardships of army life, many Union soldiers adopted attitudes and opinions about various facets of the war quite different from those of civilians, positions often elucidated in their letters to family members. Soldiers who, as an army, roundly supported President Abraham Lincoln perceived members of his Democratic opposition as enemy adversaries. Soldiers became irate about civilian actions that failed to support wartime measures of which the army approved, or who engaged in activities the army perceived as against its interest. Some of the disgruntlement came in the form of lack of support, whether real or imagined, for soldiers by those at home. “Those who complain of the war the most,” Private Wilber Fisk wrote, “are generally those who have suffered the least,” and few Union soldiers would have disagreed with him.2 Union soldiers left their homes expecting to fight their Confederate enemies, but clashes with family and communities at home emerged unexpectedly . The issues that divided soldiers and the Union home front were numerous, complex, and long-lasting. While some issues emerged only during certain periods of the war, others caused friction for the duration of the war. Several themes emerge when considering the perception held by Union soldiers of home communities. First, soldiers tended to lash out at things about which they could not immediately do anything. Soldiers at the front, unable to return home, felt frustrated at their inability to influence events. Consequently, their only recourse was to encourage certain courses of 2 > 3 and communities by long distances. For most young men, military service created the first opportunity to leave their hometowns and undergo new experiences. The early war excitement induced many men to volunteer as soldiers, but recruits soon found their new lives much different from their old lives. Military existence proved very different than anything the volunteers anticipated, and the separation from home became something many soldiers came to regret. Soldiers left behind families, and often their spouses had to fend for themselves. The stress of separation became only worse as the war, so optimistically estimated at only a few weeks in 1861, stretched into months and years. Soldiers matured, changed, and evolved over time, and wartime separation usually meant young recruits were quite different when they returned as veterans at the end of their service. Compounding the emotional difficulties of the physical divide was the experience divide, as soldiers believed civilians often simply did not understand or comprehend their wartime experiences. Civilians, soldiers complained , had no concept of the risks, constraints, and difficulties of soldier life. They grumbled that civilians did not recognize that soldiers had a different mindset and separate priorities than those unfamiliar with military life. Private William Bentley summed up the lack of understanding when he tried to explain to his family how “a soldier, when he enters the Army, almost loses his Individuality and becomes a very small portion of the great machine.”3 Even more difficult, soldiers struggled to make civilians who were relatively safe in their homes comprehend the stress of living under constant threat of death, illness, or serious injury. Civilians certainly worried about the physical well-being of their relatives and loved ones in the army, but soldiers often believed their families equated the difficulties and hardships of the civilian home front with the deadly business of being a soldier. Such dissonance might not have occurred except for a communication divide. Soldiers and civilians had only limited means to convey their thoughts, opinions, and ideas, primarily through letters and newspapers. Both methods, however, had limitations that prevented a closing of the communication gap between the army and Northern civilians. Newspapers held a bias for one political party or the other, slanting the news into pro- or antiAbraham Lincoln rhetoric that skewed the progress of the war or the collective attitudes of a community. The absence of modern journalistic standards meant that newspapers...