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chapter five Tourists with Guns (and Pens) Union Soldiers and the Civil War South What is an expeditionary force without guns? Tourists. dean maccannell By far, the four years that witnessed the largest movement of travelers through various parts of the South were those between 1861 and 1865. During these years, approximately two million northern visitors, most members of the Union Army, traveled to or through at least one of the southern states. During this same period, many southerners, too—approximately 750,000 Confederate soldiers— traveled through the region and also visited briefly parts of Pennsylvania and other northern states. A surprising number of these soldiers wrote narratives or kept diaries describing their travels. E. Merton Coulter emphasizes this vast number of travelers and written accounts in the preface to his bibliography, arguing, “Not again until the twentieth century, if then, were there as many travelers in the South or in any other part of America as during the Civil War; for soldiers, who made up the vast majority, were travelers even though they did not have the opportunities for observation nor the viewpoints which characterize peacetime visitors. And never have as many travel accounts been written dealing with so short a period of American life as appeared on the Confederacy” (x). Only rarely had most of these visitors, the overwhelming majority of whom were young or middle-aged men, traveled outside of the vicinities immediately surrounding their birthplaces. Their beliefs about the American nation, and about the cultures, environments, and populations of regions other than their own, depended largely on newspapers, travel books and other texts, and the stories and stereotypes circulated within and among their communities. Even those who had been raised in one of the North’s metropolitan areas had often had only limited exposure to people whose lifestyles were dramatically different 166 chapter five from their own. These were frequently tourists with little prior experience of interregional or intercultural travel. According to Shelby Foote, the simple fact of movement dramatically altered the ways in which many of these soldiers, Union and Confederate, thought about themselves and their larger communities. As Foote writes, “Whatever else the veterans brought or failed to bring home with them, and whether they returned to snugness or dilapidation, with or without back pay, bonuses, and pensions, they had acquired a sense of nationhood, of nationality. . . . They knew now they had a nation, for they had seen it; they had been there, they had touched it, climbed its mountains, crossed its rivers, hiked its roads; their comrades lay buried in its soil, along with many thousands of their own arms and legs” (1042). The travel most southerners experienced during these years encouraged in them a stronger sense of their regional identity, even creating a sectional patriotism where there had been little before the Civil War, according to Foote.1 On the other hand, Foote explains, the Union soldiers who traveled through the South during this period emerged from the war with a transformed sense of the nation as a whole. Having engaged in a four-year war in order to keep their nation unified, these soldiers discovered through their movement across the entire country both the vastness and the diversity contained within its borders. Like the numerous travelers to the South before them, these soldiers shifted and enlarged their perspectives on their nation and their national identity , expanding their views of what the United States was and should be. Thus, one of the most significant aspects of the American Civil War was simply this movement of an unprecedented number of individual travelers, as well as the incontrovertible result that the movement of the Union Army had on the land and society through which it passed. Like the numerous travelers before them who had visited the South and written about their experiences, Union soldiers confronted a region quite unlike their own. Through their writings they addressed many of the same themes, and used many of the same strategies, as had earlier travel writers. Many found the natural environment of the South surprisingly beautiful, describing it as a tropical Eden. Like Bartram, though, many thought nature in the South also dangerous, marveling at the fertility of the land while worrying about the disease , innumerable insects, and unbelievable heat. In addition, like Douglass and Northup, Union soldiers wondered about the rights of the slaves, many seeing the expansion of American citizenship as the primary goal of the entire war but others viewing the...

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