Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War

Conclusion: The Ruins of History

CONCLUSION The Ruins of History After slogging through the swampy ravines of Mississippi during Grant’s campaign for Vicksburg in May 1863, Ohio sergeant Osborn Oldroyd confessed to looking forward to the siege of the city and the sharpshooting practice it would afford him. As he and his men fired over the edge of their rifle pits at the Confederates, who were near enough to spot with the naked eye, the bullets flew with “the familiar zip and whiz.” So many of them littered the ground around the Union lines that Oldroyd “gathered quite a collection of balls, which I mean to send home as relics of the siege. They are in a variety of shapes, and if a thousand brought together , there could not be found two alike.” Oldroyd was pleased by his bounty of unique keepsakes and by the fact that he was “the only known collector of such souvenirs, and have many odd and rare specimens.” They were not valuable in a monetary sense — there were too many of them lying about for that — but Oldroyd was optimistic about their future worth. “Should I survive,” he wrote, “I would like to look at them again in after years.”1 The Ruins of History 229 As northern and southern troops moved through the landscapes of the South during the Civil War, they transformed cities, homes, forests, and bodies into ruins. It was a shared experience, a national project. Sometimes they were ordered to destroy these things by commanders convinced that hard-war strategies would bring the conflict to a close. Other times, the destruction arose from anger, vengeance, greed, or a desire for self-preservation. In all of these cases, soldiers used both newly developed and increasingly accurate and long-range killing technologies (torpedoes, mines, rifles, and artillery) and the most basic of destructive implements (fire, axes, and hands) to create these ruins. And as they did so, these men took fragments of the ruins and saved myriad other material objects as mementos of their experiences. These objects, many of them mundane, were viewed, described, collected, redistributed, transported, displayed, traded, and cherished, ultimately finding their way from parlors to museum display cases. To soldiers and civilians, these objects came to embody the war and its histories. This fetishizing of evocative, mnemonic objects — and the simultaneous and rapid erasure of Civil War ruins within a generation of the war’s end — reveals a tendency in American culture to consume rather than directly confront the past. Collecting Fragments Souvenir collecting began almost as soon as men were mustered into service . In September 1862, Massachusetts chaplain Frank Morse wrote to his wife, Ellen, “I am trying to gather up all the specimens I can and curiosities to carry home.”2 So many men picked up such a variety of items on battlefields, along roadways, in the enemy’s camps, and in local houses that some soldiers characterized it as a craze — “relic fever,” a “craving for spoils and relics.”3 Soldiers loaded boxes with the souvenirs of their battles (spent bullets like Oldroyd’s were most popular) and of the southern homes that they ransacked and burned; northern men also collected and sent home objects they viewed as “peculiarly” southern. Massachusetts soldier Charles Ripley wrote “long and interesting letters,” his mother noted, “with ever and anon a flower or weed unlike what he has seen at home.”4 Ripley and other soldiers sent persimmons, oranges, sprigs of holly, magnolia blossoms, live oak leaves, strands of tillandsia (Spanish 230 Conclusion moss), grains of “Georgia rice,” and bolls of cotton — all as evidence of the South’s exotic verdure.5 With these, soldiers collected curiosities taken from enemy camps and fortifications; they wrote on “rebel” or “Yankee” paper and mailed home the enemy’s letters, along with money — Confederate “shin plasters” (twenty-dollar bills) were popular items — and military documents.6 Both the specter and reality of death also provoked the accumulation of objects.7 While the gun smoke still drifted among the trees, soldiers wandered through battlefields, pulling up grass, and picking leaves and flowers from the site of a comrade’s or sibling’s death or burial, sending home natural relics that “retained and represented something of the spirit of the departed” who had died far from home.8 Some friends and family members received even more intimate mementos of the dead: personal effects (such as watches, tintypes, rings...