Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War

Two: Lone Chimneys: Domestic Ruins

TWO Lone Chimneys Domestic Ruins She held her breath and waited, squeezing the children a little too tightly. The guard had been called off and left with his command, so it was just a matter of time. The minutes passed. Then footsteps sounded on the stairs, one pair of boots and then two and then ten. The sound of a door hitting a wall echoed like a pistol shot, and she jumped. She could hear them, moving everywhere throughout the house, breaking open presses, bureaus, and trunks, sending wood splinters whirling through the air. The loud riiiip of sheets and pillowcases, the crash of medicine bottles thrown to the floor, the soft rustle of clothing rifled in a drawer. When they reached her room, she stood and ushered the children out into the front passage, stopping only to ask that they not disturb the trunk at the foot of the bed; it contained the belongings of her dead husband. They did not disturb it. But she discovered later that they mutilated a photograph of her husband that they found in a letterbox, putting it back when they were done. When she saw his image, scratched almost to pieces, she screamed with such wild abandon that her friends feared that she was possessed 62 Chapter Two by the devil. After the soldiers had left (they had been there an hour — only an hour!), she wandered through the house in a daze. It seemed like everything was broken. Objects both precious and mundane were strewn about the house and yard: shards of furniture, toothbrushes, silver spoons, brushes, cups and saucers, needle books, pins, thread, writing paper and envelopes, sealing wax and pens, books, shirts, shawls, and stockings. In the days after the raid, she found herself praying that the wretches who had brought such violence into her home and into all the homes of Virginia would have something unutterably terrible in store for them — in life or in death.1 As Union and Confederate armies marched, camped, and fought across the landscapes of the South, they destroyed thousands of homes, from planters’ mansions to one-room log cabins inhabited by poor whites and slaves. Soldiers shot houses full of holes during battle and pillaged homes in the name of military necessity. The lone chimneys that loomed up in the barren countryside and the broken windows of pillaged houses gave both northerners and southerners another opportunity to articulate their ideas about the (im)possibilities of civilized warfare. In the mid-nineteenth century , domestic spaces were aligned with women and their bodies; therefore , the transformation of southern homes into piles of debris was an invasion of southern women’s spatial and corporeal privacy. Such behavior was deliberate and pointed, part of a hard-war strategy that allowed soldiers to enact their class resentments and their desires for vengeance. And when they turned to the destruction of slave cabins and quarters, these soldiers expressed a range of responses to slavery and emancipation as both the cause and goal of the war. After the ashes cooled, the ruins of big houses and slave cabins stood in opposition — the former becoming the central symbol in the Lost Cause, the latter becoming an important emblem of the survival and emancipation of former slaves. Battlefield Houses Days after her first Christmas away from her childhood home, Mary Custis Lee received a letter from her husband, Robert E. Lee, who was resigned to Arlington’s fate. Even if the house was not destroyed, he wrote, “it will be difficult even to be recognised. Even if the enemy had wished to Lone Chimneys 63 preserve it, the change of officers, the want of fuel, shelter etc., all the dire necessities of war, it is vain to think of its being in a habitable condition.” The “dire necessities of war” (the effects of the war’s weaponry on houses built of wood, brick, and stone) and the embrace of hard-war tactics by both northern and southern military strategists produced the majority of domestic ruins along the armies’ most traveled paths between 1861 and 1865. For the Lees and for thousands of families across the South, the war that came to their doorsteps often ruined their homes, leaving nothing, as Robert E. Lee wrote sadly, but “the memories of those that to us render it sacred.”2 Like southern cities, whose location made them lucrative trade centers and military targets...