War in Earnest: The Army of Virginia and the Radicalization of the Union War Effort, 1862

"War is . . . a continuation of political activity by other means," wrote the nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz in what now amounts to a classic maxim regarding the nature of warfare.¹ The American Civil War witnessed its share of politics interfering with and shaping military operations, not least because for the first time in recorded history the mass armies on both sides were composed of citizen-soldiers who were politically enfranchised, literate, and vocal about for what they fought. In other words, politicians and generals did not shape war policy separated from and uninfluenced by the opinions and actions of common fighting men.

By the summer of 1862, white Union soldiers and their elected company-and field-grade officers serving in Virginia expressed increased dissatisfaction with the policy of West Point-trained generals to respect the property of civilians who openly aided Confederate forces and scorned the federal government.² A significant part of this property consisted of the nearly 500,000 slaves in the Commonwealth, composing almost a third of the Virginia's population. These northern soldiers found slavery appalling even as they remained unwilling to accept African Americans as fellow citizens.³ "War in earnest" was the desire of one New Englander on July 30, 1862. Having "played at war" in 1861, Union soldiers now recognized that the purpose of "war is to destroy, not protect an enemy."⁴

Rather than rely solely on a top-down or a bottom-up perspective, this article involves analysis of the shifting political ideology of both military elites and enlisted men in the summer of 1862. A word on the article's structure is due. The alliance between Radical Republican politicians and Republican-leaning generals against Democrats (northern and southern) and slavery is the initial focus. The article then turns to the frustrations of Union soldiers at lenient Federal policies toward southern civilians and their growing opposition to slavery via exposure to self-emancipated slaves. Regardless of their antebellum political convictions, by July 1862 volunteer soldiers and their (mostly) elected officers demonstrated increasing willingness to implement harsh policies toward Confederate civilians. The goals of politico-military elites and citizen-soldiers converged in a shared dream of revolution, of remaking the lazy South in the North's image as a year of conciliation was thrown back in the faces of Union occupiers.

Internecine politics and slavery both enjoy increasing focus in recent historiography of the American Civil War. In his study of the Confederate army of Northern Virginia, Joseph Glatthaar notes that "politics and generalship went hand in hand in Lee's army" much the same way as in Union armies, and he pays attention to the politics of promotion at the field and company levels. Glatthaar also includes more coverage of slavery as an ideological motivation for Confederate soldiers than previous studies of the main rebel army.⁵ In Bell Wiley's classic study of the Union's common soldiery, politics and slaves were only two items on a long laundry list of topics of soldierly conversation and correspondence.⁶ By contrast, "three in ten Union soldiers" in the study sample assembled by James McPherson for his 1997 analysis of why northern soldiers fought, understood within "the first eighteen months of the war" that the "abolition of slavery was inseparably linked to the goal of preserving the Union."⁷ Chandra Manning's 2007 book builds on McPherson's text and "rescues slavery from the periphery of soldiers' mental worlds, where subsequent generations have tried to relegate it." This article follows in McPherson's and Manning's scholarly footsteps, particularly with regard to soldiers' increasing awareness of the necessity of destroying slavery as well as Confederate armies to defeat the rebellion in the first year of the war. It also adheres to Manning's view that many Union soldiers were ahead of their president in seeing that the Union "must reform rather than merely preserve itself," a reformation or reconstruction that necessarily involved emancipation.⁸ Yet Gary Gallagher's recent cautionary comments on...