Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861-1865

Introduction: Civil War Time(s)

INTRODUCTION Civil War Time(s) Since Robert E. Lee’s 1865 Palm Sunday surrender, the Civil War has marked and defined time in the nineteenth century. Like a clock that strikes only one hour, the Civil War split nineteenth-century American time into two discrete units: antebellum and postbellum. Some historians have argued that the postbellum era, with its aggressive northernization of southern life, replaced the antebellum era, with its dedication to northern industrialism and southern agrarianism.1 Yet not all aspects of antebellum society disappeared with the birth of the postbellum era. Although the Civil War may have divided American time in the nineteenth century, it did not permanently alter Americans’ perceptions or usages of time. Rather, the Civil War years complicated and temporarily altered how Americans understood and used time, as battlefield events overrode antebellum conceptions of time to create new temporal parameters within which Americans functioned. This reconfiguring was, however, momentary. At the war’s conclusion, antebellum American temporalities reemerged to organize life in the postbellum era. Antebellum America was a world of multiple, competing times.2 The world was governed by clock times, natural times, God’s time, and personal times. While clock times were determined by human or mechanical means, natural times were determined by the seasons, the weather, the sun, and the moon. God’s time regulated the antebellum week by insisting on the setting aside of each Sunday for worship. And personal times were determined by individuals themselves. In the North, workplace changes wrought by capitalism—namely, industrialization—resulted in the emergence and eventual preponderance of clock-regulated wage labor.3 Some historians have argued that with clock ownership uncommon and with the region isolated from the currents of capitalism, the slave South developed a task1 2 Introduction oriented and premodern sense of time based on nature’s rhythms.4 However, free wage labor is not the only measuring stick of capitalism.5 Under the pressures of the market revolution, southerners embraced a “capitalisteconomy”asan“economicallyprofitableandsociallystabilizing” force.6 Slavery was a profitable institution largely because in their drive to profit, southern planters and industrialists ran their businesses in the same way that northern industrialists ran their factories. At base, slavery and its accompanying brutality represented “unrestrained capitalism,” as planters implemented any means necessary to ensure profit.7 Furthermore, slavery gave planters “capitalized labor”—access to all of a slave’s labor power and ownership of all of a slave’s time. Slaves, then, were “a form of capital, specifically ‘fixed’ capital” that permitted planters easily to diversify in their pursuit of profits.8 Slavery, however, was not the region’s only labor force. Yeomen also shared planters’ drive for profit and operated within a society that may have been undemocratic and even preclassical but was increasingly capitalistic.9 Moreover, some southerners, including some slaves, worked for wages. Construction, industry, and agriculture offered jobs that paid by the amount of time worked or the amount of material produced. In 1834, for example, Sea Island planters James Hamilton Cooper and Mr. Nightingale hired Irish laborers to build a canal connecting Brunswick, Georgia, with the Altamaha River at a rate of twenty dollars a month.10 Industries such as Richmond’s Tredegar Ironworks also embraced wage labor; if slaves “worked overtime or turned out more than their required amount of piecework, they could earn money for themselves.”11 Other southern industries preferred female wage laborers to slaves. Indeed, Georgia’s Columbus Cotton Factory employed mostly women, paying them ten to twelve dollars a month.12 Wage labor, however, was not limited to southern industry. For example, shopkeeper Rueben King of Darien, Georgia, paid his employees a flat rate of two dollars a day regardless of race or gender.13 Even some southern planters engaged in wage labor, hiring out slaves, paying overseers, and hiring other workers.14 The fact that antebellum planters, industrialists, yeomen, and wage laborers embraced profit capitalism meant that they clearly possessed the context necessary to develop a clock-conscious society. And by 1830, historian Mark Introduction 3 Smith argues, capitalistic southerners had done just that, using the clock to reinforce a conservative, organic social order. Clock-regulated horns and bells scheduled the agricultural workday, just as factory clocks and bells ordered the industrial workday.15 Both planters and industrialists used the clock in a most capitalist fashion—to conserve time and maximize labor. Industrialists measured work by the factory clock...