Civil War Humor

Chapter Three: CIVIL WAR, WAR HUMOR

[ 83 ] ChapterThree CIVIL WAR,WAR HUMOR “War is at best barbarism. Its glory is all moonshine,” retired Union General William Tecumseh Sherman told the graduating class at the Michigan Military Academy in 1879, and he concluded with what has become the most famous judgment of armed conflict: “War is hell.” So very succinct, and a truth invoked since by both those who oppose war and those who, however reluctantly, accept its necessity. Even if we have not been in battle, we “know” it is true in the same way we know that humor is a way of coping with something so horrific. In doing so in the Civil War, humor is often free of partisan passions because it deals with the many and various vicissitudes of being a soldier no matter what cause he fought for. Becoming a soldier (or avoiding it), being in battle and getting killed or wounded, the rigors of soldiering , the numbing boredom of camp life—all of them new, unsettling realities that soldiers of each side had to deal with. And although this was humor about the soldiers and, in part, for them, it was most often written by and for those at home. The quip “United we sleep, divided we freeze” appeared in newspapers on both sides, expressing with some wit a real hardship on the part of the soldiers but also an implicitly patriotic solidarity for survival that would comfort folks at home. Humor on one subject, though, was written solely by and for soldiers , humor about imprisonment. For prisoners of war, humor was crucial to creating some semblance of normalcy under conditions so abnormal. Confederates incarcerated at Fort Delaware produced in [ 84 ] CIvIl WAR, WAR HumoR April 1865 one copy of a handwritten, three-column newspaper titled the Prison Times (The war ended the next month). Union prisoners at Libby Prison in Richmond formed the “‘Richmond Prison Association ’ to supervise their life, to make rules for cleanliness, and to furnish entertainment.” The official seal represented the sardonic truth: a circle of lice with the Latin motto translated as “Bite and Be Damned” (Hesseltine 1930, 60). At Camp Ford in Tyler, Texas, Union prisoners put out a handwritten newspaper, Old Flag (1864), with the hope of “enlivening the monotonous, and at times unbearably eventless life of Camp Ford.”1 With many of the “departments” of a conventional newspaper—“local” news, jokes about prison life, and mock commercial notices among them—Old Flag created some semblance of home. Given that only one hand-written copy of each issue was issued and read aloud “at the various cabins,” it made the editor’s repeated, indignant remonstrance against unpaid subscribers a running joke and a parody of hometown newspapers of the time, here an “inside joke,” as it were. Prison humor was, in fact, arcane, with references to people, events, and conditions that only men living in such singular circumstances could know and therefore “get.” A prisoner at Libby Prison composed a long “Prison Bill of Fare,” the formal poetic structure and diction an ironic contrast to the mock appreciation of the barely edible provender to be had in prison. Most of what the 160 lines are about puzzles modern readers (and amateur poetry does not help), but the description of the rations of bread and meat is clear enough: Our friends sends us loaves that are unique and neat, Our loving eyes upon the “batch” we fix, And quietly eat our rations—ounces six. Meat rations are equally meager: Three ounces of some butchered cow: How late, deponent saith not—but the smell Would indicate it hard to tell.2 ◊ ◊ ◊ Death, the ultimate hell of war, haunted soldiers and those who loved them, and it dominated sentimental popular culture, an industry in its own right. Humor came as close as it could to dealing with the real CIvIl WAR, WAR HumoR [ 85 ] thing, and how close had much to do with how “humorous.” Authenticating details helped do that, as in the following from Harper’s Monthly (March 1862): “We had been encamped in Indianapolis,” writes one of the brave boys, “about a month before we left for the seat of war. Some time after we arrived in Virginia we heard that quite a large number of letters for the regiment were detained at Indianapolis for the postage . While passing through the camp one day, I overheard a couple of soldiers conversing about those...