Post edited 2:51 pm – May 5, 2011 by cmccune

This article was submitted to the Ohio Civil War 150 Website.

Softer Shades of Blue and Gray
By Susan Meissner

  
When civil war was declared in the spring of 1861, the citizens of the United States became the citizens of the divided states, and they took on new personal descriptors-Unionists and Confederates. Yankees and rebels. But for many, especially those in border states, reassigning allegiances proved impossibly difficult. Geography placed people firmly on one side or the other, though ideals have always been matters of the conscience, not a map.  

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. And like most epic events that we pause to remember, there is more to this anniversary than a date on the calendar. The Civil War was a clash between politics and policies, between Blue and Gray, but also between families and friends. How did the war leave its mark on those untrained for battle and whose loyalties were torn from them?   A recent research trip to Fredericksburg, VA, was the backdrop for analyzing this concept within the context of my novel A Sound Among the Trees. In my fictitious story, I placed a young Southern woman-born of a Northern father and who loves a Northern man-in Fredericksburg, a city nearly destroyed by Union shelling in the winter of 1862. In the midst of her loyalty to her father's memory and her affection for a young West Point cadet, this woman struggles for a handhold in the quest for survival- not just of the body but of her integrity as well. How can she hate those whom she loves? How can she wish for their utter defeat? How can she turn her back when war brings them to her shattered doorstep? It was an imagined dilemma for me as I walked the streets and fields of present-day Fredericksburg taking notes, but one surely all too real during the dark days of war.  

As I researched what the Civil War might have been like for a young woman with loved ones on both sides of the conflict, I was struck by the peculiars of the First Battle of Fredericksburg, particularly for the civilians who survived the terrible shelling of their city, and then witnessed the defeated Northern soldiers crawling back through the same streets they had decimated and sacked only two days before. Over the next twenty-four months, Fredericksburg's population shrunk from its pre-war count of 5,000 to roughly 700, most of these women and children. By October of 1864, a Florida traveler observed:  

"A few trees remain upon the hills near the site of the depot, but there is not a fence nor an inhabited house all the way to Fredericksburg. A few cattle may be seen grazing on the rich plains which bear no crops now but crops of luxuriant weeds…There are no hands at work in the fenceless fields-no signs of animated life about the deserted houses…All is still as death for miles and miles under the sweet and autumnal sun."[i]

Fredericksburg had been a battleground where the fighting for the war of ideals had been the most barbaric. Richmond diarist Mary Chesnut, wife of a Confederate officer, perhaps captured best what many disheartened residents no doubt observed:  "Brutal men with unlimited power are the same all over the world." As I breathed life into my young protagonist, Susannah Towsley, I was uncomfortably aware of the battle inside the minds and hearts of those who did not take up arms. A soldier was trained-even constrained-to follow orders without question, but the civilian who watched from her front porch had no directive to follow except that of common decency. This was undoubtedly the stiffest test of valor for civilians, especially women, living in cities like Fredericksburg.

In his essay, "It is Well That War is So Terrible," history professor George Rable writes of the Fredericksburg Campaign,  

"Its particular combination of monstrous slaughter, intense pain, raw courage and pointless sacrifice left an indelible impression on many participants and sent shock waves into the cities, towns, and rural communities of the divided United States. Any major battle leaves its physical and psychological marks on the immediate vicinity and the local inhabitants, but the flight of refugees from Fredericksburg and the shelling of the town on December 11 seemed an especially dramatic example of how the war could suddenly disrupt the routine lives of countless people."[ii]

The battle itself, at Fredericksburg's Marye's Heights, was as decisive a Confederate victory as the Union's sacking and occupation had been two days earlier. Casualties to the Northern army numbered an astonishing twelve thousand-tallied while the remaining inhabitants of Fredericksburg watched from a distance. The horror of the victory's aftermath was recorded by Joshua Chamberlain, Union commander of the 20th Maine-incidentally, the company of my character's fictitious beloved:  

"But out of that silence rose new sounds more appalling still; a strange ventriloquism, of which you could not locate the source, a smothered moan, as if a thousand discords were flowing together into a key-note weird, unearthly, terrible to hear and bear, yet startling with its nearness; the writhing concord broken by cries for help, some begging for a drop of water, some calling on God for pity; and some on friendly hands to finish what the enemy had so horribly begun; some with delirious, dreamy voices murmuring loved names, as if the dearest were bending over them; and underneath, all the time, the deep bass note from closed lips too hopeless, or too heroic to articulate their agony…"[iii]

For a Fredericksburg woman in love with a man from Maine, this hellish, repeating debacle just outside her door no doubt defied reason. The stakes for a woman such as this were high, as they surely were for any Southern woman of the day whose heart beat for a Northern man, and vice versa.

Today, Fredericksburg bears quiet reminders of what it survived. A national cemetery honors the dead from both northern and southern states, stately houses on the national registry attest to a city's resilience, and museums offer solemn and staggering insights into the war that redefined a nation and its people. Uniform buttons and bullet casings found in the former fields of battle and in forgotten cedar chests are sold at a corner memento shop, and just outside the city, trenches that troops dug and hid behind still swell across the leaf-covered landscape. The civilian population that was left to rebuild what was lost found a way to do it.  

The physical reminders are there for the viewing, and storytellers like me can somewhat adequately suppose what those physicalities meant to the ordinary people who lived them, but we may never know the full extent of the Civil War's impact on those who survived it, not even as we purposefully stand at the edge of 150 years and look back at it.  

Indeed, American poet Walt Whitman, who visited the Union wounded after the first battle at Fredericksburg, predicted that we would not fully comprehend it, and perhaps should not; and that the best we could do is stand at a distance and ponder. Whitman wrote:"Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not.   The real war will never get in the books."Even so, the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War still provides us with a startling opportunity, if not clarity, to reflect on the choices made by those who wore subtler shades of blue and gray and to consider how we might also respond if forced by love and fate to stand at a similar crossroads.  

Susan Meissner is a former newspaper editor and the author of the Civil War-themed novel, A Sound Among The Trees, and also The Shape of Mercy, named by Publishers Weekly as one of the top 100 novels of 2008. She lives in southern California.

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[i] Mobile Register, November 26, 1864
[ii]"It is Well That War is So Terrible," George C. Rable, The Fredericksburg Campaign: Decision on the Rappahannock, Gary W. Gallagher, editor, University of North Carolina   Press, 1995.
[iii] "The Civil War Archive," Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, 20th Maine, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, p.192