In Maine, where I lived for 17 years, the American Civil War is rarely a topic of casual conversation. There is no reason it should be, unless one is a student taking an American History class. Granted, every Mainer should know about the Missouri Compromise of 1820, since that was how the land mass that had been part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts became a state; it was also a critical move in the lengthy congressional chess game that led up to the secession of the southern states in 1860. Still, in New England and in the north in general, there is little daily discourse about the most important even in this country after the revolution.
Since my wife and I both retired from teaching in 2023 and moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee - much closer to my own roots in the south - I have found a very different attitude. I have met plumbers, carpenters, lawyers, salesmen, musicians, bartenders and plenty of other people from various walks of life who all seem to know at least something about the war. Some of them know a great deal about it. What might be the reason for this contrast in the level of interest between northerners and southerners? After all, both sides lost hundreds of thousands of men in a death-smeared four-year span; even now it is difficult to imagine how two armies managed to spill so much of one another’s blood in such a relatively short amount of time.
And yet it happened. Much of it happened right here, on this slope where I live, called Missionary Ridge, and down in the valley just below us where Chattanooga stretches to the river, and also a few miles to our south at Chickamauga in Georgia. It surrounds us; some of my neighbors here have Union or Confederate markers, some with cannons alongside them, on their front lawns, placed there long ago by the National Park Service.
And therein lies the simple reason that many southerners still care about the war: it is present here. It is in the ground, in the air, and in the blood.
People who have been raised here and remain here share in a lucid, collective memory of the war, but in my experience, they do not view it through the lenses of mythology and romanticism, as many people believe. I would like to dispel the notion that southerners remember the war because of a longing for some past glory. Rather, it is like looking at a terrible scar every morning when you get dressed, from a long-ago injury that nearly did you in, or like the sensation of a lump just under the skin of memory: you keep hoping it will go away one of these days, but, always…there it still is. The relevance of the Civil War here, today, is not in any of the nonsense about Southern Pride or lost causes, but in the strange coupling of a human being’s natural abhorrence of death by butchery and his curiosity about it. Maybe our most crucial accomplishment since 1865 lies in the fact that we have not experienced all-out warfare on American soil since then. We have not had to witness it or clean it up afterward because it tends to happen in some faraway place. And even then, our military technology has advanced so far as to give us yet another layer of inoculation against the horror: we now have pilotless drones and conscienceless robots to do our killing for us.
The soldiers who died on the battlefield at Chickamauga had only a few things: their weapons and ammunition, some water… Many of them carried bibles and photos of family members, and some carried last letters home, having asked their comrades to post them on their behalf, should they be killed. They carried their memories: somewhere there was a girl on a swing, with flowers in her hair, a mother with arms outstretched as a column of men marched away, a father who sat looking sternly down at his uneaten supper… and every one of them carried the burden of fear.
In the year and a half or so that I have lived here, I have spent a lot of time at Chickamauga Battlefield. This is mostly because I was lucky enough to become friends with a man named Ralph Brown, who lives not far from me. Ralph is a scholar, widely read in many subjects, an engrossing conversationalist, and a gentleman in the oldest and best sense of the word. He is also an authority on native plants of this region, on birds, on Henry David Thoreau, on Tai Chi, and on local history. A morning walk with Ralph at the battlefield is somehow both delightful and morbid, a treatise on both bravery and mortal terror, as he describes the movements of troops and batteries and horses as if it were all happening right before his eyes.
Mostly what I see are acres of tall grass leaning with the wind, and beyond, the sentinel-like trunks of black, white and red oaks, walnut trees, hickories, maples, elders, cedars, and pines; and everywhere are monuments of stone, bronze, pink marble, and granite in honor of the many brigades and regiments, northern and southern, and the silent cannons, their barrels colored by oxidation. Most remarkable to me are the bronze bas-reliefs that depict dramatic moments in the fighting - thrashing horses, fallen men, raised swords, artillery blasting away, bulbous, unmoving clouds of smoke… They have the grandeur of Homer’s descriptions of the combat between the Achaeans and the Trojans, but Ralph says they are also historically accurate: “See that canteen? It’s the type the Union armies used, but here you see a Confederate soldier carrying it. What does that tell you?”
“The artist made a mistake.”
“No. The soldier must have taken it off the corpse of a northerner.”
I do not have Ralph’s uncanny ability to see it all both in context and in its enormity at once. Maybe it’s because I have not been to war, as Ralph has (although he has very little so say about the one he was actually in), but by all accounts, at Chickamauga in particular, there was a great deal of outright chaos - chance encounters between lost groups of soldiers, unplanned attacks on the flanks and rear of the enemy, desperate orders shouted and unheard, regiments routed and fleeing one moment and then charging in the next. Death raged among the horses, too, as thousands of them were cut down. It was a nightmare come to life, in which only brute force can eventually rule over madness, as in the case of Colonel John T. Wilder’s “Lightning Brigade” from Indiana, who carried hatchets instead of sabers and whose firearms were new Spencer repeating rifles - far more efficient than the muzzle-loaders carried by most soldiers then (which, as Ralph informed me, took even an expert rifleman 20 seconds to reload). Wilder led his men in a counter-attack on the advancing Confederate column, pinning down a section of it in a low, wet area that would come to be known as “Bloody Pond” (self-explanatory as to the results, I’d say).
Nevertheless, the battle went down in the record as a Confederate victory. On September 20th, 1863, after three days of savagery, William Rosecrans, commander of the Federal forces, left the field, clearly rattled, according to his associates. When he arrived at headquarters in Chattanooga, he confined himself to his bedroom and wouldn’t come out for several days. He was relieved of command by Ulysses Grant.
All that I have written here I have learned either from the park rangers and historians at Chickamauga, from my own reading (Six Armies in Tennessee, by Stephen E. Woodworth, is an authoritative but turgid text), or from my trampings around on the battlefield trails with Ralph. Yet somehow it all remains an enigma to me. For the most part, I have been unable to imagine real human beings moving about here and doing the things we know were done here. Here? On these peaceful, green pastures cleared long ago by European farmers, and where families of deer now make their beds? Here, where the daffodils and azaleas bloom on through the long summer? Where couples push their baby carriages and treat their grinning dogs to long walks in the woods?
So it was mostly a need for clarity that compelled me to attend an artillery demonstration this past September, put on as part of the 162nd anniversary of the battle. I do not believe it was a ‘re-enactment,’ per se, since only one side in the conflict was represented, but a group of Civil War Era devotees travelled roughly 800 miles to relive (if that is the right word) a small part but critical part of the movements of the Wisconsin 3rd Independent Battery, called the “Badger Battery,” on a field near the Viniard House. On September 19th, 1863, they successfully repelled a Confederate advance there, though on the following day, the unit suffered heavy losses at the Dyer Field.
The night before, I had spoken to a few of these Wisconsinites; they were camping out in the adjacent woods, just settling in with the first flames of a fire and with their big horses - stunningly beautiful in the soft evening light - tethered among the trees. I quickly gathered that these fellows took their task quite soberly, as they pointed out to me the authenticity of their gear, right down to their belt buckles, their buttons, and the coffee pot they had put on to boil. They were also a little nervous, like actors before a premiere, I guess, and one of them asked me if I thought that many people might attend their demonstration.
I had no idea really, but I replied, “Oh, there will be a lot of people here, I’m sure. People around here are very interested in the battle and in the war in general.”
“Maybe a couple hundred?”
“I’d say at least.”
Luckily, I was correct. My wife and I were among those who turned out for the first of three demonstrations, and there were easily two hundred of us there for that one alone.
The Wisconsin boys made a fine job of it. It was thrilling to watch them coming out, some on foot, some mounted; in Civil War artillery maneuvers, typically there were also riders atop some of the horses who pulled the cannons, for greater control. The cannons themselves were both 10-pounder Parrott rifles and 12-pounder howitzers. A Parrott rifle was a cannon loaded through its muzzle with either a shell (explosive or incendiary), a shrapnel shell (which carried many bullets inside it that were ejected upon explosion), a canister shot (a thin outer shell containing numerous round hunks of iron, also ejected on explosion), or solid shot (essentially a cannonball, non-explosive but designed to go ripping and bounding at high speed through ranks of men, taking off legs, arms, heads and blowing through torsos as it proceeded). A 12-pounder howitzer also fired shells, canister, and shrapnel at medium to long ranges.
It was impressive, but as I watched, I kept thinking that it was all unfolding much more slowly than I had expected. It took several minutes for the battery to ride out to the middle of the field, turn the entire unit about 80 degrees or so, load the cannon, wait for the officers to give the orders, and finally, for the cannon to erupt in the direction from which the Confederates would have been approaching. My wife agreed with me.
“Why wouldn’t they have the horses cantering instead of trotting and walking?”
That was the first question I asked Ralph when next I saw him (he had attended the two later demonstrations).
“Canter?” he said. “No way. Think about it. You have an entire battery of men and horses that have to be coordinated. Also, there’s a lot of bouncing around going across that field, rocks and gopher holes and such, and some of the shells on those pallets contained incendiary chemicals that could easily explode. It happened all the time. Also, once you were in position to fire, it all had to go just so. One mistake and the cannon could explode, and you’d kill a dozen or more or your own men, not to mention the horses.”
That made sense, of course. But what about all the chaos and the fury of the battle?
“Well, for the foot soldiers who were providing cover, there was constant skirmishing. Lots of fast movement there, but remember, it also took them time to reload. Quickness was an asset, and slowness… you get the idea. It was a different kind of speed from what we think of today. If you’re attacking, you run fast, find some cover if there is any, you shoot, then you run some more.”
That was another side to the fighting - the physical toll. Combined with the stress and the mortal fear, and in the case of an officer, the weight of responsibility for the lives of other men, a three-day battle was an ordeal unlike anything most of us will ever experience in our lifetimes. It is no wonder that Rosecrans eventually cracked under the pressure. After all, the battle at Chickamauga was second only to Gettysburg in numbers of killed and wounded.
Perhaps that is why some people, especially in the southern United States, still become so swept up in the Civil War, swept far beyond the seductive wiles of nostalgia. Ultimately it amounts to self-reflection: could I have done what they did? Would I have been willing to charge up a mountainside, as the Union troops did two months later on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, straight into cannon and rifle fire, unable to see for the smoke, with the sounds of terrified men and horses around me? Could I have put myself into whatever frame of mind was necessary to move forward and face the real possibility - the likelihood - of my own violent death? And if I were to have survived, what would I do with the dark memory of what I had endured? How would I move on? Would there ever be any chance at all of finding peace?
All I really know is that when I walk Chickamauga Battlefield, I never do sense the presence of ghosts. Some people say that Gettysburg is haunted, but I have heard of no such notions regarding this place. Usually I prefer to meet Ralph there for a leisurely amble and good conversation, if both our schedules allow for it. But if not, I take my dog with me, and we follow the LaFayette Road, then turn west, cutting up through the fields and monuments, past the Snodgrass Cabin, and on into the upland woods, where the birds sing old tunes and the trees nod at the two disbelievers who have entered their realm.