Joint Encampments

, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and Union Army of the Potomac remained stalemated across from one another on the Rappahannock River. Following the victory at the Battle of Fredericksburg, the Confederate Army held the city while the Union forces remained across the river in Falmouth, Virginia. Soldiers on both sides had several reasons for discontent at this point in the war. The larger causes that drove these men to enlist and fight faded as larger political issues, incompetent commanders, and the difficulties of camp life intensified. Union and Confederate soldiers felt infringement on their independence and looked for other ways to regain their manhood. While soldiers on both sides took their turn on picket duty, they were only a stone's throw away from their enemy. The permeability of the river and a truce against firing allowed for quite possibly the largest instance of fraternization throughout the Civil War.. While soldiers sat on picket duty across from their enemy, they sang songs, shared jokes, and shouted to one another. As this behavior became accepted, soldiers sent sailboats across with coffee in exchange for tobacco and vice versa. Newspapers were also a hot commodity for exchange. Despite ordinances by both General Lee and General Hooker, soldiers continued to trade items and even began to cross the river. Why would soldiers risk their lives for an enemy that weeks earlier they fought against at the Battle of Fredericksburg? The answer to this question lies in the analysis of the deeper meaning of fraternization, which is at the center of this study. Fraternization was not just an exchange of coffee and tobacco, but served as a larger purpose and had a very complex meaning. When soldiers met one another across enemy lines, they shared stories of home and combat, and talked of peace. These interactions were possible through a common soldier culture of alienation. Confederates were able to relate to disheartened Union soldiers through a common bond of sacrifice and honor. As seasoned veteran soldiers, Federals and Confederates felt that they had more in common with one another than the generals who led them and the politicians at home. This culture of alienation created a bond that was strong enough for these men to travel behind enemy lines, exchange commodities, and share emotions. Fraternization was a subtle form of dissent and did not deter men from staying and they continued to fight at Chancellorsville. The same unity and empathy that brought these men together on the Rappahannock, kept them in their ranks. Therefore, the unique culture developed through fraternization serves as a tool in the development of the synthesis of the Civil War soldier experience. iii Table of Contents Introduction……………………….………………………….1 Chapter I: The Evolution of Fraternization……….……....10 Chapter II: Analyzing Beyond the Ritual of Exchange…....24 Chapter III: Fraternization and Reconciliation……………..41 Conclusion…………………………………………………….47 Citations…………………………………………….…………52

The Journal of Military History, 2006

Journal of American History

At the close of the Civil War in 1865, many Americans began talking about "reunion" and "reunification", even "healing" and "reconciliation", although the precise meaning of those words would remain perpetually elusive. Indeed, from 1865 down to the present day, these sentiments would reverberate in American culture and American politics, sounded at gatherings of Union and Confederate veterans and then of their descendants, in the pages of newspapers and magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the speeches of presidents and politicians, and in countless films and theatrical productions that imagined northern and southern men joining hands in unity and fraternal love. Two years after Appomattox, the former abolitionist Gerrit Smith told of his longing "for a heart-union between the North and the South." Seventy-one years later, in a final gathering of ancient soldiers on the once blood-soaked fields of Gettysburg, Franklin Roosevelt dedicated an "Eternal Light Peace" memorial and honored the "joint and precious heritage" that Gettysburg had come to symbolize. Speaking in July 1938 to the "men who wore the blue

The Journal of American History, 2018

Interest in Civil War memory and post-Civil War sectional reconciliation has expanded greatly in recent years, as two 2016 historiographical essays attest. 1 Matthew E. Stanley's new book, The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America is thus well timed to make an important contribution to our evolving understanding of the process of sectional reconciliation in the decades following the Civil War. With his focus on Kentucky's northern neighbors in the lower portions of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, the editorial staff of the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society believe Stanley's book will help historians better understand the role Kentucky played in the events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which saw a white supremacist version of Civil War memory eclipse an emancipationist version nationally. We have asked four nineteenth-century historians to consider Stanley's book from varying perspectives. M. Keith Harris teaches history at a private high school in Los Angeles, California. He is the author of Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration among Civil War Veterans (2014) and is currently writing a book on D. W. Griffith's controversial 1915 silent film, The Birth of a Nation.

2013

: While there are veritable libraries dedicated to the study of war, few military theorists or historians have evaluated the role of the army in the study of peace or the craft of peacemaking. Even the great Western master of war theory Carl von Clausewitz exerted little to no effort in explaining peace and its causes in his magnum opus, On War. Most of the focus of military art and military history has been on the causes of war and its conduct. Such military historians as John Lynn have stressed that the uniqueness, hence the raison d' etre of military history, is the study of combat. The study of violent conflict between nations and social organizations is what differentiates military history from all other types of historical inquiry. The study of non-violent resolution of conflict through military means would thus seem to be antithetical to what military history is all about. Yet the militaries of most nation states have spent the vast amount of their existence in what most ...

This essay critically examines the notion of reconciliation. I take up the notion of reconciliation in the context of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2006), and argue that the commission's project runs up against the limits of reconciliation in places of originary fracture. If the pain of the past is the founding wound of a polity, rather than a break from a prior unity or prior sense of the common, then the rhetoric of reconciliation is misplaced. Prompted by Grant Farred's work on the same, I suggest instead the idea of conciliation: a making of friendship and home "for the first time." This sense of "first friendship" forms an ethical and political response to a history whose first moment (conquest, slavery) is wounding by refusing nihilism, while also recognizing the profound difficulty of imagining another world without a standing model. Without the rhetoric of repair, there is only the rhetoric of building-with...for the first time, always.

2016

The thesis investigates the nature of the relationship between white unionists during the American Civil War and their enslaved and free black counterparts. To do this it utilizes the records of the Southern Claims Commission, which collected testimony from former unionists and their character witnesses from 1872 to 1880. For comparative purposes, it focuses on two regions economically similar and frequently contested by opposing armies: Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, and the region of central Tennessee to the southeast of Nashville. As the war began, white unionists were suddenly alienated from the larger community and faced persecution by authorities and threats of violence. They sometimes coped in ways which mimicked the survival tactics long practiced by slaves. Meanwhile, free blacks and slaves were forming new identities in relation to the Union, viewing it as the bringer and protector of their freedom. The devotion to Union evidenced in the Claims Commission testimony suggests that they should be considered unionists in their own right. Free blacks and slaves recognized persecuted white unionists as natural allies. The recognition of shared experience and suffering among both races resulted in cooperative action during the war, and suggests a deeper alliance than that of mere convenience. These partnerships endured into the postwar period, as white claimants were supported by black witnesses and vice versa. The persistence of such bonds despite postwar pressures supports the idea of a period of social/racial "fluidity" after the Civil War, and invites further investigation into the nature of racial cooperation in the South

2013

This thesis seeks to answer one of the fundamental questions of history: how did the people, in a given place and time, view their world? This work addresses Confederates, or those Southerners who supported the secession movement and the Confederate States of America, during the American Civil War, 1861-1865. This work seeks to offer a nuanced view into the minds of Confederates over the course of the war by framing their experience with the Five Step Grieving Process. This process, first described by psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, identifies the five major emotions a person experiences while suffering a loss. These emotions are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. This framework allows greater insight into the Confederate culture because it does not force people's lived experiences into a cause, process, effect format. Instead, it allows flexibility in understanding the human condition as many different people faced the loss of a way of life. The five stages of the Grieving Process provide the structure for this thesis. Research rooted in the diaries, letters, newspapers, and sermons of Confederates allows their lived experience, told in their own words, to illustrate the usefulness of the five-step grieving process as an analytical framework. This approach brings together voices from women, men, soldiers, civilians, government officials and journalists from across the Confederacy. Class lines and geographical boundaries only enhance the efficacy of the framework as the Confederates worked toward accepting the doom of the American Civil War. Embattled Courage also suffers from an unbalanced collection of sources and a bibliography comprised entirely of memoirs. While Linderman argues that all soldiers in the American Civil War, regardless of sectional affiliation, followed the same process of disillusionment, his sources mostly come from Northern soldiers. The costs involved in publishing these memoirs leads to a bias in favor of the upper ranks of the armies, excluding the voices of the everyman. Due to the self-aggrandizing nature of memoirs, the sources also damage Linderman's argument because they portray the authors in the best possible light. 5 This thesis seeks to address the problems found in Embattled Courage by providing an in-depth exploration of the mood of the Confederate people between 1861 and 1865 6. The sources will include writings of soldiers, civilians and government officials, as well as newspapers and sermons, to offer a comprehensive evaluation of Confederate attitudes over the course of the American Civil War. I argue that the five step grieving process, comprised of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, first described by psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in 1969, provides a significantly useful framework for understanding how Confederate mindsets changed over the course of the war. Dr. Kubler-Ross first described these stages in On Death and Dying, in which she studied the processes through which people facing mortal illness understand their situation. Dr. Kubler-Ross wrote On Death and Dying to allow people dying of terminal illness to normalize and understand their experience. David Kessler joined Dr. Kubler-Ross as she reached the end of her life, and the two scholars wrote On Grief and Grieving. In this volume, the authors described the five stages of grief, previously reserved for the dying, in the life of family and friends of a dying person. Dr. Kubler-Ross described the grieving process, better understood as the process of receiving catastrophic news, as a major part of the emotional ordeal which terminally ill patients and their 5 Linderman, 298-350. 6 While this paper focuses on white Southerners who supported the Confederacy, thereby becoming "Confederates," for the sake of variation I will use the terms "Confederate," "Confederates," "Southerner," "Southern," and "Southerners" interchangeably for the sake of variety. 9 families experience while coming to terms with the severity of the illness. This process consists of five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. 5. 7 This process applies to the Confederate experience because the Southern men and women who left behind letters and diaries embodied the Confederacy, and existed in a socioeconomic system which defined everything in their lives. When this system faced destruction, so did everything known to these men and women. Their identities, so connected to this society, also faced annihilation. They faced the American Civil War not only as onlookers grieving an external loss, but as the dying facing the end of the only identity they had ever known. John Gaddis lauds the ability of the historian to mold time and space to better understand the past. 8 This ability allows this analysis of the evolution of the Confederate mindset through denial to acceptance and all the stages in between. Not every person engages with each stage at the same time, for the same amount of time, or in the same order. Kubler-Ross and Kessler have discussed the ways in which anger can transition into depression, skipping over bargaining altogether, or depression can step backwards into denial, which necessitates flexibility in the interpretation. This does not indicate a weakness in this interpretive framework. Instead, it emphasizes the true applicability of the Kubler-Ross grieving process to the citizens of the Confederacy by allowing the society, made up of humans, to maintain the same emotional flexibility of the people who compose the society. The degree of nuance allowed by the stages of the grieving process allows the model to better illustrate the changes in Confederate perceptions of the American Civil War. The flexible nature of the grieving process as described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross acknowledges that the person experiencing grief can experience more than one stage at the same time, for example denial and anger. In order to afford the greatest clarity possible, this thesis is arranged in

2010

Journal of American History, 2012