Originally aired on April 12, 1996 - In part 85 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson discusses the large-scale fraternization that occurred amongst Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs between military actions.
#85 – Fraternization - The Last War between Gentlemen
The Civil War was not an unbroken campaign of fighting. Rather, it was a series of widely spaced military actions, with much idle time in between. Opposing armies seldom fought in wintertime. Hence, for 8-9 months each year, the camps of blue and gray were in close proximity to one another. Men on picket duty therefore had ample opportunity to get acquainted with their enemy counterparts across the way. What resulted was the most unbelievable fraternization that has ever taken place in an American war.
Bear in mind that friendly feelings between the two sides never reached the level of hatred that was there. Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, describing hand-to-hand fighting at Winchester, noted: “The names the Rebels called me reflected disrespect upon my parentage”. Nevertheless, fraternization did attain such proportions as to give commanding officers on both sides constant and deep concern.
Why this informality existed is not difficult to explain. The men of blue and gray spoke the same language, possessed the same national heritage, worshipped the same God, had the same likes and dislikes. Many were from the same states, which was noticeably the case in Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky.
Large numbers of soldiers had kinfolk and/or close friends on the other side. Two sons of Senator John J. Crittenden went in opposite directions. George became a major-general in the Confederate armies; Thomas held the same rank in the Union forces. Federal General Phillip St. George Cooke fought against his son, Confederate General John R. Cooke, and his son-in-law, General Jeb Stuart, while his nephew, John Esten Cooke, became the best-known Southern writer in the war.
Other factors gave rise to large-scale fraternization: a war weariness that increased with each passing year; an ignorance over the real issues of the war; a sense of fair play peculiar to most Americans; and a desire among the soldiers to obtain such commodities as coffee (which Billy Yanks had) and tobacco (which Johnny Rebs could supply).
Following Malvern Hill and the end of the Seven Days Campaign near Richmond, a Confederate soldier exclaimed: “Our boys and the Yanks made a bargain not to fire at each other, and went out into the field…and gathered berries together and talked over the fight, traded tobacco and coffee and exchanged newspapers as peacefully and kindly as if they had not been engaged for the past seven days in butchering each other.”
Perhaps the soldiers despised the North or the South as sections, but many of them had little dislike for the enemy as individuals. There even appears to have been a code of honor that forbade the capture – or interruption – of any soldier who was (in the words of one infantryman) “attending to the imperative call of nature”.
War does not always foster personal animosities. War is too big for that. The hate is there, but it is a larger hatred for everything the enemy represents. In this mammoth hate, the individual stands for nothing. This destruction comes through quite clearly in the observation of a Confederate major who watched Northern and Southern soldiers together bury the dead on a battlefield.
“The pleasant courtesies of the combatants, on to another,” the major said, “only they can know and appreciate. The civilian who imagines war to be only hate and blood and fire, can’t conceive, nor be made to believe, that war also exercises the finer feelings of the human heart. Brave men who fight one another must come to love one another…It is the happy law of our nature; else there would always be fighting (and) war. Only cowards hate; brave men never do.”
That may well be the explanation for why veterans North and South became Americans together after a war that would seem to have left wounds too deep for healing.
