Lesson Plan Material - War of Invasion—War of Liberation: Occupied Nashville and the Civil War and Emancipation in the Upper South

When we visited Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, on the last day of our workshop, we had the privilege of touring the very ground where so many soldiers died.

We were able to purchase t-shirts with the likenesses of the opposing commanding generals - Confederate General Braxton Bragg and Union General William Stark Rosecrans. Under their likenesses were the words "Men of Valor! Men of Honor!" It would be interesting to have students read primary source documents and come to conclusions about whether it is valid to suggest that the opposing soldiers, as well as the civilians in the area of the fighting, would ever consider that the "enemy" soldiers were honorable, even after 146 years.

After I had posted this, I sent a note to the director of this workshop; he was gracious enough (as always) to send a reply regarding his own thoughts on this matter:

Viz. the item about valor. Genuine soldiers on both sides were generally willing to credit their opponents with valor, or courage on the battlefield. Nineteenth-century war had moved to a point where it was considered an element of the civilizing process, if a dark one. In order to ensure that war became part of the larger nation-building process, it became part of the culture that prisoners of war were to be captured rather than killed or enslaved (as previously), and it became part of the process to limit killing to the "sporting chance." As part of this, one was almost required "to respect" uniformed soldiers on the other side, along with enemy female civilians if you were the army in enemy territory.

And, truth be told, the balance of the evidence is that uniformed soldiers on both sides held to this standard during the war and after. It was simply obligatory--as a measure of your OWN moral worthiness--that you always referred to your uniformed foe in proper terms of honorable respect. Now, the enemy's cause as a whole you could denegrate with all the vehemence of an evangelical Protestant. Moreover, various other unworthy people could be readily ridiculed and attacked. Confederates, for example, never accepted the legitimacy of the USCT (United States Colored Troops), during the war or after. Union soldiers, for their part, openly referred to the fact that they had executed enemy guerilla fighters on the spot.

Southern/Northern civilians didn't have to abide by the same code, by the way. The famous Lost Cause that emerged after the war (as a defense of the Southern war effort) in the 1880s and '90s was a broad-based Southern cultural movement promoted by everyone from women's groups to ministers. According to the promoters of the Cause, Sherman and his men were mere vandals, unworthy of the name soldier. Moreover, during the conflict, the women of both sides were intense in their denunciation of their respective opponents. Item: after the war, Northern women were heavily behind the effort to create the national cemeteries--like Stone's River--because they could not stomach the thought that the bodies of their sons, husbands, or fathers were being left in Southern soil to be desecrated by morally degenerate former Confederates.

Feelings didn't die easy here. r.