Why People Buried Their Fences During the Civil War

Joan Cashin:
Civilians are always drawn into war. You know, if a war lasts any period of time, civilians always are involved in some way. And wars encourage transgressions by their very nature.

Joanne Freeman:
Over the years, while Joan Cashin dug into the history of the Civil War, something surprising caught her attention.

Joan Cashin:
I would often come across references to soldiers taking things from civilians.

Joanne Freeman:
Cashin was well aware of stories about Union soldiers taking the possessions of people living in the Confederacy, but she was surprised to find out it actually went both ways. Confederate soldiers took things from pro-Confederate people and Union soldiers from pro-Union people.

Joan Cashin:
Pretty quickly when the war gets underway, ideology seems to fade into the background and soldiers and civilians are engaged in this intense struggle over what they need to survive.

Joanne Freeman:
Cashin explores the struggle in her new book, War Stuff. It looks at wartime clashes between armies and civilians over things, material resources like livestock and lumber. Ed recently talked with Cashin about what this looked like in practice and the toll it took on civilians living in the south.

Ed Ayers:
You know, that’s such a part of the folklore, that the United States Army was a well-oiled machine, that it came to the south and was able to deliver with all of this industrial might everything that his soldiers needed. But you’re suggesting that’s not the case.

Joan Cashin:
That’s right. I found that out pretty early in my research that neither army is very efficient or very well organized. And then that was definitely the standard line that you would see in the textbooks, that the Union army was good at this. The interactions on the ground out there between a farmer’s wife and a soldier and I found out the soldiers in the ranks complained frequently and bitterly about the fact that they don’t have enough to eat and they are determined to overcome that. Union soldiers are hungry and they are not going to put up with this. So they go out into the field and they take what they need.

Joan Cashin:
And the way that this was supposed to be done is, there are procedures on this. Now officers are supposed to be present with a group of soldiers. They go out together in the daylight and they give out paperwork to the civilian whose goods they’re taking and they fill in all the information and that paperwork is supposed to be redeemable either during the war or after. But what I found in practice is that a lot of soldiers, privates, just take off by themselves. They often go out at night they manage to avoid their pickets and they start roaming through the countryside and they don’t give out paperwork. In fact, they’re trying to avoid any contact with human beings if they can, to just get the food they need and get back to camp.

Ed Ayers:
Well, the other thing that you said that was surprising is that the Confederate soldiers took advantage, without permission, of the southern people among whom they lived. You know the story in the postwar south that the Yankees came in and stole everything, but what you show is that the Confederate soldiers were also hungry and they also took what they wanted and needed, that in some ways that the Confederates lost more from their own armies than they did from the Union. Is that a correct understanding?

Joan Cashin:
Yes, that is. And that is exactly what I found, which surprised me, it surprised me very much. I thought that Confederate soldiers would at least try to avoid harming pro-Confederate white people. And in the beginning of the war, some of them do that, but as the war unfolds and their physical needs become more and more important, they don’t think about that anymore.

Ed Ayers:
Yeah. So it’s the families on the home front and women in particular who bear the brunt of a lot of this in your story. We sometimes forget, if you see reenactments, it just looks like a bunch of guys running across a park. But this is unfolding in people’s backyards and in their very homes. So how do you integrate that story of women’s experience in the war with the story of the Civil War that we think we know?

Joan Cashin:
Well, the gender dynamics are very important because almost all soldiers are men and most of the civilians that they’re dealing with are women. And there are often these very intense exchanges where women will say to the soldiers, my children have to eat and the response comes back from the soldier, “Well, if we don’t get food, we’re going to starve.” And when civilians, including women, of course, realize that their survival is at stake or the survival and wellbeing of their children, their family members, are at stake, then they think that should take precedence. So they began to realize, even people who may have been strongly in favor of secession and/or the Confederacy, they begin to realize that the Confederate army also poses a threat to them.

Joan Cashin:
So what happens is the behavior converges so that men from both armies will take what they say they need from civilians. And civilians began to fear and distrust soldiers from both armies. And they start hiding things. They hide their food. They also will disassemble their fences. You know, armies use a lot of wood and an army or regiment moving through an area can take hundreds and hundreds of panels of fences down and civilians need that to keep their crops protected from animals from coming in and trampling their corn crops and so on. So I found people who would disassemble a fence and bury the fence or they would take the fence down and put it in a closet inside the house to try to protect it from soldiers. And whether the soldier has on a gray uniform or a blue uniform, civilians realize that this person can take things that they themselves need to survive.

Ed Ayers:
If you were to make a museum that’s not like the usual Civil War museums, with spurs and swords and things, what would your museum of the material culture of the south look like?

Joan Cashin:
Oh, that’s a good question. I would put a lot of household objects in it. You know, a piano, for example, a piano was a luxury object. In the mid 19th century, only affluent people had pianos. You know, the piano is a symbol of an upper middle class person, an upper middle class family. And soldiers will often deliberately destroy the piano. They’ll break it apart with axes. Sometimes they’ll sit down and play it. They’ll play a few were their favorite songs and then they smash it up with axes. So I would put a piano. I would also put a four-poster clean bed with a white quilt on it. But soldiers often talk about how much they miss sleeping on a comfortable bed, a clean bed and a bed with white sheets and and a quilt on it. And so sometimes when they take over a house, they make a beeline for the bedroom so they can take a nap on top of one of those beds with their muddy boots on. And if we could have some plates, some cups, some silverware, that would be useful. I found the soldiers in both armies will take those things. You know, they’ll make a kitchen raid and they not only will take food that’s in the kitchen, they will also take all of the forks and spoons and knives. And civilians will say, don’t do that. That’s ours. You can’t do that. And they take them anyway.

Ed Ayers:
Do you see this as the beginning of a new way of thinking about the Civil War and maybe American history more broadly?

Joan Cashin:
Oh I hope so. I’m hoping that scholars will take material culture more seriously, and I mean historians of course, because anthropologists and archeologists have been working on this for over a hundred years. But I think we need to recognize that the material world matters a lot to the people we are writing about. They care about material objects, whether it’s a piano, whether it’s a house. And these objects are not only important to them because of the physical reality, they live in a material world, but also because of what they symbolize. That’s how it is. You see soldiers breaking up pianos with axes. So if it matters a lot to them, then I think we, as historians, need to take this more seriously. And fortunately the museums are filled with these objects. There are literally millions of them in museums all over the country and there are many objects that are still in private hands.

Joan Cashin:
The state of Tennessee did a very interesting project a while back in which they asked the citizens of Tennessee to bring in their Civil War artifacts to be photographed and described by the State Archives. And that website is just amazing. The things that people have kept in trunks in the attic or maybe displayed on the mantle piece. So they’re objects that mattered a lot during the war and many of them have been preserved in the decades since then.

Ed Ayers:
What would you say to people who happen to find that their family has some artifact of the war? How do you think it changes their perspective on these things that they may have?

Joan Cashin:
Well, first of all, I would ask them to please photograph it and write about it, to preserve it as an artifact. But I think that the material world is something that matters a great deal to human beings in every generation and that if your family has artifacts from its past, whether it pertains to the Civil War, World War II, Korea or other events in family history, if one of your ancestors was involved in the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, whatever, and there’s a material manifestation of that, I think you should treasure that. I think you should preserve it and make sure that other family members know that it’s there.

Ed Ayers:
And maybe think about sharing it with a museum so lots of other people can enjoy.

Joan Cashin:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for a long time museums collected objects associated with the tiny number of elites, but that has changed a good deal in the last 30 years. And there are all kinds of objects out there that document the experiences of ordinary citizens, the average person. Whether we’re talking about peacetime or wartime, and that has value, of course, as part of the American experience.

Speaker 6:
John Cashin is a history professor at Ohio State University. Her latest book is, War Stuff, The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War.

Speaker 6:
That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @backstoryradio. Backstory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 7:
Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor the humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connelly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.